Hollywood Madonna

by Bernard F. Dick

  Zanuck hoped to release the first movie that dealt, at least peripherally, with the war. Walter Hackett had written an unproduced play, The Fugitives, in which the Nationalists were portrayed trying to keep valuable jewelry from falling into the hands of the Loyalists. It was a boilerplate plot, with enough intrigue, romance, and politics to sustain audience interest. In October 1936, three months after the war began, Kathryn Scola and Darrell Ware had an adaptation ready for Zanuck’s scrutiny. The script was a skein of contradictions; the characters were so chameleon-like with their shifting allegiances that if the Scola-Ware script were ever filmed, it would have only reflected many moviegoers’ own ambivalence about the war. Defenders of a democratic form of government might have been thrilled that the Spanish people voted to make Spain a republic, but they might have balked when they realized it would be a socialist one. Those with fascist sympathies might have hoped for a Nationalist victory, but they were uneasy about Franco’s contempt for the democratic process. And when it was known that both sides were guilty of atrocities, some might have wondered if either side was worth supporting.

  Zanuck finally realized that he could never make the kind of film he envisioned and issued an ultimatum: “Eliminate all references to ‘loyalists’ and ‘traitors’, etc. Refer to all other sides as General so-and-so and his forces.” The title went from The Fugitives to Fandango and ended up as Love under Fire, with new screenwriters: no longer Scola and Ware, but Gene Fowler, Allen Rivkin, and Ernest Pascal. All that remained of Hackett’s original plot were the jewels, reduced to a pearl necklace that Loretta’s character supposedly stole. Once a Scotland Yard inspector (Ameche) learns she is not a thief, they can fall in love and leave Madrid, which is under bombardment for reasons that would not have interested most of isolationist America. And those who decided to see Love under Fire were more interested in “love” than in “fire,” knowing that with Loretta and Ameche in the leads, the lovers could enter the fiery furnace and not get singed.

  Power and Loretta were teamed for the penultimate time in Second Honeymoon (1937), which had potential. But the paradigmatic comedy of remarriage, Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth, was released the same year, relegating Second Honeymoon to the oubliette for runners up. The writers, Kathryn Scola and Darrel Ware, imagined a retread of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, filmed in 1931, in which a couple divorce, remarry, and discover that all the parties involved are spending their honeymoons at the same hotel. Eventually the original couple shed the new spouses and reunite. In Second Honeymoon, Loretta and Power do not meet cute; they run into each other in Palm Beach, impeccably dressed—Loretta in chiffon that streams down her frame, and Power with glistening hair and a figure-flattering tuxedo, usurping the moonlight for no other reason than to make love to his ex-wife.

  In The Awful Truth, the divorced couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) has not remarried, giving each partner the opportunity to undermine the other’s marital prospects. In Second Honeymoon, Power has to woo Loretta away from her stolid husband (Lyle Talbot), which is not that difficult. With Power’s piercingly compassionate eyes, promising dream fulfillment, and Loretta’s knowing smile and coy body language, how else could the film end? Second Honeymoon’s main problem is its uneasy juxtaposition of high and low comedy. The latter involves carry-overs from Three Blind Mice: Stuart Erwin as Power’s valet and the lively Marjorie Weaver as his fiancée. Although intended as comic relief, they emerge as the only real characters in a world where the problems of the idle rich alone matter. Neither Loretta nor Power was at his and her best. When they quarrel, Loretta is gratingly shrill; by way of comparison, in Private Lives, the couple literally comes to blows, but the dialogue remains on the same urbane plane. Loretta and Power engage in a shouting match that is totally out of character. Although Second Honeymoon aspired to be an amalgamation of screwball and comedy of remarriage, it was so only in theory.

  For the third time in one year, Loretta was cast as a woman of privilege. In Wife, Doctor, and Nurse (1937), she was a socialite, married to a doctor (Warner Baxter) who suspects that her husband’s nurse (Virginia Bruce, in the film’s best performance) is her rival. Properly handled, the film could have qualified as respectable screwball comedy, but the plot turned out to be just another triangular template without the wit of My Favorite Wife and Too Many Husbands. The nurse is an atypical “other woman”: She is neither a gold digger nor a home wrecker, but merely a victim of unrequited love. Her refusal to join the ranks of rebuffed women by seducing the husband or feeding the wife’s suspicions gives her a stature that Loretta’s character lacks. Because she is one of the upper East Side ladies who lunch, Loretta invites the nurse to a classy restaurant where she plans to confront her, discovering instead that the nurse does not even realize that she is in love with the doctor until Loretta brings it up. Privilege allows the privileged to play psychiatrist, getting the unsuspecting “patient” to reveal unconscious motives and desires. Satisfied, the wife returns to her Park Avenue apartment, unappreciative of the nurse’s integrity. The nurse is a professional, not a rival. The wife does not even have to reclaim her husband, who never cheated on her. If there was ever a film to dispel the myth of woman’s intuition, this was it.

  The role made no demands on Loretta, whose name preceded Baxter’s in the credits only because she was a bigger star than he. Baxter was never A list; it was only when he starred in the “Crime Doctor” series at Columbia in the 1940s that he found a new audience, less discriminating than those he once knew, who could accept his workmanlike performance. To his credit, Baxter could register intensity and menace, but when it came to romance, it was hard to envision him as a lover. Loretta had to work doubly hard to convince the audience that she was attracted to him. Bette Davis had a similar problem with George Brent in Dark Victory. Actress that she was, Davis convinced audiences that Brent was her great love, even though he, too, was not the most charismatic of actors.

  There was no “working actress” job description during the studio years. If one had existed, it would state that a working actress is one who works, despite the quality of the material handed to her. And if she balks at the assignment, she goes on suspension, switches studios, or freelances, as Loretta began doing when she left Fox in 1939. She must have sensed that in the coming decade the roles would be fewer or not worth accepting, unless money or ego were the sole considerations.

  At the end of 1937, Loretta knew it was only a matter of time before her days at Fox were over. The previous year, she refused to do Lloyds of London (1936), claiming that the role she was offered, which went to Madeleine Carroll, was too small. “Loretta Young Walks Out In Huff Over Film Role,” a Los Angeles Times headline (6 September 1936) announced. It was true: Loretta flew to San Francisco and took a boat to Honolulu. She was developing a reputation for being difficult. Zanuck did not know how difficult she could be. Loretta had not yet begun to fight.

  CHAPTER 12

  Addio, Darryl

  Zanuck was so pleased with the box office receipts for Wife, Doctor and Nurse that Loretta and Warner Baxter were teamed again in Wife, Husband and Friend, adapted from James M. Cain’s novella, Career in C Major (1936). By 1936, Cain’s bestseller, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), had already established him as a novelist who transcended the gaudy prose of the pulps. By the time Wife, Husband and Friend was released, he had published another novel, the controversial Serenade, fraught with racial stereotyping and homophobia, none of which appeared in the 1956 movie version with Mario Lanza as an operatic tenor caught between two women. Opera was not alien to Cain. Although he was an acknowledged master of hardboiled fiction, he aspired to be an opera singer but soon discovered that his forte was language; however, he never lost his love of opera, which resonates throughout Career in C Major, in which a contractor discovers he is a natural baritone, as opposed to his un-talented wife, who aspires to be a concert artist. Career is a first-person narrative, told almost exclusively from the point of view of the contractor,
Leonard Boland, in a style hardly befitting an opera singer. It mixes streetwise vernacular, tangy and colorful, with the kind of metaphors (a conductor’s demeanor is “as cheerful as cold gravy with grease caked on the egg”) that became the hallmark of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Ellroy.

  The specter of the Great Depression broods over Cain’s novella. Leonard’s business is suffering, although his socialite wife, Doris, is oblivious to the country’s economic woes and focuses solely on her concert debut, which proves a disaster. When Cecil Carver, a concert and opera star, accidentally hears Leonard sing, she experiences the “star is born” syndrome and immediately grooms him for a singing career, introducing him to the rituals of the concert and operatic stage. Leonard is an overnight sensation, and Cain allows his narrator to describe his initiation into an alien world as he dissects the plots of La Bohème and Rigoletto in a refreshingly muscular style, lacking in highbrow pretentiousness. But Cain knows enough not to have Leonard triumph at his wife’s expense. After a catastrophic Rigoletto, Leonard realizes he is out of his element. Then, in an eleventh-hour reprieve, an offer comes through to build a bridge in Alabama. And Career ends with the Bolands en route to the Deep South as they sing, off key, the duet, “Là ci darem la mano “ from Don Giovanni.

  Wife, Husband and Friend follows the broad outlines of the novella, with Loretta and Baxter as the Bolands, and Binnie Barnes as Cecil Carver. In the film, Leonard’s operatic debut is a singer’s nightmare. A grotesque costume that looks like a fat suit, a stringy beard, and a floppy hairpiece all conspire against him. Leonard storms off stage, now able to understand how Doris felt when she read her hostile notices. Nunnally Johnson wrote an engaging script, which Gregory Ratoff directed capably, but without much flair. Still, the film featured a number of good performances, particularly from Loretta and Barnes, who played Cecil as if she were as serious about making Leonard into an artist as she was about netting him for herself—thus adding another dimension to the “other woman” type. The character actors did their usual scene stealing: the blustery, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette as the owner of the construction company, and the imperious Helen Westley as Doris’s mother.

  Ten years later, Fox remade Wife, Husband and Friend as Everybody Does It (1949), and in this case the remake was superior to the original. But it used the same basic plot, with Cecil (Linda Darnell) becoming Leonard’s (Paul Douglas) muse, determined to launch his career and steal him from his wife (Celeste Holm). The production values were much higher in the remake, and Douglas, looking burlier and more befuddled than Baxter, was a more suitable quarry for the predatory Darnell. To coincide with the remake, New American Library published a Signet paperback with the same title, Everybody Does It, noting that the novella was originally published as Career in C Major.

  There was a powerfully acted scene in the original that did not appear in the remake, perhaps because either the writer (Johnson again) or director (Edmund Goulding) thought it would not work with Holm and Douglas as the Bolands. In Wife, Husband and Friend, when Doris discovers the truth about Leonard’s supposed business trips, she lashes out at him, pelting him with blows and landing both of them on the floor. Loretta played the scene so realistically that her slim, 105-pound body must have sustained more than a few bruises. The sight of Douglas—looking like a construction worker getting pummeled by the petite Holm—would have produced guffaws. In the original, Loretta acted the scene so convincingly that it can still make one feel uncomfortable.

  Four Men and a Prayer (1938) was Loretta’s first and only experience working with John Ford. Despite the title, Loretta’s character—a globetrotting socialite who, in a different film, would have been a screwball heroine—is the movie’s catalyst; without her, the plot could not have been resolved. Although Ford dismissed the film (“I just didn’t like the story, or anything else about it, so it was a job of work”), a few scenes bear his signature. One such scene is a barroom brawl set to an Irish jig coming from a player piano and Barry Fitzgerald feinting like a boxer without any opponents. Ford’s fondness for Irish shtick could derail a film, as it almost did in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), where Victor McLaglen’s high jinx left a smudge on one Ford’s most poetic works.

  There was no poetry in Four Men and a Prayer, in which the four sons of a disgraced colonel (C. Aubrey Smith) vow to restore the reputation of their father, who was murdered before he could prove his innocence. For lack of evidence, his death is classified as a suicide. The sons know otherwise and set out for India and South America, where they discover that their father was a victim of an arms cartel that had no qualms about selling weapons to both insurgents and their oppressors. The film includes an uncommonly violent scene, in which Loretta watches in horror as soldiers gun down the rebels, leaving the steps on which they have assembled strewn with bodies. One cannot help but think of the massacre on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s Potemkin. The romantic idyll that the socialite envisioned has brought her into the midst of a struggle for self-determination, where men and women are willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause. Once Loretta learns that her father is the president of the cartel, she confronts him, not acting as if she were morally superior, but simply wanting to right a wrong—particularly after having fallen in love with one of the sons (Richard Greene). The father explains that artillery is not the company’s sole export and henceforth will cease weapons production. Developing a conscience or activating one that has been dormant is not usually that sudden, but the film had to come in under ninety minutes (it ran eighty-five), so the conversion process was reduced to an epiphany. The colonel’s killer is unmasked, the sons see their father honored posthumously, and Loretta becomes part of the family.

  Loretta’s character is integral to the plot. The socialite moves in international circles, attracting the attention of shady characters like war profiteers and making it possible for the brothers to learn their identity. Although Ford expressed disinterest in the script, Loretta—her stylish wardrobe not withstanding—gave the film whatever degree of credibility it had. The brothers’ two-continent manhunt is the stuff of espionage and detective fiction, and their way of piecing information together is a variation on connecting the dots, with Loretta doing some of the connecting. Loretta’s character is achingly real. A child of privilege, indulged by a multimillionaire father, she witnesses the dark side of colonialism. She may have grown up hearing the familiar jungle movie line, “The natives are restless,” but she never saw the extent of that restlessness until she was caught in the crossfire of a rebellion. Her revulsion at the sight of innocent men, women, and children gunned down in cold blood may have been required by the script, but her face, drained of its beauty by shock and anguish, suggests that she was reacting to the scene on a more personal level. Loretta had never before been in a film in which violence erupted with such frightening immediacy that horror was the only possible reaction. Politically, Four Men and a Prayer was liberal and mildly anti-capitalist—except when politics took a back seat to high adventure, with the action shifting from India to England, then back to India and Argentina, and finally to England. Moviegoers who sensed that the film was ambivalent about imperialism were in the minority. This was 1938, when honor, reputation, and romance were more important than self-determination. For the prescient few, Four Men and a Prayer offered a glimpse into the future, when liberation movements became more widespread after the European superpowers divested themselves of their colonies.

  Suez (1938) was Loretta’s last film with Power, who received first billing—as one would expect in a biopic about Ferdinand de Lesseps (Power) and his dream of building the Suez Canal. Philip Dunne and his collaborator, Julien Josephson, devised a script involving an ill-starred romance between de Lesseps and the Countess Eugenie de Montijo (Loretta), who must choose between Louis Napoleon (Leon Ames), later known as Napoleon III, and de Lesseps. She is not influenced by Louis’s looks. Ames was a fine actor, but no match for Power’s dark beauty. Power and Lorett
a had already become such a romantic team that audiences expected a combination of love story and spectacle. But history, when passed through the Hollywood prism, separates into a spectrum of fact and fancy. True, there was a Ferdinand de Lesseps who, physically, would never have been mistaken for Tyrone Power; however, Napoleon III was every bit as dictatorial as he is portrayed in the film, dissolving the legislative assembly and imprisoning dissidents. Since the historical Eugenie was reputedly a beauty, who else but Loretta could play her? Loretta could turn costumes into period attire and wigs into authentic coiffure. You could almost hear the rustle of silk when she walked—or rather glided—across a room. But Eugenie, unlike de Lesseps, is royalty, and in mid-nineteenth century Europe, a countess does not marry a diplomat obsessed with creating a waterway connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The film’s omission that Eugenie’s mother was the niece of de Lesseps’s mother, making Eugenie and de Lesseps cousins, is more significant. The historical de Lesseps married his first wife in 1837, thirteen years before the time of the main action. No matter; unrequited love plays better than domestic drama.

  Although Suez was directed by the venerable Allan Dwan, it owes much to the second unit director, Otto Brower, who knew how to stage action in the desert, as he proved in Under Two Flags. A landslide that dislodges a mass of rock and earth was the work of Brower and the great special effects artist, Fred Sersen; so was the cyclone that sucks Toni (Annabella), the army brat who worships deLesseps, into it and disgorges her body on the sand. These are the scenes that linger in the memory.