Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries

by Paul Donnelley

  Loretta Young

  (GRETCHEN MICHAELA YOUNG)

  Born January 6, 1913

  Died August 12, 2000

  ‘Attila the Nun’. 5́ 5˝ Loretta Young was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, one of three daughters of John Earl and Gladys Royal Young. There was also a son, Jackie. Another was the 5́4½˝ actress Sally Blane (b. Salida, Colorado, July 11, 1910 as Elizabeth Jane Young, d. Los Angeles, California August 27, 1997 of cancer). The girls’ parents’ marriage fell apart in 1916 and Mrs Young relocated from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, where she moved in with her sister, set up a theatrical boarding house and began to promote her daughters as juvenile performers in films. Mrs Young withdrew the children from work while they were being educated at the Ramona Convent in Alambra. John Young later joined his family but was caught in bed with the maid. Disgraced, he left the family and his daughters never saw him alive again. A half-sister, Georgiana Belzer (b. Los Angeles, September 30, 1923), would be born later from their mother’s marriage to George Belzer. Gladys Young was the archetypal stage mother who lived her life vicariously through her daughters. All four were soon appearing as extras in small roles, and a very youthful Loretta is to be seen briefly in The Primrose Ring (1917), Sirens Of The Sea (1917), The Only Way (1919), White And Unmarried (1921) and The Sheik (1921). According to showbiz legend, her big break came in 1927 when she answered a phone call from the director Mervyn LeRoy asking her 5́ 2˝ older sister Polly Ann (b. Denver, October 25, 1908, d. Los Angeles, California, January 21, 1997 of cancer) to audition for his film Naughty But Nice (1927). Loretta went along instead, got the role, and never looked back. That year Gretchen Young became Loretta Young thanks to Colleen Moore who said Loretta was the name of “the most beautiful doll I ever had”. Her first real leading role was in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928) as Simonetta, a circus story in which she was the object of romantic rivalry between Lon Chaney and Nils Asther. The same year she successfully made the transition to talkies in The Squall (1929) as Irma, and signed a contract with Warners, where Darryl Zanuck saw her star potential as the screen’s favourite innocent. She was regularly cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr in The Careless Age (1930) as Muriel, Fast Life as Patricia Mason Stratton, The Forward Pass (1929) as Patricia Carlyle, Loose Ankles (1930) as Ann Harper, I Like Your Nerve (1931) as Diane and again, four years later, in The Life Of Jimmy Dolan (1935) in which she played Peggy. Her other films around this time included Her Wild Oat (1927), The Magnificent Flirt (1928) as Denise Laverne, The Head Man (1928) as Carol Watts, Scarlet Seas (1928) as Margaret Barbour, Seven Footprints To Satan (1929), The Man From Blankley’s (1930) as Margery Seaton, The Second Floor Mystery (1930) as Marion Ferguson, Road To Paradise (1930) as Mary Brennan/Margaret Waring, Kismet as Marsinah, The Truth About Youth (1930) as Phyllis Ericson, The Devil To Pay! (1930) as Dorothy Hope, Beau Ideal (1931) as Isobel Brandon, The Right Of Way (1931) as Rosalie Evantural, Three Girls Lost (1931) as Noreen McMann, Too Young To Marry (1931) as Elaine Bumpstead, Big Business Girl (1931) as Claire ‘Mac’ McIntyre and Platinum Blonde (1931) as Gallagher. She got good notices for her acting in The Hatchet Man (1932), in which she played Sun Toya San, a Chinese girl who marries Edward G. Robinson, also Chinese and the murderer of her father, and she looked her most beautiful in Rowland V. Lee’s curious romance Zoo In Budapest (1933) as Eve. In 1933 she fell in love with Spencer Tracy, her leading man in Frank Borzage’s A Man’s Castle. She said of him, “I’d never met anyone like him. Such fire, the talent blazed at you. The story was a trifle but we really lived it. I proved I could really act with that one.” Tracy, who was separated from his wife at the time, was involved in a fight with William Wellman over Young at the Trocadero Club but the affair ended on October 24, 1934 because of their shared Catholicism. “Since Spence and I are both Catholic and can never be married, we have agreed not to see each other again,” she announced. Other boyfriends included: George Brent, Lyle Talbot, Gilbert Roland and the tennis star Fred Perry. Her films included The Ruling Voice as Gloria Bannister, Taxi! as Sue Reilly, The Hatchet Man (1932), Play-Girl (1932) as Buster ‘Bus’ Green, Week-end Marriage (1932) as Lola Davis, Life Begins (1932) as Mrs Grace Sutton, They Call It Sin as Marion Cullen, Employees’ Entrance (1933) as Madeline Walters West, Grand Slam (1933) as Marcia Stanislavsky, Heroes For Sale (1933) as Ruth Loring Holmes, Midnight Mary as Mary Martin, She Had To Say Yes (1933) as Florence Denny and The Devil’s In Love (1933) as Margot Lesesne. When Darryl Zanuck left Warner to found Twentieth Century he took her with him. Here she appeared (and was not best pleased) in a series of costume pieces, such as The House Of Rothschild (1934) as Julie Rothschild, Clive Of India (1935) as Margaret Maskelyne Clive and (on loan to Cecil B. DeMille) in The Crusades (1935), her dark hair disguised under a waist-length blonde wig, as Richard the Lion-Heart’s Queen Berengaria. After Twentieth Century amalgamated with Fox she got a new contract, taking account of her constantly improving status, and found herself teamed as a romantic duo with Tyrone Power in Ladies In Love (1936) as Susie Schmidt, Love Is News (1937) as Toni Gateson, Cafe Metropole (1937) as Laura Ridgeway, Second Honeymoon as Vicky Benton and Suez as Countess Eugenie de Montijo. She also appeared, though not to any particular advantage, in a film directed by John Ford, Four Men And A Prayer (1938) as Miss Lynn Cherrington. Despite the high hopes of Zanuck, her career seemed to be going nowhere, and after making The Story Of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) as Mabel Hubbard Bell, a biography of the inventor of the telephone (which she resented because she was not allowed to play Bell’s wife as the deaf-mute she had in fact been, but merely as deaf) she refused to renew her contract with 20th Century Fox. Her other films at this period included Born To Be Bad as Letty Strong, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934) as Lola Field, Caravan (1934) as Countess Wilma, The White Parade (1934) as June Arden, Shanghai (1935) as Barbara Howard, The Call Of The Wild as Claire Blake, The Unguarded Hour (1936) as Lady Helen Dudley Dearden, Private Number (1936) as Ellen Neal, the title role in Ramona (1936), Love Under Fire (1937) as Myra Cooper, Wife, Doctor And Nurse as Ina Lewis, Three Blind Mice as Pamela Charters, Kentucky (1938) as Sally Goodwin, Wife, Husband And Friend (1939) as Doris Borland, and Eternally Yours (1939) as Anita. That same year Loretta Young went freelance, and was supposedly blacklisted by the Hollywood majors as too difficult to deal with. After a period of inactivity she signed a three picture contract with Columbia, at half her usual salary, and made a succession of minor comedies for various studios, incidentally co-starring with Alan Ladd in two films, China (1943) as Carolyn Grant and And Now Tomorrow (1944) as Emily Blair, the film which caused Bosley Crowther of the New York Times to remark, “Whatever it was that this actress never had, she still hasn’t got it.” Then she made one of her most interesting films, The Stranger (1944) as Mary Longstreet (Rankin), directed by and co-starring Orson Welles, who was under strict instructions to stick strictly to the agreed script, schedule and budget in order to prove that Hollywood could trust him. In Hollywood you are only as good as your last effort and so many critics began to say that Young was finished in Tinseltown. Then Dore Schary, RKO’s new wunderkind offered her the role of Katrin Holstrom, a Swedish farm girl from Minnesota who goes to Washington and becomes a Congresswoman, in his film The Farmer’s Daughter (1947). The part was originally intended for Ingrid Bergman. Young made the critics eat their words as she won the Oscar against such stiff competition as Joan Crawford in Possessed, Susan Hayward in Smash-Up, and Rosalind Russell in Mourning Becomes Electra. When Young got to the podium at the ceremony, all she could sigh was, “At long last!” Her other films included The Doctor Takes A Wife (1940) as June Cameron, He Stayed For Breakfast (1940) as Marianna Duval, Bedtime Story (1941) as Jane Drake, The Lady From Cheyenne (1941) as Annie Morgan, The Men In Her Life (1941) as Lina Varsavina, A Night To Remember (1943) as Nancy Troy, Ladies Courageous (1944) as Roberta Harper, Along Came Jones (1945) as Cherry de Longpre, The Perfect Marriage (1946) as Maggie Williams, The Bishop’s Wife (1947) as Julia Brougham (both sh
e and Cary Grant insisted on being photographed from the left side, so that one scene had to be shot with them both looking out of a window. “If I can only use half your face, you only get half your salary,” Samuel Goldwyn told her), The Accused (1948) as Wilma Tuttle, Rachel And The Stranger (1948) as Rachel Harvey, Mother Is A Freshman (1949) as Abigail Fortitude Abbott (director Richard Sale commented, “Loretta was delightful in the leading role. She was very vain, but you expect that from actors. Still, her wardrobe tests were longer than the picture”), Come To The Stable (1949) as Sister Margaret in a sentimental comedy drama for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Key To The City (1950) as Clarissa Standish, Cause For Alarm! (1951) as Ellen Jones, Half Angel (1951) as Nora, Paula (1952) as Paula Rogers, Because Of You (1952) as Christine Carroll and It Happens Every Thursday (1953) as Jane MacAvoy, her last major cinematic appearance. With her big screen career over, Loretta Young retired to the small screen. She said, “I was considered a traitor in Beverly Hills. Louis B. Mayer took it upon himself to phone me and said, ‘Loretta, television is considered the enemy. You’ll never make another picture, dear.’ He was right, too. I’ve never done another movie.” From September 20, 1953 until September 10, 1961, she presented The Loretta Young Show, a dramatic anthology on NBC. The show was a considerable success and won three Emmy awards – in 1954, 1956 and 1959. The show ended with her second marriage – he worked on the programme. The New Loretta Young Show ran for only six months on CBS from September 24, 1962 until March 18, 1963. She appeared in the straight-to-video film Christmas Eve (1986) as Amanda Kingsley and her last appearance was as magazine editor Grace Guthrie in Lady In The Corner (1989). A critic commented after seeing the film that Young never could act and seemed unlikely to learn now. A devout Roman Catholic, Young was married three times. On January 26, 1930, she eloped with 6́ 3˝ actor Grant Withers (b. Pueblo, Colorado, January 17, 1904, d. North Hollywood, California, March 27, 1959 by his own hand). He called her ‘The Steel Butterfly’ because she obtained exactly what she wanted when it came to lighting, costume and make-up. On January 17, 1931, the marriage was annulled. After filming The Call Of The Wild (1935) with Clark Gable, Loretta announced that she was exhausted and would be going to Europe with her mother for a long holiday, expected to last at least a year. On November 30, 1936, Loretta suddenly reappeared in Hollywood apparently fit and well. On May 11, 1937, single Loretta “adopted” a 23-month-old girl, Judy. Californian law of the time forbade single people from adopting but somehow Loretta circumvented the legal niceties. In fact, Judy was the product of her mother’s affair with Gable. Director William Wellman said, “All I know is that Loretta and Clark were very friendly during the picture, and it was very cold up there. When the film was finished, she disappeared for a while and later showed up with a daughter with the biggest ears I ever saw except on an elephant.” Loretta later arranged for surgery on her daughter’s ears. Judy who became a therapist in Los Angeles, was not told that Clark Gable was her father for more than 30 years, and the matter only became public knowledge in 1994. In 1939 Loretta was dating William Buckner who was later indicted and jailed for fraud. On July 31, 1940, writer-producer Tom Lewis became her second husband. They had two sons, Christopher Paul (b. Los Angeles, California, August 1, 1944) and Peter (b. Los Angeles, California, July 15, 1945) and he adopted Judy. The Lewises divorced on October 21, 1969 in Los Angeles, California on the grounds of desertion. In 1973 Chris Lewis, 29, was arrested and charged with “lewd conduct with two 13-year-old boys”. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to five years’ probation and a $500 fine. He had also made a kiddie porn film called Genesis’s Children. Detective Lloyd Martin described Lewis and his co-defendants as “not homosexuals at all, but sick child molesters who bring discredit on the gay community”. On September 10, 1993 Loretta married Columbia Pictures designer Jean Louis. He died on April 20, 1997. Loretta Young was known in Hollywood as something of a prude. In 1972, she won $600,000 from NBC, after claiming that they were ruining her image by broadcasting films in which she was shown in outmoded costumes. She campaigned to abolish swearing, pornography and immoral literature. On every one of her sets she had a swear box with the money going to St Anne’s Maternity Hospital for Unmarried Mothers in Los Angeles. Some actors would put $10 in the box at the start of filming. Once when working with Robert Mitchum, he asked what her rates were. “Five cents for every ‘damn’, ten cents for ‘hell’ and 25 cents for ‘goddamn’,” she told him. “How much for ‘fuck’?” he asked. Smiling, she told him, “That’s free.”

  CAUSE: She died aged 87 of ovarian and stomach cancer in Los Angeles, California. Loretta Young was buried with her mother in Grave 49, Tier 65, Section F of Holy Cross Cemetery, 5835 West Slauson Avenue, Culver City, California 90230.

  Z

  Darryl F. Zanuck

  Born September 5, 1902

  Died December 22, 1979

  The last tycoon. Darryl Francis Zanuck was born on the second floor of Le Grande Hotel, an establishment managed by his father on the corner of Fifth Street and Broadway in Wahoo, Nebraska. When he was eight years old Zanuck played a Native American in a silent Western and the experience seemed to pique his interest in films. To escape an unhappy home life he joined the Nebraska National Guard on September 4, 1916, and later served in World War I. In Hollywood after the war he screen-tested unsuccessfully for the role of Oliver Twist. Having failed, he decided to become a writer but first had to support himself in a variety of menial jobs. He wrote pulp fiction but soon realised that the real money was made by the screenwriters who adapted works for the cinema. In 1923 he wrote, or rather cobbled together from four rejected articles, a book called Habit. All four tales were sold to Hollywood studios for £11,000. He became a joke writer for, among others, Mack Sennett, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. On January 24, 1924, he married actress Virginia Fox. He had also, by this time, joined Warner Bros as a screenwriter and subsequently wrote many films for canine star Rin Tin Tin. He also became Jack Warner’s favourite writer, because of his speed and inventiveness. However, after writing 19 films in one year he had to change his name and began using three pseudonyms: Melville Crossman, Mark Canfield and Gregory Rogers, only occasionally utilising Darryl F. Zanuck for special events. Zanuck was bemused when MGM tried to hire ‘Melville Crossman’. The 5́ 5˝ Zanuck gradually moved up the pecking order at the studios to become manager in 1928. The only advice Jack Warner gave his new head of production was to grow a moustache and invest in a pair of glasses, even if he didn’t need them. His salary was $260,000 a year. He began a brief affair with attractive blonde actress Dolores Costello. Zanuck supervised the first all-talking film The Lights Of New York (1928). He also instigated a series of historical biopics at Warner Bros, such as Disraeli (1929) starring George Arliss. In March 1933 Hollywood finally felt the chill wind of the Depression that was sweeping across America and the studios suggested taking a 50% reduction in staff salaries, or 25% if they earned below a certain figure. The technicians’ union, IATSE, refused to allow its members to face a wage slump and threatened to strike. Harry Warner wanted to call their bluff, so the whole of Hollywood shut down on March 13, 1933. IATSE was not to be intimidated and so the studios announced that only the highest paid employees would face the cut. (Certain stars – Constance Bennett, Clara Bow and Maurice Chevalier to name but three – went off salary rather than accept the reduction.) Harry and Jack Warner petulantly announced they would not take a cut in salary. Samuel Goldwyn tried to act as a mediator, but Zanuck was ready to act. He had taken a cut and was furious at the high-handed way the Warners were behaving. On April 15, 1933, he walked out on his $5,000-a-week job. Two days later, he had a breakfast meeting with Joseph M. Schenck and on April 27, announced the formation of Twentieth Century Pictures. On May 27, 1935, Twentieth Century Pictures announced a merger with the Fox Film Corporation to create 20th Century Fox. Schenck became chairman and Zanuck was head of production at 32. It was at TCF that Zanuck really began to build his r
eputation as a mogul. He would stride around the Fox lot wearing riding boots and jodhpurs, carrying a crop that he would beat against his leg or on a desk to make a point. Zanuck insisted that none of his male stars have hairy chests. The bald-chested Tyrone Power was okay but hirsute hunks such as John Payne and William Holden had to shave their chests to comply. He demanded that one of the Fox actresses had sex with him in his office every afternoon and would often flash his penis at actresses. Once he took it out before Betty Grable and put it on the desk. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked. “Yes,” she said, “and you can put it away now.” During World War II Zanuck made propaganda films but stayed at TCF until 1956 when he became an independent producer, though still working with the company. His biggest success was the war epic The Longest Day and the following year he was summoned back to 20th Century Fox to try and rescue the company from the financial mire that the film Cleopatra had landed them in. Displacing Spyros Skouras on July 25, he became President of the company, appointing his son, Richard, as Vice President with responsibility for production. On August 1969, Richard became President while Darryl took over as Chairman and CEO. The following year, on December 1970, he sacked his son and consolidated his position but only until May 18, 1971, when he became Chairman Emeritus.