Although Loretta still fretted about Berkeley Square, once Midnight Mary opened to flattering notices, she realized that, like everything else in her life, it was part of a divine plan. When filming began in April 1933, Loretta was faced with a challenge: Mary Martin was her most complex role to date. Mary was born in 1910; by the time of the main action she is twenty-three. Although Wellman says nothing about the film in his autobiography (which is not surprising, since A Short Time for Insanity is not a life in film, but a life that, coincidentally, involved film), he lavished a great deal of attention on Loretta, particularly on her eyes. She is first seen in a courtroom, where she is on trial for murder; totally disinterested in the proceedings, she thumbs through a copy of Cosmopolitan, holding it so close that it masks her face, except for her eyes, which seem larger than usual. In fact, her eyes resemble those of Joan Crawford who, reportedly, had been slated for the role. With fashionably plucked eyebrows and half moons penciled over her eyes, she looks like a woman of the world, although her world is in actuality the criminal underworld. Later, while waiting for the verdict, Mary sits in the county clerk’s office, where the dates on the court records books occasion an ingenious flashback sequence, with the camera panning left to right, as Mary’s past is reenacted. Orphaned at nine (Loretta plays a convincing nine-year-old with pigtails, scavenging in a dump), Mary is falsely accused of theft and sent to reform school. She emerges as a gangster’s moll in the making, awaiting only the right gangster, who materializes in the person of Leo Darcy (Ricardo Cortez), whose mistress she becomes.
Loretta reconciled the two extremes of her character: an essential decency and a cynicism spawned by an unfair legal system that only fed her passion for survival, even if it meant offering herself to Darcy. She knew his weakness for enigmatic women, who could shift back and forth between virgin and whore. Mary’s way of snaring a wealthy lover is to gaze at him with playfully seductive but dreamily innocent eyes (brightened by James Van Trees’s hagiographic lighting) to signal her availability—but only if she gets her way.
It was a daring performance, all the more because of Loretta’s Catholicism. But Loretta also understood Mary’s integrity. When a wealthy lawyer, Tom Mannering (Franchot Tone), befriends and then falls in love with her, becoming Darcy’s rival, Darcy plans to have him killed, but only succeeds in killing Mannering’s close friend (Andy Devine in an unusually sympathetic role). With Mary’s shooting of Darcy, the action then returns to the courtroom where a verdict is imminent.
Midnight Mary could easily have been an indictment of capital punishment, which is where it seemed to be heading. Like one of Euripides’s plays, Midnight Mary required a deus ex machine: Mannering, who barges into the courtroom, claiming to have fresh evidence and demanding a retrial. Exactly what evidence Mannering has, apart from the fact that Mary committed murder to spare his life, is never revealed. But with a lawyer from an illustrious family defending her, Mary not only gets her acquittal but also Mannering. Their fade-out kiss must have convinced cockeyed optimists that “Happy Days Are Here Again” was not just Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign song, but a prediction of things to come.
Midnight Mary was originally intended to be more socially conscious, but to what extent is hard to determine. The first writer to take a crack at it was veteran Anita Loos, who had a script ready in November 1932 entitled “Nora,” featuring a prologue in “socialist” Vienna, where the state takes care of tenement children like Nora (Mary’s original name). (Actually, Vienna was never socialist, although after World War I, socialists briefly dominated the Austrian National Assembly. Radicals were in their element, but their fervor was dampened when Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor.) The prologue was not intended as a critique of capitalism, but as an example of a humane way of dealing with parentless children. In 1933, Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola took over; the title was still “Nora,” but it was minus the Vienna prologue, and opened, as the film does, with Nora on trial. Whoever was responsible for the change of title realized “Midnight Nora” has as much appeal as flat beer. Midnight Mary, apart from being alliterative, could raise eyebrows and revenues. It did both.
The film was a triumph not only for Loretta but also for the other Warner loan outs, William Wellman and James Van Trees, who photographed Loretta so strikingly in Life Begins, They Call It Sin, Taxi!, and Heroes for Sale (not to mention Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face). Although Mary was Loretta’s most mature characterization to date, the film ultimately became Wellman’s. Wellman worked out the flashbacks so that when the camera panned the dates on the court records, left to right, the action would return to the present by complementary horizontal wipes, proceeding from right to left—with the present emerging, as the past recedes. Usually, in a wipe, one is aware of a line moving horizontally, vertically, or diagonally across the screen, with one shot ending as the other begins. But here, it is as if the past exits to the left, as the present enters from the right. It is still a horizontal wipe, but done so artfully that it seems that past and present were once conjoined like Siamese twins and have now been separated. Although Loretta gave a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, she did not get one. That year, the nominees were May Robson (Lady for a Day), Diana Wynyard (Cavalcade), and the eventual winner, Katharine Hepburn (Morning Glory).
Twenty-year-old actresses were rarely given such fulfilling roles as Trina and Mary. During the studio years, even the icons were stuck with parts they knew were beneath them, but which they were contractually obliged to accept. Warner’s was perhaps the least sensitive to the entitlements of stardom, dismissing the idea that if one good turn deserves another, so should one good film lead to another. Bette Davis, for one, languished in a limbo of unmemorable films in the early 1930s, until out of desperation she moved over to RKO to give an indelible performance as the self-destructive waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934). Warner’s punished Davis by ignoring her when Oscar nomination time came around. It was only a groundswell of support that resulted in her name being placed on the ballot. Many thought Davis would win, but dark horses have been known to reach the finish line before the odds-on favorite, and Claudette Colbert won that year for It Happened One Night. Davis had to fight for better roles, even though the Academy gave her a consolation prize for her performance in the potboiler, Dangerous, the following year. Then more of the same, until other leading roles resulted, but she never experienced one artistic triumph after another. Garbo fared better, but she was at MGM, where she was revered, with her films sufficiently spaced so that audiences were not given a surfeit of Garbo. Davis, by comparison, was at the Warner factory, where the merchandise varied from Jezebel (1938), for which Davis received a second Oscar, to the disastrous Beyond the Forest (1949), a transmogrification of Davis’s art that reduced her to a gargoyle. Freelancing was the solution, as it later became for Loretta.
CHAPTER 6
Last Days at Warner’s
After Platinum Blonde, Man’s Castle, and Midnight Mary, which together required her to play three different types of women at two other studios, Loretta felt more secure about her art. The reviews bolstered her confidence, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she would be moving on. But where?
In November 1932, Jesse Lasky announced his intention to become an independent producer at the Fox Film Corporation, with Zoo in Budapest and Berkeley Square as his first productions. Loretta was well aware of Famous Players-Lasky, the studio resulting from the Famous Players-Lasky Feature Plays merger in 1916, with Adolph Zukor as president, and Lasky as vice president for production. It was there that Loretta’s film career was launched in 1917. The company underwent various name changes, the most significant being the addition of “Paramount” in 1927. Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky was not the corporate name for long. Zukor was obsessed with creating a vertically integrated empire, with its own theatre chain, Publix. To prevent friction between the studio and its theater circuit, Lasky stepped aside. The new name was Paramount-Publix, eventually becoming just
plain Paramount.
Lasky wanted Loretta for his first independent film, Zoo in Budapest (1933), with Gene Raymond as her costar. Raymond gave a bravura performance as Zanni, an animal trainer orphaned at an early age and raised by the director of the Budapest Zoo, where he grew into a combination of noble savage and animal activist, stealing fur stoles and burning them. Loretta also played an orphan, Eve, who is not as fortunate as Zanni. Eve lives in an orphanage, where a holiday is a trip to the zoo, and a chaperone or “keeper” is dependent on a guidebook to describe the attractions. Zanni locks eyes with Eve, beckoning to her to come with him. Another orphan, eager to cooperate, diverts the group’s attention by diving into a lake, making it possible for Eve to escape and join Zanni’s world, where humans bond with animals.
For those who only know Raymond as Jeanette MacDonald’s husband, his Zanni is a revelation. It is a strikingly athletic performance, requiring Raymond to jump over partitions, and in the terrifying climax, to hop on the back of an elephant with a young boy he has rescued. He must then grab on to a rope to hoist the boy and himself to safety—but not before a tiger leaps up and takes a piece out of Zanni’s leg. Regardless, Zanni survives, his gait no less springy, and both he and Eve are rewarded by the boy’s father, who makes it possible for Eve to leave the orphanage, marry Zani, and live in a cottage on his estate. In the last scene—which is more like the finale of an operetta—the couple arrives at their new home, radiantly happy and unperturbed about the future.
Loretta had relatively little to do in the film. The real stars were Raymond and director Rowland V. Lee, who kept a fragile script from splintering. Raymond fancied himself the successor to Douglas Fairbanks; however, it was Errol Flynn and then Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who buckled the swash and wielded a mean rapier. Still, Raymond’s performance was admirable. He did not need a double; like Burt Lancaster, he did his own climbing and swinging, in addition to exuding the kind of machismo that won over audiences. Raymond was probably one of the leading men Loretta developed a crush on, not knowing at the time that he was bisexual, more homosexually than heterosexually inclined. In fact, when he married Jeanette MacDonald in 1937, she was still in love with Nelson Eddy, her first and only love. Raymond’s lover at the time was Mary Pickford’s husband, Buddy Rogers. On their honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, Jeanette and Raymond had a cabin next to Rogers and Pickford, then an incurable alcoholic: “There was a honeymoon going on—but the ones sleeping together were Gene Raymond and Buddy Rogers.” But at the time Zoo in Budapest was filmed, Raymond had not met MacDonald, and only a few kindred spirits knew his sexual preferences. As for Loretta, the crush ended when the shoot was over, and then it was on to another leading man and another crush.
Except for Heroes for Sale, her last films for Warner’s were as unmemorable as the first, requiring only that she have the stamina of a gymnast. For The Hatchet Man, she had to sit patiently in the makeup chair while she was turned into a mannequin and her face into a mask. Her best work was in the loan outs, which are now recognized as outstanding examples of pre-code filmmaking.
In addition to Wellman, the other director of note with whom she worked during her last year at Warner’s was the German-born Wilhelm, later, William, Dieterle, with whom she made two films. They would team up again in 1948, but at another studio, Paramount, for The Accused. Dieterle, with his white gloves and riding crop, tended to single out one of the featured players, generally a novice, for criticism bordering on harassment. He steered clear of the stars, either because they were seasoned performers or because he knew they would not tolerate such behavior.
The Devil’s in Love (1933) is more revelatory of Dieterle’s ability as a director than Loretta’s as an actress. If the misleading title attracted moviegoers expecting a steamy love story, they saw instead an imaginatively made film set in North Africa, where a French doctor, André Morand (Victor Jory), selflessly tends to the wounded, including a sadistic major who belittles his subordinates, including Salazar (J. Carrol Naish, Hollywood’s ethnic specialist). When Morand is falsely accused of the major’s murder, he escapes with the help of his boyhood friend, Jean Fabien (David Manners), to a port city, where he practices medicine under an assumed name, favoring the needy over the privileged. A friar prevails upon Morand, who, in another age would have belonged to “Doctors without Borders,” to volunteer at his mission, where he meets and falls in love with Margot (Loretta), the friar’s niece and Jean’s fiancée. For the trio to become a duo, one of the men has to die. The Devil’s in Love could end either way, particularly since Manners exudes more sex appeal than Jory, the better actor. Appearances are deceiving, and the ending does not disappoint. Truth triumphs, Salazar confesses to the murder, and Jean dies in battle, freeing Margot for Morand.
There have been better desert dramas than The Devil’s In Love, such as Under Two Flags, Beau Geste, and Gunga Din. But the chief reasons the film is worth viewing are Dieterle’s direction and Hal Mohr’s poetic photography. Because Dieterle understood German expressionism, he was able to modify it for American consumption, purging it of its excesses and leaving in its place a monochrome palette, with subtle gradations of black and white. Photographed in the evening, Loretta did not so much look backlit as moonlit. The nighttime insurgency, with a disproportionate distribution of light and shadow—the only light sources being torches, the moon, and the natives’ white robes—and the rebels on horseback, streaming over the sand as if they were riding the waves, was so breathtaking that one ceases to care whether Morand will be exonerated and marry Margot. Dieterle knew audiences expected the insurgency to be crushed, as indeed it was. But in the movies defeat can be ignominious or glorious. Here, the rebels do not so much die as make a graceful exit into another realm. A director can only achieve such visual poetry with the help of a sympathetic cinematographer, like Mohr, who also seems to have heard the siren call of the desert and to have responded with as much mystery as the budget allowed—which was enough to make the dark of the moon more romantic than ominous.
Dieterle’s Grand Slam (1933) was a “triumph of the underdog” movie, set in the world of contract bridge, portrayed as if it had replaced baseball as the national pastime. One could get that impression from the tournament headlines that blazed across the screen, as families huddled around the radio to hear whether Stanislavky (Paul Lucas) would beat Van Dorn (Ferdinand Gottschalk) to regain his title as bridge champion. Since both share a lower middle class background, they would seem to have come up the hard way. The difference is that Stanislavky never denied his origins, while Van Dorn buried his. When Stanislavky publishes a book on contract bridge (which was ghost written), he proves, with his wife Marcia (Loretta) as partner, that his book can bring bridge-playing couples closer together. However, a cross-country tour creates such friction between the two of them that the Stanislavsky method seems to be a failure. The marriage is on the verge of deteriorating after the press learns the truth about Stanislavsky’s bestseller. Determined to challenge Van Dorn one last time, Stanislavsky is losing until Marcia sweeps into the room and becomes his partner. Naturally, he wins, the marriage remains intact, the couple give up bridge, and Stanislavsky does what he always wanted to do: He writes political treatises.
Although Lucas was the star, turning on enough continental charm to air out Stanislavsky’s stuffiness, Loretta played Marcia as if she were an experienced bridge player, and she looked enticing in her pre-code décolletage. Capra might have found a heart somewhere in the manipulative script, but Dieterle knew enough about plot templates to follow the rubrics.
Loretta’s last Warner Bros. film, She Had to Say Yes (1933), had her playing a “working girl,” Florence, a garment district secretary, expected to entertain buyers by dining and clubbing with them but shopping short of one-night stands, although that caveat was never enforced, as long as the buyer signed the contract. Loretta’s costars were two competent but uncharismatic actors: Regis Toomey, as her supervisor and would-be fiancé, and Lyle Talbot, nev
er intended to be a leading man, as a buyer, who respects Florence until he mistakenly concludes that she is damaged goods and therefore available. A near rape in a darkened bedroom, with the only light coming from a moonlit window, is averted when the buyer realizes that Florence is not playing hard to get, but only preserving whatever remains of the dignity she has had to sacrifice to entertain buyers without making herself part of the entertainment. Although the role did not call for an elaborate wardrobe, Loretta looked her beatific self, as if she were slouching toward sainthood, needing only a nimbus to encircle her head upon arrival.
Loretta was not sorry to leave Warner’s. Like Coriolanus, she believed there was a world elsewhere, with better roles awaiting her. There were, but not as many as she had hoped.
CHAPTER 7
Darryl Zanuck’s Costume Queen
In 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression, Darryl F. Zanuck resigned as production head at Warner’s. The previous year, the studio had suffered a net loss of over $14 million, twice that of the 1931 deficit. Warner’s was not alone; RKO reported a loss of almost $4.4 million, and Paramount declared bankruptcy. The studios knew that the only way to survive was to adopt a policy of temporary salary cuts. Although opposed to the decision, Zanuck voluntarily went on half salary. Even after Price Waterhouse and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed that salary reductions were no longer necessary, Harry Warner continued enforcing the policy. As president, Harry held the purse strings. Rather than renege on his promise that everyone’s salary would return to what it had been, Zanuck left. It was time, anyway. Zanuck was meant to give orders, not take them.
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