Back in 1939, Wanger never thought of Loretta as one of his company, knowing that she would not be making long-term commitments. But he also was aware of her less-than-amicable departure from Fox. That did not faze Wanger, nor did Zanuck’s blacklist—if it ever existed. Wanger knew there was no place for him at Fox, where one testosterone-driven producer was enough.
Loretta was useful to Wanger; she had appeared in his production of Shanghai and still had the gossamer femininity that he needed in Eternally Yours, in which she literally fell under the spell of a magician-mesmerist (David Niven). Exactly how that happens is left to the imagination. Anita (Loretta) attends a performance by the Great Arturo (Niven), who during a Q-and-A session makes ocular contact with her. What follows is a scene without any dialogue, in which Arturo/Tony is shown conversing with Anita, citing incidents from her past that only she would have known. He is so successful that she becomes his assistant and eventually his wife. When “the other woman” (Virginia Field) threatens their marriage, Anita sues for divorce, and Arturo/Tony resorts to mesmerism to win her back. Loretta worked well with Niven; she could turn coy and kittenish when he behaved like a proper Brit. When he relaxed, shedding stuffiness for urbanity and sexual indifference for sexual attraction, Loretta was transported into the realm of Eros, Hollywood style, radiating the glow that comes from fantasy recollected in tranquility.
Loretta would make one more film for Wanger, but meanwhile it was off to Columbia, where Harry Cohn offered her a multi-picture deal but not at the salary that her agent had requested: $75,000 a picture. Cohn drew the line at $50,000. Loretta agreed, and stayed on to do five pictures for him between 1940 and 1943, then one more in 1952, the year before she quit the big screen. Cohn respected Loretta, who had appeared in two of Columbia’s best films of the 1930s, Platinum Blonde and Man’s Castle. He was an unusual studio boss, serving as both Columbia’s president and production head (under ordinary circumstances, an atypical combination, but understandable in the egomaniacal and insecure). He was notorious for his gleaming white office, with a desk on a riser that made him seem taller. Behind the desk were shelves stocked with expensive perfumes and nylon stockings for services rendered. There was also a white couch, smaller than a love seat but able to accommodate Cohn’s needs—which, if short term, were often satisfied with fellatio. Otherwise, it was a courtship, aggressive but amorous, the kind he resorted to when he wooed—or rather, pursued—Joan Perry, a Columbia contract player. He knew Perry could never be a star, but she could be his wife. Joan Perry became the second Mrs. Harry Cohn in 1941 and provided him with two male heirs.
Cohn knew all about Loretta, the devout Catholic, who suffered a moral relapse at which Hollywood winked—as if to say, “Yes, we know, but why should the public?” And the public didn’t. Cohn also distinguished between ladies and broads; Loretta belonged to the former category. He treated her with respect, as he did her close friend and fellow Catholic, Rosalind Russell. Both were indebted to him—Russell, for giving her some excellent comedic roles in the 1940s, especially her Oscar-nominated My Sister Eileen (1942); and Loretta, for providing her with a temporary haven as she learned to negotiate the slippery slope of free lancing.
Loretta was in better pictures than Columbia’s The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940), a romantic comedy with a dash of screwball, but not enough of either genre to make it distinctive. Director Alexander Hall was the perfect match for Rosalind Russell during her decade at Columbia, eliciting performances from her in This Thing Called Love (1941), My Sister Eileen (1942), and She Wouldn’t Say Yes (1945) that confirmed her extraordinary gift for comedy. He could not do the same for Loretta. The Doctor Takes a Wife had potential: A feminist writer (Loretta), whose espousal of the single life has made her the idol of spinsters, cadges a ride to New York with a neurology instructor (Ray Milland). A simple trip becomes a cause célèbre when the press assumes they are married. Complications abound, affecting each party. With Loretta behind the wheel of a souped-up plot, only the happiest of endings is possible: Loretta sabotages Milland’s engagement to a ditzy socialite (Gail Patrick, out of her sophisticated element), but also gets him promoted. Academics, take note. Once the couple makes it legal, the dean, who only doles out full professorships to married faculty, promotes Milland from instructor to full professor without his even going through the assistant and associate professor ranks—not to mention peer review. In 1940 few moviegoers would question such largesse; if any academics caught the film, they would attribute the premature promotion to Hollywood’s ignorance of higher education—unless perhaps they were unmarried and wondered if there were colleges where the sole qualification for a full professorship was a wedding band.
Although The Doctor Takes a Wife is far from vintage Loretta, it illustrates the difficulty studios had pairing her with a compatible costar. In Easy Living (1937), Milland enjoyed a genuine rapport with Jean Arthur, looking as if he were amused by her wackiness. But it was not the same with Loretta. Once it is time to press the love button, Loretta’s eyes turned limpid, as if they were the windows not so much of the soul as of the psyche. She began moving sinuously, provocatively with an erotic rhythm that was always genteel, but also sexy—as if she were having one of her fantasies, in which the only sighs were her own. You could not imagine Milland making any sound, except perhaps a groan because he was stuck with a script that gave him no control of the narrative. When Milland was in control, he was superb—but rarely in comedy. His best work was in drama: Mitch Leisen’s Arise, My Love (1940), Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944), and especially Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, (1945), for which he won an Oscar playing an alcoholic writer. Milland may have looked as if he were meant for the drawing room, but he could also stagger, unshaven, up Third Avenue in search of a liquor store and experience the DTs in a dingy apartment.
Loretta had a slightly better vehicle in Columbia’s He Stayed for Breakfast (1940), a Lubitsch-like film without the Lubitsch touch. He Stayed for Breakfast was Columbia’s response to MGM’s Ninotchka (1939), in which Melvyn Douglas converted Greta Garbo as an extraordinary Soviet envoy, to the joys of capitalism, inducing her to shed regulation attire for evening gowns and negligees. In He Stayed for Breakfast, the roles are reversed. Douglas is the Communist spouting the party line to Loretta, an ardent capitalist (who looks it). Communism comes in for a good deal of ribbing, which is understandable in an industry where capitalism reigned unchallenged, and communism was regarded with a combination of fear and loathing. There were also lingering memories of the 1919 Palmer Raids and the infamous and soon-to-be ignored nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, signed on 23 August 1940, one week before The Doctor Takes a Wife opened at New York’s Roxy. Under the circumstances, there was no doubt who would win this ideological battle. The Doctor Takes a Wife did not require a suspension of disbelief; it inspired disbelief that was too pervasive to be suspended.
He Stayed for Breakfast is so deliciously improbable that one accepts it on the level of Märchen or fairy tale, a pleasant diversion that cannot subvert verisimilitude because there isn’t any. The Paris depicted in Ninotchka did not seem like a soundstage creation, although it obviously was. The sets looked too authentic to be questioned in He Stayed for Breakfast, in which much of the action takes place in Marianna and Maurice Duval’s (Loretta and Eugene Pallette) opulent apartment; a sense of place is totally lacking. But since Ninotchka was set in Paris, so must He Stayed for Breakfast. Melvyn Douglas looked and sounded no more like a French Stalinist than Eugene Pallette seemed a French banker. Both were French in name only. But perhaps the greatest test of credibility is the marriage between Loretta and Pallette, who specialized in playing blustery and blubbery characters. Pallette was a Dickensian figure, with a waistline reminiscent of Mr. Pickwick’s in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, where it is described as the product of “time and feeding [which] had expanded that once romantic form.”
What could have attracted Marianna to Maurice except his
wealth? At the beginning of the film she is preparing to divorce him because of the unbearable loneliness that she has felt since the first day of their marriage. Paul Boliet (Douglas) is so revolted by the effete (read “capitalist”) way Duval holds his coffee cup that he shoots the cup out of Duval’s hand, nicking him in the finger. Boilet is now the proverbial man on the run. Disguised as a policeman, he takes refuge in the Duvals’ apartment, much to the delight of Marianna, who considers being his prisoner a divertissement. It is also an opportunity for Loretta to model some classy outfits, such as billowy negligees with diaphanous sleeves, and an art deco lamé gown with a metallic sheen. This was clearly Loretta’s film; it is Marianna who guides the trajectory of the plot, convincing Boliet that there are only two classes of people: not capitalists and communists, but men and women. And when she succeeds, her face registers the resplendent look of victory.
Boliet goes before the his party’s executive committee, and in a scene that would have garnered applause in some quarters, denounces communism for its insistence on unswerving loyalty to Marxism and its subordination of the individual to the collective. Marianna, who has also become disgusted at the way Duval extends his index finger, whips out a pistol and shoots him in the finger. Now that she and Boilet are fugitives, they have no other choice but to emigrate to America, where they plan to settle in—of all places—Maine, where Boilet hopes to be a lobster fisherman! Whether they have money or passports is irrelevant; a fairy tale cannot be subjected to logical analysis. All audiences wanted was for Boliet to leave the party and Marianna to leave her husband so the two could settle in the land of the free and home of the brave.
If Douglas looked exasperated and, at times, lost, it was because the script placed Loretta in the driver’s seat, with Douglas behind her. He did not undergo the gradual conversion to capitalism that Garbo experienced so convincingly in Ninotchka. Although director Alexander Hall was not Ernst Lubitsch, the fault lay more with the script than with either Douglas or Hall. Paul Boliet was a cardboard character, whose only purpose was to illustrate the folly of communism and make audiences feel grateful that they were living in a country where the unit of currency was not the ruble.
Loretta discovered dance when she was a teenager. Dancing became one of her passions; she even studied dance with Marge Champion’s father, Ernest Belcher. But to play a circus performer, whom an impresario (Conrad Veidt) transforms into a world-famous ballerina in Columbia’s The Men in Her Life (1941), Loretta had to learn the rudiments of ballet. Although a stand-in was used for the long shots, audiences expected some proof that the versatile Loretta could stand en pointe, as she did in several scenes—and quite convincingly. It was difficult for a woman in her late twenties to master such technique, but Loretta, ever the perfectionist, did. She also looked like a ballerina.
The screenplay was another matter; it was a generic starmaker scenario, in which a successful actor/director/producer/agent turns an unknown into an icon. In The Red Shoes (1948), the impresario (Anton Walbrook) fails to convince his prima ballerina (Moira Shearer) to forgo marriage to a composer and remain his protégée. In The Men in Her Life, the ballerina (Loretta) marries the impresario, who expects her to give up her career. When he suddenly dies, the ballerina can either continue dancing or remarry. Career or remarriage? Remarriage, with a daughter and the resumption of career, perhaps? But this outcome would not set well with audiences. Instead, the ballerina remarries and returns to the world of dance. Once she realizes that her performing days are over, she decides to live vicariously through her daughter by preparing her for a career of her own.
The Men in Her Life opened at Radio City Music Hall, then known as “The Showcase of the Nation,” on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—when a ballerina’s love life was not uppermost in audiences’ minds. The New York Times critic, Bosley Crowther, panned The Men in Her Life, even implying that Loretta was not much of an actress. It was a mean-spirited review, but at least Music Hall audiences, seeking refuge from the bleak headlines, could settle into their seats, watch a movie about selflessness, and get a stage show as a bonus. As for Loretta’s performance: How many actresses could stand on point, look like a prima ballerina, marry a domineering male, remarry after his death, temporarily abandon her daughter, and then monitor the girl’s career? Even Bette Davis never ran such a gamut at Warner Bros. But Columbia was not Warner’s, and Harry Cohn was grateful that his film made it to the Music Hall.
The best of Loretta’s Columbia films of the 1940s was Bedtime Story (1941), her third with Alexander Hall. Loretta had now adjusted to Hall’s approach to domestic comedy, which required an airiness that kept the action afloat, gradually bringing it down to earth for the denouement. The idea was to convince viewers that they were being served a soufflé that may have sagged a bit, but had not collapsed. Bedtime Story ranks as one of the unheralded films about remarriage, which owes a great deal to The Awful Truth (1937) and His Girl Friday (1940). Loretta and Fredric March play a married actress and playwright—like Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne—who, in true Hollywood tradition, have never had a flop. Still, after seven years of eight performances a week, Loretta yearns to retire to a farm in Connecticut. March agrees, but continues writing a play that will give her the greatest role of her career. Loretta, however, is so determined to retire that she divorces March, who goes on writing his masterpiece, while she becomes the wife of a banker (Allyn Joslyn).
Robert Flournoy’s clever script adds a new complication to the traditional comedy of remarriage plot: the wife’s second marriage turns out to be legally questionable. There are other plot divagations, all of which are beautifully integrated, including a credit card receipt from a California motel (then called an auto court) that invalidates the wife’s required residency in Reno, the nation’s divorce capital. But, as expected, Loretta returns to March and appears in his play, which is a hit as well as a personal triumph for her. Loretta was surprisingly convincing as a Broadway star. She had never performed on stage, although she was not averse to doing live radio drama, like Lux Radio Theatre, where she was a regular. She was also at ease on the lecture circuit. Apparently, the theatre held little interest for her. Yet she understood the way a stage diva moved and spoke, perhaps because she assumed that stars from all media behaved similarly. For Bedtime Story, she had the walk, grace, and technique to execute a flawless cross from one side of the stage to the other and then swivel around. She knew enough about stage acting to re-create it. Perhaps Hall, a former stage director, helped her; more likely, Loretta just tapped into those hidden resources that actors possess and found the stage diva within the movie star—the only difference being that, in the theatre, an actor has to master the entire script, while in the movies, learning several pages a day is standard.
Despite top billing, Fredric March fared less well. March was a fine dramatic actor, but without much of a flair for comedy. The script required the playwright to woo his wife back to the stage, and when she remarries, to cause as much mayhem as he can to return her to both the theatre and himself. Thus, March behaves no differently than the ex-husbands in The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, who resort to whatever means they can to bring their ex-wives to their senses. March has nothing to do but orchestrate the chaos; he does not have to participate in it. Loretta, however, has to delve into her character’s unconscious, as Rosalind Russell did in His Girl Friday, in which Hildy Johnson (Russell) has no desire to wed her dullard fiancé (Ralph Bellamy) and settle down in Albany, hoping instead that her ex (Cary Grant) will deliver her from the boredom awaiting her. Similarly, Loretta secretly hopes March will rescue her. He does, and one assumes Broadway will be the better for it.
Loretta’s next picture to fulfill her Columbia commitment was her least memorable: A Night to Remember (1943), not to be confused with the harrowing 1958 British film of the same name about the sinking of the Titanic. This was not a memorable occasion for any of the cast, which included some of Holly
wood’s finest character actors: Jeff Donnell, Sidney Toler (minus his Charlie Chan makeup), Gale Sondergaard, Lee Patrick, and Blanche Yurka. It was a species of screwball mystery, inspired by The Thin Man series, in which amateur sleuths solve murders, as they do in The Gracie Allen Murder Case and It’s a Wonderful World (both 1939). The Thin Man (1934) is really faux screwball. Pure screwball does not center on a married couple, but rather a man and a woman who come from totally different backgrounds (e.g., It Happened One Night, Easy Living, Nothing Sacred, Bringing Up Baby). Loretta could do romantic comedy with screwball overtones, but playing the “dizzy dame” was not in her repertoire. She was not the sort who could release her madcap self, probably because, unlike Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and Katharine Hepburn, she did not have one. Nor did her costar, Brian Aherne. Aherne’s best Columbia films were the two he did with Rosalind Russell, My Sister Eileen (1942) and What a Woman! (1943), where his urbanity complemented Russell’s cool sophistication.
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