Myrna Loy (56 page)

In adapting Nathanael West’s novel for the screen, Schary gave some of the characters new names and took many other liberties. He underplayed the Christlike aspect of Miss Lonelyhearts, turning Adam White’s suffering into something personal to him rather than symbolic. He removed the sexual relationship between Mrs. Shrike and Adam. Most dissonant with the bleak tone of the book was what he did to the ending. In the novel the bleeding-heart newspaper columnist who takes on the sufferings of those who write letters to him is shot and killed by the “cripple” he has cuckolded via Fay Doyle, the character played by Maureen Stapleton. Schary substituted hearts and flowers. The cuckolded husband tries to shoot Adam but drops the gun. Adam’s girlfriend forgives his infidelity, and they are going off together to get married. The blisteringly sarcastic and relentlessly cruel editor Shrike suddenly turns mushy and plucks a flower to give his tormented wife. The feel-good ending contradicts everything we’ve learned about Shrike’s character, prompting disbelief in the audience, but that is the way Schary wanted it. Schary’s daughter Jill wrote of him, “Daddy loves all stories about disastrous problems that are overcome. One of the main characters must be a Decent Human Being. His problems must have happy endings.”
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Clift mocked the happy ending as a travesty, telling Robert Ryan he could find no trace of Nathanael West in it. “Where’s the corruption? The misery? Hysteria has been replaced by blandness. Miss Lonelyhearts, meet Andy Hardy.” Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
chided, “With due respect for Mr. Schary’s idealism and optimism in this sad world, his wrap-up is naively and incredibly pat.”
¹⁴

Montgomery Clift, who was bisexual, had a gift for friendship with women. A good listener, he could be wonderfully caring and supportive. Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he costarred in two more movies after their memorable teaming in
A Place in the Sun
, headed the list. He had been returning from a dinner party at her house when he crashed his car. Intimate friends, and perhaps once lovers too, Taylor and Clift even looked alike. Clift called Elizabeth his true twin, his other half. Most of his other close female friends were older women who mothered him. Salka Viertel, the blacklisted former writer of screenplays for Garbo, was one. The tobacco heiress, fellow drinker, druggie, and onetime torch singer Libby Holman was another, and the comic actress Nancy Walker, who was visiting Clift in California while
Lonelyhearts
was in production, was a third. Myrna Loy would join this select circle.

Clift’s astute biographer, Patricia Bosworth, doesn’t name her informant, but she quotes someone on the set of
Lonelyhearts
who describes Myrna’s electric response to Monty when they first met: “There were sparks. He had this kind of cosmic thing.” They began to spend lots of time together. Leone Rosson reported in her terse, telegraphic diary entries: “August 23, 1958: M. L. first dinner date with Monty. August 25: Miss L left with Monty from studio for dinner. August 27: M. L.–Monty. End of Picture. August 28: M. L. lunch Monty. I went to rushes with M. L. and Monty. August 29: M. L.–Monty Bel Air [Hotel].” In early September Clift’s driver drove them to La Jolla, where they spent a few days. Leone went with them but stayed in another hotel. Her September 7 diary entry reads, “Picked M. L. and Monty up at 7:30 and we left for L.A.” It isn’t clear if they were sharing a room.
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It’s impossible to know if they became lovers. Certainly alcohol impairs sexual performance, and Monty couldn’t stop drinking. Jack Larson said he didn’t know whether the relationship was sexual but that Monty’s confidante Salka Viertel thought it was. Larson also said that Montgomery Clift was a very physical, affectionate man who liked to touch those he loved. He adored Myrna, and she in turn was “wonderful to Monty, very loving.”
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In her autobiography Myrna dismisses any such notion and denies the rumors, reported in newspapers of the day and repeated in Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Clift, that she was deeply in love with him and wanted to marry him. According to Myrna, Monty’s sexual ambivalence tormented him. “He could never quite settle for homosexuality. He wanted men but loved women” (
BB
, 289). She implies he was too troubled to take on any committed relationship, but there’s no question that she cared deeply for him and may have been sexually attracted to him as well. Myrna depicts herself not as a captive of desire but as a would-be rescuer of a gifted drowning man.

Intelligent, well-read, and perceptive, Clift had been a professional actor since his boyhood and possessed a director’s sense of what would work in a scene. He coached Myrna and helped edit down a scene in which she and Robert Ryan go at each other. Myrna offered one of her most concentrated and affecting performances on the screen and won the enduring affection and admiration of Robert Ryan.

Monty wanted to work with Myrna again, perhaps in the theater. He spoke of a production of
Hamlet
in which he would play the tormented Dane, Peter Finch would be Claudius, and Myrna would be cast as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. He envisioned a dramatization of Colette’s
Chéri
featuring Myrna Loy as the aging courtesan. He was too bent on self-destruction to realize either project. Ten years after the accident and six years after
Lonelyhearts
he would die in his Manhattan brownstone at age forty-five.

During the filming of
Lonelyhearts
, Clift drank so much at night and took so many pills that he would pass out. “You’d have to put him to bed,” Jack Larson remembers. Myrna tried to get him to stop drinking. In his presence she always drank a Coke. He darkened the windows of his room so he wouldn’t have to look at himself. On sedatives and painkillers he would hallucinate, talking to chimeras. Larson would run lines with him and find Clift’s copy of the script “a jumble of pages, not consecutive.”

When they were both back in New York, Clift and Myrna continued to see each other for a while, attending the theater together, afterward going out to eat and, in his case, drink. Often Clift would have to be literally carried out of a restaurant or bar. Or they’d meet at parties hosted by Clift or by the actor-photographer Roddy McDowall, an important new friend Myrna had met through Clift. When Clift summoned her, she would drop everything else to be with him. Leone Rosson’s diary records a night that she and Myrna had scheduled jointly to go over Myrna’s financial records. “Monty called so our work night was cancelled” (Feb. 2, 1959). But toward the end of his life, Myrna stopped seeing him. She had come to the forlorn conclusion that he was beyond help and that watching him destroy himself was more than she could bear.

As soon as she returned to Manhattan after the completion of
Lonelyhearts
, Myrna had to face the dissolution of her marriage to Howland Sargeant. Once again she moved out of the home—this time a Beekman Place apartment—which she and her husband had shared. A draft of the letter of farewell that she left for Howland survives, offering a rare unmediated glimpse into Myrna’s intimate life. “Dear Howland,” it begins:

This is the most difficult task that I have ever performed. After a long period of searching analysis into our relationship I have come to the conclusion that we should separate. I am sure you will agree that the struggle to adjust our different interests has resulted in too little for either of us. With deep regret I have chosen to leave to avoid the unnecessary cruelty of unfair recriminations. . . . I hope you will always have a warm feeling for the things we have learned together as I most certainly will have. It is my wish to see you again someday. . . . I hope you know how much faith I have in the contribution you have made and will in future make to this sorry old world of ours.

With love and in friendship always,

M
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Avoiding direct confrontation, as was her habit, she asked him to contact her attorney.

Although Myrna had realized for some time that her fourth marriage was played out, she found the process of initiating and following through on the divorce shattering. In her bones she knew that this was it: there would be no fifth attempt. Howland represented her last chance, said Estelle Linzer, to create a life similar to the one she had known with Arthur, combining love, marriage, and a home. Myrna found it deeply hurtful that Howland didn’t seem to care about losing her. She became withdrawn and depressed, refusing invitations to go out to the theater or movies.
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During the months of transition she leaned heavily on the steady, practical support of Leone Rosson, who answered Myrna’s call for her to depart Los Angeles and come to New York to help, and of Estelle, a generous, nurturing friend who lived on Manhattan’s East Side.

Since leaving Howland, Myrna had been living in Manhattan at the Plaza Hotel. Leone helped her settle into the less costly Volney on East 74th Street, an apartment building offering room and restaurant service for meals. Many “women of a certain age” lived there, mostly widows and divorcees. Dorothy Parker was a resident; she wrote about the Volney in her 1953 play
Ladies of the Corridor
. Lillian Hellman would sometimes join Myrna and Dorothy for a meal, before she left the city to take care of Dashiell Hammett in his last days. Hellman never became a steady friend. Myrna found her too thorny and competitive (
BB
, 288).

Myrna counted on Leone to perform all kinds of services for her. Leone met with attorneys and served as an intermediary between Myrna and Howland. She spent time in Georgetown, making an inventory of items in the house on N Street that would be used in the property settlement, since Myrna did not simply walk away this time. The house would be sold and the furnishings divided. Leone had gone to Washington to help select the same pieces of furniture that she now had to catalogue for the divorce. She helped Myrna find permanent quarters and move from the Volney into a modest rented apartment with a terrace at the Royal York at 425 East 63rd Street. Some of the pieces from Georgetown found their way there.

Myrna didn’t consider living anywhere else but in New York City, home of the United Nations and of many dear friends. Her current agent at MCA, Mimi Weber, lived right across the street from the Royal York. She felt fully alive in Manhattan, whereas Los Angeles made her conscious of her has-been status in the movie industry. She had long ago adjusted to living on the opposite coast from Della and David, and she preferred it.

Leone found Myrna difficult to be with, not at all the cheerful, even-tempered, and thoughtful woman she had known for more than a decade. Leone wrote things like this in her diary: “Went to Volney. M. L. was in bad humor” (Nov. 26, 1958). “M. L. called. She didn’t sleep and was very grumpy. We had words” (Nov. 29, 1958). “Miss Loy refused to talk. I blew my top but good” (Dec. 31, 1958). “Dinner at Volney. No Monty. Big discussion & fight” (Jan. 16, 1959). Leone behaved admirably, realizing that Myrna truly needed her and that after a blowup she must stay steady. She knew that Myrna was distraught and needed time to heal.

The actual divorce took place by mutual consent in Juarez, Mexico, at the end of May 1960. Newspapers reported, “The 54 year old actress charged ‘incompatibility of character.’ ” Once again Myrna Loy found herself seated forlornly at a table for one.
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CHAPTER 18

New York Ending

Over a period of months, work, activism, and friends pulled Myrna out of her depression. It dawned on her, after some extended wallowing, that she needed to get out of her own skin, to get busy and to be around other people.

Before her fourth divorce was final, she returned to 20th Century–Fox at the end of 1959 to play Paul Newman’s alcoholic and adulterous mother in
From the Terrace
. The role was similar to her battered wife in
Lonelyhearts
, except that this film is in CinemaScope and color, with posh sets providing background for hard-driving East Coast business tycoons and their expensively dressed neglected wives. Based on a sprawling John O’Hara novel, and shot on both coasts,
From the Terrace
opens with Loy’s Mrs. Martha Eaton passed out drunk in an empty train. The sequence follows her home to a poignant, stumbling reunion with her just-back-from-the-war son, Alfred. But after that affecting opening, the script abandons the mother-son relationship to focus on Alfred’s attempts to reconcile vaunting ambition with true love, which his marriage to a cheating snow queen wife, played by Newman’s real wife, Joanne Woodward, fails to provide. We aren’t told what becomes of Mrs. Eaton after the script drops her, but we can guess it isn’t pretty.

If Myrna had any doubts about her diminished status in Hollywood, the ho-hum response to her presence on the Fox set when she came west put them to rest. Paul Newman’s dressing room was piled high with floral tributes, but no one bothered to send flowers to Myrna Loy. Some members of the crew who remembered her from the old days gave her an ovation on the first day of West Coast shooting, but she realized that “I was yesterday and he [Paul Newman] was today” (
BB
, 293). Myrna thought the world of Paul Newman, and they shared similar political views. They would campaign together for Eugene McCarthy’s nomination as the Democratic contender in 1968, but these days she didn’t play in Newman’s professional league.

Loy’s next role as Doris Day’s gallivanting, Auntie Mame–like Aunt Bea in the thriller
Midnight Lace
offered better outfits (designed by Irene) and a chance to speak some sparkling lines onscreen, rare for Myrna in the 1960s, when she only appeared in three films all told. The producer Ross Hunter revered Hollywood’s Golden Age and its leading ladies. His lush Technicolor production gave Myrna a chance to be photographed wearing green taffeta, with real diamonds and emeralds around her neck, and perfectly coifed red hair. Beautifully showcased, she and Doris Day both look elegant throughout the London chill, although Doris Day found her role as a stalked wife emotionally draining. Myrna liked Doris Day and appreciated the collegiality and respect Day showed her. Rex Harrison, on the other hand, who portrayed the villainous husband, behaved as if Myrna were a piece of furniture inconveniently placed in his path.