Hollywood Madonna

by Bernard F. Dick

  Visually, The Stranger bears Welles’s signature: chiaroscuro lighting; spectral faces; silhouettes, menacing and otherwise; high and low angle shots; and long takes (but not as long as those in Touch of Evil). There are other Wellesian touches. Exactly who decided that Rankin’s first name would be Charles is unknown, but one cannot help but think of Charles Foster Kane, who dominated his second wife, Susan Alexander, just as Rankin does Mary. The scene in which Mary, still dubious about her husband’s Nazi background, is asked to look at newsreel footage of the death camps that ends abruptly with the film flapping off the reel recalls the News on the March sequence in Citizen Kane, at the end of which the projector sputters, as if exhausted from the ordeal of compressing seventy years of a life into seven or eight minutes. Mary is also a Supreme Court justice’s daughter; Kane’s first wife, Emily, was a president’s niece. Clearly, Welles was more than the film’s costar and director; he was its auteur, courtesy of Veiller and Huston.

  When Rankin discovers that Mary’s brother has learned his identity, and then, that Mary has, Loretta is forced to play the imperiled wife/avenger, which she does well—although audiences were only interested in how Rankin would meet his fate. Perhaps Veiller, Huston, and/or Welles brainstormed and recalled the way Uncle Charlie (Welles alumnus Joseph Cotten) in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) planned to get rid of his niece (Teresa Wright), who has figured out that he is the Merry Widow murderer. He weakens a step on the outdoor staircase, which, if his niece loses her balance, could result in a broken neck.

  Rankin asks Mary to join him at the church tower, where he is working on the clock, whose biblical figures—one of which is a spear-wielding angel—revolve on a track when the bell tolls. Rankin saws off a rung of the ladder leading to the tower, which he then glues together. Mary, however, has asked her brother Noah (Richard Long) to go in her place;, fearing that her housekeeper has had a heart attack, she stays behind. Noah brings Wilson with him; when Wilson nearly falls to his death, he realizes what Rankin had done.

  Knowing what her husband had in store for her, Mary sets out for the tower, where Rankin has taken refuge and where she intends to kill him. Wilson arrives, and the gun goes off, activating the mechanism that starts the statues circling around the belfry. Rankin is skewered on the angel’s spear. Clasping the figure, now the avenging angel, the two come crashing down. How could Loretta compete with such a coup de théâtre or with Orson Welles, arguably the greatest showman in American film? Her work, as usual, was respectable, but she was in an Orson Welles production, in which the auteur hogged the spotlight, leaving everyone else, except Robinson, in shadow. Still, she endured the shoot, despite occasional bouts of illness and a schedule that wreaked havoc with her five-o’clock-quitting-time policy. At least twice, on 18 October and 1 November, respectively, she worked from 4:30 p.m. to 10:50 p.m., and again from 6:00 p.m. to 2:40 a.m.

  Loretta’s last day was 30 November 1945, after which it was back to Paramount for two pictures for Hal Wallis, two for Sam Goldwyn, and three for the man for whom, she once said, she would never work again, Darryl F. Zanuck. But how could Loretta pass on playing a college student, a nun, and a somnambulist?

  Mother and daughters. Left to right: Elizabeth Jane (Sally Blane), Polly Ann, Mother Gladys, and Loretta. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta and Gladys. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta with her children: Christopher, Peter, Judy. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta and godchild, Marlo Thomas. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta at prayer. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Actor Grant Withers, with whom Loretta eloped at seventeen. Photofest.

  Loretta and Tom Lewis on their wedding day, 31 July 1940. Photofest.

  World-famous designer, Jean Louis, whom Loretta married at eighty. Photofest.

  A teenage Loretta and Lon Chaney in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  The eighteen-year-old Loretta and Robert Williams in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931). Photofest.

  Loretta being made up to look Chinese in William Wellman’s The Hatchet Man (1932). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta as the daughter of the title character. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta and Spenser Tracy, with whom she fell in love while making Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933). Photofest.

  Loretta as the title character in Midnight Mary (1934). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Costars and lovers: Loretta and Clark Gable in Wellman’s The Call of the Wild (1935). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Costars as ex-lovers: Loretta and Gable in The Key to the City (1950). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta, now pregnant, in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades (1936). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta as Eugenie in Suez (1938). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta as Katie in the Oscar-winning The Farmer’s Daughter (1947). Photofest.

  Loretta and Celeste Holm as nuns paying a visit to artist Elsa Lanchester in Come to the Stable (1949). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  The Last Picture Show: Loretta and John Forsythe in It Happens Every Thursday (1953). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Tyrone Power and Loretta in Suez (1938). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Alan Ladd and Loretta in China (1943). Photofest.

  Loretta and Gary Cooper in a western satire with serious overtones, Along Came Jones (1945). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta on CBS’s Lux Radio Theatre. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  The living room opening of NBC’s The Loretta Young Show. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta authentically costumed in “I Remember the Rani” (The Loretta Young Show, 1 May 1955). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Loretta as a terminally ill wife and Joseph Cuby as the hitchhiker who persuades her to visit Lourdes in “The Road” (NBC, 20 September 1959). Photofest.

  Trevor Howard (left), Arthur Hill, and Loretta in the Emmy-winning Christmas Eve (NBC, 22 December 1986). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Fredric March presenting Loretta with her Oscar, 28 March 1948. Photofest.

  The 1956 Emmy-winning Youngs for best continuing performance as actress and actor in a dramatic series: Loretta for The Loretta Young Show and Robert for Father Knows Best. Photofest.

  Loretta and best director Oscar-winner Warren Beatty for Reds (1981), 29 March 1982. Photofest.

  CHAPTER 16

  Thrice Blessed

  A Reunion, a Replacement, and an Oscar

  Loretta owed Paramount two more pictures, which turned out to be Hal Wallis productions. As production head at Warner Bros. from 1930 to 1944, with credits ranging from Little Caesar (1930) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and the forever fabulous Casablanca (1942), Wallis could have remained at the studio indefinitely. Instead, he chose to leave in 1944 after Jack Warner’s hubris brought their once amicable relationship to an end on Oscar night, 2 March 1944. When director Sidney Franklin opened the envelope and announced that the Academy’s choice of best picture was, not surprisingly, Casablanca, Wallis immediately rose from his seat to accept the award. It was he who monitored the transformation of an unproduced play into a classic film bearing a title that he personally gave it. But Warner, assuming that Casablanca was the studio’s film—and, therefore, his—beat him to the stage and accepted an Oscar for a movie to which he had contributed nothing.

  Tired of playing the crown prince to the clown king, Wallis moved to Paramount, where he set up his own production company with Joseph Hazen, a lawyer friend from his Warner Bros. days. With the formation of Wallis-Hazen, Inc., which
by 1952 would be Hal Wallis Productions, and with backing from Paramount, Wallis began recruiting talent that would form the basis of a repertory company. He fancied himself a “starmaker,” the title he gave his highly selective autobiography. But his stars could not equal the Warner galaxy that he once had at his disposal. Wallis discovered some promising newcomers, such as Lizabeth Scott, Wendell Corey, Kristine Miller, and Douglas Dick. But, with few exceptions, he failed to find starmaking vehicles for them, even though Dick and Corey delivered standout performances—Dick in The Searching Wind (1946) and The Accused (1948), and Corey in The File on Thelma Jordan (1949) and The Furies (1950). Three of his discoveries—Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Charlton Heston—appeared in a few Wallis productions, but defected once they achieved stardom. The films for which they will be remembered—The Bad and the Beautiful, Paths of Glory, Lust for Life (Douglas); Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Gantry, Birdman of Alcatraz (Lancaster); The Greatest Show on Earth, Touch of Evil, Ben Hur (Heston)—were not Wallis’s. It was not until 1949, when Wallis discovered Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and later Elvis Presley, that he could truly claim to be a starmaker. Most of the others were stars in the making who never made it to the firmament.

  Wallis was a regular theatergoer, who found Lancaster and Douglas in short-lived Broadway plays that revealed a talent that could be transferred to the screen. Significantly, some of Wallis’s best films were stage adaptations: Tovarich, Jezebel, The Male Animal, Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind, Come Back, Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, Summer and Smoke, and Becket. Naturally, quality mattered, but even if the play were not a masterpiece, Wallis would option it if he thought it could work as a film. Samson Raphaelson’s The Perfect Marriage, costarring Miriam Hopkins and Victor Jory, had a respectable, but not impressive run during the 1944–45 season. The play had a promising premise, involving a couple on the verge of divorce after ten years of marriage. Wallis thought The Perfect Marriage (1946) might be another Skylark (1941), which was also based on a Raphaelson comedy about an imperiled marriage. When it came to casting the film, Wallis decided that none of his discoveries had the style for the leads—but Loretta Young and David Niven did.

  Wallis knew that Loretta could handle repartee, and Niven could exude a sophistication that moviegoers would not find snobbish. Wallis and Loretta were also not strangers; their relationship had been forged at Warner’s, where Wallis witnessed Loretta’s versatility and later acknowledged her as not just a “star” but also a “friend.” In 1946, Loretta was not a prima donna, nor would she ever be; but she had reached a stage in her career when she could insist, as she did when she signed on for China, on a 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (sometimes 5:00 p.m.) schedule. She had to make an exception for Orson Welles when she did The Stranger. Loretta’s policy was meant for mortals, not for Welles. She accepted his erratic shooting schedule, even if it meant working past midnight. She had often done so during her apprentice years and now found herself marching to the beat of a drummer whose tempo was like no other’s. Although Loretta gave her usual professional performance, she could not compete with the boy wonder of Hollywood, who was no longer a boy but would always be a wonder. The Perfect Marriage contracts imply that Niven was the bigger draw (compare his $150,000 for ten weeks, and $15,000 per week thereafter to Loretta’s $100,000 for the same period and $10,000 per week thereafter). The reason, however, was that Niven was under contract to Goldwyn, who determined salary when he loaned the actor out to Paramount. The Perfect Marriage turned out to be a twelve-week shoot beginning on 2 January 1946, with Niven and Loretta receiving an additional amount ($30,000 and $20,000, respectively) for additional filming.

  Loretta had a genuine flair for sophisticated comedy—as opposed to a flair for comedy as a genre, a characteristic shared by Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, and Claudette Colbert, all of whom were especially adept comediennes. But if Loretta had lines that were elegantly crafted, without sounding sententious or pompous, she could toss them off with aplomb. She was at her best with dialogue that was more parlor than drawing room, more town house than penthouse. Samson Raphaelson was not Philip Barry, but he could write dialogue that, if it did not conjure up the image of cut glass, at least suggested a 60-watt chandelier.

  Skylark was a better play than The Perfect Marriage and enjoyed a longer run. Leonard Spiegelgass adapted The Perfect Marriage, opening up the single-set play in the interest of realism and moving the action toward a believable conclusion, in which the couple’s fathers, each of whom disliked his child’s choice of spouse, became co-conspirators, pooling their wiles to save the marriage. Wallis assembled an excellent supporting cast: Virginia Field, the “other woman” angling to become Niven’s second wife; Eddie Albert, who has similar designs on Loretta and is already planning to send her ten-year-old daughter to boarding school; and Zazu Pitts, as the maid whose pixilated expression got a laugh with every entrance.

  Loretta made one more film for Wallis, The Accused (1948), which tested her ability as a serious actress in a way that no other film had. The Accused begins with a shot of a car at the edge of desolate cliff, overlooking the Pacific. A woman emerges in a trench coat, clutching a briefcase. She heads for the Freeway, shielding her face from the glare of the headlights. She finally accepts a ride from a truck driver, who drops her at a bus stop. The woman is Dr. Wilma Tuttle, a Los Angeles psychology professor, who has just killed one of her students. In a flashback, the cliff is revealed as the murder scene, the car, as the student’s, and the motive as self-defense. The flashback also explains why Wilma was with a troubled student at such a lonely place.

  Ketti Frings’s screenplay is a model of criminal detection, until the denouement. Academics might quibble about Wilma’s way of dealing with Bill Perry (menacingly played by Douglas Dick), a brilliant but disturbed student who studies her in class, mimicking her mannerisms. Although Perry makes Wilma uneasy, she has no qualms about accepting a ride, as well as a dinner invitation, from him in her naïve belief that she can rehabilitate him. Or is the coolly dispassionate professor intrigued by Perry’s penetrating stare, as if he can see through her emotionally calcified exterior to the unfulfilled woman within? Loretta played Wilma with startling ambivalence, as if dinner with Perry was as much of an adventure as a form of therapy. Perry, however, has other plans. He drives her to the fatal cliff and changes into a tight-fitting bathing suit. Although Wilma is fascinated by the swirling water below and perhaps by the buff Perry, she also suspects his intentions. Loretta now makes it clear that Wilma is alternately attracted to, and repelled by, the libidinous Perry, who pins her down on the back seat of the car, kissing her passionately. The kiss restores the professional virgin to her senses; realizing what comes next, she reaches for the steel bar on the seat and clobbers Perry to death. Anyone hoping Wilma would get away with ridding herself of a creepy kid had more plot to contend with. Perry’s guardian, Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), a San Francisco lawyer, comes looking for his ward but falls for Wilma instead. Police detective Ted Dorgen (Wendell Corey) starts building a case, at first suspecting a lovesick student (Suzanne Dalbert), but finally settling on Wilma, who eventually confesses.

  The plot twists and counter twists keep the action from flagging until the courtroom ending, when Ford delivers an impassioned but morally flawed speech to the jury, admitting that Wilma was guilty of concealing evidence out of fear but not of committing homicide. Cummings sounds so persuasive, that, although the film ends before the verdict comes in, audiences assumed that Wilma would not do time for defending herself against a rapist.

  Edith Head designed a wardrobe for Loretta that was faithful to her character. At the beginning, she looks like a typical unmarried professor, with hair piled high, sexless suits, and an austerity that keeps her from enjoying the give-and-take of the classroom. To avoid being recognized as the woman on the freeway, Wilma abandons the academic look, morphing into an ultra feminine, even alluring, woman, with hair framing her face and a wardrobe that few academics
could afford. The transformation from uptight professor to woman in love is even reflected in her relaxed classroom manner.

  The director, William Dieterle, who with his white hat and gloves behaved like a Prussian general, was known for his habit of subjecting one member of the cast (never a star) to withering criticism, whether it was merited or not. In The Accused, the scapegoat was Suzanne Dalbert, and according to Douglas Dick and Wallis’s publicity director, Walter Seltzer, Dieterle almost succeeded in breaking her spirit. Loretta had no problem with Dieterle. Wallis was another matter. She now insisted on not working after 5:00 p.m. and even refused to do an over-the-shoulder shot favoring her. She and Wallis also disagreed on a variety of issues: stills (“old fashioned”), close-ups, and even the soundtrack. Wallis was unsympathetic, accusing her of taking an “arbitrary stand”; when she persisted, he reminded her in no uncertain terms that there were “legal steps” he could take if she continued to be uncooperative. Loretta understood; she was in no position to challenge Wallis. All Loretta wanted was to be recognized as a serious actress, as if that was necessary. But Hollywood has a short memory; in 1948, few remembered her extraordinary performances in Life Begins, Man’s Castle, Platinum Blonde, and Midnight Mary.