It was a perfect role for Loretta. At seventy-three, her cheekbones were still clearly defined, and artfully applied makeup erased time’s fingerprints. Having gained ten pounds after breaking her smoking habit, she was less svelte than she had been in her salad days. With hair looking like a swirl of silver, and pastel sheaths flowing down her frame, Loretta appeared to have had a heavenly makeover. Although she had been off the screen for almost a quarter of a century, she was still every inch an actress. She had not lost the art of radiating spirituality, even though she was not playing a nun, just a wealthy liberal with a mission: finding housing for the homeless, including cats. Some of the lines reflected Loretta’s philosophy as much as they did Amanda’s. In the scene in which Amanda tells a dying woman (Kate Reid) that she is a “child of God who loves you dearly,” one could envision Loretta saying the same to a patient in one of the hospitals where she volunteered. When she explains to a group of children how the dove came to symbolize peace, she uses a parable, describing the time a dove alighted on a battlefield, inspiring the combatants to drop their weapons and walk toward each other in a gesture of reconciliation. Significantly, when the Christmas Eve reunion has ended, Amanda notices a dove on her terrace, which then flies off. Amanda is now at peace and ready for what Peter Pan in James M. Barrie’s play (act 3) calls “an awfully big adventure.”
Loretta held her own, despite formidable competition from Trevor Howard, as the quintessential English butler, who could easily have walked off with the film (as John Gielgud did when he played a similar character in Arthur). But like a typical manservant, Maitland knows his place—and it is not in the limelight. Still, it was a rich performance, in addition to one of Howard’s last. Trevor Howard died the following year. The script also made demands on Leibman and Hill. Leibman is not a Hollywood “private eye,” laconic and dispassionate like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. As he meets each of the three grandchildren, he behaves more like a father figure, making them feel slightly guilty for ignoring the grandmother they claim they adore, but never chastising them for their thoughtlessness. Hill had to project a severe rigidity that his children equated with lovelessness. But, again, Christmas Eve can bring about miraculous changes, with the embittered growing mellow and the loveless dispensing love, as the estranged are reconciled and reptilian eyes give way to pools of compassion.
Loretta also had a challenging role. Amanda may have been an affluent matron, dressed like a grand dame at home, but she wears pants and a working class coat when she and Maitland went about performing nocturnal acts of charity. She knew the difference between eccentric and certifiable, making Amanda’s mission more like normal behavior—at least for those with a social conscience. Loretta only made a few films in Technicolor, which was too flamboyant for her delicate features. Color television was more congenial, avoiding the theatricality of a process that called attention to its lush palette. The mellow lighting and the soft colors of the costumes coalesced in a visual style familiar to 1986 viewers, who knew they were not watching a 1940s MGM Technicolor film. Loretta was proud of Christmas Eve: “It took out football on Monday night.” It also won her a Golden Globe for best actress in a television movie.
Lady in a Corner, her next and last NBC Monday movie, was telecast two weeks before Christmas, on 11 December 1989. In many ways, it was a more contemporary film, reflecting the mergermania and corporate takeovers whereby once freestanding companies—networks, newspapers, publishing houses and movie studios—became subsidiaries of corporations. Paramount was engulfed by Gulf + Western in 1966. In 1985, Twentieth Century-Fox became part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which also included the New York Post, HarperCollins, and Basic Books. Time Inc. acquired Warner Communications in 1989, resulting in Time Warner. The same year, Sony bought Columbia Pictures. A year later, another Japanese company, Matsushita, the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer electronic goods, bought MCA, a package that included Universal Pictures, Universal Television, MCA Records, and Universal Tours in Los Angeles and Orlando. And this was just the beginning. Owners would change, subsidiaries would be spun off, and eventually the day would come when even the big three networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, would become cogs in the corporate wheel: NBC in General Electric’s, CBS in Viacom’s, and ABC in Disney’s.
In Lady in a Corner, Grace Guthrie (Loretta), the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine that bears her name, bucks the trend of showing sullen-looking models with arms crossed on bare breasts. She regards such magazines as pornographic. She meets her match when a hotshot editor, Susan Dawson (Lindsay Frost), becomes the anointed of a Rupert Murdoch-like media tycoon (Christopher Neame), who plans to replace Grace with Susan after taking over the magazine. Will the magazine be swallowed up by a ruthless British empire-builder, or will Grace be able to raise enough money from like-minded millionaires to purchase the company herself? If she succeeds, will Grace work with Susan to bring the magazine into the next century without compromising her values? Will Grace and her partner (Brian Keith) legitimize their autumnal romance in marriage? And did Loretta extract a quarter from Keith for the Swear Box when he said “Hell,” as mandated by the script? Again, the show was aired two weeks before Christmas, when media pirates do not hijack decent magazines and turn them into softcore. But it is a time when late-life romances end at the altar, and swear boxes are shelved with other relics of the past. Loretta at least had the satisfaction of knowing that she appeared in a truly contemporary television movie reflecting her own standards of decency, which she assumed were shared by her viewers. But whether the viewers appreciated the intelligence of the script depends on how knowledgeable they were about the corporatization of the media. Probably not too many were. To most of them, it was a Capra upgrade, another individual vs. the establishment movie.
There was nothing simplistic about Lady in a Corner. To survive, a magazine might have to become part of a conglomerate. A magazine must also accommodate the evolving taste of its readers. When The New Yorker, renowned for its sophistication and stylistic elegance, began printing stories with four-letter words, purists were shocked. Yet there was no lowering of standards; the magazine still printed quality fiction, poetry, criticism, and globe-spanning articles. Viewers were not left with the idea that it would be business as usual at Grace magazine. Grace appoints Susan as her successor, and at a staff meeting asks that she sit next to her. Susan declines, choosing to sit opposite her—the young Turk facing the old guard. Is this a face-off or a compromise? Susan sports a triumphant smile, but Grace flashes a wily one. Capitulation or cooperation? Loretta capitulate? Did she ever? Compromise? Every actress does for the sake of the film.
For her final television appearance, Loretta did not look her best. Pants were a mistake; her weight gain left an abdominal bulge and a drooping backside. Suits were no help, either. Sheaths did the trick in Christmas Eve, but she needed a different wardrobe to minimize the extra inches that encircled her waist. And there was also the matter of Loretta’s voice. She seems to have had some kind of dental problem, creasing the sides of her mouth as she spoke, as if she were going to whistle the lines. She did not sound like the old Loretta, but she was still the pro, always in character, particularly at the end when she had to come to terms with a changing readership and name the former editor from Foxy Girl as her successor.
Like Grace Guthrie, Loretta had made peace with the present. She still had more to do as she approached the last decade of her life.
CHAPTER 23
The Last Reel
Early in her career, Loretta was romantically linked with several men, including director Edward Sutherland; actors Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power; a British polo player; and a shady lawyer. All were attracted to her beauty, just as she was to their varying degrees of masculinity: paternal, carnal, androgynous, and protective. Most were older than she; some, significantly so (Gable, twelve years; Tracy, thirteen; Sutherland, eighteen). She and Power were the same age; they would
have made a smashing couple, except that during the Suez shoot (1938), Power discovered the gamine-like Anabella in the supporting cast and married her the following year.
Tom Lewis was another “older” man—eleven years Loretta’s senior, to be exact. It would be simplistic to reduce their courtship to Loretta’s quest for a father figure to compensate for the desertion of John Earle Young. Ironically, his desertion brought Loretta to Los Angeles, where she became a bona fide movie star at fifteen. For someone attuned to the divine will, as Loretta was, Young’s abandoning his family was providential. Eventually, everyone prospered, which would probably not have been the case if he stayed. Conversely, was Lewis contemplating a brilliant marriage to a Hollywood star? Or was he really in love with Gretchen, saving Loretta for his radio, and later television, productions? Loretta and Lewis were in their late twenties and late thirties, respectively, when they married in 1940. Riotous youth had passed, along with the heyday of the blood. Loretta was no longer a teenage fantasist or a moonstruck ingénue, flaunting convention even by Hollywood’s liberal standards and socializing with a married man—much less a married Catholic, like Spencer Tracy. Neither was she reacting to Gable’s erotic instant messaging with her easily decodable body language, which William Wellman and some of the Call of the Wild cast, particularly Jack Oakie, had no trouble deciphering.
Loretta was a poor judge of men. None of her great loves ever lived up to her expectations. What she experienced with Grant Withers was first love, which when it was over left a void in her life that could never be completely filled. Even at seventeen, Loretta seemed to know that once she really fell in love, as she did with Withers, she might be able to love again, but never in the same way. Loretta was sincere when she admitted that she would always love Withers. First love may be evanescent, but it is not forgotten. The passing years and Withers’s suicide may have lessened the intensity of her emotions, but it was still her first encounter with, as Cole Porter put it, “this funny thing called love.” She was seventeen when she eloped with Withers, twenty-seven when she married Tom Lewis. “Love is too young to know what conscience is,” Shakespeare observes in Sonnet 151. At seventeen, Loretta certainly did not know; at twenty-seven, she did. She knew the distinction between first love, infatuation, and conjugal love. She wanted a stable marriage to make up for her own short-lived one and her mother’s two failures.
When Loretta married Lewis, the scenario changed: It was no longer the princess and her betrothed; it was the movie star wife and her radio producer husband, followed by the TV celebrity and her TV producer husband, and ending with the former star and her ex-husband. Undoubtedly, Loretta and Lewis loved each other, but it was not a case of love given unconditionally and selflessly. In 1939, Loretta left Fox despite Zanuck’s threat of blacklisting. She had, she believed, survived worse: l’affaire Gable, the unplanned pregnancy, the subterfuge. But now it was time for a real marriage, a church wedding even though Loretta would not be wearing white. There should be life after Fox, Loretta reasoned, but where? Harry Cohn, who had no love for Zanuck, offered her a haven at Columbia, but after she fulfilled her five-picture commitment there, then what? A couple of movies at one studio, a couple at another? A stable marriage? That she found, temporarily, in Lewis.
Lewis’s pursuit of Loretta was partly motivated by desire but also by his need for her talent—not to mention her contacts—for Screen Guild Theatre, the radio program that he was creating for Young & Rubicam. It was no different when he signed on to Father Peyton’s Family Theatre, or later, when Loretta ventured into television. The network needed an anthology series, the series needed a star, the star needed a producer. Marriage served a dual purpose. Lewis wanted a family and got one; he wanted producer status, and he received it. Loretta’s needs were more complex. If she were to be known as a butterfly, better a rare one with translucent wings, not metallic ones. For a time Loretta was airborne, but as the 1950s approached, the wings began to harden. The star-producer-network relationship began to unravel. Soon it was just the star with a new series, production company, and network.
After her divorce from Lewis, Loretta was rarely seen in the company of eligible men. She was too busy enshrining her image, accepting awards, lecturing, and supporting charities. It was odd, then, to pick up the National Enquirer (24 July 1979) and read the headline: “Loretta Young, 66, and Producer—It Looks Like Love.” The producer was William Frye (then in his early fifties), who had produced, among other films, the two Rosalind Russell vehicles The Trouble with Angels and Where Angels Go … Trouble Follows, both of which were written by Blanche Hanalis. It may well have been Frye who brought Hanalis’s Christmas Eve script to Loretta and encouraged her to star in it. The National Enquirer was known for sensationalizing even the trivial, which seems to have been the case when the couple was spotted on their way to a dinner party. Frye and Loretta may have been holding hands and smiling at each other, but Loretta insisted they were only “very, very good friends.” The friendship continued, but speculation about an upcoming marriage did not. A serious relationship with a younger man would not have been typical of Loretta, who was usually attracted to older ones. In 1979, Frye’s being a Presbyterian would not have been an impediment; if their relationship really became serious, Loretta would have done some serious proselytizing to bring him into the fold—her fold. The age disparity was the real obstacle. “[V]ery, very good friends” was all they could be.
However, a sensational bit of news occurred some fourteen years later when the eighty-year old Loretta married one of her favorite designers, Jean-Louis, five years her senior and far from a father figure. The wedding took place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, the preferred parish of the Hollywood Catholics. The couple had known each other even before The Loretta Young Show, for which Jean Louis designed the gowns for fifty-two of Loretta’s entrances. Loretta insisted that his creations were seductive, but never obscene. That was indeed true; the strapless black satin gown that he designed for Rita Hayworth when she sang “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda (1946) was tastefully sexy—although at the time the question was not how tasteful it was but how Hayworth managed to avoid a wardrobe malfunction while she went through her gyrations. The shimmering gown in which he dressed Marilyn Monroe when she appeared at Madison Square Garden in 1962 to purr “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy was intended to be so form-fitting she had to be sewn into it. Like Loretta, who could reconcile her faith with her profession, Jean Louis saw no disparity between his deep-rooted Catholicism and his creations, even when they raised eyebrows by their suggestiveness (e.g., Marlene Dietrich’s beaded nudecolored gown, which she wore for her Las Vegas debut in 1953). Jean Louis could also design less sensational costumes, as he proved with the stylish ones he created for Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), for which he won his only Oscar.
Loretta and Jean Louis’s was not a late autumn-early winter romance, but more of an early winter-late winter one. Two octogenarians, Loretta and Jean Louis were both in the winter of their lives; the golden years had turned to silver, and sunset was darkening into evening. Loretta’s decision to marry was primarily an act of charity, really a form of love, the greatest of the three virtues, even surpassing faith and hope. It was love that Loretta felt, but of a certain kind: love mingled with compassion. Loretta knew what a staggering loss Jean Louis experienced in 1997 when his beloved wife, Maggy, died. In Jean Louis, Loretta found a man who was content with his own achievements, as she was with hers. Withers fulfilled her romantic longings, however briefly. Tracy could only provide Loretta with fatherly affection that was misinterpreted by a prying press and discouraged by the faith they both practiced. Lewis offered a dual arrangement: a husband-producer who did not feel threatened by her fame until she became a television celebrity with a larger public than she had ever known—and one that she had every intention of retaining regardless of what kind of a turn her health would take. In Jean Louis, she found the companionship
she once had with Tracy, except that now she played the dual role of nurturing mother and ministering wife. She was no longer searching for a surrogate father, but rather a lost soul in need of rehabilitation. Although they only enjoyed four years of marriage, Loretta gave Jean Louis as close a reincarnation of Maggie as he would ever find—in addition to being a wife as fashion-conscious as he was. Visitors marveled at Jean Louis’s attire. He usually looked as if he were wearing one of his creations, which he probably was. With Loretta and Jean Louis, it was both mutual affection and shared taste.
A new marriage, a new address. Loretta was no stranger to relocation; from her childhood on, she was used to a peripatetic existence. Gladys moved the family from one home to another. Loretta was no different; she lived in a variety of homes in Los Angeles, including a ranch in Beverly Hills, a Santa Monica beach house, and a maisonette that Gladys had designed for her in the North Flores apartment complex. However, her most famous residence was the one in Bel-Air designed by Garrett Van Pelt and decorated by Gladys, where Loretta lived in the 1930s and which was showcased in Architectural Digest. It was a ten-room white colonial that featured a dining room with hand-painted wallpaper and some of her mother’s collectibles, such as a lacquered screen from Korea and artifacts from the American Southwest and Mexico. In the living room, ivory settees faced each other on either side of a fireplace. Loretta’s room was a vision in blue and rose: rose chair and rug, wallpaper in rose and ivory. Hers was not an ordinary bed; it was double-canopied with a ruffled bedspread. Dresden figurines imparted a Victorian femininity to the room, which looked as if Christina Rossetti slept there. If any room could define Loretta, it was the Bel-Air bedroom. It was as much of a paradox as she: innocent yet sensuous, childlike yet sophisticated, luxurious yet simple.
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