Annabella, who received better notices than Power or Loretta, became the first of Power’s three wives a year after the film’s release. The marriage was short-lived, ending in divorce seven years later. Power’s second marriage, to Linda Christian, also lasted for seven years. His third marriage, to Debbie Ann Minardos, was tragically brief; six months after they were wed, Power suffered a heart attack and died on 15 November 1958 at the age of forty-four. His son was born two months later.
Loretta might well have been Power’s first wife. Once she learned that Power was Catholic (probably one in need of a refresher course), he was no longer an adolescent crush, but a desirable costar and potential mate. Whether Power felt similarly about Loretta is a matter of conjecture. The press felt they were made for each other, and the public did, too—but not Zanuck. To him, they were good copy—fan food, like hors d’oeuvres, not the main course. If they married, Zanuck feared he would lose his investment, and he had no intention of taking such a loss. It would be better if Power were seen with someone much plainer, another Fox contract player without a definable persona or the promise of a major career. In other words, Sonja Henie. Loretta continued to harbor some affection for Power, even though she was demoralized, as she later told Zanuck, when she learned that after Power’s first year at Fox, his salary was raised twice, and hers was not. At Power’s funeral, she arrived in costume after filming an episode for her television show, in which she played an Asian. Loretta claimed she had no time to change, but flashbulbs popped, and her appearance was the highlight of the occasion. Photo op or farewell? Probably both.
The last of Loretta’s 1938 films was Kentucky; released just before the end of the year to qualify for the Oscars. It was nominated in one category: Best Supporting Actor. The winner was Walter Brennan as a Yankee-hating son of the Confederacy, whose bias is explained in the 1861 prologue, when his character, Peter Goodwin, appears as a boy. Although Kentucky remained in the Union during the war, there were families, like the slave-holding Goodwins, that sympathized with the Confederate cause. To the Unionists, such families were rebels. When a Union official, John Dillon, arrives at the Goodwin plantation with an order to confiscate the livestock, Peter’s father, Thad Goodwin, becomes so enraged that he draws his pistol, but he is shot before he can fire. Peter witnesses the killing; unable to avenge his father’s death, he harbors a deep hatred for Dillon’s descendants.
The prologue had more potential for drama than the film proper, which cannot make up its mind if it is a domestic tragedy, a romantic melodrama, or a horse-as-hero movie on the order of Capra’s Broadway Bill (1933). Seventy-five years go by, and the main action takes place in 1938. Thad Goodwin Jr. has a daughter, Sally (Loretta), who is also Peter’s niece, and John Dillon Jr. has a son, also named John (Richard Greene). Even though Sally is a Goodwin, and John a Dillon, we are only in feuding family, not Montague-Capulet, country—which does not mean that the course of true love will run smoothly. Sally eventually gets John Dillon III, even though the audience is denied the usual kissing couple fadeout—perhaps because the romantic subplot is secondary to what is implied by the title. No matter how the credits read, the star is Kentucky, the costar is Walter Brennan, and the supporting cast is headed by a horse, followed by Loretta and Greene.
Any movie entitled Kentucky would have to highlight the Derby, which is cleverly worked into the plot so that the climax can take place at Churchill Downs. A horse joins the cast: Bluegrass, the proverbial dark horse that everyone hopes will come in first. And if Bluegrass does, will he suffer the same fate as Broadway Bill, the horse that gallops triumphantly through the finish line and then collapses in death? Bluegrass is a bona fide character; he may be a horse, but he stands in for anyone who has been pegged a loser and confounds the skeptics by doing a star turn. We know Loretta and Greene will resolve their problems and go into a clinch, on or off the screen. It will be much easier with the death of Peter, who is adamantly opposed to his niece’s involvement with a Dillon. Once Bluegrass wins the cup, it is Peter whose heart gives out from excitement, and it is Peter who posthumously gets the last scene when John Dillon Jr. delivers the eulogy at his funeral, reminding the mourners that, with Peter’s demise, “We are burying a way of life. “
Some moviegoers might have felt that Peter’s was a way of life that should be buried, based, as it was, on false ideals and festering hatred—not to mention racism, which is also reflected in the film’s portrayal of the Southern black as illiterate darkie, a stereotype that Hollywood perpetuated over the years and that many whites accepted as fact. Although the Goodwins treated their slaves and later their servants humanely, they did so condescendingly, as if, as Christians, they were expected to be tolerant of inferiors. And for all the accolades heaped on Walter Brennan for his portrayal of Peter, he gave a performance in one key, in a voice so petulant that he would have been a prime candidate for anger management classes if they had existed in 1938.
This was Loretta’s second color feature. She was given a wardrobe with soft colors: white, yellow, pink, and pale blue. Although an equestrian like Sally Goodwin would have been comfortable in jodhpurs, they did little for Loretta except call attention to her backside. Her makeup was also a problem. Her face lacked its usual translucence and delicately sculpted cheekbones. Instead, it looked like an alabaster mask with rouge-tinged cheeks that seemed stained. Neither her makeup nor Greene’s was consistent. At times, Greene looked as if he were not so much made up as painted. When Loretta’s makeup was applied less extravagantly, the old aura returned. But black-and-white truly did her justice, and it was not until 1949, when she was thirty-six, that she appeared in another color film. Zanuck was pleased with the final script, requesting only minor changes. But the film did nothing for Loretta, who was eclipsed by a state, a horse, a race, and Walter Brennan, who for some reason endeared himself to the public.
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Loretta’s last film at Fox, was not hers; both the title and the credits confirmed as much. Don Ameche in the title role headed the cast, followed by Loretta and Henry Fonda as Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, the recipient of the world’s first phone call: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Bell was Ameche’s most memorable role, which he played with an ardor that reduced everyone else to supporting cast status, despite their billing. Like Loretta, Fonda learned that at Fox, contract players were the equivalent of repertory actors: a lead today and a supporting role tomorrow. The year that The Story of Alexander Graham Bell was released also saw the release of one of Fonda’s best-remembered films, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, in which Fonda played the title role. Only a movie buff would associate Fonda with The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, which was Ameche’s film, and his alone. Everyone else was relegated to the wings until needed on stage.
Loretta was not needed that often. When she was, she looked ravishing—particularly when Bell proposes marriage on the staircase, both of them using an encoded language that might seem too decorous for ordinary mortals, but not for the angelic Loretta or her character, Myrtle Hubbard, who is propriety incarnate. Myrtle is also deaf; it is Bell’s reputation as a teacher of the hearing-impaired (who performs scientific experiments in his spare time) that results in his meeting Myrtle, who has mastered the art of lip reading. Since the historical Myrtle Hubbard was deaf, the screenwriter, the invaluable Lamar Trotti, acknowledged her condition and then consigned it to plot point limbo, the repository of once used and then discarded information, so Loretta would not be burdened with the dual task of looking beautiful and reading lips. Once the film takes a romantic turn, Myrtle’s deafness becomes irrelevant; Loretta plays her scenes with Ameche as she would with any leading man with whom she is supposed to fall in love.
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell is one of Fox’s more accurate biopics; certainly there is less embroidering of the facts than there was in Suez, even though the latter is cinematically more impressive with its disaster scenes and special effects. But there is some massaging of
facts. The historical Myrtle was not enthusiastic about her husband’s experiments with the telephone; her father, one of Bell’s chief financial backers, preferred that he concentrate on the telegraph. Trotti’s Myrtle, in contrast, is the perfect inventor’s wife: She simply tells her husband to continue with the telegraph, while he secretly works on the telephone.
The film was handsomely mounted and well acted, but with little sense of urgency or drama. Essentially, it was an information retrieval movie. Since everyone knows the outcome, there is no suspense. Trotti realized he could not make the world’s first phone call the climax. For those who did not know that Bell might have become a historical footnote, and that the invention of the telephone could have been attributed to Western Union, Trotti devised as dramatic a conclusion as the facts would allow. Bell initiates a law suit that generates little heat. Myrtle, now pregnant, is in the courtroom; she is also in possession of a letter proving that Bell succeeded in transmitting sound through a wire. When she goes into labor, Bell uses his invention to contact the hospital. Bell wins his suit, and the film ends as he describes his dream of air transportation.
For Loretta, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell had a personal significance. It was the only time she and her three sisters appeared in the same film. The three played Myrtle’s sisters: Gertrude (Sally Blane), Grace (Polly Ann Young), and Berta (Georgiana Belzer). Sally’s resemblance to Loretta is so striking that seeing them together is like the charm of recognition that comes from leafing through the family album on a rainy afternoon. Perhaps in any year other than 1939 Ameche might at least have garnered an Oscar nomination. But 1939 was the year of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Destry Rides Again, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Women, and the one and only Gone with the Wind. Who cared about an invention that in 1939 was taken for granted?
Loretta had mustered enough courage to say her own farewell to Zanuck, not knowing that she would be back for three more films. In 1939, she felt that the cord had been severed. At a meeting with Zanuck and Joseph Schenck, then president, she voiced her disillusionment: “Darryl, I won’t work with you …. In all the years I’ve been here, you never once sent me flowers or given me a bonus or even a raise …. I went back for ‘Mother Was (sic) a Freshman’ and ‘Come to the Stable’ And boy, Fox paid!” Zanuck felt the same about Loretta, going to whatever lengths he could to see that she paid for her ingratitude. Hollywood buzzed with “Loretta will never eat lunch in this town again” rumors. But Loretta was always able to find a protector, at least temporarily. And she found champions now in Walter Wanger and Harry Cohn.
CHAPTER 13
The Price of Freedom
Loretta could have continued indefinitely at Fox, but if she stayed beyond 1939, there would have been nothing for her except more of the same. She must have known that Zanuck had his favorites: the more bankable talent, the bigger box office draws such as Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Maureen O’Hara, and Loretta’s replacement, the sylphlike Gene Tierney, the perfect mirror image for Tyrone Power, who still had his looks, but without the androgynous glow. Loretta was no longer one of the inner circle.
While Loretta was shimmery and angelic, a beam from the moon’s bright side, the exotic Tierney seemed to emanate from both the light and the dark. She could play the daughter of Hecate or Diana. Put Tierney in a rowboat, with sunglasses shielding her eyes from the sight of her drowning disabled nephew (a fate that she diabolically engineered in Leave Her to Heaven [1945]), and she is even deadlier than Regina in The Little Foxes (1941), who makes no effort to retrieve her husband’s medicine when he is having a heart attack. Loretta could never have played Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven. Nor was there any likelihood that, when Zanuck decided to remake Love Is News as That Wonderful Urge (1948), he would have had Loretta reprise the role she had originated. Once Zanuck saw Tierney on the stage in The Male Animal (1940), he knew he had found Loretta’s successor. Tierney was not long for Broadway; she was off to Hollywood that same year, making her movie debut in Fox’s The Return of Frank James (1940). Zanuck had no problem with Power—ten years older and now merely handsome rather than beautiful—re-creating his role in the Love Is News remake. But Power needed a younger and fresher talent, and Tierney could easily step into Loretta’s shoes. Like Loretta, Tierney could also play Asians (China Girl). She was the new Loretta, even as Jeanne Crain was the ingénue and budding dramatic actress that Loretta once was.
Zanuck was also going through his blonde period. At first he touted Alice Faye, holding Betty Grable in reserve. But Grable gradually came into her own, supplanting Faye as Fox’s musical queen. Longevity was a major concern of Zanuck’s. As Grable was nearing thirty, he began grooming the younger June Haver, a superb dancer but no match for the World War II pinup in a white bathing suit. Haver was “the girl next door,” not the kind that GIs taped inside their locker doors. Perhaps out of gratitude, Zanuck threw Grable a few crumbs, even costarring her with her successor, Marilyn Monroe, in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). Since Monroe was only a passable dancer, he tapped Sheree North, whose dancing was the highlight of the Broadway musical Hazel Flagg. But the Fox musical had seen better days, and Marilyn was too bedeviled by the demons of insecurity to be reliable. Still obsessed with blondes, he found a Marilyn clone in Jayne Mansfield, a comically gifted actress with a sense of self-parody she revealed in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Mansfield re-created her role in the 1957 movie version that bore the same title but little resemblance to the original, a mordantly clever Faustian take on the extent to which some will go to achieve fame in a medium where “integrity” is not in anyone’s lexicon. Mansfield’s tenure at Fox was brief, as was her career, which ended with a fatal car crash in 1967.
Fox in the 1940s and 1950s was no place for Loretta Young. Loretta insisted on claiming that Zanuck had her “blacklisted” for walking out on him. She did not know what it was like to be blacklisted. The writers and actors who were persecuted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the late 1940s and 1950s for their politics knew. Loretta was a blacklistee who continued to work. Zanuck had no choice but to express outrage at Loretta’s decision, although whether or not he felt it was another matter. It was a variation on the “Nobody leaves a star” syndrome: Nobody leaves Zanuck until he decides it’s time.
Zanuck probably was relieved. He had essentially written Loretta off. Her expectations did not coincide with his perception of her as a competent but essentially decorative performer, whose idea of passionate love was convent school foreplay. Loretta could never be a femme fatale like Linda Darnell, or a mysterious beauty like Gene Tierney, who seemed too well bred for passion, but whose veiled look could make a viewer curious about the difference between Tierney veiled and unveiled. Loretta was already a star. Now she could fend for herself, while Zanuck added newer celestial bodies to the Fox firmament.
Unlike a typical blacklistee, Loretta had no gaps in her filmography. Both 1939 and 1940 were accounted for: three films in 1939, two in 1940. Walter Wanger’s production, Eternally Yours—released in November 1939, seven months after The Story of Alexander Graham Bell—marked the beginning of Loretta’s post-Fox period. Although she would return to the studio for two films in 1949 and one in 1951, she was now a freelancer. Eternally Yours was a bauble, not a fresh water pearl. In that annus mirabilis, 1939, Garbo had Ninotchka; Rosalind Russell, The Women; Bette Davis, Dark Victory; Marlene Dietrich, Destry Rides Again; Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz; Merle Oberon, Wuthering Heights; and Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind. And what did Loretta have? A film in which she played a bishop’s granddaughter, who falls for a magician. But at least she was in a film produced by one of the industry’s premier independent producers.
Dartmouth-educated Walter Wanger was not so much an independent, as a semi-independent producer, who could supply a studio with product that was distinctive but still had audience appeal. Wanger would provide most of the fi
nancial backing, minimizing the studio’s contribution, which was at times non-existent. He sought real autonomy, not the relative kind that that came from being dependent on a studio’s largesse. Unlike Hal Wallis, who, after leaving Warner Bros. encamped at Paramount for thirteen years before heading for Universal where he ended his filmmaking career, Wanger preferred to studio hop, cutting deals that worked to his advantage. At Columbia, Wanger produced, among other films, Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) and at MGM, Gregory LaCava’s Gabriel over the White House (1933), in which the Deity allows a president to survive a supposedly fatal car accident by assuming the persona of a dictator, who cures the ills of the Great Depression. More impressive was Wanger’s sumptuous MGM production of Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1934), with Garbo at her peak. His first Paramount production was William Wellman’s phantasmagoric The President Vanishes (1935), a strangely allegorical film in which an isolationist president, fearing he has lost popular support for refusing to embroil his country in a European war, allows himself to be kidnapped by right-wing extremists. After he is rescued, the president returns to office, where he continues to advocate non-intervention, espousing George Washington’s admonition in his Farewell Address to “steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.” Wanger did not shrink from controversy, although he knew he had to sweeten the brew: The president proposes to force the nations of Europe to sign a disarmament treaty and to establish an oxymoronic “dictatorial democracy” that will eliminate unemployment and crime. The President Vanishes neither embraced fascism nor advocated the suspension of civil liberties, but instead argued for a program that combined both—for the good of the American people, of course.
In 1937, United Artists gave Wanger a five-year contract at $2,000 a week and “complete control of all production matters.” It was there that Wanger produced his most famous films: Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night (1937); William Dieterle’s Blockade (1938); John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and The Long Voyage Home (1940); Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940); and Henry Hathaway’s Sundown (1941). Eternally Yours was not in their league; it was Wanger in down time. Wanger’s dream was a repertory company on the order of the one John Ford was assembling. He started recruiting talent like Sylvia Sidney, Madeleine Carroll, Charles Boyer, and Joan Bennett, none of whom wanted to be bound by the standard seven-year studio contract. When a studio beckoned, they might sign on for a film or two, but generally they preferred a multi-picture arrangement. Wanger’s stock company eventually consisted of two stalwarts, Susan Hayward and Joan Bennett, each of whom starred in five of his productions. Of the two, Hayward fared better, gaining an Oscar nomination for Smash-Up—The Story of a Woman (1947) and the coveted statuette for I Want to Live! (1958). Bennett was actually more than one of Wanger’s stars; she married him in 1940, continuing as his wife in name only after he shot her lover—wounding, but not killing, him in 1951. At first, Bennett stood by Wanger, as he made his way through the Hollywood labyrinth, stopping off at one studio, then another, creating production companies under various names, and adding to his legacy a parcel of films that are now taken seriously. By 1965, Wanger’s producing days were over; Bennett, tired of his infidelities, demanded a divorce. Wanger enjoyed three more years of life, dying of heart failure in 1968.
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