Hollywood Madonna

by Bernard F. Dick

  Loretta may have toyed with the dark side, but, to her, brightness was all. So was her television legacy. Accepting the debacle of The New Loretta Young Show as an ill-conceived bid for sitcom fame, she was determined that its failure would not undermine her pioneer work in anthology television. Apart from her Emmys, Emmy nominations, and Golden Globes, The Loretta Young Show could rest on its laurels. It was in syndication, both in the States and abroad in thirty-three countries, including Syria, Thailand, Cyprus, Brazil, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. As long as the series remained in syndication, NBC had to honor the terms of her contract, one of which required the deletion of her entrance/welcome and her mini-sermon sign offs, which were abbreviated fashion shows, with wardrobe and hairstyle changing from episode to episode, but always reflecting the styles of the era. Since the series ended in 1961, Loretta did not want to be seen a decade later in anything that had become passé. Her character’s costumes were another matter; they were determined by the script. But the entrances and exits were Loretta’s way of acknowledging her designers and supplying women with a dream wardrobe that, if nothing else, would make them envious enough to tune in every Sunday night. When NBC failed to eliminate the entrances and exits for foreign syndication, Loretta sued for $1.3 million, including payment for the opening and closing segments. NBC countered, insisting that the accountant, Robert Shewalter, had granted the network oral permission. Although Shewalter was subpoenaed and was in attendance, he was never called to testify. Instead, the litigious footage was shown in the courtroom. A year later, the breach-of-contract suit was resolved in Loretta’s favor. She did not get $1.3 million, but $559,000 was not bad take-home money.

  One would like to believe that audiences worldwide assumed that Loretta’s choice of wardrobe was partially dictated by trends, but more by her instinct for choosing outfits consistent with her image. Fashion can transcend time. The creations of Adrian, Travis Banton, Edith Head, and Jean Louis that adorned the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age can still awe in their unerring ability to capture period, style, and mood, so that when they are seen, even in the twenty-first century, they are timeless, bridging the years between their era and the viewer’s. It is the same with television: When a show goes off the air, it moves into history, where it plays a role, however slight, in the development of the medium, studied in depth or relegated to a footnote. To call any show “dated” is to ignore the age in which it is set and the ethos it reflects. Perhaps some of Loretta’s costumes seemed quaint, but they suited her hostess image.

  In America, viewers seemed less tolerant of the settlement. The Los Angeles Times ran a series of letters that were highly critical of Loretta: “I would like to know what Miss Young … is going to do with her $559,000—buy new clothes?”; “Did my tax money pay for her jury?”; “I hope that NBC fights to the last penny to get a reversal.”; “Loretta underestimates the intelligence of TV viewers.” Only one writer expressed sympathy: “NBC shouldn’t have made the contract unless it intended to honor it.” Loretta may have underestimated the intelligence of her viewers. One can hardly imagine Cyprians, Syrians, or New Zealanders scoffing at her costumes—although maybe at her choreographed entrance.

  Since Loretta had programmed herself into a litigious mode, she was even ready to take on her old studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, when she discovered that it planned to use a clip from The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) in Myra Breckinridge (1970), the execrable film version of Gore Vidal’s brilliantly satiric novel. In the film, which was midway between sleaze and low camp, a shot from a film from the past would be edited into a scene for no other purpose than to elicit a cheap laugh. Someone at Fox had selected a shot from The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, in which Loretta dreamily beseeched Don Ameche, “Don’t move. Don’t even breathe. I want to remember this moment all my life,” to be intercut with Myra’s rape of Rusty with a dildo. When Loretta learned about the context, she was furious. Claiming that the film “depicts unnatural sex acts,” she filed for an injunction against the studio, threatening a $10 million lawsuit. Loretta prevailed; she had spent too much time and money creating her image, and had no intention of seeing it sullied. Instead, the victim was the minor Laurel and Hardy film, Great Guns (1941), in which the rape was juxtaposed with a shot of Sheila Ryan cheering lustily.

  Until an offer she could not refuse came her way, Loretta occupied herself with other activities after the failure of The New Loretta Young Show. She spent almost two years traveling around the world. Upon her return, she hit the lecture circuit. The subject? “The subject is me …. What else do I know about?” Loretta knew more than she let on—until it was time for a press release. That she understood fashion was evident to anyone who watched her show. Loretta did not wear a wedding gown when she married Tom Lewis in 1940; it would not have been appropriate for a woman who had been previously married, as the teenage Loretta had been to Grant Withers. But bridal gowns fascinated her, and in 1968, she joined Bridal Showcase International, even allowing her name and photo to be used. Bridal Showcase was a bridal salon franchise and thus not quite so manageable as an autonomous company. Loretta came on board in March 1968; by the end of August, she had resigned, claiming that the company did not measure up to her standards. According to the Wall St. Journal (30 August 1968), Bridal Showcase felt otherwise: Loretta’s lack of retail experience, the company claimed, did not equip her for the task. Four years later, she was on the verge of launching a cosmetics line, but nothing came of that, either.

  For someone with a work ethic, Loretta found little comfort in retirement. If there were gold in the golden years, she had yet to mine it. Loretta became restless, searching for projects but never finding one that would bring either the success or fulfillment she was seeking. She did not despair; in fact, her faith grew stronger. Her piety may have struck scoffers as incipient senility, yet it was not all that different from the spirituality of her youth—except that it had acquired a mystical cast. Churches took on a special aura for her, as if the Holy Spirit brooded over them. She was fond of quoting a childlike prayer, perhaps one she composed herself: “Each time I pass a church / I stop in for a visit. / Comes the day they wheel me in, / the Lord won’t say: ‘Who is it?’” Once a week Loretta volunteered at hospitals, where she read to patients, who must have felt that they were blessed with a heavenly visitation. On Sundays, she often accompanied a priest friend to Los Angeles’s then seedy Skid Row, where he ministered to homeless women, many of whom gravitated to her and felt better about themselves after being in her presence.

  But not everyone was impressed by Loretta’s religious fervor. When one of Joan Crawford’s backgammon partners dropped by her New York condo during a snowstorm and, exhausted, sank down on an antique chair, Crawford snapped, “Oh! Don’t sit there! Gretchen just sat there and she left the shape of the cross.” It is interesting that Crawford referred to Loretta as “Gretchen.” But as she moved into her sixties, Loretta became more like Gretchen and less like Loretta. Loretta Young was one of the wealthiest women in Hollywood, having made some sound investments in real estate, including the elegant Beverly Wilshire Hotel, when Hernando Courtright purchased it for $6 million in 1961. Twenty-five years later, Regent International Hotels bought it from Courtright for $125 million, making the other investors, including Kirk Douglas and Irene Dunne, richer than they were before. Loretta was a woman of wealth, but money without good works does not guarantee salvation. She was determined that the Lord would not ask, “Who is it?” when her casket was brought into the church. To Loretta, even acting was a prayer, a form of repaying God for what had been given her: “God gave me this face … and I’ve made a lot of money with it. I should be grateful and I am.”

  If Loretta were living in 2007, she also would have been grateful to her son Christopher and his wife Linda when the DVD, The Road to Lourdes and Other Miracles of Faith (VCI Entertainment) was released in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Virgin’s apparitions to Bernadette. In addition to Th
e Road, the disc included the three Sister Ann episodes from The Loretta Young Show, Christopher Lewis’s description of the making of The Road, and Linda Lewis’s account of the Lourdes miracles. Christopher, relaxed and clearly proud of his mother, emerged as a born storyteller, leaving the viewer with a renewed respect for both mother and son.

  Loretta went back to her familiar routine, performing acts of mercy and collecting awards. In April 1981, she was honored with a career retrospective at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (FILMEX). She had not lost the art of making an entrance. Wearing a sheath dress, her neck bedecked with pearls, Loretta assumed a regal pose in a director’s chair. No director ever looked like Loretta. Even as sixty-seven, Loretta was “cherce,” as Spencer Tracy called Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (1942). Loretta was “cherce” personified, charming her audience as she recounted highlights from her career: Herbert Brenon throwing a chair at her during the filming of Laugh, Clown, Laugh; feuding with Darryl Zanuck; winning an unexpected Oscar for The Farmer’s Daughter; and making her four favorite films: The Farmer’s Daughter, Rachel and the Stranger, Come to the Stable, and, surprisingly, The Men in Her Life (perhaps included because of the discipline it required of the then twenty-seven old actress to give a convincing portrayal of a ballerina).

  In 1987, she was given the Golda Meir award. Although Golda Meir had been an Israeli prime minister, Loretta was not singled out for her support of Israel but, according to Variety (15 May 1997), for her dedication to human values such as working with the homeless and volunteering at veterans’ hospitals. The following year she was one of six recipients of the Women in Film’s Crystal Awards, and she received a standing ovation when she was introduced at the awards ceremony. Loretta echoed what some of the other honorees admitted, addressing the paucity of women in high places and the difficulties aspiring female executives faced when they tried to break through the glass ceiling in a male-dominated business, whose motto seems to have been “Separate and unequal.” Recalling the Hollywood of her day, Loretta described a business in which, “[O]ther than actresses, there was the script girl, a wardrobe girl, maybe a stand-in …. There was one female editor back then, Margaret Booth.”

  Actually, there were other editors, although none as well known as MGM’s Booth. Ten of the sixteen feature films directed by Dorothy Arzner, who managed to break through the glass ceiling and land behind the camera, were edited by women: Doris Drought (Manhattan Cocktail), Verna Willis (Sarah and Son), Jane Lorring (Anybody’s Woman, Working Girls, Merrily We Go to Hell, Christopher Strong), Helen Turner (Honor Among Lovers), Viola Lawrence (Craig’s Wife, First Comes Courage), and Adrienne Fazan (The Bride Wore Red). Loretta apparently forgot that Viola Lawrence, who joined Columbia in 1933, edited two of her films, The Doctor Takes a Wife and He Stayed for Breakfast. Like all film editors, Lawrence cut both B movies and classics, including Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Yet another female editor who may not have been as famous as Margaret Booth was Darryl Zanuck’s favorite: Barbara McLean, who won an Oscar for editing a movie that meant more to Zanuck than it did to audiences: Wilson (1944). It’s difficult to imagine Loretta’s not being aware of McLean while she was at Fox. McLean edited three of her films, The House of Rothschild, Love Under Fire, and Suez, as well as some of Fox’s biggest hits, such as In Old Chicago (1938), The Rains Came (1938), Jesse James (1939), and the multi-Oscar winner (best picture, supporting actor, director, screenplay, sound recording, and costume design), All About Eve (1950). During the studio years, women were well represented in the editing room, the closest most of them ever got to the executive suite.

  Loretta adhered to the theme of the evening: the progress women made in the Hollywood boys club, concentrating on the absence of women in key positions during her tenure. Still, she could not resist giving a homily. Noting the strides women had made since her day, she went into uplift mode: “You bring your sensitivity, intuition and spirit in wanting to create and inspire and educate. Knowingly or unknowingly, you put that in the films you do.” That was nothing compared to the homily she delivered three weeks later at the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), an organization devoted to promoting racial and religious harmony. Loretta arrived in a wheelchair because of a leg injury, but when Sidney Poitier, who was hosting the event, introduced her, she rose and walked to the podium, which became her pulpit. She acknowledged Christianity’s Jewish roots, noting that the religions are “braided, interwoven, intertwined—and never to be separated.” She was sincere when she called Christianity a “demanding” religion, but then added: “I don’t think I could live one day more—not one day more—without it.” She ended with a rousing peroration: “So tonight I boldly and unhesitatingly beg God to bless all of us in all of our efforts and everything that you’re trying to do for Him—all of us, all of His children, all over the world.”

  Loretta’s zeal may have struck some as a bid for the title of Our Lady of Hollywood, yet she was as sincere as any missionary who believed that the age of the apostles had not ended, but had evolved into the age of the personal apostolate, in which the individual embarks on his or her own crusade, promoting and defending the faith, whatever it may be. For Loretta, faith was not so much Christian as Catholic, her brand. To Loretta, Catholicism was the true faith, just as the cross the Emperor Constantine’s mother, Helena, discovered in Jerusalem in the fourth century (said to be the cross on which Christ was crucified) was known as the true cross. Loretta knew that some scoffed at her commitment to the Church, regarding it as self-canonization, yet whenever she spoke of religion, it was with such conviction that even the most jaded interviewers did not question her belief, even if they could not comprehend the spiritual depths from which it came. Ten years before she died, Loretta, then seventy-eight, spoke philosophically about her religion, which—demanding as it is—establishes limits within which we must live our lives, and beyond which we should not venture: “My belief in God is the main thing …. Religion gives us strength. It tells us how far we can and cannot go …. Take the qualities you have and build on them and pray to find out what God wants of you. Oh, I know some people think I’m a prude. ‘Holier than thou Loretta,’ they say …. Well, that’s their business. Me? I believe in establishing limits and setting standards, because you can’t be happy without them. And I’m happy!” To Loretta, happiness, faith, and prayer were all interconnected. She had much for which to be happy: financial security, and a distinguished career that might have been aborted if Hollywood had not closed ranks and protected her from newshounds and moralists after she bore Judy. Loretta would have argued that her conspirators were really God’s emissaries, carrying out a divinely ordained mission on behalf of a repentant sinner, whose faith saved her from the crucifying press. Loretta understood that her transgression caused her to transcend the boundaries set by her religion and career and deviate from their standards. She vowed that she would never again wander into enemy territory.

  The 1980s were especially meaningful to Loretta, not just because she was lavished with honors and awards, but because of her triumphant return to television on 22 December 1986 in Christmas Eve on NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies. Her television career had come full-circle, beginning and ending at NBC—not in a half-hour series but in two two-hour films. Christmas Eve could easily have been a tear-duct opener—had it not been for Blanche Hanalis’s script with its honest sentimentality, and Stuart Cooper’s direction that observed the line of demarcation between poignancy and emotional manipulation. It is easy to understand Loretta’s attraction to the script. The character, Amanda Kingsley, was very much like Loretta: a woman of enormous wealth who goes out with her Jeeves-like butler (Trevor Howard) on nightly forays to dispense money, food, and encouragement to the homeless. (They also befriend stray cats and bring them back for rehabilitation.) Learning that she has an inoperable aneurysm, Amanda makes use of what little time she has to locate her three g
randchildren, who became so estranged from their coldly indifferent father (Arthur Hill) that they left home without forwarding addresses. Determined to have them back for what might be her last Christmas Eve, Amanda hires a private investigator (Ron Leibman, in a beautifully understated performance) to locate them, enabling Hanalis to intercut the New York sequences with the investigator’s trips to Nashville, Los Angeles, and Toronto to track them down.

  Hanalis was not an arbitrary choice. She had written the screenplays for The Trouble with Angels (1966) and its sequel, Where Angels Go…Trouble Follows (1968). Loretta’s fascination with angels was not the reason for signing on to Christmas Eve; the “angels” in the two movies were rambunctious girls in a convent school. The reason was the films themselves, which were informed by a Catholic sensibility. While Catholicism was not a theme in Christmas Eve, Loretta’s character was the embodiment of the perfect Christian, as she went about performing spiritual and corporal works of mercy. Loretta was totally believable as a benefactor of the underclass; but so was Leibman, who made the character’s investigative technique—a combination of deduction and networking—refreshingly credible. That Hanalis handed Loretta and Leibman a script without loopholes or loose ends made it easy for them to flesh out their characters. Although the terminal illness plot does not allow for a misdiagnosis, Christmas Eve is really about the reunion, not Amanda’s aneurysm. We know she will not make a pilgrimage to Lourdes; Loretta had already gone down that route in The Road. Hanalis sustained audience interest by posing three questions: Will the trio arrive in time? Will the son drop his mental incompetency case against his mother? Will the yuletide spirit bring the family together? The script was not entitled “Christmas Eve” for nothing.