Loretta was also not inundated with quality scripts after her Oscar; few winners are. But those that she chose to do were respectable, even when the material was tissue-thin. At least her next and last RKO film, Rachel and the Stranger (1948), was anything but flimsy.
When Loretta’s sister, Sally Blane, married Norman Foster in 1935 after his divorce from Claudette Colbert, Loretta never thought that, a decade later, her brother-in-law would direct her in a film. Loretta first met Foster when he was an actor, costarring with him in Play-Girl and Weekend Marriage (both 1932). In the mid 1930s, Foster discovered his true calling: directing. He revealed a knack for avoiding racial stereotypes in the Mr. Motto series about a Japanese amateur sleuth played by Peter Lorre. Foster directed and coauthored six of the eight Mr. Moto films. Before Orson Welles began Citizen Kane (1941), he screened a number of films, including the Mr. Motos. Welles was particularly taken with Foster’s ability to evoke a menacing environment through the manipulation of light and shade. His subtle use of chiaroscuro was exactly what Welles wanted for Citizen Kane. When Welles realized he could not edit The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and direct Journey into Fear (1942) at the same time, he entrusted the latter to Foster. Sadly, RKO had its own ideas about Ambersons, and Welles’s masterpiece underwent radical surgery. But even in its truncated form, it remains a testimony to Welles’s genius.
Nineteen forty-eight saw dramatic changes in the film industry. The boom year of 1946, Hollywood’s annus mirabilis, when paid attendance was at an all-time high, was followed by a period of budget cutting and the curtailment of unnecessarily lavish productions. As RKO’s new production head, Schary sought a mix of the prestigious but financially unsuccessful (Mourning Becomes Electra [1947], Joan of Arc [1948]), and the popular (John Ford’s Fort Apache and Rachel and the Stranger, which reaped profits of $445,000 and $395,000, respectively). Schary expected Rachel and the Stranger to have great popular appeal, which it did. Since Norman Foster was a known quantity at RKO, Schary entrusted him with the film, which was based on Howard Fast’s short story, “Rachel,” with a screenplay by Waldo Salt. Knowing that Loretta was not bound to any studio and had time before starting The Accused, Foster cast his sister-in-law in the lead. Her costars were William Holden, on loan from Paramount, and RKO contract player Robert Mitchum.
Anyone who expected a movie with an anti-capitalist subtext was disappointed, even though Fast and Salt had both been members of the Communist party. Fast served three months in prison in 1950 for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). In 1956 he severed his connections with the Party after learning that Josef Stalin, the avuncular “Uncle Joe, “ was nothing more than a genocidal dictator. Salt had been subpoenaed by HUAC in fall 1947 to testify to the preposterous charge of Communist subversion of the movie industry. Eleven were called, the last being German playwright Berthold Brecht, then residing in Los Angeles, who denied being a Communist and immediately returned to East Berlin. If the hearings had not been temporarily suspended, Salt would have been next. But, as an unfriendly witness, Salt was soon blacklisted, working only intermittently and under pseudonyms. He was finally vindicated when his adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) was awarded an Oscar, followed by a second one for 1978’s best original screenplay, Coming Home.
Rachel and the Stranger, however, is apolitical. Loretta was cast as a bondswoman in the 1820s, bought by widower David Harvey (Holden) to run his household and educate his young son. Until the end of the film, Rachel is a wife in name only, a combination servant-housekeeper. Loretta was the perfect frontierswoman, in her high-necked dress that made her look austere but could not conceal her body’s natural curves—actually, the dress emphasized them. The high neck worked to the character’s advantage, forcing her to hold her head high, despite the treatment she received from her husband. A specially created makeup gave Loretta’s face an earthen glow, the opposite of the lustrous look she had in romantic comedies.
Of all her mother’s films, Rachel and the Stranger is Judy Lewis’s favorite. It is certainly one of Loretta’s best. To see her churning butter is to watch an actress inhabit a character that was completely at odds with her persona. Yet when Loretta had to play women from society’s lower echelon (e.g., Life Begins, Man’s Castle, Taxi!, Midnight Mary), she gave them a sense of dignity that steeled those women against life’s injustices and men’s callousness. Loretta played Rachel as a woman so inured to a hard-knock life that she would never break down. Like Cherry in Along Came Jones, Rachel can handle a rifle. During a Shawnee attack, Rachel kills one of the Indians, her face registering the pain she feels about taking a life as she presses herself against a wall.
Robert Mitchum gave an unusually sympathetic performance as Harvey’s itinerant friend, Jim Fairways, who falls under Rachel’s spell. Knowing that Harvey regards Rachel as little more than a hired hand, Fairways makes a bid for her, as if she were up for auction. Here, perhaps, is a vestige of Salt’s leftism: two men vying for a woman as if she were chattel—at least from the woman’s point of view. After the Indian attack interrupts what would have been a violent confrontation between the men, Fairways realizes that, from the way Rachel rallied to protect a family that was not even hers, she is meant for Harvey. And the film ends with a close up of Harvey kissing Rachel, who emerges as morally superior to both her husband and her suitor.
Expecting a stream of obscenities from Mitchum, whose maverick ways and public brawls always made the papers (he was jailed for marijuana possession in 1948, the same year Rachel came out), Loretta arrived on the set with her swear box. When Mitchum learned what each bit of profanity or blasphemy cost, he asked within Loretta’s hearing distance, “How much does Miss Young charge for a ‘fuck’?” He then stuffed a $5.00 bill into the box and indulged himself with his favorite expletive. Loretta’s response is unknown. In her profession she must have heard the national obscenity before, but she probably referred to it as the “f word.”
CHAPTER 17
The Return to Fox—and Zanuck
In 1939 Loretta told Zanuck she would never work for him again (which, in effect, meant never working at Fox), but the passage of time, an Oscar, and a three–picture contract—including one in which she would play a nun—prompted Loretta to think differently about the studio where she had spent five years, making twenty-two films. However, only one of three that Zanuck offered her, Come to the Stable (1949), was significant. If the other two, Mother Is a Freshman (1949) and Half Angel (1951), had never reached the screen, audiences would have been spared two more mediocre movies.
A college administrator should have been hired as technical advisor for Mother Is a Freshman, which gleefully flaunted academic protocol. It was filmed in Technicolor, never the ideal medium for Loretta, whose sculpted cheekbones were suffused with red, making her face look flushed. Anyone planning to send a child, particularly a female, to college might have thought twice after seeing the movie. Loretta played Abigail Fortitude Abbott, a widow with a spendthrift daughter, who finds herself in financial straits—although one would never know it from Abigail’s elaborate wardrobe and Park Avenue apartment. When Abigail remembers that her grandmother had established a scholarship at her daughter’s college for anyone with the name of Abigail Fortitude (Abigail’s unmarried name), she decides to apply, even though she and her daughter Susan (Betty Lynn) would be attending the same school and perhaps taking some of the same classes.
Loretta’s costar was Van Johnson, five years younger than the thirty-six-year-old Loretta, and still looking like the boy next door. We must take it on faith that he is not only an English professor, but has also become so attracted to Abigail that he pressures her into coming for tutoring to his house, where he has prepared a candlelit dinner. Although he has also invited his parents, he makes sure that Abigail arrives early. We are also asked to believe that the professor and Abigail’s lawyer (Rudy Vallee) were contemporaries at Yale, even though Vallee was seventeen year
s older than Johnson—and looked it. “That’s Hollywood for you,” as columnist Sidney Skolsky used to say.
Complications arise when Susan develops a crush on the professor. Once she learns that he is her mother’s prom date, she invites the lawyer to attend as Abigail’s escort, pitting the two men against each other. Any veteran moviegoer could predict the ending: Abigail will continue working toward her degree—but in the dual role of student and professor’s wife—and Susan will discover someone her own age. Although Loretta did not disappoint her fans, who wanted their fashion plate in Christian Dior’s “new look,” Mother Is a Freshman is more of an ellipsis than a footnote in her career.
Loretta was in her element in her next Fox film, Come to the Stable (1949), as Sister Margaret of the Holy Endeavor, humble but wily enough to use her charm and powers of persuasion to achieve her goal. She was a Catholic child’s ideal grade school nun: not the knuckle-rapper, but the kind who would enter a classroom with a gentle rustle of her habit as it trailed along the floor and the jingle of the fifteen-decade rosary suspended from her belt, heralding her arrival as she approached the desk. The habit was only the exterior; beneath it lay a determined educator and, in Sister Margaret’s case, an entrepreneur. Loretta would play nuns again, but not on the big screen. Loretta looked as if she were to the habit born. There have been other authentic movie nuns (Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s, Gladys Cooper and Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story, Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels, Claudette Colbert in Thunder on the Hill, Donna Reed in Green Dolphin Street), and actress-nuns for whom the habit was just a costume (Greer Garson in The Singing Nun, Maggie Smith in Class Act). Loretta was the genuine article.
Come to the Stable was one of Fox’s top-grossing films of 1949, nominated for seven Oscars: Best Actress (Loretta), Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester), original story (Claire Boothe Luce), original song (“Through a Long and Sleepless Night”), set direction, and black-and-white photography (Joseph LaShelle). It did not matter to Zanuck that Come to the Stable failed to win a single award. He was happy with the gross and thrilled that Dean Jagger was voted Best Supporting Actor for Fox’s Twelve O’Clock High, Zanuck’s personal favorite that year. If some of the others made money, all the better.
Although Come to the Stable was not Zanuck’s kind of film, he took it more seriously than one might expect. Loretta was his only choice to star as Sister Margaret, even though Luce envisioned Irene Dunne in the role. Zanuck wanted “a great Catholic,” which to him meant Loretta, and a “great Catholic” required a “great script.” Zanuck made sure the great Catholic got it. Dorothy Parker and John B. Mahin collaborated on one, but it was not great enough. By mid November 1948, Sally Benson came on board and managed to write, with some assistance, a script that conformed to Zanuck’s requirements: “a comedy about faith that is not preachy or religious.” Come to the Stable is a comedy in the classical sense: a work with a happy ending, despite what transpires earlier.
Come to the Stable was inspired by the visit of Catholic convert and playwright Clare Boothe Luce (The Women, Margin for Error, Kiss the Boys Goodbye) to what was then the Priory of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Luce believed that the priory’s backstory was movie material and proceeded to write a screenplay, “From a French Battlefield to the Connecticut Hills”—not exactly the sort of title that would attract moviegoers. Luce was eventually given story credit, but the screenplay was primarily the work of Sally Benson, known for injecting a shot of humanity into scripts, particularly those about families (Meet Me in St. Louis [1944], Junior Miss [1945], Joy in the Morning [1965]). Benson had read Luce’s script, which catalogued the frustrations a Benedictine nun, Mother Benedict, experienced in her efforts to build Regina Laudis, which later became the Abbey of Regina Laudis. Benson also realized that certain changes had to be made. In the film, the nuns bury a medal of St. Jude at the top of the hill that marked the Abbey’s future site. Actually, it was a St. Benedict medal, as one would expect from Benedictine nuns. But Benson knew that more moviegoers were familiar with St. Jude, the patron saint of the impossible, than with St. Benedict.
Zanuck ignored Luce’s casting suggestions: Irene Dunne in the lead, Cary Grant as the composer, Zazu Pitts as the artist, and Monty Woolley as the owner of the property that the nuns desire. Irene Dunne, like Loretta, was a Hollywood Catholic, but while she succeeded in getting a king to honor his promise to give her a house (Anna and the King of Siam [1946], also coauthored by Benson), she was not Zanuck’s idea of the Chicago-born Sister Margaret: stationed in France during World War II, where she made a bargain with God that if her children’s hospital were spared, she would establish a similar one in the United States, named after St. Jude. Prayers are usually answered in movies, and Sister Margaret’s was no exception. Inspired by a postcard reproduction of Come to the Stable, and believing it was providential that the artist, Amelia Potts (the ever delightful Elsa Lanchester) lives in Bethlehem, Connecticut, Sister Margaret and her companion, Sister Scholastica (Celeste Holm, sporting a flawless French accent) set out for the American Bethlehem.
Although Holm was not a scene-stealer, she had a way of deflecting attention from others—except Loretta, who held her own. But unlike Loretta, who had to speak some French, but with an American accent, Holm had to sound like a native, which she did, even though she was born in New York. Holm also had to compete in a tennis match to raise the money the nuns need for their hospital. The intercutting of closeups, medium shots, and long shots indicated that Holm had a double for some of the scenes, which were so skillfully edited that the audience assumed Holm was also a tennis pro. She was not, but Sister Scholastica had been. Still, Holm could work the court until it was time for a double. How many actresses could play tennis in a nun’s habit, as Holm did? Celeste Holm deserved the Oscar nomination she received. She did not win (Mercedes McCambridge did for All the King’s Men), although she had won the previous year for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), which was more of a Zanuck production than Come to the Stable.
Although Sister Scholastica lost the match, the screenplay adhered to the setback-success model à la Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), in which a church is rebuilt and a school is saved from the wrecking ball. The nuns also realize their dream after overcoming such obstacles as an initially dubious but eventually persuaded bishop, a shady businessman (charmingly played by Thomas Gomez), and a composer of popular music (Hugh Marlowe), who has no intention of having nuns as neighbors—until he discovers that the “original” song he composed derived from a chorale he heard the nuns sing when he was serving in France during the second world war.
Benson was not the sole screenwriter; she shared credit with Oscar Millard, who early in 1948 submitted a brief to Zanuck, identifying Loretta’s character as the historical Mother Benedict Duss, “an American raised since early childhood in France.” The London-born Millard had only turned to screenwriting in 1945, after having been a journalist, novelist, and short story writer. He may have been hired because he had worked for French and Belgian publications and could write the kind of English that Sister Scholastica would speak—the words carefully chosen, precise and unambiguous, as might be expected of a woman whose native language was French. Millard’s brief supplied the facts. The St. Benedict medal that the nuns buried was on a forty-five-acre property on the outskirts of Bethlehem. Determined to build the priory on that site, Mother Benedict contacted Lauren Ford, the artist whose painting inspired the trip to America, and who provided a home for her and her companion. On the site was a vacant factory, whose owner agreed to sell if the nuns could pay off the mortgage. To raise the money, other Benedictine nuns and a German priest come over to sell their handicrafts and ceramics, but the profits only amounted to a down payment. In the same file with Millard’s brief is a treatment that adds an important plot point: the owner agrees to give the nuns the property if the body of his son, who w
as killed during World War II, is buried there. The father (Thomas Gomez) makes a similar bargain in the film, but it’s for a stained glass window commemorating his son. Eager to get papal recognition, the historical Mother Benedict and her companion, Mother Mary Aline, with the aid of a contessa, fly to Rome where they have an audience with the pope, who gives them his blessing but nothing more.
With the officially designated “Holy Year” coming up in 1950, the year after the film’s release, an apathetic pope, who could only have been Pius XII, would not have set well with Catholics. Naturally, neither the contessa nor the papal audience even reached the script stage. But the composer did, religion unspecified. In an early draft he was a Jew, Tony Marx, who is at first opposed to the nuns’ founding a priory on the property adjacent to his, but soon does a spiritual turnaround and composes a Christmas symphony. In the film, the religion-neutral composer (Hugh Marlowe) writes pop music, but has unconsciously appropriated the melody of his latest song from a medieval chorale. Benson and Millard did not make the composer a Jew, who decides to convert to Christianity after being exposed to the nuns’ transcendent faith. A Jewish convert in a film about Catholics might have proved edifying to some, but anti-Semitic to others. Zanuck wanted a moneymaker that incorporated religion in a plot about overcoming setbacks, convincing moviegoers that they, too, could realize their dream with the right combination of grit, luck, and divine assistance.
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