Hollywood Madonna

by Bernard F. Dick

  The historical Nathan Rothschild was an enigmatic figure, who behaved as if he had grown a carapace over his skin to deflect the slings and arrows of bigots and competitors. Arliss portrayed that aspect of Nathan’s character brilliantly. From Arliss’s strikingly angular face, one could easily see that Nathan was a man who did not wear his heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at. Rather, he cultivated an inscrutable look that discouraged those expecting a bear hug and a warm handshake and challenged others who just wanted a deal without feigning bonhomie. The latter he understood; the former, he held at arm’s length.

  The House of Rothschild was a film in which Loretta was third billed, after Arliss and Boris Karloff, who plays Nathan’s nemesis, Baron Ledrantz, and is eventually brought to his knees. If Americans responded to the film—and they did—it was not because of Loretta, but because the plot of The House of Rothschild epitomized the American dream: Start small, suffer persecution, triumph over your oppressors, and relax in the gilded cocoon of financial independence.

  The House of Rothschild established Loretta as Twentieth Century’s costume queen. One of her better costume dramas was Clive of India (1935), which chronicled the life of the so-called “conqueror of India,” who had subjugated southern, then northern India when he was twenty-six. By the time he was thirty-four, he was Lord Clive, lauded for bringing the subcontinent under British rule. As in most biopics, time is collapsed, details omitted, and historical figures reduced to walk-ons (Burgoyne) or references (George III). But most of the film was credible even when it turned hagiographic. Both Clive (Ronald Colman) and his wife Margaret (Loretta) had real character arcs to trace, Colman especially. At first, Clive is a romantic, a combination of Lord Byron and Werther. Suffering from Weltschmertz, which was probably clinical depression, he attempts suicide (a prefiguration of his manner of death, only hinted at in the film), but the pistol fails to discharge. All Clive has to see is a picture of his friend’s sister, Margaret, before he declares that she will be his wife. Romeo and Juliet were not the only ones whose eye contact set a plot in motion. Similarly, Margaret takes one look at Clive and succumbs. Since Colman was one of Loretta’s first crushes, she had no problem playing the love-stricken lady—even though her first scene required her to bathe a dog, which seemed like an inauspicious beginning. But Loretta, again in a blonde wig, was game, acting as if she had been bathing dogs since she was a child.

  Once Clive arrives in India, he realizes that his mission in life is to add India to the British Empire, even if it means defeating one warlord by wooing another and forging an admiral’s signature. The Clives undergo the usual adversities, including losing their first child. And Loretta has some poignant moments once they have settled in London, when she tells Clive what a trial India was for her and how grateful she is to be back on British soil. The corrupt East India Company officials, whom Clive fired, return to London and proceed to sully his reputation, costing him his seat in Parliament. Clive has no other choice but to return to India to work for the company again. Visually, his return results in the most impressive sequence in the film: an attack during a monsoon in which elephants trample their victims or sweep them up in their trunks. Clive’s speech in Parliament to justify his actions is historically accurate; neither the real nor the cinematic Clive lost his fortune. Husband and wife have grown wise through suffering, each showing it in a different way: Colman by lowering his commanding voice during the brief speech and concealing the pain he feels with slow, measured speech; Loretta by adopting an air of determination, inflexible yet touchingly feminine, when she refuses to accompany her husband to India even though he has become a pariah in Britain. Audiences to whom Clive of India was a history book figure like Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo would have had no idea how Robert Clive died—and the writers intended it that way, offering the knowledgeable enough clues by portraying Clive as being plagued by headaches that drove him to stab himself at forty-one. The writers could only hope that some moviegoers would understand their tragically flawed hero; for the others, what mattered was that Robert Clive was not financially ruined, thereby escaping the fate of so many less fortunate Americans in the Great Depression.

  Twentieth Century Pictures was just on the verge of becoming Twentieth Century-Fox. Thus Clive of India was advertised as a Twentieth Century film, and also—in equally imposing type—“a Darryl F. Zanuck Production.” Like the other Twentieth Century features, it was released by United Artists. Clive of India was also Loretta’s last film with Colman. Zanuck had found another leading man for her, Tyrone Power.

  Paramount was going through an exotic phase in the early thirties, with such films as Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), The Sign of the Cross (1932), Madame Butterfly (1932), White Woman (1933,) and Cleopatra (1934). When it came time for the studio to cast Shanghai (1935), a Walter Wanger Production, the studio was hard pressed to come up with any contract players to portray Barbara Holland, an American socialite, or Dimitri Koslov, the Eurasian who falls in love with her. Thus, Loretta was loaned out to play Holland, and since Charles Boyer was under contract to Wanger, he was cast as Koslov.

  Shanghai might have fared better under Zanuck; at least he would have encouraged the writers to look for a way in which the couple could transcend the boundaries of race. The 1934 version of the production code forbade miscegenation, defined as “sex relationships between the black and white races.” Theoretically, the code did not apply to Boyer’s character, since Koslov was not black; he was the son of a Russian father and a Manchurian mother. Still, if Koslov and Barbara Holland married, they would be an interracial couple, which would not set well with moviegoers who believed in strict separation of the races. Like love affairs between a prince or princess and a commoner, theirs was doomed from the start.

  Koslov discovered the ideal way to triumph over prejudicial whites: He founded a financial empire in Shanghai. When the Chinese ambassador (Warner Oland, in another Asian role) warns Koslov that he must tell Barbara about his mother, he finally agrees. At a costume party, he pays tribute to the two women responsible for his success: Barbara and his mother, a Manchurian princess, whose portrait hangs on the wall. Shocked, the guests leave one by one. Just when it seems Barbara might remain, she puts down her drink and exits. Since Wanger suspected that moviegoers might behave similarly, Shanghai ends with a chastened Barbara and a resigned Koslov admitting that, if they married, they would encounter the same prejudice that Koslov’s parents did, prejudice so strong that it drove his mother to suicide. In his closing speech, Koslov yearns for the day when people are not judged by the color of their skin—which is ironic, since Boyer looked no different in Shanghai than he did in Wanger’s other 1935 film, Private Worlds.

  Nineteen thirty-five was a benchmark year for both Zanuck and Loretta. For Zanuck, it was the year that he achieved his goal: At thirty-three, he would be production head of his own studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. In the early 1930s, the founder of the Fox Film Corporation, the Hungarian born William Fox, realized his empire was crumbling. In 1932, Fox reported a loss of nearly $17 million. In 1935, Twentieth Century was valued at $4 million, as opposed to Fox’s $1.8 million. A merger was proposed in the form of an exchange of stock, and Twentieth Century-Fox became Hollywood’s newest studio. For Loretta, 1935 was the year of her “mortal sin.” Early that year, she learned that she was pregnant. Her relationship with her Call of the Wild costar did not result in one of her usual crushes. This time it was not a romantic fantasy, or grand amour à la Hollywood, where the camera tracks back from the passionate couple, followed by a slow fade out. It was rather like a “one indiscretion, one conception” movie on the order of The Old Maid (1938), To Each His Own (1946), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), and Not Wanted (1949). If Loretta went through with the pregnancy, the child’s father would be one of Hollywood’s best-known actors who, in February 1935, won his only Oscar for It Happened One Night. Ironically, the Academy Awards ceremony coincided with Loretta’s discovering she was
pregnant. Clark Gable was no dream lover. He was the genuine article.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Men in Her Life

  “I have been in love fifty times,” Loretta admitted to an interviewer in 1933. “If I didn’t fall a little bit in love with the men I play opposite, I could not do love scenes with them. “ This was not the boast of a starlet, eager to graduate to siren, or at least love goddess, status. Loretta was a star; she was also speaking truthfully. Her adolescence was spent in the movie business. While other girls her age went off with their boy friends to the local soda fountain and sipped ice cream sodas through two straws—the era’s idea of safe sex—Loretta was constantly in transit, spinning through Warner’s revolving door, with an occasional break. Few other actresses could claim to have appeared in fifty-five films by the time they were twenty.

  Not every actor made the cut. Walter Huston, who played Loretta’s racketeer father in The Ruling Voice (1931), giving the only memorable performance in a less-than-classic crime film, was too avuncular for fantasy. Besides, Huston was twenty-nine years her senior, and Loretta had been cast as his daughter. When Loretta spoke of falling in love, she was talking about a transferable infatuation generated by her imagination that enabled her to perform credibly on the screen. Whether she knew it or not, she was talking about the art of acting, an art so elusive that, once experienced, it can only be described, not defined. Even in her early thirties, Loretta sounded like a child of fancy. Quoting a limerick that ends, “I like men,” she cited some of her favorite screen lovers: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Don Ameche, Richard Barthelmess, Ronald Colman, Charles Boyer, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, and Alan Ladd. When she mentioned Clark Gable, it was only to record, like a school teacher, that knowing how she felt about swearing, he observed decorum on the set, even when something went wrong and justified a bit of profanity. Anyone who knew what had happened when they were making The Call of the Wild would have been amused that while Gable curbed his language, he did not do the same to his libido.

  When Loretta was sixteen, and making The Second Floor Mystery (1930), she fell in love with her leading man, Grant Withers. This time, it was not love filtered through the lens of the imagination, but an emotional attachment that may have been love. But how would Loretta know? She was so used to fantasy that, if she ever experienced the real thing, she might not have known the difference. Loretta was always attracted to older men. Withers, born in 1904, was nine years her senior. They seemed to have much in common: both were born in January, Withers on the sixteenth in Colorado, the state in which Loretta’s sister, Sally Blane, was born; Loretta on the sixth in Utah. Before becoming an actor, he loaded freight at the Santa Fe railroad yards, reported on the crime scene for a Los Angeles newspaper, and drove a riot squad car for the LAPD. Loretta responded immediately to his rough-edged masculinity. She had no idea that he had been married before, but soon learned when his ex-wife, Inez, filed for alimony the first week of February 1930, shortly after Loretta and Withers were married. That January, Loretta thought she had found her future husband and was even willing to ignore the mandates of the Church and elope with him. “When love comes so strong, / There is no right or wrong. / Your love is your life,” Anita sings to Maria in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Loretta felt similarly. However, when she experienced that love, short-lived as it was, she was sixteen, which was not a marriageable age in California. Once Withers learned that a woman could be married in Arizona at seventeen, they waited until Loretta had reached her seventeenth birthday.

  On Sunday, 26 January, Loretta and Withers boarded an early morning flight to Yuma, Arizona, where they were married. When the couple returned, a furious Gladys Belzer met them at the airport, threatening to have the marriage annulled, until she learned it was legal. Gladys was savvy enough to know that the press would make fodder of the three of them. She withdrew the annulment suit, and Loretta informed the press that she would remain married to Withers and that her mother had accepted her decision. The situation changed on 8 February, when Loretta received a subpoena to testify in an alimony suit brought by the first Mrs. Withers against her ex-husband, whom she had married in 1925, and with whom she had a child. If Loretta was devastated by the news, she did not show it. There was a front to maintain and a press to contend with. Still, at the end of June, Loretta, who knew how to make her life into a movie, informed reporters that she and Withers were taking a delayed honeymoon in Denver, as if, “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” But it wasn’t. God ruled otherwise, and in early July, Loretta initiated divorce proceedings.

  But she still carried a torch. As she confessed to Gladys Hall in 1933, in an interview that never saw print, “I never, I know, felt that way about any man again. I was in love with him. I shall always be in love with him.” The torch burned out the following year when she made Man’s Castle with Spencer Tracy. Modern Screen (December 1933) reported that Tracy and Loretta were often seen lunching together and going out dancing in the evening. Ironically, both were Catholics, and Tracy was married but estranged from his wife. The Tracys never divorced; as Catholics, they remained faithful to their marriage vows, even though their marriage was foundering. Loretta was also a Catholic, yet she thought nothing about clubbing with a married man. Perhaps it was her youth or just the desire to enjoy the nonthreatening company of a man who respected her. There was no “affair.” At the time, Loretta had a rainbow-colored notion of love: it was passion viewed through a kaleidoscope, a swirl of colors, with kissing and petting in place of sex. Loretta’s idea of love was a precoital paradise. Still, she should have realized that, as a single Catholic, she was consorting with a married man whose marriage, the press implied, was imperiled because of her. But from her standpoint, it was not adultery; she was merely enjoying the companionship of a man who was secure in his masculinity and could be her “cleft in the rock of the world.” Tracy was the male companion and surrogate father that she desperately sought, and Loretta was the soul mate that Tracy’s wife could never be. “Soul mate” is apt. If Tracy harbored any physical desire for Loretta, her virtue-emblazoned face would have inhibited him—although it did not stop Clark Gable two years later.

  In early 1934, Loretta and Tracy knew they had to address the subject of their “romance” and put their fans at ease. Loretta stated unequivocally that marriage was out of the question: “I would never marry outside my church. Nor will I. Consequently, Spencer and I might as well part company now as later.” Yet she did acknowledge her debt to him: “He has given me gentleness, thoughtfulness, and consideration such as I have never known in any other man,” adding, “[H]e has a rare masculine quality—a refined mind.” In November 1934, the Tracys separated but never divorced. Tracy told Gladys Hall that, although he was in love with Loretta, she “had nothing whatever to do with our separating, Mrs. Tracy’s and mine. Nothing whatever to do with it.”

  Loretta found other male admirers, and Tracy found Katharine Hepburn, who implied that they were lovers, although Tracy was too guilt-ridden for adultery. “I tried to save him from drink,” Loretta told celebrity biographer Donald Spoto when he visited her Sunset Boulevard mansion to do a piece for Architectural Digest. Hepburn couldn’t save him, either. Tracy had his own desert places that others could not visit. Apart from chronic alcoholism and a marriage gone sour, there were unconfirmed tales about male prostitutes who allegedly serviced him in a bungalow on George Cukor’s estate, where he spent his final years.

  There was no happy ending for Grant Withers, either. He married three more times, and his career, which was never meteoric, spiraled downward. In 1959, his landlord discovered Withers’s body in his apartment, a suicide note in one hand and a telephone receiver in the other. It’s tempting to think that he might have been trying to call Loretta.

  If Loretta pined over Tracy, no one would know it. There were other men—several, in fact. When David Niven arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, he stayed at the home where Loretta, her mother, and sisters lived
until he found a place of his own. An unreconstructed (and unapologetic) ladies’ man, Niven was immediately attracted to Loretta and escorted her to nightclubs. According to his biographer, he and Loretta were “never lovers, certainly not at first.” On the other hand, it was “common knowledge that he had practically every star in Hollywood.” If that’s the case, perhaps Niven could not distinguish between his successful conquests and his failures.

  In 1939, Loretta set her sights on James Stewart. Supposedly, she was too forward for Stewart, whose shyness challenged her femininity and put it in overdrive. At that stage in his life, Stewart was “fearful of, a bit confused by, and more than a little tinged with guilt about her strong sexual advances.” What Stewart misinterpreted as sexual advances, strong or weak, was flirtatiousness. If Loretta was more aggressive than usual, it was because she had encountered a man who resisted her platonic notion of eros, preferring the reality to the dream. Stewart did not marry until 1949, when he was forty-one. In 1949, Loretta was thirty-six and had been married twice.