Even when hospitalized, Loretta’s primary concern was her show. Fortunately, she had assembled a staff as loyal to her as they were to the program and knew fellow actors who would pinch-hit until she could return for the third season, which she did in 1956. Until then, a number of outstanding guest hosts substituted (e.g., Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, her brother-in-law, Ricardo Montalban, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck—who was so taken with the anthology concept that she used it for her own series, The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1960–61).
Loretta’s confinement secretly delighted Tom Lewis, who, despite his executive producer title, believed that his wife’s success relegated him to the wings, depriving him of the spotlight that shone on her. In her autobiography Judy Lewis, twenty at the time of her mother’s hospitalization, writes about overhearing her stepfather boast to Helen Ferguson, “Finally, I have my little Gretchen back.” Then Lewis started to behave more like a lover obsessed with reclaiming his lost love than a media professional committed to keeping a successful series on the air. Apparently, Lewis no longer thought of his wife as Loretta, but as Gretchen—as if he preferred the woman she might have been if she had never became a movie star. Lewis did not care about the series, either; it was Loretta’s, not his. He only wanted his Gretchen back. Loretta Young was not his property; she belonged to the world. Lewis decided to take matters into his own hands and inform Norman Brokow, Loretta’s agent at William Morris, that her present condition made it impossible for her to return to the show—in effect, canceling it. Once Loretta learned what he had done, she “called her own meeting” in her hospital room, announcing that The Loretta Young Show was hers, and assuring her sponsor, Proctor & Gamble, that, in her absence, high profile guests would substitute, as they did. Tom Lewis was a typical example of the “star wife” syndrome, dramatized so effectively in A Star Is Born (1937). In the film, Norman Maine, once one of Hollywood’s leading men, is eclipsed by his wife, Vicki Lester, and is known to mail carriers as “Mr. Lester.” Tom Lewis had become “Mr. Young.” As Loretta told an interviewer in 1987, “It was awfully hard when there was no way of stopping a headwaiter from calling my husband Mr. Young.”
Lewis may have been the original producer of The Loretta Young Show, but it was Loretta’s protean repertoire that made television history, proving that there was an audience for an anthology series. CBS’s Four Star Playhouse had debuted earlier in September 1952, but even with its four stars (Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, David Niven, and Ida Lupino), it only lasted until 1956. Loretta would double that record. None of the four stars had Loretta’s cachet—not even Charles Boyer, who was no longer the Great Lover, except to the Broadway audiences that flocked to see him in person in The Marriage-Go-Round (1959–60) with Claudette Colbert. (Significantly, neither Boyer nor Colbert reprised their roles in the movie version, in which James Mason and Susan Hayward played the leads.) Anthology TV was Loretta’s domain, which she intended to rule until she had to concede the throne. Nineteen fifties’ television had never seen anything like The Loretta Young Show, in which one actress released the myriad women within her and brought them into the American living room.
If Lewis wanted a stay-at-home wife, he had completely misread Loretta. The Loretta Young Show was her property; if Lewis wished to continue as producer, he would play by her rules. Even at the beginning, he should have inferred from her weekly schedule that their lives had changed. The episodes were filmed each year from July to March, with rehearsals on Mondays and Tuesdays; filming, Wednesday-Fridays; Loretta’s welcomes and au revoirs every other Thursday; and her quote of the week on alternating Sundays. Weekends were not that different: There were wig fittings; wardrobe shopping; scripts to be read; story, interview, cast, business, program, and rewrite conferences. For eight years, Loretta’s life was not her own—and it was certainly not her husband’s. The steel butterfly was afloat, and no one, particularly Lewis, would bring her down.
As of April 1956, the marriage was unofficially over. For the time being it was a separation. Divorce would not occur for thirteen more years, until Loretta finally realized that, like her mother, she too would be a divorcée. But there was no way that Loretta’s ruptured marriage could be sutured, much less healed. On 11 May 1956, Lewis resigned as producer from The Loretta Show, at the instigation of Loretta and Robert Shewalter, Lewislor’s secretary-treasurer and accountant, seeking control of Lewislor for themselves but knowing that the name would have to be changed. At first, Lewis seemed compliant. On 30 April 1956, he agreed to relinquish his role in the company, in return for which he was offered sole title to one of the apartment houses that he and Loretta owned on N. Flores Street, a house on Sweetzer Avenue, and the Ojai ranch. (There were actually two Flores Street apartment buildings; the final settlement, a decade later, allowed Loretta to chose the one she wanted, which, naturally, was the better one.)
By 13 March 1958, Lewis had second thoughts about his exclusion from Lewislor. He filed suit against Loretta and Shewalter, accusing them of treating him unfairly and depriving him of his rights as a shareholder; he also argued that, with his departure, Loretta and Shewalter doubled their salaries. Loretta countered with copies of their 30 April 1956 agreement, in which the couple divided their property, and Lewis disassociated himself from the company. The case dragged on until 1966, when it was finally dismissed by the appellate court. By that time, it was no longer front-page news. Nor was their divorce, which was granted on 20 August 1969, with Loretta receiving a dollar a year as token alimony.
The emotional toll that the litigation had taken on Loretta even caused her to question the career to which she devoted her life. Whether Loretta truly enjoyed acting or regarded it as a challenge that had to be met is problematical. Perhaps at the beginning, the excitement of stardom compensated for the grueling hours and often thankless parts. But when Judy announced that she wanted to be an actress, Loretta scoffed: “You’re too nice.… You’re going to have to be tough.” Loretta learned toughness from a childhood characterized not by privation but by desertion, from a mother who refused to succumb to depression and self-pity when her adulterous husband walked out on his family and instead reinvented herself, first as a boarding house owner and then as one of Hollywood’s leading interior decorators. A costar who impregnated her and turned her life into a scenario of fabrication, studios that exploited her, and a production head who failed to appreciate her range further seasoned her. At one point she even called acting a “dreadful profession.” To Loretta, it had probably become that, creating a tension between her religion and her art. The polarity drove her to priests for guidance in resolving that tension or at least bringing the two opposing forces into a state of equilibrium. When that proved impossible, Loretta decided that she could do it herself with a television series that would both entertain and instruct—and with a sign off quote for the viewers’ edification.
CHAPTER 21
The Road to Retirement
When Loretta initiated a separation from Lewis in spring 1956, she secretly hoped their marriage could be salvaged—not for personal reasons, but because she feared the stigma of divorce, a word that was anathema to devout Catholics. Her mother avoided the problem by not remarrying after her divorce from Belzer. Loretta’s marriage to Lewis, on the other hand, was a media event, and a divorce would be a bigger one, particularly since it involved two exemplary Catholics. Thus, Loretta was careful to give the press the impression that she and Lewis were only separated, appearing together, if necessary, at important social functions. In 1962, Loretta and Lewis were invited to a fundraiser for Father Peyton. As close friends of the priest, they would be seated on the dais with him. It may not have been a command performance, but their absence would certainly have been noticed. It was one of those starry evenings with yesteryear’s favorites (Dorothy Lamour, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Jack Haley, Dorothy Malone, etc.) processing into the Beverly Hilton to the sound of cheering fans, clicking cameras, a
nd popping flashbulbs. If Loretta thought that her first public appearance with Lewis in four years would be interpreted as a sign of a possible reconciliation, she was mistaken. One reporter referred to Lewis as Loretta’s “estranged husband,” adding that, “[T]heir estrangement, never officially admitted, long has puzzled Hollywood.” Although she and Lewis declined to be interviewed, some of the attendees expressed confidence that the couple would resolve their differences. Reconciliation, however, was highly unlikely, since they were embroiled in litigation, with charges of mismanagement, deception, and chicanery coming from both parties.
The future of their marriage, if there was one, rested with a higher authority. Loretta needed guidance, not just from a parish priest or her confessor, but from the highest possible source: the vicar of Christ on earth, Pope Pius XII. It doesn’t seem likely that Loretta herself negotiated a private audience with the pontiff; she had powerful allies in Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Claire Boothe Luce, who may have acted as intermediaries. Loretta’s audience with Pius XII on 27 April 1957 was front-page news in Los Angeles. But Loretta was really on a pilgrimage, using her visit to Rome to meet those chosen few who had the stigmata—physical manifestations of the wounds that Christ sustained at the time of his crucifixion (impressions on the brow from the crown of thorns, the hands and feet from the nails, and the side from the centurion’s lance). Loretta had become obsessed with the stigmata, believing that by consulting with those who had been blessed with it, she could better understand it and perhaps experience it vicariously.
While in Italy, she met the mystic and stigmatist, Padre Pio, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Although he purportedly understood only Latin and Italian, Padre Pio was said to be able to hear confessions in any language, as if, like the apostles after Pentecost, he were endowed with the gift of tongues. Then Loretta flew to Germany to meet Teresa Neuman who, since she was twenty-nine, reportedly never ingested anything but the Eucharist. She too was a stigmatist, speaking, when questioned, in Aramaic, Christ’s dialect. After hearing Loretta’s rapturous description of her spiritual odyssey, an interviewer noted in a cynical aside that Loretta “had assumed an aura of inspiration … as if she were in a state of mystical repose.” Still, the interviewer could not conceal his respect for Loretta and her unshakable belief in experiences that would strike many as too bizarre to be credible.
But Loretta was a convent school product who never shed her fascination with stories about the saints, true or apocryphal—especially those about their miracles and martyrdoms. Taught by the nuns that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians,” Loretta learned that, according to tradition (a phrase rarely used in her day): St. Peter was crucified upside down; Cecilia was beheaded after she survived suffocation in her bath; Ignatius of Antioch was thrown to the lions; Agatha was dragged over burning coals; Lawrence was roasted to death; and Bartholomew was flayed alive. Loretta must have graduated from convent school convinced that Catholicism was a religion written in blood, which courses liberally through its liturgy, devotions, and feasts: meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ on Good Friday, and commemorative feast days such as The Finding of the Holy Cross (3 May), The Precious Blood of Jesus (1 July), The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary (15 November). Each month of the liturgical calendar has its share of martyrs and their special masses, for example: the beheading of John the Baptist (29 August), the Forty Holy Martyrs (10 March), and the Holy Four Crowned Martyrs (8 November). The nuns had transformed Gretchen Young into the layperson’s equivalent of themselves.
Loretta Young, however, was not Gretchen Young. Gretchen was the private self that Loretta revealed episodically, like a serial: the devout Catholic, patron of unmarried mothers, the actress with the swear box, friend of the clergy. Gretchen never lost her childhood fascination with the miracles in The Greek New Testament, which expanded her imagination into a stage—soon, a sound stage for Loretta—where truth mingled freely, sometimes playfully, with illusion, legend with doctrine, and apocrypha with the canon. Loretta Young was Gretchen’s public self, her persona: film, radio, and television star; glamour queen; Oscar, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner; the exquisite butterfly that men tried to net until they discovered her wings could cut; the canny business executive whose manicured nails could spout claws, if necessary. Gretchen’s first encounter with narrative came from the Bible, which provided ballast for some of the sinkable films that Loretta kept afloat by convincing first herself, and then the audience, that the movie was worth their time. Was the real Loretta the miracle-believing devotee of the Virgin Mary, who had become the equivalent of her role model? Or was she the actress who bore Clark Gable’s daughter out of wedlock and, with the help of her studio, a gossip columnist, and a loyal and well-connected physician, devised a cover-up worthy of a woman’s film? Gretchen was the child who never outgrew convent school; Loretta was the actress, who, finally at seventy-four, revealed that Gretchen would always be a part of her.
She did so in the interview that she gave Gregory Speck in 1987, in which she rhapsodized about Pope Pius XII, Padre Pio, and Teresa Neuman. She also spoke with the utmost candor about sex. Loretta was forty-three when she separated from Lewis. She did not remarry until 1993, when she was eighty and Lewis had been dead for five years: “I must say that for the first ten years I thought I would go crazy. It was very difficult going without sex. And you never lose that need until you die.” Loretta felt the same need, perhaps even more strongly, when she was in her early twenties and on location with Clark Gable for The Call of the Wild. Inevitably, Speck broached the subject of Gable, to which Loretta replied more honestly than she had ever done before: “One could very easily fall in love with him, and if we did it was nobody’s business but ours and clearly nothing to discuss, for he was married.… I will confess I love the idea of Clark and me falling in love and having Judy. I have to admit it’s really a charming idea, very romantic.” It was more than an idea, as Judy revealed and as Loretta confirmed shortly before her death.
Speck had a much higher regard for Loretta at the end of the interview than he did at the beginning, when he was greeted by a woman in her early seventies, swathed in green silk to match her eyes, with a rope of beads dangling from her long neck—as if, like Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, she was ready for her close up. He left, realizing that what he saw was an eidolon, an image that emanated from the actress to the camera—or, in this case, to the interviewer. Although he did not share Loretta’s religious convictions, he understood from the look on her transfigured face, that she believed every word she uttered about the pope, the stigmatists, and the miraculous. He heard Gretchen speaking through Loretta, the fervent believer in signs and wonders decked out like a movie queen.
The 1957 trip to Europe was one of Loretta’s defining moments. Whatever transpired between Loretta and the pontiff, or Padre Pio and Teresa Neuman, was too private to divulge. But it is clear that Loretta was spiritually rejuvenated and ready to embark on a mission to prove that miracles come in various forms, including the spiritual kind that scientists would dismiss for lack of proof, because they have no access to another’s inner self—much less to a divine plan.
The year 1958 marked the Lourdes centennial, commemorating the apparition of the Virgin to Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes in 1858. The waters that sprang forth from the earth formed a pool, where millions have come, hoping to be cured of chronic ailments or terminal illness. Unusual cures, perhaps even miraculous ones, have been reported. But the real drama, the human drama, did not lie in miracles, the equivalent of deus ex machina endings, but in nonmiracles—or rather miracles of a different sort—the serenity that comes with the acceptance of the ultimate reality, particularly from someone who had treated mortality lightly until, quite by accident, she came to Lourdes.
This was the kind of script Loretta wanted: an hour-long teleplay, a first for her show, about a converted agnostic.
In summer 1959, Loretta and her
television crew flew to France for on-location filming. Richard Morris had written the kind of script she requested: a philanderer’s wife, aware of her husband’s dalliances with secretaries, but choosing to ignore them, books a flight to Paris for a second opinion about her diagnosis of brain cancer, only to hear a French neurologist confirm that she has an inoperable tumor. When cognac and painkillers prove to be only stopgap measures, she rents a car and heads for Spain, meeting on route a boy, who persuades her to visit Lourdes. The Lourdes sequences are impressive in their documentary simplicity, with the infirm in wheel chairs, stretchers, and mobile beds, lined up in rows, waiting to be brought to the pool. Lourdes transforms the woman from a denier to a believer; she accepts the inevitable with a newly found serenity. The miracle of Lourdes is not that the character became cancerfree, but that she became free of cancer and the fear that it engendered, which she tried to banish with alcohol.
The Polish-born Rudolph Maté was Loretta’s personal choice for director. He had directed an earlier woman-with-terminal cancer picture, No Sad Songs for Me (1950), with great sensitivity, which he also revealed in the one film he and Loretta made together, Paula (1952), in addition to a number of her television shows. Maté could also take material that another director would have reduced to treacle and treat it with respect, as he did in Sally and St. Anne (1952), in which Ann Blyth’s devotion to the saint had a disarming sincerity about it. Shooting on location posed no problem for Maté, who had proven in D.O.A. (1950) that he could deal with a gritty urban landscape—specifically, the dark streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco—without prettifying it. Under his direction, Loretta gave an extraordinary performance, revealing each facet of the character: the wealthy wife of a cheating husband who hides her humiliation behind a stoic façade; the terminal cancer patient who confronts mortality by drinking her way into the safety zone of denial; the second opinion seeker who jets across the Atlantic to Paris, only to receive a confirmation of the original diagnosis; the doubter who turns believer after being sidetracked to Lourdes. The role allowed Loretta to shed the veils of self-deception in which the character had wrapped herself. One scene in particular attests to the subtlety of which she was capable (and which critics so often ignored). Drinking one cognac after another in a bistro, she piles the glasses on top of each other as she flirts with the non-English- speaking bartender across the glass façade that she has erected. Beckoning to him to join her, she at first seems to be taking advantage of his inability to understand English. But when she realizes that, from his point of view, there is no language barrier if all she wants is sex, she merely wags her finger, signaling that a drinking companion, not a one-night stand, is all she is seeking. Richard Morris’s script enabled Loretta to trace a real character arc, as a skeptic gradually becomes a believer, achieving a spiritual transformation that she does not fully understand but that is visible in her face, which is finally at peace.
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