Myrna Loy (54 page)

George V. Allen, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, whom Myrna had met at the UNESCO meeting in San Francisco, invited her to attend and advise the American delegation at an upcoming UNESCO conference in Paris. She agreed but stopped in the Austrian Tyrol en route to visit Gene during production of a British film,
The Wonder Kid
, being written by Markey as a vehicle for the child actor Bobby Henrey. Bobby’s mother, a travel writer, found Myrna “simple and gracious,” and described the less modest Gene as something of a dandy, tricked out in a braid-decorated Austrian hunting jacket and “the most beautiful of Tyrolean hats.” Myrna told Mrs. Henrey she could not linger in the Tyrol; she had an obligation in Paris. As it turned out, her days in Austria would be the last she and Gene Markey would spend together under one roof as man and wife.
¹⁸

At the UNESCO conference in Paris Myrna once again battled a lack of self-confidence. George V. Allen put her to the test by asking her to deliver a speech to the American UNESCO delegation, which included Milton Eisenhower, the youngest brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower and at that time president of Kansas State University, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, intimidating presences. Myrna stayed up half the night preparing a talk that championed artists as ambassadors of peace. It was greeted with an ovation that she read as a ratification of her legitimacy. Democratic Representative Mike Mansfield of Montana, a participant in the conference, helped her to further UNESCO’s visibility when he praised her contribution to the conference on the floor of Congress. “It did my heart good to see how Miss Loy came to every meeting for two weeks, took part in all discussions and even made a speech or two,” he said, going on to suggest that she was helping UNESCO gain wider acceptance among ordinary Americans. “It is unfortunate that UNESCO’s principles have been hard for the miner, the working man and the housewife to grasp.” For Myrna, a Montana-born woman whose formal education had ended in high school, being praised in the Congress of the United States by a Montana congressman had to stir pride.
¹⁹

Instead of rejoining Gene on the continent, Myrna returned to California to answer a call from 20th Century–Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck wanted her to costar opposite Clifton Webb in a film version of the best-selling memoir
Cheaper by the Dozen
. Once again she would serve as poster Mom for the all-American family, this time as Lillian Gilbreth, the competent and level-headed mother of twelve and during the 1920s the wife of despotic efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth. Several of Myrna’s actress friends who were also in their mid-forties let her know that they felt that she was committing career suicide by agreeing to play a middle-aged wife with a dozen children; she would never again be considered to portray a younger woman or romantic leading lady. Myrna didn’t care. She liked the role of Lillian Gilbreth and was realistic about the way an actress’s age influenced casting decisions in Hollywood.

She’s appealing in this film but definitely overshadowed by Clifton Webb until the final sequence, after the overbearing Frank Gilbreth’s sudden fatal heart attack. At that point Lillian Gilbreth takes command, telling the children that she will keep the Gilbreth industrial engineering firm afloat and deliver her late husband’s speeches at professional conferences in Europe. Before this we’re barely aware that she has any professional credentials.

Working with Webb, who had recently triumphed as the acerbic babysitter Lynn Belvedere in
Sitting Pretty
, proved to be no lark. Though Myrna attended many parties he hosted with his mother and lifelong companion, Maybelle, and she considered him a friend, on the set she found him dictatorial and a scene-stealer. A soloist by temperament, he tried to dominate every frame.

Cheaper by the Dozen
scored at the box office, earning $4.4 million in North American receipts, but Myrna took a pay cut to play in it. She was paid only $80,000, compared to the $200,000 she had earned for
The Red Pony
.
²⁰

After spending more than a year in Europe, Myrna returned to a Hollywood racked by change and uncertainty. A 1948 Supreme Court ruling had forced the studios to divest themselves of their ownership of theaters. As the Hollywood Ten began to serve their prison sentences, fear of the blacklist continued to cast long shadows in the film community. Television kept gaining ground, at the expense of movie attendance, which plummeted to sixty million per week from its one hundred million peak in 1946. MGM had been supplanted as the dominant studio and 20th Century–Fox now led the field. Zanuck sat in the throne that Louis B. Mayer had long occupied.

Myrna knew that the ground was shifting in her private world as well. Emotional distance and clashing values, as well as an ocean and a continent, now separated her from Gene Markey. Their planned collaboration on an independent film and TV company went nowhere, although they had formed a corporation, bought some stories, and hired a publicist. Myrna rarely heard from Gene. When he did write to her from England, he assured her that he loved her and asked for news from Pacific Palisades: “How are the poplars and all the other friendly trees? What is the general pattern of life around the little red house?” he inquired. “All of it means a great deal to me. I would like to know how your room looks, and mine. I would like just to be able to look in the window for a little moment.”
²¹

When Myrna learned from a friend in Europe that Gene had been pursuing an Irish countess, she decided she’d had it. Over the telephone she informed him that she would seek a divorce. “We were away from each other too much,” Gene told a reporter for the
London Daily Mirror
. In the United States Louella Parsons broke the story: “Myrna Loy Admits Marriage to Gene Markey Is on Rocks.”
²²

A distraught Gene dispatched a few melancholy letters to Myrna from Claridge’s, London. In these his occasional use of the lowercase
i
for first person
I
may signify how diminished he felt:

i shan’t go into a post-mortem; it would only be sad. I believe you know how happy i was with you—when you (at least so I thought) were happy with me. I tried very hard—as I think you realize—to make it go: particularly when I took you away to the Continent. From the time you went to Paris I could only judge from your behavior that the bell rung. [That was] the deepest hell i have ever been in.

After I got to Vienna I wanted to write you, asking for a divorce, but I held back for one reason: that I feared it would be a comment on your Fox “mother” film

[Cheaper by the Dozen]

. The American Public is an old monster, half daemon, half puritan. “Moral” defects in film stars, it regards with a prurient eye, but divorce—a third divorce—is not good. So I say—in all friendship—I think it best to wait . . . until your picture has been out and is no longer news.

i tried to take care of you—but apparently it went awry somewhere.

Good luck, always,

G
²³

When he heard from her lawyers in Hollywood that a Mexican divorce was in the offing, Gene reiterated to them his argument that the divorce should be postponed. Myrna would suffer public lambasting if it took place now, just before the release of
Cheaper by the Dozen
. She’d be grouped with such other divorcing stars currently in the news as Ingrid Bergman, John Huston, and Betty Hutton and would be subjected to “another storm of sneers and jeers at ‘loose Hollywood marriages’ from women’s clubs and the writers of newspaper editorials.”
²⁴

The Mexican divorce did go forward in August when Myrna filed an uncontested petition charging mental cruelty. She’d ended her marriage to John Hertz in the same dingy Cuernavaca courtroom. Her friend and assistant Leone Rosson, who during the four-year marriage had always managed to resist Gene’s charm and because she kept the books and knew how expensive he was, accompanied Myrna on the brief, sad journey to Mexico. Myrna told the reporters who greeted their returning plane, “It’s too painful to talk about,” and quickly dispatched them.
²⁵

Gene’s final letter about clearing his belongings out of the house they’d shared sounded a plaintive note: “There are a few old clothes,” he wrote, “but I shan’t take anything except my silver (which was my family’s), my books—and a few plates for the small apartment that I shall need when I go ‘home.’ ”
²⁶

Myrna never succumbed to rancor when she thought back on her years with Gene and the many good times they’d shared. She called him “a born courtier, witty companion, [and] skilled lover,” who “simply found it impossible to concentrate on one woman” (
BB
, 256). Markey would later marry the wealthy widow Lucille Parker Wright, who owned Calumet Farm in Kentucky, where thoroughbred horses were bred.

Right before the impending divorce was announced, Myrna spent a week in Washington, D.C., meeting and socializing with State Department and United Nations officials. Washington made her feel welcome, important. She thought of moving there. She, too, was looking for a home.

CHAPTER 17

Mrs. Howland Sargeant

As the pace of her film career slackened, Myrna took tentative steps into the burgeoning world of television, hoping for a lead role in a series. She never landed one, although she starred in a few pilots made with the hope that a series would ensue. Instead, she appeared several times in filmed
General Electric Theater
productions and on live variety shows hosted by Perry Como and George Gobel. She was Walter Pidgeon’s wife and the mother of Jane Powell, Jeanne Crain, and Patty Duke in a live, made-for-TV remake of the MGM musical
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Since her movies from the 1930s and 1940s were making the rounds on late-night television, Myrna would sometimes find herself face-to-face with her previous self on the small screen, at times startled by the experience. But her acting career, past or present, didn’t totally engage her these days. World affairs and her private life occupied the front burners.

During the 1950 California senatorial campaign, Eleanor Roosevelt telephoned to enlist her help on behalf of three-term Democratic congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, Melvyn’s wife, who was being smeared as “the Pink Lady,” a communist sympathizer, by her rival candidate, Richard Nixon. Mrs. Roosevelt told Myrna, “I want you to help me. Helen is in trouble. She is up against a man who is unscrupulous.” Myrna hosted several fund-raisers for Mrs. Douglas, who would be trounced by Nixon in the November election. A reporter asked Myrna during the campaign if she would consider running for Congress if Helen Gahagan Douglas had to vacate her seat to become a senator. Myrna answered that she had been away from California for a while and didn’t feel qualified to represent its citizens. “I don’t know enough to be in Congress. I’m learning to be a diplomat but I’m no politician. I’m too busy with UNESCO.”
¹

Soon after Secretary of State Dean Acheson appointed Myrna Loy to an unsalaried three-year position as a member of the National Commission for UNESCO, she rented her Pacific Palisades saltbox to the actor George Sanders, said another good-bye to California, and bought a house on N Street in Georgetown, a “smart little grey house whose front porch is two steps below street level.” A newspaper columnist wrote, “There’s a new face in the national capital. It’s pretty and freckled and familiar to millions of American moviegoers.” Although she maintained an office near the State Department, she was able to work from her desk in the little gray frame house a few days a week.
²

In addition to her UNESCO work she resumed the military hospital visits to wounded servicemen that had engaged her during World War II, this time calling on veterans of the Korean War.

She had already become close to the man who would become her fourth husband, Howland Sargeant, who was divorced, just shy of his fortieth birthday when they wed, and eight years her junior. A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a graduate (like both Arthur Hornblow Jr. and Gene Markey) of Dartmouth, Howland Sargeant was a career diplomat whose title was deputy secretary of state for public affairs. The Loy-Sargeant romance began a few months after she broke with Gene Markey, at a UNESCO conference in Florence at which Howland headed the U.S. delegation. Taking tea with him at a monastery in Fiesole, or strolling beside him along the Arno, Myrna felt renewed and romantic, full of hope for a future life in which being a movie star would no longer define her.

A New Englander whose mother still lived in the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Howland had an earnest, buttoned-down demeanor. Lacking the dash of Myrna’s three previous husbands, he showed scant interest in the clothes he wore or his physical surroundings. Terry Hornblow characterized him as a nice guy, but not a single one of Myrna’s close women friends had a good word for him. Estelle Linzer considered him cold and repressed. Natalie Visart Taylor found him pompous. Elsie Jensen Brock, who headed the AAUN West Coast branch, faulted him for being condescending toward people less well educated than he and for failing to recognize Myrna’s intelligence. She thought he regarded Myrna as little more than a pinup girl, although Myrna reported that their courtship included stimulating conversations about politics and the United Nations. Howland was exceedingly bright. From the start, though, he resented the flurries of attention that Myrna’s celebrity generated. He wanted a conventional, subservient wife, a “little woman” who would yield the spotlight to him.
³

Attended only by her old friends Betty and Bob Black, Howland and Myrna’s wedding was a hurried ceremony, presided over by a military chaplain in Fort Myer, Virginia. Howland had wanted a Presbyterian minister to officiate, but because Myrna had been divorced from Gene Markey for less than a year, the minister they had chosen refused. Bob Black, a colonel in the Pentagon Medical Corps, found the chaplain who rescued them. After the improvised wedding the couple headed almost immediately for Europe on the
Queen Elizabeth
. They would combine their honeymoon with a UNESCO meeting in Paris.