Hollywood Madonna

by Bernard F. Dick

  Schary had little faith in Cause for Alarm!, which clocked in at a mere seventy-four minutes. The 1951 films that he was championing were The Red Badge of Courage (which failed miserably at the box office), The Great Caruso, Quo Vadis, Show Boat, and An American in Paris. Cause for Alarm! was a low-budget movie that generated enough suspense to sustain audience interest and enough money to justify its being made. Except for Paula (1952), Cause for Alarm! was the last film that made demands on Loretta. The other two were cut from an old, now frayed, fabric.

  After Loretta and Harry Cohn reconciled, she returned to Columbia for the first of her final three films. Larry Marcus, who wrote the original story that became Cause for Alarm!, came up with another that James Poe and William Sacheim turned into Paula (1952). Dismissed at the time as a three-hankie flick, Paula is as engrossing as it is morally disturbing. In her haste to attend a reception for her husband (Kent Smith), Paula (Loretta) accidentally runs down a young boy (Tommy Rettig). The accident is not a typical hit and run; Paula pulls up, rushing over to find the boy conscious but aphasic. Despite his condition, the boy notices Paula’s necklace, which becomes an important plot point. A truck driver stops and assumes the worst: drunk driving. He orders Paula to follow him to the hospital where he is taking the boy. Too many traffic problems intervene, and the driver informs the police that the boy was a hit and run victim of a drunk driver. The script is crafted in such a way that audiences know it is only a matter of time before Paula will be found out. Instead of turning herself in, Paula atones for what she has done by teaching the boy to regain his speech. Naturally, at some point, Paula will wear the incriminating necklace, causing their relationship, originally based on trust, to deteriorate, as the boy grows sullen and fearful.

  Paula is a twist-counter twist film. First, Paula encourages the boy to resume his lessons, with the understanding that once he can speak, he can disclose her identity. Then the truck driver (venerable character actor Raymond Bascom in a frighteningly self-righteous performance) reappears. But just when it seems that Paula is doomed, the boy, now able to speak in rudimentary English, addresses Paula as friend, and then as mother. The detective, who thought he had nabbed Paula, relents, reminding her that she will get the DA’s sympathy. Obviously, Loretta would not be going to jail.

  In case anyone felt that Paula should have been prosecuted for leaving the scene of an accident, the writers covered themselves by showing that she would have followed the driver to the hospital if she had not encountered a series of delays. There is a moral issue here, the kind that might be debated in an ethics class: namely, her refusal to identify herself as the driver. Paula, however, chooses retribution over confession, and the boy’s magnanimity suggests that even a child is capable of forgiveness. Naturally Paula should have come forward, but that would have resulted in a different kind of film: a courtroom melodrama, in which the boy, who had now progressed to grandiloquence, would deliver an impassioned speech in Paula’ s defense. The film’s ending is as believable as The Accused, in which Loretta got away with homicide, thanks to Robert Cummings’s powers of persuasion.

  Paula was one of Loretta’s better, if unheralded, late-career performances. Especially impressive was the maternalism she lavished on the boy (sensitively played by Tommy Rettig). When Loretta prepared him for his bath and taught him the rudiments of speech, she did more than just play a mother surrogate; she was the dream mother, the kind to whom any child would gravitate. Loretta may not have been that way to Judy, but one would like to think she was to Christopher and Peter.

  As Loretta approached 40, she found herself, like other stars in the same or an older age bracket (e.g., Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford) playing opposite younger actors. She committed herself to two pictures for Universal-International (UI): Because of You (1952) and It Happens Every Thursday (1953). Because of You was a low budget production that cost $625,690 and filmed over a five-week period (21 April–26 May 1952). Loretta received $75,000, and Norman Brokaw, her agent at William Morris, arranged for a 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. time clause in her contract. Because of You was a shamelessly manipulative woman’s film with a victimized heroine and a target audience of female moviegoers who had suffered at the hands of unscrupulous (played in the film by Alex Nicol) or unforgiving (played in the film by Jeff Chandler) men. Chandler was thirty-four, but his prematurely gray hair made him seem older and at the same time enhanced his sex appeal. Nicol was thirty-three, but his character’s brand of sleaze is ageless. Fortunately, Loretta’s still milky complexion only needed some carefully applied makeup and subtle lighting to place her character, Christine, in her twenties. Loretta took care of the rest, which, for a thirty-nine-year-old actress, was no easy feat. In the opening scene, as the camera tilts up her back while she is dancing with Nicol, it seems to be ogling her every curve. Loretta is wearing a form fitting dress and sporting an obvious platinum blonde wig. Breathy and clueless, she appears to be channeling her inner Marilyn Monroe. Christine is the mistress of drug dealer Nicol, who sets her up for a prison sentence when he gives her incriminating evidence for safekeeping. In jail, her hair returns to its original—and natural—color. She also acquires a marketable skill that she can use on the outside: She trains as a nurse’s aide. Once she gives Chandler a rubdown, which she performs with a soothing eroticism, he is smitten. They marry, have a daughter, and are enjoying domestic bliss until Nicol crops up. So much for happily-ever-after, at least for the moment.

  The screenwriter, Ketti Frings, must have seen Eternally Yours, in which Loretta became a magician’s assistant. In fact, the working title of Because of You was “Magic Lady.” Once Chandler dumps her and takes their child, Loretta masters a repertoire of magic acts that she performs at children’s birthday parties, one of which happens to be her own daughter’s. Since her former husband is now engaged, she runs off to Oregon, and works on a farm (shades of The Farmer’s Daughter). A repentant Chandler tracks her down, scoops her up in his arms, and the reunited couple go bounding through the field—an idyllic ending to a film that may have convinced Loretta that her movie career was coming to an end, which it did the following year. It was not that Loretta gave a bad performance, only that Because of You was a 1930s-type movie that should have been made around the same time as Midnight Mary. A twenty-year-old Loretta would not have had to work as hard playing a woman in her twenties as Loretta did when she was pushing forty.

  Her Hollywood swan song was somewhat better. At least it didn’t occasion disbelief like Irene Dunne’s envoi, It Grows on Trees (1952), in which the “it” was real paper money sprouting on Irene’s trees; Joan Crawford’s in Trog (1970), in which the star was upstaged by a gorilla; or Bette Davis’s cameo witch in Wicked Stepmother (1989). Like an augur, Loretta could read the signs. It Happens Every Thursday, which ran a mere eighty minutes, a little longer than Cause for Alarm!, and looked distinctly low budget, was filmed over twenty-five days (5 January–3 February 1953) at a cost of $617,085. Loretta received her usual $75,000, but despite the time clause, the Daily Production Reports show that for half of the shoot, she started at 8:00 a.m. and finished at 4:30 p.m., which still gave her time to recoup for the next day. UI considered the film a potboiler that might attract Loretta’s aging fan base—but certainly not that of her costar, John Forsythe who achieved stardom in another medium, television. While Forsythe went on to Bachelor Father and Dynasty, and had his own show for a season, Loretta also found her niche on the tube where, for eight years, she attracted the biggest audience of her career.

  The “it” in It Happens Every Thursday is a local paper, The Eden Archives, that a journalist (Forsythe) and his wife, pregnant with their second child (Loretta) take over. Loretta plays the dutiful wife, using her ebullience to increase circulation, until Eden suffers a serious drought. Forsythe does some research and finds a scientific way of ending the drought, but before he can, nature intervenes and delivers five days of rain. The once rain-hungry populace turns on the couple, demand
ing compensation for their losses. In this deceptively feminist film, Loretta saves the day by bringing in a meteorologist, who explains that nature alone was responsible for both ending the drought and causing the excessive rain. In Capraesque fashion, the formerly vindictive citizens rally around their editor and his wife, as small town pettiness evaporates in the presence of a husband and wife without an ounce of guile.

  It Happens Every Thursday may not have been Loretta’s shining hour, but it was far from embarrassing. Loretta was totally credible as a homemaker, believing so strongly in her character that she gave the wife a blazing integrity that put her husband to shame—particularly since he could not bring about the resolution that audiences expected. Loretta could at least claim that her last film portrayed a woman who may have been her husband’s intellectual inferior, but who could do for him what he could not do for himself: restore the people’s confidence, and from the audience’s standpoint, guarantee a happy ending.

  CHAPTER 19

  Radio Days

  When Loretta closed the book on her film career, she could say with justifiable pride that for someone who started in pictures at four and stopped at forty, she had left behind an impressive gallery of characters. Her beauty made her difficult to cast; it was obvious that she was neither a femme fatale nor a musical comedy diva. In fact, Loretta never made a musical; the closest she came was the vaudeville bit she did with her sister in The Show of Shows. She was not a character actress as such, but an actress able to grow into her characters, and, for the most part, fit into their skin, whether they were tight rope walkers, orphans, champion bridge players, ballerinas, academics, criminals, socialites, waitresses, royalty, actresses, reporters, authors, politicians, aviators, homemakers, or nuns. She could be white, Asian, or mixed race.

  Loretta was at her best when she was playing either a reflection of her real self (iron butterflies like Katie and Sister Margaret), or her anti-self, women at the other extreme (waifs, shop girls, molls)—the kind she might have encountered if, at four, she had never been exposed to the world of make believe on Catalina Island. But when she had to play someone in that intermediate zone, the no man’s land between those selves (a middle-aged college freshman, a sleep walker, a screwball sleuth), she found herself caught between knowing how the role should be played and being unable to play it convincingly. At least none of her films was an embarrassment, unlike The Iron Petticoat (1956), which featured the unlikely team of Katharine Hepburn and Bob Hope, with Hepburn as a Soviet commissar with an Russian accent that sounded like a Muscovite’s idea of Bryn Mawr English; or Beyond the Forest (1949), in which the forty-year-old Bette Davis, vampire-like in a black fright wig, tried to pass for a woman in her late twenties.

  Loretta was always looking for ways to expand her repertoire. Her growing fame as a movie star paralleled the rise of live radio drama. Arguably, the best and most popular of the dramatic shows—at least for moviegoers—was Lux Radio Theatre, which aired on CBS from 1934 to 1955. Until June 1936, the show was broadcast from New York, after which it moved to Hollywood, where it originated from the Music Box Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, and then from the Vine Street Playhouse. Tickets were always at a premium. Movie lovers, both Angelenos and tourists, relished the opportunity to see their favorite stars in front of a microphone either re-creating one of his or her own roles or taking on another’s. The program allowed for both; availability was the key. If the original actor had a prior commitment, usually a film, another substituted who could play the part—if not as well, at least believably. When Loretta was unavailable for the 17 December 1949 broadcast of The Bishop’s Wife, Jane Greer filled in. Similarly, Loretta assumed Claudette Colbert’s role in Arise, My Love (18 June 1942). The replacements were at least adequate, and occasionally better than the originators. Sometimes, an actor missed the point of the script, which was the case in the 12 April 1948 broadcast of The Perfect Marriage. Loretta knew how to play a stage actress without overdoing the histrionics. Lizabeth Scott, of the darkly sensuous voice, alternately throaty and husky, did not. Scott was the perfect standby for Tallulah Bankhead in The Skin of Our Teeth on Broadway, but not for Loretta in The Perfect Marriage. Scott, a good enough actress, was unable to locate the fine line between theatricality and flamboyance and aimed for the latter.

  Although Loretta appeared on other radio shows, Lux was special: It was the one on which she performed more often than anyone else—twenty-six performances, followed by Fred MacMurray (twenty-five) and Claudette Colbert (twenty-four). Live radio, unlike theatre, made it relatively easy for a working actress. For Lux, there was a read-through on Thursday afternoon, a noon rehearsal on Friday, and another on Saturday. Two dress rehearsals were scheduled for Monday: the first at 10:00 a.m., the second, ninety minutes before airtime. Salaries varied: Established stars received $5,000 a week, except for Clark Gable, who received $5,001. The director Cecil B. DeMille was the program’s host from 1936 to 1945, followed by another director with a sonorous voice, William Keighley, from 1945 until the show went off the air ten years later.

  Loretta joined the program the year after Lux premiered, making her last appearance in 1952. She re-created some of her roles (Man’s Castle, Bedtime Story, The Lady from Cheyenne, China, And Now Tomorrow, Mother Is a Freshman, and, of course, The Farmer’s Daughter and Come to the Stable). But more often, she appeared in roles originated by others. Her first Lux appearance was in The Patsy (16 June 1935) in the Marion Davies part. She also took on another Davies role, the bareback rider in Polly of the Circus (30 November 1936).

  But her greatest challenge was assuming roles made famous by others, especially Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. Loretta played four of Davis’s parts. The first was Miriam Brady in The Girl from Tenth Avenue (16 May 1938), a sympathetic woman lacking in social grace who consoles an attorney jilted by his fiancée, marries him, and then discovers he is still infatuated with his ex until he learns to appreciate Miriam’s decency. This was the kind of part Loretta could handle; it was lesser Davis, minus the mannerisms. But Loretta was only partially successful when she played Julie in Jezebel (25 November 1940), the role that brought Davis her second Oscar. Julie is kin to Scarlett O’Hara, a pampered Southern belle who flaunts convention and matures only after her lover marries another and is stricken with yellow fever. At the beginning Loretta’s Southern accent was inconsistent, and her simpering was grating. But when Pres (Jeffrey Lynn in Henry Fonda’s role) marries Amy, an Easterner, Julie grows in stature. After Pres becomes a plague victim, Julie begs Amy to allow her to become his caregiver and accompany him to that “desolate island, haunted by death,” where the infected are quarantined. Loretta delivered her lines as if they were poetry—not like a woman with a martyr complex, but like one desperate to perform a selfless act to compensate for her selfish ways. Julie reminds Amy that she understands Creole, while Amy does not, and, therefore, can be of greater help. “Give me the right to be clean again, as you are clean,” she implores Amy. At the end, Loretta is every bit as effective as Davis—so much so that one can forgive the unpromising beginning.

  Two of the roles, both Bette Davis vehicles, must have struck a responsive chord in Loretta: The Old Maid (30 October 1939) and The Great Lie (2 March 1942). In the former, Loretta was Charlotte, who bears a child out of wedlock and is forced to live in her sister Delia’s home, where her daughter grows up calling Delia “mother” and referring to Charlotte as her maiden aunt. The Great Lie was another woman’s film, with its share of complications. Maggie (Loretta) raises her friend Sandra’s child as if it were hers and her husband’s. If Sandra’s maternal instincts resurface, will she demand the child back? Yes. Good complication. Does Sandra succeed or does she perform a magnanimous gesture? The Great Lie was a two-, not a three-hankie movie.

  Katharine Hepburn will always be the definitive Tracy Lord in Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), a role that she created on the stage and repeated on the screen. Loretta offered a fresh take on Tracy in th
e Lux version (14 June 1943), making no attempt to duplicate Hepburn’s mandarin line readings, but delivering the dialogue as if she were in a romantic comedy like Love is News or Eternally Yours. When she tells Mike Connor (Robert Young in the James Stewart role) that she has fallen in love with his short stories, she sounds as if she were having one of her romantic fantasies; her voice has a dreamy quality, as opposed to the yearning that Hepburn was so adept at expressing. There is an inside joke in the broadcast that was also in the film. When Tracy and Connor become slightly tipsy, they break into a boozy rendition of “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, which, like The Philadelphia Story, was an MGM film. It’s a lovely moment that was probably intended to evoke memories of a movie that was never as popular in its day as it has become, and of a song that in 1943, the bleakest year of World War II, envisioned a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops” that just might turn out to be America.

  While Loretta’s flair for romantic comedy could easily transfer to The Philadelphia Story, nothing that she had done in film prepared her for screwball comedy on radio. Yet she did reasonably well in both Theodora Goes Wild and True Confession in roles created by two of the best exponents of the genre, Irene Dunne and Carole Lombard, respectively. In True Confession (13 May 1940), Loretta assumed the Lombard role of a writer who also happens to be an incorrigible liar, not one motivated by malice, but by her hyperactive imagination. She takes a job as secretary to a broker, but his wandering hands send her running to the nearest exit. When he is murdered, the writer is a suspect. Although innocent, she pleads guilty, thus giving her lawyer-husband (Fred MacMurray, in his original role) the chance to defend her. Acquittal follows, of course. True Confessions is respectable screwball, but not on a par with the best of the genre. Thus Loretta treated it like a bauble, not like a pearl of great price. The key to screwball is to keep it buoyant so that it does not sink into whimsy. This Loretta managed, playing the dizzy dame with the same kind of intelligence that Lombard brought to the role by wearing the motley—but not on her brain.