Antoinette Bosco’s Mother Benedict: Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis provides the historical context for Come to the Stable, inspired by the true story of the Pittsburgh-born Vera Duss, who spent much of her early years in France pursuing a degree in medicine until she discovered her true calling. Vera was the daughter of a controlling mother and a father whose gentle ways were misinterpreted as lack of ambition. Since Vera’s mother, Elizabeth Duss, had converted to Catholicism, divorce was out of the question; instead, Elizabeth left for Paris, her father’s home, with her (almost) two-year-old son and three-year-old Vera. They arrived at the outbreak of World War I, which they survived. Since Elizabeth returned periodically to America, Vera was raised for the most part by her grandmother. Although a Catholic education attracted Vera to the religious life, she preferred to study medicine at the Sorbonne before making her decision. By graduation time, she was ready to enter the Benedictine abbey at Jouarre, first as a postulant, then as a novice with the name of Sister Benedict, and finally a nun, known for the rest of her life as Mother Benedict. Mother Benedict believed it was her mission to establish a Benedictine presence in the United States. When World War II erupted in 1939, and France fell to the Nazis the following year, Mother Benedict, technically an American, was in danger of being imprisoned or perhaps sent to an internment or, worse, a concentration, camp. When the Nazis began checking the papers of Americans living in France, members of the Resistance furnished Mother Benedict with a new identity card and name.
If Come to the Stable seems like a boilerplate “triumph in the face of adversity” film, the true story, with its supporters and skeptics, is not that dissimilar. The difference is that the actual supporters were a heterogeneous group that included Major General George S. Patton, the future Pope John XXIII (then papal nuncio, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli), President Truman’s personal representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, philosopher Jacques Maritain, and Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the Vatican Undersecretary of State and future Pope Paul VI.
Once Mother Benedict and Mother Mary Aline (Come to the Stable’s Sisters Margaret and Scholastica) learned that they could stay with painter Frances Delehanty (who shared her Bethlehem home with another artist, Lauren Ford, like her a devout Catholic), they sailed from Le Havre on 20 August 1946, arriving in New York eleven days later. Like their film counterparts, the two nuns ran a similar obstacle course, including an encounter with an indifferent bishop. Their savior is a wealthy donor, who wants his property used as a place of worship. By 1947, a converted factory became the Priory of Regina Laudis, then and three decades later The Abbey of Regina Laudis. Mother Benedict’s life was far more complex than the simplified version in Come to the Stable. In 1949, the true story could never have succeeded on the big screen—any more than it could today, despite the intriguing plot points: a troubled marriage; a three-year-old expatriate child; a woman with a medical degree subjected to the rigors of convent life; endangerment during an enemy occupation; and the realization of a goal born of belief, courage, and unstinting effort. Rather, Mother Benedict is the perfect subject of a TV documentary, for among the nuns at the Abbey is Mother Dolores Hart, currently Mother Abbess.
In 1963, Dolores Hart—a Broadway (The Pleasure of His Company) and movie (the Elvis Presley films Loving You and King Creole, and others including Wild Is the Wind and Where the Boys Are) star—made a decision that shocked Hollywood: She gave up an acting career to become a postulant at Regina Laudis, which she had visited earlier, hoping to find the longed-for peace that passes understanding. That she found it there resulted in a commitment that lay beyond the powers of ordinary mortals. But then, Regina Laudis is not a community of ordinary women. Despite some unfavorable press, the Abbey has survived, attracting visitors from the entertainment world such as Maria Cooper Janis (Gary Cooper’s daughter and pianist Byron Janis’s wife), and actresses Patricia Neal, Gloria DeHaven, Celeste Holm, and Martha Hyer Wallis, all of whom have benefited from exposure to an environment that comes close to offering what T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday calls “the still point of the turning world.” Strangely, perhaps, Loretta never visited.
Half Angel completed Loretta’s three-picture agreement with Fox. Although Julian Blaustein was nominally the producer, Zanuck, as production head, gave the film his imprimatur, considering it a minor addition to Fox’s 1951 slate of releases that was rather thin in terms of quality. The best of the lot were People Will Talk and Decision before Dawn. That Half Angel’s running time was a mere seventy-eight minutes was an indication of the studio’s lack of faith in its drawing power. Critics and audiences felt similarly, and Half Angel disappeared shortly after it opened in 1951.
Zanuck had no reason to make Half Angel, except to provide Loretta with a third film. Story analyst Michael Abel wrote a two-and-a-half page critique of a draft, then entitled “Half an Angel,” dismissing it as “unreal and imaginary,” with a “contrived and artificial” plot. Abel was also disturbed that the heroine’s alter ego was a “crude and self-centered tart, with her dangling cigarette, undulating hips, and a general emphasis on sex.” By 1950’s standards, the script seemed to be—to use the vernacular of the period—“hot stuff.”
Abel was not the only one offended by the script. Joseph Breen found the material “totally unacceptable,” chiding Fox’s director of publicity for submitting a script to the Production Code Administration in which marriage was treated shabbily and “without dignity.” He was also concerned about the heroine’s less angelic self, insisting that “breasts should be completely covered” and “the subconscious conduct herself” in good taste—as if a film with Loretta could be otherwise.
Amazingly, Robert Riskin, Capra’s best screenwriter (American Madness, Platinum Blonde, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) was responsible for the screenplay. Riskin was in his early fifties, with his best work behind him. However, since he had to adapt George Carleton Brown’s story, he treated it as just another assignment. Possibly, he exaggerated the pervasive sexuality of the scenes depicting the heroine’s other self to emphasize the disparity between the daytime woman and the nighttime seductress. The sexed-up scenes could also have been the inspiration of the original director, Jules Dassin, whose forte was certainly not romantic whimsy. He was a specialist in the dark side (Brute Force [1947], The Naked City [1948], Thieves Highway [1949], and especially Night and the City [1950]) and assumed that even a repressed nurse had hers. When Half Angel was at the story conference stage, Dassin was still involved. But Dassin was also a Communist, who decided to return to his native France, knowing that it was only a matter of time before he would be blacklisted. It was a wise move; on 23 April 1951, director Edward Dmytryk one of the original Hollywood Ten, realizing that unlike writers he could not work under a pseudonym, cooperated with HUAC, naming Dassin along with five others.
The title is misleading; Half Angel is a comic variation on the dual personality film that could have been called “The Two Faces of Nora.” Loretta played Nora Gilpin, a nurse by day, who has relegated her infatuation with a prominent lawyer, John Raymond (Joseph Cotten), to the depths of her unconscious, only to find it surfacing at night. Like her mother, Nora is a sleepwalker who, at night, becomes the woman she imagines herself to be. Once Nora the vamp—slinky, provocatively dressed, and coquettish—takes over, she literally stalks Raymond, who is fascinated by the fey creature who has entered his life. The problem is the discrepancy between Nora the vamp and Nora the nurse. Loretta gravitated to the former, reveling in her low cut aquamarine dressing gown that revealed the lacy edge of her petticoat, which she had no qualms about displaying as she assumed an enticingly recumbent position. Neither she nor director Richard Sale, Dassin’s replacement, seemed to have any interest in the daytime Nora, whose troubled psyche eluded both of them. When day breaks, all Loretta can manage is a reversion to Nora’s dull professional self, much to Raymond’s confusion. The film can stand only so much role reversal. The ending is a variation on the “fligh
t from the altar” movie (It Happened One Night, Cover Girl, It Had to be You, The Runaway Bride): The sleepwalker ends up marrying Raymond, then upon wakening, she realizes there is a man in the next bed, who indeed is Raymond. (Twin beds were the norm then.) Nora also awakens on the day of her wedding to dull Timothy McCarey (John Ridgley), which Raymond interrupts, causing Nora to faint and the film to expire.
If Capra had made Half Angel in the 1930s with a screenplay by Riskin, it would have been a model screwball comedy, a genre that was never Loretta’s forte. Ideally, it needed an actress like Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert, who could slip in and out of Nora’s two selves more effortlessly than Loretta, who could handle the sexy, but not the sexless self. What Half Angel became in 1951 was a depressingly unsophisticated and humorless movie, unworthy of Riskin, Cotten, or Loretta. If Riskin had ever planned to enrich the script with the same wit and humanity that he brought to his Capra films, it would have been impossible after 27 December 1950, when he suffered a major stroke, leading to his death five years later. The Riskin touches are few: a father-daughter relationship in which “father knows best”; an interrupted wedding (It Happened One Night); a trial in which Raymond is discredited (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) until his marriage to Nora is authenticated. But Riskin, always one to tie up loose—not to mention dangling—ends, could not do so after his stroke. And so, what should have been an important plot point is never resolved: Raymond ignores his opportunity to plead a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to pursue the nocturnal Nora. If any lawyers saw the film, they would have been disgusted at such indifference to an occasion that could have been a milestone in his career. But the moviegoers who saw it—and could remember it a few weeks later—went for the stars. And those, who saw it in June 1951 at New York’s Roxy, “the cathedral of movie palaces,” were at least treated to a stage show that included the Andrews Sisters—perhaps not as popular as they were during the World War II years, but still able to draw an audience.
Sadly, Zanuck felt the film had potential, and he expressed his views in an eight-page summary of a May 1950 story conference with Blaustein, Dassin, then set to direct, and Riskin, seven months away from his debilitating stroke. All Zanuck seemed to want from the script was more humor: “My only worry about this story now is—is the last act funny enough?” He should have asked the same question about the first two. The only moviegoers who found Half Angel humorous were those who were amused by the idea of a plain Jane by day morphing into a sex symbol at night. Loretta did not play the role for its humor because she did not find any in it. Actually, there wasn’t.
CHAPTER 18
Slow Fade to Small Screen
It was probably Dore Schary’s idea to reunite Clark Gable and Loretta in MGM’s Key to the City (1950). In July 1948, Schary, realizing he could never work with RKO’s new owner, Howard Hughes, left the studio and accepted Louis Mayer’s offer to become MGM’s vice president in charge of production. Schary does not mention Key to the City in his autobiography, although he includes it in his filmography as one of the movies made under his “executive supervision.” The credited producer was Z. Wayne Griffin, whose chief function was dealing with logistics (schedule, budget, daily reports). George Sidney, the versatile director who was equally at home with musicals (The Harvey Girls, Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat), costume dramas (The Three Musketeers, Scaramouche, Young Bess), and comedies (Who Was That Lady?, A Ticklish Affair) was more than competent to handle the creative end of the production. Reuniting The Call of the Wild stars could only have been the inspiration of MGM’s new production head.
Gable was still an MGM contract player, but he would leave the studio four years later. Loretta was freelancing, interested only in two or three picture commitments. She could have declined, but she owed much to Schary for her Oscar. Although she knew Key to the City would win no awards (she was right), she was intrigued about a reunion with the actor who changed her life in 1935.
The film itself is a sporadically witty comedy about two small town mayors: Steve Fisk (Gable), an ex-longshoreman from California, and Clarissa Standish (Loretta), a Harvard Law School alumna from Maine, who meet at a convention in San Francisco. For budgetary reasons, San Francisco’s unique ambience was only suggested. Key to the City did not require on-location filming; whatever significance it has lies in its contrast with The Call of the Wild shoot on Mount Baker in 1935, when Loretta costarred with a man who could not just provide her with romantic fantasies, but with the real thing and all its trappings. That was her first encounter with raw masculinity, not the madras silk kind that colored her dreams. But in 1950, Loretta was the mother of three children, two of whom she acknowledged as her own. History would not repeat itself.
In Key to the City, Loretta is at first the paragon of propriety—a by-the-books conventioneer, committed to agendas and parliamentary procedure and chastising those like Fisk, who do not adhere to them. Irene’s costumes, influenced by Christian Dior’s “new look” (tailored jackets, full-length skirts with tapered waists) reflected Loretta’s character, suggesting that Clarissa’s libido had disappeared into the fabric. Loretta played Clarissa as if clothes were her personal armor, easily removable under the right circumstances. When Fisk suggests a night on the town, Clarissa demurs: “I only want to uphold my title of honorable mayor,” to which Fisk replies—as only Gable could—with a skeptical smirk and mischief in his eyes: “How honorable can you get?” The battle of the sexes is on, and Fisk frees Clarissa’s libido from the folds of her skirt, returning it to its proper location. Watching Gable break down Loretta’s virginal façade (forget the characters’ names for a moment), knowledgeable viewers—and there were enough in Hollywood—could make the connection with The Call of the Wild, except that this time, Loretta, who would atone for her “mortal sin” until the end of her life, did what only a true artist can: She summoned up the emotions needed for the scene, however personal they may be. When Gable presses his lips against the back of Loretta’s neck, then her ears, and finally her face, the foreplay becomes a replay of the earlier event, with the eroticism intact. Nineteen fifty dissolves into 1935, as the witchcraft in Gable’s eyes overlaps with the willingness in Loretta’s.
However, the foreplay in Key to the City does not lead to consummation. Fisk holds off kissing Clarissa on the mouth, expecting her to ask him. She does, indicating that she is ready for what comes next. “I respect you,” Fisk admits guiltily. “I don’t want to be respected,” Clarissa answers defiantly. As they kiss in silhouette, the camera slowly tracks back, and the audience can assume what it wants. The professionalism that Gable and Loretta brought to the seduction (or would-be seduction) scene that evoked their short-lived affair is a tribute to their ability to re-enact so convincingly the collision between a highly sexed male and a sexually unemancipated female.
Although Loretta did not owe MGM another film after Key to the City, Tom Lewis, sensing that his wife’s Hollywood days were nearing the end, decided to try his hand at producing. He found an original story based on a radio play by Larry Marcus about a wife whose husband, convinced that she and his doctor are lovers and plotting his death, sends a letter to the district attorney implicating both of them. Lewis hired Mel Dinelli to write the screenplay, which became Cause for Alarm! (MGM, 1951). In selling the package to MGM, Lewis insisted on co-screenplay and producer credit in addition to copyright ownership.
Lewis may not have known that most of Dore Schary’s productions were under his “executive supervision” even when Schary’s name did not appear in the credits, which was often the case. It was the same with Cause for Alarm! Exactly whom Lewis envisioned for the wife is unknown, but it was not Loretta, perhaps because he knew that she was more knowledgeable about moviemaking than he and could usurp his authority. Schary felt otherwise, and cast Loretta, who gave a riveting performance—one of her best, in fact, though unappreciated at the time.
There is no way of knowing what Lewis contributed to the script, particularly since Doro
thy Kingsley, an accomplished screenwriter (Neptune’s Daughter, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Pal Joey, etc.) did a rewrite. The imperiled heroine script was a Dinelli specialty (The Spiral Staircase; Beware, My Lovely, which he adapted from his play, The Man; Jeopardy) Despite Lewis’s co-screenplay credit, Cause for Alarm! is classic Dinelli. Auteurists, on the other hand, would call it a Tay Garnett film. Garnett worked in various genres, including romantic comedies like Eternally Yours, his first film with Loretta. He was especially good at building suspense in films where dashed hopes result in either deliverance or death (Bataan, The Cross of Lorraine, Mrs. Parkington, The Postman Always Rings Twice). Lewis brokered the deal with MGM and probably helped shape the screenplay, but Cause for Alarm! is a Dinelli-Garnett film, acted by a first-rate cast.
Loretta, looking like a typical 1950s homemaker, is married to a mentally unstable man (Barry Sullivan) with a heart condition. The husband, convinced his wife and doctor are planning to murder him, devises a diabolical scheme to trap them. He deliberately spills some of his heart medication, making it difficult for the prescription to be renewed, and making it look as if he is being overmedicated. The husband then writes an incriminating letter to the district attorney, which his unsuspecting wife gives to the mail carrier. Growing increasingly irrational, the husband boasts about the letter, attempting to shoot his wife but collapsing before he can pull the trigger. Except for a flashback showing how the couple met, Cause for Alarm! unfolds in real time. The film was a tour de force for Loretta who, in order to retrieve the letter, must deal with a skeptical mail carrier, his sympathetic supervisor, her husband’s nosy aunt, a curious notary, and an intrusive child. Everything leads up to the denouement in which the mail carrier informs the wife that the letter has to be returned because of insufficient postage. The tension that had been building up in her erupts in hysterical elation, which Loretta conveys convincingly, sounding almost inarticulate as she gropes for words to express her relief.
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