Myrna Loy (60 page)

Myrna and Jim Kotsilibas-Davis flew together from Los Angeles to Montana and spent a week there, in Radersburg and Helena. Kotsilibas-Davis said, “That trip gave me more of a sense of Myrna than anything. We saw the whole world she came from, that feeling of vastness and cleanliness and integrity.”
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Helena would later honor her with a performing arts center named the Myrna Loy Center, housed in what used to be the Lewis and Clark County Jail, an imposing granite structure. As a girl, Myrna had been afraid to walk anywhere near that building, and she was amused but pleased when the planners, led by Arnie Malina, asked for permission to use her name. Open since 1997, the center thrives today as a venue for movie screenings, theater, concerts, and dance performances, with prison bars still affixed to the windows and vintage Myrna Loy photos adorning the walls of the inside lobby. The sidewalk in front of the center, inscribed with the names of donors, includes the names Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Myrna and Jim Kotsilibas-Davis spent countless hours together during the six years it took to complete
Being and Becoming
. The sessions of reminiscing at times became wrenching for Myrna. “There were many days when Myrna would break down and cry,” Kotsilibas-Davis recalled. Myrna said, “Going through my past was like intense psychotherapy.”
²⁷

The American Place Theatre celebrated the publication of
Being and Becoming
with a benefit gala that also marked the theater group’s fifteenth anniversary. The humorist Cynthia Heimel put together a program of Myrna Loy film clips titled “When in Doubt, Act like Myrna Loy,” a celebration of her style and savoir faire. “Who else could play poker with the boys in the baggage car and never remove her hat?” The gala’s guest list included Harry Belafonte, Betty Comden, Jules Feiffer, Carrie Fisher, Adolph Green, Helen Hayes, Anne Jackson, Penny Marshall, Roddy McDowall, Phyllis Newman, Maureen O’Sullivan, Tony Randall, Calvin Trillin, and Joanne Woodward. They all watched the scene in
After the Thin Man
where Nora cajoles a groggy Nick into dragging himself out of bed to cook her some scrambled eggs. They all heard Wynn Handman say, “Myrna Loy’s legacy is her total honesty, her irresistible charm, her great sense of humor, a delicate touch, her dignity as a woman.”
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A long overdue tribute from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences arrived with a gala at Carnegie Hall in January of 1985. Although several films she appeared in had been honored with awards or nominations, no Myrna Loy performance had ever been singled out by the Academy, and that hurt. Robert Osborne conjectures that “the reason she never won a competitive Oscar or nomination is because she was
never
bad. She didn’t do the bad work that makes good work look better.” Until 1970, when she presented the Academy Award for Best Director to Jon Voight, who accepted for John Schlesinger for
Midnight Cowboy
, she had never even been chosen to participate as an Oscar presenter. Robert Osborne suggests that her exclusion was due to Arthur Freed’s antipathy to her politics. Only after Freed stopped producing the telecasts was she asked to participate.
²⁹

As she approached her eightieth birthday, the Academy president, Gene Allen, and the program coordinator, Douglas Edwards, began planning the tribute to be held at Carnegie Hall, with a prior reception at the Russian Tea Room and a party afterward at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Academy spokesmen explained, “We thought Myrna Loy deserved this kind of event, given her time in the industry and the consistency of her talent.” Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote the script for the tribute, which Lauren Bacall hosted. Bacall told the crowd that she admired Myrna Loy “as a person, an actress and a face, but also as a woman aware of what went on in the country and world. She is not a frivolous human being. And she’s a great wit, which I’m a sucker for.”
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To select the clips that would be shown, Douglas Edwards screened fifty-five Loy films and chose excerpts from twenty-two of them. The evening’s coup would be a screening of
The Animal Kingdom
, all of it, featuring Myrna Loy as the stunning but soulless wife of Leslie Howard. It had not been shown in New York since 1932, had been missing for decades, and had been tagged a lost film. The film historian Ronald Haver rediscovered it, and the UCLA Film Archive restored it.

From the stage, before the screening, Maureen Stapleton told about the time she asked to borrow Myrna Loy’s lipstick and then realized that the lipstick had touched lips that had kissed Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and William Powell. Lena Horne came forward to hail the guest of honor for living “a useful, purposeful life,” for being “aware of the problems of others and ready to do something about them. To look like that and be like that—that’s a great woman. I salute you, Madam.” Miss Loy herself, fragile but resplendent in a sequined gown, cradled long-stemmed red roses and stood up from her dress circle seat to acknowledge tumultuous applause. Among those who joined the ovation were Lillian Gish, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Sidney Lumet, Robert Mitchum, Maureen O’Sullivan, Tony Randall, Burt Reynolds, Sylvia Sidney, Harold Russell (the double amputee who portrayed Homer in
The Best Years of Our Lives
), and Teresa Wright (
BB
, ix–x).

It took another five years for the Academy to finally, during the 63 rd Annual Academy Awards for 1990, bestow an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Anjelica Huston, whose father, John, had worked with Myrna on the Committee for the First Amendment and whose grandfather Walter had appeared with her in
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, presented it, praising Loy’s “sweet way with a sharp line.” No longer strong enough to travel, Myrna was shown by satellite from her New York apartment, saying simply, “You’ve made me very happy. Thank you very much.”
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Earlier, in 1988, Anjelica Huston and Senator Ted Kennedy had sat at Myrna’s table at the dinner that followed the Kennedy Center Honors, when Loy was one of five honorees. Robby Lantz, who years back had been Nancy Davis’s agent, escorted Myrna; Walter Cronkite served as master of ceremonies for the awards presentation; and Kathleen Turner introduced Myrna Loy’s segment. At the White House reception, Ronald Reagan, whose presidency Myrna Loy vociferously opposed, called her “lovely and mysterious,” extolling her “great ease and comfort, as though she were possessed of answers to questions you hadn’t even thought of asking in the first place.” When the Kennedy Center Awards were broadcast on CBS television two weeks later, Myrna watched them from her Lenox Hill hospital bed, with Wynn and Bobbie Handman beside her.
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Myrna never liked talking about her illnesses. Hers pursued and tormented her far too long. In the 1970s she survived two mastectomies and underwent chemotherapy. In subsequent years she was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital repeatedly, enduring treatment for two other forms of cancer (bowel cancer and squamous cell carcinoma of the nose), fractures, neurological problems that affected her balance, and heart disease. Her acting days were over by the time she turned eighty, but she carried on, supported by a full-time helper, Cynthia Hill; by devoted and attentive friends; and by a physician, Dr. Naham Winer, who with his entire family had adopted her as one of their own.

She clung to life beyond her capacity to enjoy, or even to remember, it. Her memory began to fail around the time her autobiography appeared. After a party celebrating that event, coming home in a taxi she shared with Miles Kreuger, a historian of musicals who was a friend of the party host Jim Kotsilibas-Davis, she couldn’t recall her own address to give to the cab driver.
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She died during surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital on December 14,1993. “Myrna Loy, Model of Urbanity in ‘The Thin Man’ Roles, Dies at 88,” ran the headline to a lengthy obituary in the
New York Times
.
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Fewer than fifty people attended her underpublicized memorial at the Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York. No member of the Hornblow family had been informed of the event, and none attended. Myrna’s will, however, bequeathed the contents of her apartment to Terry and made his three children major beneficiaries of her estate.

In his eulogy Roddy McDowall told the mourners—who included Alan King; the Handmans; Lawrence Quirk; Betty Comden; James Kotsilibas-Davis; the family of her physician, Dr. Nahum Winer; John, June, and Gary Springer; the actress Jan Miner; Estelle Linzer; and Alan Pakula—that Myrna Loy had no surviving immediate family. (Her brother, David, had died in 1983.) He acknowledged Myrna’s friends Estelle Linzer and Robbie and Sherlee Lantz, as well as her caregivers Cynthia Hill and Lorna David. He recalled Myrna as “one of the least vain people I have ever met,” a woman “full of waltzing gentility,” a “flirtatious American-Edwardian” who carried off “a wry mix of romance and reserve. There was no tone like her baccarat crystal laugh.” He confessed, “Her love provides one of the golden threads in the tapestry of my life.”
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When Robert Lantz took the podium, he spoke of how bracing he found it that Myrna’s “rueful acceptance of human shortcomings was untainted by sanctimony, that her attentive, intelligent curiosity was never intrusive, that her crystalline wit had no wounding edge. She was the screen’s most approachable sophisticate, an aristocrat who knew neither snobbery nor disdain.” She never became a boring matron, he said, “because there was a touch of the tousled in her immaculately groomed person. She was the Grand Copain of movies and of those who were blessed to know her.”
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No memorial for her took place in Los Angeles, nor is there any sort of marker for her there, other than the replica of the 1922 statue of her as “Inspiration” at Venice High School. Her ashes are interred near the graves of her parents in Helena’s Forestvale Cemetery, under the capacious dome of the Montana sky.

For all her generosity of spirit, Myrna Loy shunned halos. John Ford’s “only good girl in Hollywood” remains an embodiment of buoyancy, companionability, engagement with the world, elegant urbanity, cool affection, and wry humor. She once said of herself, “If you want to know the secret of the perfect wife I played, well, she was really a rascal—just like me.”
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APPENDIX

Myrna Loy’s Film, Television,

and Theater Credits

FEATURE FILMS

1.

Pretty Ladies

Sept. 6, 1925; six reels, silent, b&w.

Directed by Monta Bell; produced and distributed by MGM.

Cast: ZaSu Pitts (Maggie Keenan), Tom Moore (Al Cassidy), Ann Pennington (Herself), Lilyan Tashman (Selma Larson), Bernard Randall (Aaron Savage), Conrad Nagel (Maggie’s dream lover), Norma Shearer (Frances White), Lucille Le Sueur (Bobby), Roy D’Arcy (Paul Thompson), Lew Harvey (Will Rogers), Jimmie Quinn (Eddie Cantor); ML as uncredited chorus girl.

2.

Satan in Sables

Nov. 14, 1925; eight reels, silent, b&w.

Directed by James Flood; produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Cast: Lowell Sherman (Michael Lyev Yervedoff), John Harron (Paul Yervedoff), Pauline Garon (Colette Breton), Gertrude Astor (Dolores Sierra), Frank Butler (Victor), Francis McDonald (Émile); ML was inserted into a scene with Lowell Sherman.

3.

Sporting Life

Nov. 29, 1925; seven reels, silent, b&w.

Directed by Maurice Tourneur; produced by Carl Laemmle/Universal Jewel; distributed by Universal Pictures.

Compiled with the assistance of Karie Bible.

Cast: Bert Lytell (Lord Woodstock), Marian Nixon (Norah Cavanaugh), Paulette Duval (Olive Carteret), Cyril Chadwick (Phillips), Charles Delaney (Joe Lee), George Siegmann (Dan Crippen), Oliver Eckhardt (Cavanaugh), Ted “Kid” Lewis (Boxer); ML in uncredited role as chorus girl.

4.

Ben-Hur (abbreviated credits)

Dec. 30, 1925; twelve reels (128–29 min.), silent, b&w (with Technicolor sequence).

Directed by Fred Niblo; produced by (in arrangement with) Abraham L. Erlanger, Charles B. Dillingham, and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.; produced and distributed by MGM.

Cast: Ramon Novarro (Judah Ben-Hur, also known as Arrius the Younger), Francis X. Bushman (Messala), May McAvoy (Esther), Betty Bronson (Mary), Claire McDowell (Miriam Princess of Hur), Carmel Myers (Iras); ML plays bacchante as part of the general’s harem. Her scene was cut and survives only in a still.

5.

The Wanderer

Feb. 1, 1926; nine reels, silent, b&w.

Directed by Raoul Walsh; produced by Famous Players-Lasky, Adolph Zukor, and Jesse L. Lasky; distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Cast: Greta Nissen (Tisha), William Collier Jr. (Jether), Ernest Torrence (Tola), Wallace Beery (Pharis), [Frederick] Tyrone Power (Jesse), Kathryn Hill (Naomi), Kathlyn Williams (Huldah), Snitz Edwards (Jeweler); ML has bit as dancer in orgy scene.

6.

The Caveman

Feb. 6, 1926; seven reels, silent, b&w.

Directed by Lewis Milestone; produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Cast: Matt Moore (Mike Smagg), Marie Prevost (Myra Gaylord), John Patrick (Brewster Bradford), Myrna Loy (Maid), Phyllis Haver (Dolly Van Dream), Hedda Hopper (Mrs. Van Dream).

7.

The Love Toy

Feb. 13, 1926; six reels, silent, b&w.

Directed by Erle C. Kenton; produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Cast: Lowell Sherman (Peter Remsen), Jane Winton (The Bride), Willard Louis (King Lavoris), Gayne Whitman (Prime Minister), Ethel Grey Terry (Queen Zita), Helene Costello (Princess Patricia), Maude George (Lady in waiting); ML has bit as dancer.