Theodora Goes Wild was another matter. This was classic screwball, aired not on Lux, but on Campbell Playhouse (14 January 1940). Campbell Playhouse, sponsored by Campbell’s soup, premiered on CBS in 1939 under Orson Welles’s supervision and was devoted to adaptations of well-known novels, plays, and films. Theodora represented a double challenge: doing vintage screwball and appearing opposite the formidable Welles (neither of them knew they would be playing husband and wife six years later in The Stranger). For Loretta, screwball on radio was easier than it would have been in film. Radio allowed her to play a madcap without having to become one for the camera. To Loretta, screwball—or at least, Theodora Goes Wild—was a romantic caper involving the title character, a respected citizen in small town America, who writes a steamy best seller under a pseudonym, and an illustrator (Welles, in the Melvyn Douglas part), who discovers Theodora’s identity. Just as he is about to out her, Theodora discloses it herself through a publicity campaign. Theodora indeed went wild, and Loretta relished every bit of the comic mayhem. Realizing that the action has to move away from the illustrator and over to Theodora, Loretta took control of the script, not hijacking it out of ego but steering it in the direction of her character, as the plot required. Theodora is in love with the illustrator and can do for him what he cannot do for himself: bring his tottering marriage to a state of collapse. Theodora Goes Wild was Loretta’s show, just as it had been Irene Dunne’s movie, not Melvyn Douglas’s. Welles would move on to far greater prominence the following year in his directorial debut, Citizen Kane (1941).
Loretta costarred with Welles again in the Lux broadcast of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (5 June 1944), with Welles as Rochester and Loretta as the title character. Unlike Joan Fontaine in the movie, released four months earlier with Welles as Rochester, Loretta gave Jane an armorclad exterior that concealed her insecurity, as might be expected of a Victorian governess who came out of a school for “charity-children” and was treated accordingly. Loretta was not fluttery and breathy like Fontaine, who played servant to Rochester’s master, never forgetting her origins. Loretta’s Jane was closer to Brontë’s; Her Jane traveled the same route from Lowood School to Thornfield, without losing the survival skills that she learned at Lowood. Loretta, strong-willed but respectful, gave Welles a run for his money; the novel was entitled Jane Eyre, not “The Master of Thornfield.” It was Jane’s story, of which Rochester was part. Unfortunately, the radio version did not include the novel’s famous line, “Reader, I married him.” If it did, listeners would have heard the voice of an exotic steel blue butterfly, with no intention of ending up in anyone’s net, even one with silken meshes.
Casting Loretta in the Lux presentation of Algiers (14 December 1942) in the role that Hedy Lamarr originated was, to be charitable, casting against type. Loretta was not a world-weary siren like Lamarr, whose exotic looks made her seem an alien breed, unlike any of her Hollywood peers. But then, Hedy Lamarr had no peers; she was a gorgeous hieroglyph awaiting decipherment that never came. Loretta, in contrast, could be elusive but never Sphinx-like. Thus the writers wisely made Loretta the narrator recounting her short-lived affair with the gangster, Pepe Le Moko (Charles Boyer). Loretta could not dispel memories of Lamarr, who never lost the Viennese lilt in her voice that carried with it an air of mystery. Lamarr’s Gaby was a woman of the world, always eager for a new adventure and, this time, finding it in the Casbah. Gaby was a creature of wanderlust; if a trip leads to an affair, so be it. It would always be short term. And if it ends in tragedy, as her trip to Algiers did, there’s always a plane to another romantic place. Those who tuned in that Monday night were more interested in Boyer than Loretta. If the leads had been Boyer and Lamarr, the audience would have quadrupled to hear the Great Lover and the Love Goddess re-create their original roles. What Lamarr had, and Loretta lacked, was a world-weary, “been there, done that” voice. Loretta did not even attempt an accent—ersatz European or otherwise—but simply delivered the lines in a cultured voice reflecting the character’s privileged background. It was Boyer’s show, because it was Boyer’s film. Whether or not Loretta realized it, she was a member of the supporting cast.
Loretta’s best radio performances were in Christmas Holiday (Lux, 17 September 1946) and Love Letters (Lux, 22 April 1946), in roles created by Deanna Durbin and Jennifer Jones, respectively. Durbin had been Universal’s resident soprano since 1936. In 1944, the studio thought it was time for her to change her image and go dramatic as a singer in a New Orleans dive married to a murderer (Gene Kelly, also cast against type). Durbin was surprisingly effective, but the studio was unimpressed and, except for the screwball mystery, Lady on a Train (1945), it was back to the same bland movies with porous plots for the next three years, until in 1948 Durbin had reached the stage of surfeit and left Hollywood for good.
In Christmas Holiday, a soldier (William Holden, right out of the army), whose plane has been grounded because of a rainstorm, drops into the club where Loretta is performing. They are instantly compatible, and she asks him to take her to Midnight Mass. That scene proved that Durbin could have been a serious actress. Whatever memories the church service evoked for her, Durbin alone knew; her barely audible but genuine weeping suggested someone in desperate need of spiritual guidance or even renewal. This was also the kind of scene to which Loretta could relate. Her weeping, also subtly controlled, was not that of an actress playing a scene calling for her to cry, but of a suffering wife forced to make her living singing for drunks and lotharios, while her husband (David Bruce in Kelly’s role) is serving a life sentence. When he escapes and is shot, Loretta, like Durbin, undergoes another round of emotional release, again unfeigned and movingly heartfelt.
It is hard to imagine anyone improving on Jennifer Jones’s performance as “Singleton” in Love Letters (1945), which brought her an Oscar nomination. Singleton, whose real name is Victoria Moreland, became an amnesiac after allegedly killing her husband Roger for destroying the love letters he had supposedly written to her. The plot, a neat blend of whodunit and psychological melodrama, was resolved without straining credulity. Roger did not write the letters; his buddy (Joseph Cotten, reprising his film role) did. Victoria did not kill Roger; her aunt did. Loretta’s Singleton/Victoria was much like Jones’s—poignantly sincere and guileless, a dweller in a self-inhabited world with no memory of the evening that changed her life. With Cotten functioning as both sleuth and therapist, Victoria is forced to confront her past and relive that fatal evening. The action builds to a climax in which the past is purged, and a woman’s identity restored. Loretta played the climactic scene as if she were shedding every layer of emotional insulation that kept out the real world and drove her into her own. Her performance was so compelling that someone in the audience cried, “Bravo!” at the end. “Brava!” would have been more accurate, but the sentiment was the same.
Loretta looked on any radio show as a means of enhancing her popularity. Lux Radio Theatre was her favorite; it allowed her to showcase her versatility, which was not always apparent in her films. But “versatility” was not limited merely to re-creating one of her film roles or taking on someone else’s. Loretta took advantage of any program, dramatic or otherwise, that provided an opportunity for self-promotion. It was not that she was leading a life of quiet desperation, obsessed with recycling her image in every available medium—although it is easy to come to that conclusion. She simply wanted as much exposure as she could get as compensation for her second-tier status in a business where the icons are enshrined, while the statues are relegated to dimly lit alcoves. An alcove was not what Loretta had in mind; if she had to be a statue, it would be at a dedicated side altar like those at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Naturally, she preferred movies and radio; next, fan magazine articles; and finally, as a Hollywood beauty queen, endorsements of soaps, cleansing creams, and cosmetics. But it was movies that made her famous and radio that streamed her fame throughout the country.
“Noël Coward”
was not a name ordinarily associated with Loretta, yet she often cited him among her favorite writers, perhaps because she aspired to the heady brand of sophistication his heroines possessed (Amanda in Private Lives, Elvira in Blithe Spirit, Gilda in Design for Living) and that she strove for in Bedtime Story, Eternally Yours, and Love Is News. Her determination to master the high style stemmed from her dissatisfaction with her performance as the socialite in The Devil to Pay, believing that if she had the wit and flair that the role required, she would have been the ideal costar for Ronald Colman. And yet what seventeen-year-old actress had such technique? It’s hard to imagine Coward specialists such as Lynn Fontanne (Design for Living, Quadrille) and Gertrude Lawrence (Private Lives, Tonight at 8:30) possessing it at that age. Thus when Loretta had a chance to appear in Arch Obler’s radio adaptation of Coward’s Blithe Spirit on Everything for the Boys, she accepted immediately. Everything for the Boys—the inspiration of Loretta’s husband, now Lieutenant Colonel Lewis, head of the Armed Forces Radio Service—was broadcast to members of the military during the height of World War II, from 18 January 1942 to 12 June 1944. The host and leading man was Ronald Colman, Loretta’s adolescent crush, with whom she had costarred in three films. Convinced that she had now acquired a serviceable British accent, she joined the cast as Elvira, the spectral first wife of Charles Condomine (Colman), along with Mercedes McCambridge as Ruth, his second wife, and Edna Best as the medium Madame Arcati. After dying of a heart attack. Elvira returns as a ghost to disrupt Charles’s household and sabotage his marriage to Ruth. The role required Loretta to be sexy, fey, and cunning—all the character traits that she had mastered over the years—in addition to sounding authentically British. She could toss off a line like, “I was playing backgammon with a sweet Oriental gentleman, and then that child paged me and the next thing I knew I was in this room,” and make it seem the quintessence of wit. It got a laugh from the men and women stationed in New Guinea, the intended location of the broadcast. Each episode of Everything for the Boys, which consisted of half-hour versions mostly of outstanding plays (e.g., The Petrified Forest, Quality Street), was transmitted to a particular part of the globe where the war was being fought. It is difficult to determine the exact date of the Blithe Spirit transmission; most likely, it was either late 1943 or spring 1944, when Allied operations had neutralized the Japanese threat to New Guinea.
An invitation to appear on Louella Parsons’s show, even though it only aired for fifteen minutes, was a command performance—particularly since the influential Parsons had given her imprimatur to the scenario Loretta had fabricated about Judy’s adoption. Loretta owed Parsons, and when Parsons beckoned, Loretta obeyed. However, appearing on the show worked to Loretta’s advantage. Parsons always promoted her guest’s latest or forthcoming picture; it was payment for speaking silly, scripted lines that allowed the voice of Hollywood to gush over an actor, who would humbly accept the compliment in words that others had written.
Loretta’s more discerning fans must have wondered why she agreed to be a guest on The Burns and Allen Show (23 November 1943). But Loretta was savvy enough to realize that not everyone was tuning in on Monday nights to Lux Radio Theatre; others preferred comedy shows that did not require an hour’s investment of their time. The offbeat humor of George Burns and Gracie Allen—particularly Gracie’s—was the main attraction of The Burns and Allen Show, which premiered on CBS in 1932, moving in 1950 to television, where it delighted audiences until 1958, when Gracie, whose heart condition had worsened, announced her retirement, dying that same year. But even in 1943, Burns and Allen were household names. Loretta would have been foolish to pass on a chance to appear on their show, especially since her movie career had shifted into low gear. In 1943, Gracie was at her zany peak, and Loretta knew that her sole purpose was to play “straight man” to Gracie, providing her with set-ups for the punch lines. Burns did likewise, knowing that he could not compete with Gracie’s brand of humor, which belonged to a tangent universe, where everything is inverted, the lingua franca is the non sequitur, and illogic has displaced rational discourse. Sample:
BOLINGBROKE (TO GRACIE). I have great news for you, dear lady! The Bolingbroke Little Theatre is about to open its winter theatrical season. I shall want you as the leading lady, naturally.
GRACIE. Oh, naturally. Say, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get Charles Boyer for my leading man?
GEORGE. Oh, sure, sure. You could get him easy for around twenty-five thousand dollars.
GRACIE. We wouldn’t have to pay him a cent, George—he’s Free French.
In the 23 November 1943 broadcast, Gracie’s obsession with supplementing the family’s income by writing lurid pieces for exposé magazines leads to a lawsuit when her article, “The Secret Love of Loretta Young,” is published. Even more libelous was the accompanying question: “Does Her Son, Robert Young, Know About This?” The two Youngs were not related, although they ended up achieving greater fame on television than they did in film—Loretta, in her own show, which ran for eight years, and Robert in Father Knows Best (1954–63) and Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–76). The loopy dialogue did not faze Loretta. When she slaps Gracie with a $50,000 libel suit, Gracie makes George the culprit, insisting that he is mad.
LORETTA. George always looked all right to me, mentally, of course.
GRACIE. Oh, you can’t go by appearances, Loretta. Think of George as a chocolate. Yes, you can’t tell by looking at him whether inside he’s plain or nut.
Corny? Of course. But it got a laugh.
This was not Loretta’s finest hour on radio, but at least announcer Bill Goodwin plugged her forthcoming movie: “Our guest tonight … is currently working in the Paramount Picture, ‘And Now Tomorrow.’” It did not matter if Loretta’s appearance on Burns and Allen sold more tickets to And Now Tomorrow. What mattered was that Loretta was a guest on a radio show that drew more listeners than Lux Radio Theatre. And when Burns and Allen became The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–58) on television, it lasted as long as The Loretta Young Show (1953–61), eight years.
If Loretta were asked to name the radio program that gave her the greatest satisfaction, she would not have answered “Lux Radio Theatre”—despite her record number of appearances on the program—but Family Theatre, the inspiration of Father Patrick Peyton. Loretta had great rapport with priests. Among her closest friends was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, America’s first television evangelist, whose CBS show, Life Is Worth Living (1952–57), became so popular that it caused defections from its only competition on Tuesday evenings, The Milton Berle Show. Bishop Sheen was the epitome of panache. He turned his monsignor’s cape into a costume, as if he were an ecclesiastical Batman; he handled the blackboard, his essential prop, like a seasoned teacher, which he was (more or less). Television, more than the pulpit, released the actor within whenever he had the opportunity to dramatize, as he did when he used as his text Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A year after Life Is Worth Living went on the air, The Loretta Young Show debuted. Bishop Sheen’s theatricality matched hers. But as television personalities, they were not competitive: He was on CBS on Tuesdays; she, on NBC on Sundays.
Loretta had known Bishop Sheen since the 1940s. In November 1944, she wrote to him, asking that he see “a friend … fearful of dignified persons,” a rather quaint way of saying “celebrity-priest.” Who the friend was is difficult to say. The letter is part of the Gladys Hall Collection, and the friend may have been the prolific magazine writer, Gladys Hall herself. Another Gladys, Loretta’s mother, also sought his advice. “Do as you truthfully and honestly feel about it,” was his oracular reply. When Loretta’s first son arrived, he congratulated her on the “beautiful fruition of your mutual love,” an equally quaint, if not euphemistic, way of attributing a birth to something more spiritual than physical. With Bishop Sheen, rhetoric was all; with Loretta, it was discretion.
Fr. Peyton was the antithesis of Bishop Sheen—a crusader with a mission, not a charismatic showman.
Patrick Peyton was born in 1909 in “the bleak western part of County Mayo, Ireland.” Having grown up with the ritual of the after-dinner family rosary, he was convinced that the nightly recitation of the rosary would produce harmony in the home and throughout the world. Naturally, his message was directed at Catholics, who were familiar with the rosary and understood its function as an instrument of prayer. The rosary is a five-decade string of beads that Catholics would finger while meditating on significant events in the Greek New Testament, such as: the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, informing her that she was chosen to be the mother of the Messiah; Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth; and Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. These events were divided into the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries, each of which commemorated five such incidents. Traditionally, Mondays and Wednesdays were devoted to the Joyful Mysteries (events preceding and following Christ’s birth); Tuesdays and Fridays to the Sorrowful (details of Christ’s Passion); and the Glorious (post-crucifixion events such as the Resurrection and Ascension). This was the sequence that Fr. Peyton, Loretta, and countless Catholics knew until 2004, when a slight change was introduced: the Joyful Mysteries were relegated to Mondays and Saturdays; the Glorious to Wednesdays and Sundays. The Sorrowful were unchanged, but a new category was created for Thursdays: the Luminous Mysteries, commemorating other important events such as the turning of water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana and the institution of the Eucharist.
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