Myrna Loy (55 page)

A Republican congressman from Indiana seized the opportunity to lambaste UNESCO as “a mismanaged socialite travel club” and to charge that the Sargeants’ Paris honeymoon had been undertaken at the expense of American taxpayers. Another congressman, this one a Democrat from Georgia, set the record straight, insisting that Myrna Loy’s new husband had paid for the honeymoon.
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Although she kept active on the speaker circuit in and around Washington, delivering talks to groups like the American Newspaper Women’s Club, Myrna’s most reported role was as hostess or guest at D.C. social events. She and Howland hosted elegant parties with guest lists that often included big names like Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his wife, Alice (a painter, who became a good friend); India Edwards, who headed the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee; or Vice President Alben Barkley. The society columns of the
Washington Post
might announce that at a benefit for Georgetown Neighborhood House the tea pourers included Mrs. Dean Acheson, Mrs. David Bruce (wife of the undersecretary of state), and Mrs. Howland Sargeant; or they might tell the world that at a fall cocktail party “Myrna Loy, known as Mrs. Howland Sargeant, wore a straight-cut black wool suit and a white satin cloche covered with jet bugle beads.” At Rose Garden teas and Blair House receptions Myrna got to know the first lady, Bess Truman, delighting in her genuineness and lack of pretension. Could there be anyone further removed from Nora Charles than homespun, midwestern Bess Truman?
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Myrna soon discovered that as a State Department wife she wore a gag. Howland was forbidden to talk to her openly about his work, and she was not allowed to voice her own political opinions in public. Since the District of Columbia wasn’t a state and the 23rd Amendment had not yet been passed, she couldn’t even vote in national elections. When Adlai Stevenson ran for president against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, she wanted nothing more than to campaign for the eloquent and witty Democratic candidate who bore a striking physical resemblance to Arthur Hornblow, but she had to accept being sidelined. The next time Stevenson sought the presidency, in 1956, Myrna took an active part in the campaign because by that time Eisenhower occupied the White House, and Howland no longer worked for the State Department.

The night Dean Acheson wrestled with his decision to recommend removing General Douglas MacArthur from his command of United Nations forces in Korea, she and Howland were together at the Acheson home. The men sequestered themselves to work on the Acheson brief, while their wives conversed in another room. On the drive home Howland told Myrna nothing at all about what had transpired behind closed doors. Myrna learned about President Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur when she read the headlines in the next morning’s newspapers (
BB
, 264).

The respect shown her by both the plainspoken president and the patrician secretary of state offered some solace. According to Myrna, Truman sometimes solicited her comments and advice. Dean Acheson, increasingly under fire for his refusal to distance himself from Alger Hiss at a time when Senator Joseph McCarthy kept charging that the State Department employed communist sympathizers, held her in high esteem. When Howland Sargeant was sworn in as the State Department’s chief of propaganda, Acheson said, “It strikes me that we’re getting two Assistant Secretaries for the price of one.” Myrna guessed that the nod in her direction caused her husband to blanch.
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Howland, like John Hertz Jr. before him, had misgivings about having a wife in the public eye, and he didn’t encourage Myrna to accept acting roles. She did so, nevertheless, when an offer to costar in
Belles on Their Toes
, a sequel to
Cheaper by the Dozen
, came her way. She left Georgetown and Howland for six weeks and moved into a Beverly Hills apartment provided by 20th Century–Fox. Once again she would portray Lillian Gilbreth, the widowed psychologist, industrial engineer, and mother of twelve who must now take over what had been her husband’s role of financial provider, company president, and household manager. Myrna, who had been a working woman since her late teens, identified with this role and saw it as a boost to the feminist cause. As Lillian Gilbreth she battled male chauvinist executives who wouldn’t consider hiring women engineers and seethed at a men’s club that barred her from a speaking engagement when it discovered she was female.

She also relished the chance to share the screen a second time with Jeanne Crain, who would again appear as the oldest Gilbreth daughter, Anne. Nominated for an Academy Award in 1949 for her performance as Ethel Waters’s daughter in
Pinky
, Crain had earned the right to share top billing with Myrna for
Belles on Their Toes
. In fact Crain’s name appears first in the credits. Myrna also agreed to a pay cut of $30,000 less than her takings for
Cheaper by the Dozen
, another indication that her star had dimmed; she received $50,000.
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Jeanne Crain worshipped Myrna Loy. She considered her an enormously subtle actress, whose minimalism belied her mysterious powerhouse capabilities. “The slightest thing she does has a force,” she said. She compared her to a deep pool, with a deceptively smooth surface (
BB
, 243). She also admired Myrna’s awareness of others and her engagement with global issues.

With Hoagy Carmichael cast as the slightly scandalous housekeeper who brews bootleg beer in the basement, and Debra Paget as a singing and dancing daughter,
Belles on Their Toes
was an agreeable bit of fluff with a soft-pedaled blue-stocking agenda that went down easy. The script by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, full of tuneful nostalgia for the 1920s, concentrated on the romances of the older daughters.
Time
magazine called it a “marshmallow mélange of Technicolor, tunes, slapstick and sentiment.”
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Rumors kept circulating that Myrna Loy and William Powell would reunite in a television series, but it never happened. He also backed out of a television role opposite her in “Love Came Late” for
General Electric Theater
. Melvyn Douglas replaced him. Begging off, Powell sent her dozens of red roses and invited her down to Palm Springs for dinner, which made her suspect something momentous and difficult was in the offing. When Powell told her in the spring of 1956 that he was retiring, that he was sixty-five and worn out, Myrna felt devastated. It was like losing a limb. She’d clung to the hope that they would find a way to work together again.

When she returned to Washington, Howland continued to keep his emotional distance, shutting Myrna out. The companionship, affection, and emotional closeness Myrna craved, which had flourished before their marriage, began to deteriorate once they became man and wife. His State Department job encouraged his inherent tendency to keep his own counsel. Instead of conversing with her in the evening, sharing stories and ideas, he would play squash after work, eat a hurried dinner, disappear into his newspaper, watch the news on TV, and go to bed early. On the night Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in the presidential election, Myrna sat alone watching the election returns on television and weeping. Howland had retired to bed (
BB
, 267).

The installation of a Republican administration in Washington forced Howland into the job market, and the anxiety didn’t help the marriage. After a period of uncertainty, during which he toyed with several offers, he accepted a post in New York as head of Radio Liberation, a government-financed network that broadcasted to countries behind the Iron Curtain. Myrna and Howland rented an apartment overlooking the East River in Manhattan but held on for the present to the house in Georgetown. Myrna was overseeing its remodeling. They both hoped they would be returning to live there in a new Democratic administration down the road.

Howland’s status as a propaganda officer on the front lines of the cold war didn’t protect Myrna from suspicions about her loyalty to the United States. When her application for a renewal of her passport met with delay after delay, she protested with a letter to the Passport Office. Arguing that further postponement would be “professionally and personally embarrassing and detrimental,” she included an affidavit stating, “I am not, nor have I ever been a Communist. To the contrary, I have always regarded with complete disapproval the activities of this dangerous faction.” She supported, she wrote, “a code of national pride, personal freedom and human nobility.” To bolster her credibility she enclosed copies of 1946 letters she’d written to the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (originally the Hollywood Democratic Committee), tendering her resignation because she considered it too radical.
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She got her passport and put it to immediate use when she embarked in the fall of 1955 for a three-month stay in Paris to film
The Ambassador’s Daughter
. Olivia de Havilland starred, and for the first time Myrna Loy accepted an “also starring” role, reasoning that if she didn’t make her peace with character roles and second billing, she might not work in films at all. Myrna liked the light touch of writer-director-producer Norman Krasna, who had cowritten the script for
Wife vs. Secretary
back in 1936. She also looked forward to playing the wry and sympathetic wife of a U.S. senator, to be portrayed by Melvyn Douglas, but he pulled out at the last minute and was replaced by Adolphe Menjou. Menjou had testified as a friendly witness at the HUAC hearings and was a dedicated right-winger who spotted communists lurking under every bed. He once told Gene Markey that if Myrna Loy did not qualify as an actual communist, she’d do until a real one came along. Myrna had great apprehension about working with him but was buoyed by the friendliness of John Forsythe, de Havilland’s love interest in the movie, who told her that he sided with her, politically. Menjou turned out to be congenial both on and off the set, to Myrna’s surprise and pleasure. De Havilland, who discovered she was pregnant during filming and didn’t have an easy time in the freezing Joinville studios, remembers Myrna as “a fine actress and someone who always impressed me as an equally fine person.”
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Howland joined Myrna in Paris for a festive New Year’s Eve. They traveled after that to Spain and Portugal but subsequently found themselves sharing less and less time together. There had been no major rupture, just a gradual drifting apart. When Della underwent major surgery and had to spend many weeks in a Los Angeles hospital, Myrna took an apartment there and settled in for a long stay. Her beloved Aunt Lu had died in 1953; she and Della had lived together for decades. Although Leone Rosson, Myrna’s Los Angeles–based assistant, did her best to stand in for Myrna, calling on Della often and even buying Mother’s Day gifts for her, Myrna wanted to be on the scene. She seemed glad to have an excuse to linger in Los Angeles. A few years back she’d turned down a role opposite Charlton Heston in
The Private War of Major Benson
because it would entail too long a separation from Howland, but now she actively sought work on the West Coast. Offered a part in a screen adaptation of the novel
Miss Lonelyhearts
, to be filmed at Goldwyn Studios, she accepted it eagerly.

Dore Schary, long since displaced at RKO and deposed in 1956 as head man at MGM, had recently triumphed on Broadway with his production of his own play,
Sunrise at Campobello
, about FDR. Now, wanting to try his hand back in Hollywood as an independent producer, he acquired the screen rights to the dark and surreal Nathanael West novel
Miss Lonelyhearts
and wrote his own screenplay for a film to be titled
Lonelyhearts
. He assembled a cast of exceptionally talented actors, including Maureen Stapleton, in her first movie role, and Montgomery Clift, the inward-looking and vulnerable leading man whose success signaled a new Hollywood take on masculinity and who had already been nominated for three Academy Awards in the ten years since his screen debut.

Clift had been working for Schary at MGM at the time of the actor’s devastating 1956 car accident, which disfigured his face, cost him several teeth, and left him chronically afflicted with back pain. “He would shake with pain.” Already a heavy drinker and pill popper when he crashed his car into a telephone pole, he subsequently became so dependent on alcohol, speed, and painkillers that he could only work in the morning.
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In addition to the raft of problems that Montgomery Clift brought to the set, Schary faced budget constraints. United Artists agreed to finance the project but only if costs could be kept under $750,000. Clift agreed to take on the role of newspaper lonely hearts columnist Adam White for a nominal salary of only $25,000, plus 10 percent of the grosses. He admired Nathanael West’s novel and had high hopes for this adaptation. Robert Ryan, who would deliver a volcanic performance as the sadistic newspaper editor William Shrike, also got a percentage of the grosses. His salary was the highest, at $75,000. Myrna Loy, cast as Shrike’s emotionally brutalized wife, Florence, worked for only $22,500. Maureen Stapleton, who would be nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the sex-starved wife of a disabled man, received $10,000. And Dolores Hart, asked to play a completely incongruous role as a wholesome girl next door in love with Clift’s Adam White, was paid $7,000. According to Clift’s close friend, the actor-writer Jack Larson, Clift and Hart didn’t hit it off. Hart would retire from films in 1963 to become a nun.
¹²

There was tension between Clift and the director, Vincent Donehue, which Schary tried to mediate. Schary had imported Donehue, a noted stage director from New York, because he’d been impressed by the way Donehue had staged
Sunrise at Campobello
on Broadway, but he was taking a chance with a director new to film. Schary and Donehue rehearsed the actors for two weeks before filming began and shot the script in chronological sequence, just like a theatrical production.