Myrna Loy (53 page)

Nothing goes right, or according to plan, but the Blandingses end up with a home they love, something warm and welcoming that the practical-minded Bill envies. The moral seems to be that you can spend your way to happiness. James Agee called the movie “a bull’s eye for middle-class middle-brows.”
¹⁰

Mr. Blandings
is a hymn to consumerism. Jim’s giddiest moment comes when Gussie unwittingly utters a line that he can use in ads as a slogan to sell Wham Ham. His future in advertising immediately brightens.
Mr. Blandings
itself became a pitch to promote new homes just like the one the Blandingses built. More than seventy “Blandings Dream Houses,” based on the architectural plans used for the original house, were constructed across the United States and raffled off. The Selznick Releasing Organization also arranged advertising tie-ins with several companies that sold building supplies or home furnishings, among them General Electric, Sherwin Williams, Bigelow Carpets, and International Silver. A shopper could go out and buy the same shade of apple red paint that Muriel Blandings chose for one of her home’s many bathrooms.
¹¹

Cary Grant published a (probably ghostwritten) tribute to Myrna Loy in
Photoplay
called “She’s My Dream Wife.” In it he called her “one of two expert comediennes in Hollywood,” the other being Jean Arthur. (Where were his other brilliantly comic former costars Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Rosalind Russell?) He praised Loy as a quick study when it came to learning lines, a good listener who “lets you talk about you,” and an accomplished, underappreciated actress who “knows instinctively when a scene is wrong for her or the picture.” William Wyler had also spotted, and trusted, that same instinct. Grant didn’t have to say, but did, “I love her even as I respect her.”
¹²

Loy and Grant never made another movie together, although they hoped to costar in a film version of the Terence Rattigan play
O Mistress Mine
, which didn’t materialize. They never took off as a romantic screen team, perhaps because, as Pauline Kael suggested, “they’re too much alike—both lightly self-deprecating, both faintly reserved and aloof.” They were also too close to the same age. Hollywood has often preferred the older-man-with-much-younger-woman formula.
¹³

Myrna accepted a role in
The Red Pony
because, with a script by John Steinbeck, a score by Aaron Copland, and a director, Lewis Milestone, who’d won two Academy Awards, it promised to be a quality picture and also because she had long wanted to return on film to her western pioneer and ranching roots. She’d dreamed of portraying a woman like her Montana grandmothers. Filmed in Technicolor in the Salinas Valley before production of
Mr. Blandings
got under way,
The Red Pony
was held from release for nearly two years, until March 1949.

Myrna Loy plays Alice Tiflin, the ranch wife of a discontented former schoolteacher (Shepperd Strudwick) and the mother of a daydreaming son, Tom (Peter Miles), who would rather train his beloved pony than go to school. Looking trim and lovely in waist-hugging, high-collared, apron-covered long dresses, her hair upswept, her lipstick very red, she moves and speaks with a dignified restraint. Her own son calls her “Ma’am.” Dutiful and strong, Alice seems isolated from Fred, her depressed, irritable spouse, a city-bred man who feels estranged from ranch life and toys with the possibility of returning to San Jose. Fred resents his son’s closeness to the brawny hired man, Billy Buck (Robert Mitchum), whose nonchalant competence makes Fred question his own usefulness at the ranch, and he has no patience with his father-in-law (Louis Calhern, made up to look like Buffalo Bill), whose tall tales about the Old West he has heard too many times. Something dark and menacing hovers in the air. The half-light of the dawn that opens the movie and an ominous close-up of a buzzard set the tone.

An atmospheric coming-of-age tale of young Tommy’s grief at the death of his pony, and his reckoning with the broken promises of his idol, Billy Buck,
The Red Pony
falls victim to a contrived happy ending that makes it appear that the menace and sorrow inherent in the story will magically vanish now that Nellie, the mare, has given birth. Without explanation Fred has announced that he doesn’t feel like a stranger anymore, and we’re asked to believe that all problems are now demolished by hope. The insights of Steinbeck the fiction writer succumb to the facile expediency of Steinbeck the Hollywood screenwriter.

Robert Mitchum is compelling as Billy Buck. Broad-shouldered, laconic, and unsmiling, he is at ease with the horses he grooms, sharing their elemental grace. Myrna remembered him as a “devil” who teased her relentlessly off camera, trying to crack her cool, ladylike façade. He told Hedda Hopper when she visited the set that Myrna as Alice Tiflin had to perform a dance of the seven veils. On a hot day he tried to persuade Myrna to undo the top buttons on her high collar, prompting her to ask, “Would you have me be unattractive?” (
BB
, 213). When the cameras rolled, though, he never faltered.

Myrna had been directed by Milestone before, back in 1926 at Warner Bros., where she played a coquettish French maid in
The Caveman
. She called him Milly and admired him as one of Hollywood’s most talented directors, a straightforward, no-gimmicks craftsman who knew how to get the job done.

Milestone’s coproducer, Charles K. Feldman, pushed to cast Myrna as Alice Tiflin, over the objections of Milestone, who balked at the high price tag her professional services commanded. Moreover, he argued, if you put Myrna Loy, “a big star with sex appeal,” together with Mitchum, the audience will misconstrue the picture as a romance between them.
¹⁴

Loy’s salary for
The Red Pony
was $200,000, and Mitchum’s, $130,000. Peter Miles, the child actor who played Tommy, got all of five dollars a day. The production was the costliest to date for Republic Pictures, usually characterized as a Poverty Row studio, and far more ambitious than its usual fare.
¹⁵

Despite Milestone’s misgivings, Myrna heard directly from John Steinbeck that she fulfilled his visualization of Mrs. Tiflin and that he was glad she had been cast in
The Red Pony
. Too timid to speak to her directly, Steinbeck left a note for her with a waiter at a New York restaurant where they were both having lunch (
BB
, 213).

Although she had battled shyness her entire life, Myrna began in the late 1940s to make public appearances and give talks on behalf of the United Nations, at first mainly addressing groups of women on the West Coast. The death of her dear friend Jan Masaryk in March of 1948 nudged her toward increased activism in the internationalist cause, since Masaryk had served as the Czech U.N. delegate and headed the World Federation of United Nations Associations. Although some believe that Masaryk committed suicide by jumping out of his Prague apartment window soon after the communist takeover of his country, Myrna was convinced he had been murdered because of his prodemocracy and pro-Western stance. She had visited him in his New York hotel a few months prior to his death and found him furtive, somber. A bomb in a package addressed to him had arrived, and although it failed to detonate, he knew his days were numbered.

Myrna’s U.N. debut came when Douglas Fairbanks Jr. invited her to be his guest at a dinner for Trygve Lie, the U.N. secretary general, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and she sat on the dais between Nelson Rockefeller and Benjamin V. Cohen, the undersecretary of state. On that occasion she met Estelle Linzer, a New York associate of Eleanor Roosevelt who worked as program director at the American Association for the United Nations (AAUN). She would become Myrna’s close friend, eventually the executrix of her estate. Estelle enlisted Myrna’s active participation in the AAUN, soon drafting her as a board member. Myrna created a stir on the banquet dais, which made her realize anew that her fame as an actress could help her draw others in. As an advocate for the United Nations, she could educate Americans about its importance at a time when it was often under attack. She also made a bid to be taken seriously as a participant in world affairs. Estelle Linzer said that Myrna was very anxious to prove herself a person of some depth and knowledge.
¹⁶

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) soon sent her as a delegate to a regional conference in San Francisco that was attended by three thousand diplomats, educators, and civic leaders. Myrna spoke on the radio and gave a speech at a high school, advancing her argument that “many of the tensions between nations can be eased by exchanges of art objects and films.” The State Department’s George V. Allen and the National Commission for UNESCO urged her to head a Hollywood Film Committee that would promote better understanding among nations via film. Although fewer “message pictures” were being made, Myrna campaigned for more films like
Gentleman’s Agreement
and
Pinky
, which she thought promoted tolerance and understanding. Her former producer Kenneth MacGowan, Celeste Holm, and Margaret Herrick, executive secretary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, were among those who served on the Hollywood Film Committee, but it didn’t survive long. McCarthyism and the climate of fear doomed it. “The concept of world peace seemed as threatening, somehow, as the horror of total war” (
BB
, 226). The Film Committee disbanded, but Myrna believed that the ideals of UNESCO nonetheless found their way into films such as Frank Capra’s
Here Comes the Groom
. She continued as an adviser to UNESCO on film and eventually served a three-year term on the United States Commission for UNESCO. Myrna told friends that she got more emotional satisfaction from her work for the United Nations than she did from all her decades as a screen actress.
¹⁷

It didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to induce Myrna to say good-bye to Hollywood for more than a year and take up residence in Europe. Gene had a British production in the offing, and the Russian-born Hollywood director Gregory Ratoff wanted Myrna Loy to star in a movie set in Capri that Gene would write. Sir Alexander Korda, who long ago directed Myrna when she played the wild gypsy Nubi in the early talkie
The Squall
, would oversee the Capri production, which would be filmed on location there and in London. The result,
If This Be Sin
, released in Britain with the title
That Dangerous Age
, turned out to be an embarrassment, a complete waste of time, money, and talent. Myrna plays Lady Cathy Brooke, the adulterous but self-sacrificing wife of a neglectful London barrister who will lose his eyesight and perhaps his life without her solicitous care. Oblivious to his wife’s needs, he goes around through half the movie wearing a black blindfold. Lady Cathy is in love with a dashing younger man (Roger Livesey), her husband’s law partner, but she nobly surrenders her lover to her pretty young stepdaughter. The Capri villa and rocky, sea-splashed scenery provided a picturesque background for the cinematographers Anchise Brizzi and Georges Périnal but couldn’t make up for a surplus of melodrama, stilted dialogue, and trite characters. Myrna faulted Gene Markey, a hypochondriac who, instead of doctoring the script, retired to their villa and “collapsed under his mosquito netting” (
BB
, 230). Her husband’s self-absorption had clearly begun to grate.

While in England for some location shooting Myrna was introduced to Queen Elizabeth, the consort of George VI now remembered as the Queen Mother, at the Royal Command Film Performance. Her Royal Highness thanked Miss Loy for her charitable service to Britain during the war. Because of Gene’s social cachet, Myrna also met and socialized with Marina, Duchess of Kent, widow of the youngest son of George V. Myrna found her warm, cultured, and unstuffy. She and Gene spent Christmas at Warwick Castle as guests of Guy Fulke Greville, the seventh Earl of Warwick, who had once tried his luck as a Hollywood actor under the name Michael Brooke.

While they stayed at Claridge’s in London, Myrna became aware that Gene’s taste for aristocratic companionship extended to the bedroom. He had been carrying on affairs with several titled women: “nothing less for Gene than a duchess or a countess.” When Myrna returned to the hotel after a day of filming at Shepperton Studios, the reception staff at the desk would try to stall her while making furtive calls to warn Gene that his wife was about to arrive. Myrna doesn’t, in her autobiography, specify exactly what further evidence of his philandering she discovered; she says merely that she caught him with “lipstick on his face, so to speak” (
BB
, 235). Although humiliated to discover herself a reluctant player in a bedroom farce, she didn’t suffer emotional devastation, because what she felt for Gene belonged more in the category of affection than the kind of deep love she had felt for Arthur. But she put Gene on notice that the future of their marriage hung in the balance. He promised to reform and assured her of his abiding devotion to her and no other.

During the marital showdown Myrna developed appendicitis and required surgery followed by a two-week stay at a London clinic. Informed by her doctor that a full recovery from the appendectomy would take a year of rest, she rebelled, rising from her sickbed long enough to attend a memorial service for Jan Masaryk that marked the first anniversary of his death. She then left England with Gene for some months of convalescence—and hoped-for marital regeneration—on the Italian Riviera, and in Rome, Venice, and Florence. As usual, Gene’s wide range of privileged friendships opened many doors and treated Myrna to some select hospitality. With Gene she visited Alan Moorehead—one of her favorite writers—in Portofino, and the couple were welcomed for tea with Max Beerbohm in Rapallo. Surrounded by the framed caricatures that had made him famous, Sir Max, subdued, gentle, and close to eighty, failed to dazzle with his wit. At I Tatti, near Florence, the aged art historian Bernard Berenson startled Myrna by attempting to fondle her knee when she sat beside him on a sofa. She withdrew her knee but responded with amusement rather than anger.