Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “Then there was a period when everything stood still. I had made some fine films, but all the leading men and all the directors were at war and they were not making as many films. So one day I was sent a script of Liliom, which Burgess Meredith wanted to do on the stage. There was the part of Julie, which was the lead, and the part of her friend, a comedy role, not very big. I said, ‘It’s too funny and my English is not good enough to play comedy,’ and I sent back the play. They said, ‘Funny? We wanted you for Julie.’ I met Burgess Meredith at a Thanksgiving party for the first time in 20 years and he’s still laughing about that story.

  “But you know, I could not get the theatre out of my blood. I think they thought I was crazy in Hollywood. I would make a film and on the side I would try to talk people into doing a play. Not many other stars were interested in the theatre, so they couldn’t understand it. But I have to be active. I have to work to be happy. So I talked David Selznick into letting me do Anna Christie, and I played it in three places—Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Maplewood, New Jersey. You couldn’t buy a ticket in any of those towns. Then, when I left Hollywood, I did Hedda Gabler in Paris, then Tea and Sympathy, which was a great success. Robert Anderson was a bit shocked at first, I think, because the sets were different and I was not like Deborah Kerr, but it was a happy time. And two years ago I did A Month in the Country with Michael Redgrave in London. But I hadn’t been on the New York stage since I played Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, 21 years ago at the Alvin Theatre. We ran for 11 months to standing room only every performance and every night a group of kids would gather at the stage door and bring me flowers and write me letters. I called them ‘The Alvin Gang.’ I left the country for 10 years and when I came back for one day to accept the New York Film Critics award for Anastasia I stepped off the plane and there they all were at the airport with a big sign: ‘The Alvin Gang—We Love You!’ It felt wonderful. They are all grown-up people now, with their own families, but for 20 years they have written to me and sent presents to my kids on their birthdays. When I opened this time in More Stately Mansions, there they were outside the theatre, the same kids who once stood every night in the snow. I have the same fans through the years. I have to hold on to a lot of wood”—she knocks her large Swedish knuckles on the bottom of her dainty chair, then spreads her arms and raps the wall—“I’m afraid to say it, but I’ve been fortunate. People do come to see me.”

  Indeed they do. There are so many Bergman fans, in fact, that the lineup for tickets began the morning after the critics thumbed their noses at More Stately Mansions and the influx has been so great ever since that the “This Performance Sold Out” sign never leaves the entrance to the Broadhurst Theatre. But why this play? Why O’Neill? Why a vehicle she knew would never be a commercial success? She tilts her regal head toward the dressing-room mirror, framed in the glass by cold-cream jars and silver-rimmed photo cases containing portraits of her husband, Swedish theatrical producer Lars Schmidt, and warms the room with a smile, talking over the roar of a vacuum cleaner in the early evening stillness. “Because,” she begins, “I had to do it. If I just wanted to do any old play, I could do that in Europe, closer to home, where it’s easier on my husband and children. It had to be something I would regret all my life if I didn’t do. And More Stately Mansions is that play. Usually I have had to fight in films because they made me play either the villain or the good, good girl. This character is both. Also, in this play I play my own age for the very first time.” (She’s 52.)

  “I am the only member of the company who ever met O’Neill personally. The Swedes have always loved his work, you know, that’s why he always gave us his plays to produce first. He was very influenced by our own Strindberg, just as Edward Albee is today, and we loved him for that. We understood him. So when I was playing Anna Christie in San Francisco, I was flattered and excited when his wife Carlotta came backstage and asked me to come home and meet her husband. He lived in a great house on a cliff over the ocean several miles from the city, it was called Tao House, and we drove there for Sunday lunch. He took me up into his study and there were all these plays lying around, plays here and there and everywhere. He told me about his plans to write this saga of an American family, beginning in the 1800’s and ending up in modern times, tracing their ups and downs, their greeds, nastiness, triumphs, everything. He wanted the same group of actors to sign up for all the plays so that he could have the same faces in the same roles. I was fascinated. ‘How many plays?’ I asked. ‘Nine,’ he said. ‘And how long would you want me to sign up for?’ ‘Six years,’ he said. Well, I was under contract to Selznick and I just didn’t have time, so I never did the plays.

  “Years later, when the offer came to me in Europe to do this play, it seemed like O’Neill was calling me again. I felt I owed it to him. The Swedish version lasted four hours and forty-five minutes and in its full play form it reads between five and six hours. When José Quintero came to Europe, I told him I simply did not think we could get Americans to sit still that long. The Swedes will sit through anything as long as it’s O’Neill, but Americans come to the theatre with a couple of martinis under their belts and they just want to be entertained. So he agreed and we got it down to two hours and forty minutes, and every word is still O’Neill’s. It is a difficult play. You must study it as well as I have to realize how much depth it has, but audiences don’t listen to the words so they don’t learn anything. We worked very hard, trying to present to the public something important, and then what do I do but pick up Mr. Clive Barnes in The New York Times and read, in the first phrase of his review, that of all the playwrights in the world, Mr. O’Neill is the most banal. And I nearly dropped dead!”

  And here the anger starts, turning her high Swedish cheekbones into raspberry tarts. “I cannot believe that a man who calls himself a critic could think so little about the greatest playwright America has ever produced, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. I’m mad because it’s so unfair. I’m mad because The New York Times is the only critical opinion that matters in New York and now Mr. Barnes has ruined this play all over Europe, because who will produce it now? I’m mad that just because a sick man says we have not done a finished play, it’s Out! Out Quintero! Out Bergman! Out O’Neill! I am a serious person. I like to be stimulated by theatre, then go home remembering what I’ve seen, not just have a few laughs. I mean, you may have more fun at There’s a Girl in My Soup. I haven’t seen it and I only use that as an example because I think the title is so funny. But I know I wouldn’t have returned to Broadway in a play like that. I would rather return in O’Neill. Isn’t it more interesting to see what a man like O’Neill had in his head, even if it is not one of his best plays? I have no respect for a theatre which ceases to be a forum for the ideas of great men. I would like to see all of O’Neill’s plays performed, whether he wished them performed or not. Now when some critic says we should not have done this play I say that is ridiculous. I would be very unhappy if this play had stayed in a drawer and I think it’s a horrible crime that they burned the others. I am only happy that there was a little angel looking over this one.”

  And now that she’s back, are there any regrets? Any backward glances toward more commercial times? ‘Absolutely not. I do what I want to do. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people like critics were going to say. I have been facing critics of one sort or another all my life. I have a reputation for being a woman of great courage. You can’t be anything without courage. You can’t even be good without the courage to be good.”

  She laughs again, waving her hands, and the flash of anger vanishes in a trail of pale-purple cigarette smoke. The standing-room-only crowd is filing into the theatre and she smiles at the sound. Proving, of course, that she still has what it takes at the box office. And proving, also, that Thomas Wolfe was wrong when he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. Home, they say, is where the hatrack is and, long after the roses wilt and the cameras stop turning and the gl
itter is packed up and locked away in studio wardrobe, there will always be a hatrack in the theatre with Ingrid Bergman’s name on it.

  Myrna Loy

  There’s a wan little smile in Myrna Loy’s voice, no louder than a twig crackling in the autumn wind. From the window of her penthouse overlooking the East River, a soft breeze licks against that famous red Nora Charles hair which has never turned gray, and even now, on a violent big-city afternoon, she brings back the quiet aura of a time when kids fell in love to Dinah Shore records and nice women never took their aprons off until 5 p.m. A portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, inscribed “To Myrna Loy, with my warmest good wishes,” is on a table nearby (“You want my autograph?” Mrs. Roosevelt had asked when Miss Loy made her request). Sitting down in her smart little brown dress, the actress straightens her skirt over her sensible round knees and sips plain club soda over cracked ice. Myrna Loy is a lady. Not one of those phony-elegant “I’m being interviewed” ladies who try not to crack their Touch-and-Glow when reminded of the past, but a “here and now” lady, poised and cool, laughing about yesterday and eager for tomorrow.

  There’s a reason for the visit—a new movie called The April Fools, to open in May. It’s her first film since she played Doris Day’s addled aunt in Midnight Lace in 1960, and she gets it out of the way first. “I did it because it is the only thing I’ve been offered lately where I didn’t have to play an alcoholic or an ax murderess. I love comedy, but when you’re not young enough to play glamour girls any more the comedies are hard to find. So I jumped at the chance to do something gay. I play sort of a modern-day fairy godmother. It’s a strange part, with a sense of magic to it. Jack Lemmon is this successful businessman, married to a woman who is more interested in her house than in him. He’s the typical Thurber man, the Westport commuter. Catherine Deneuve is married to Peter Lawford, an ex-used car salesman who throws parties for the jet set and lives at the UN Plaza. She’s only part of his collection of people. She and Jack meet and go out on the town together one night and run into me in a Greenwich Village discotheque. I’m married to Charles Boyer and we live in this castle in Connecticut and only go out at night because we hate daylight. We stand for the exact opposite of most married people today. We shut out all the destructive elements, all the material values. We’re quite mad, but quite wise.

  “Anway, these two young people see the way we live and they fall in love. It’s very romantic. I have no idea whether it will be any good or not, but at least it’s not a horror film. I hate to see what’s happened to Bette Davis.”

  The new biography of Irving Thalberg by Bob Thomas lies on the coffee table with a bookmark in it. She keeps eyeing it as if she’d love to get back to it. “Have you read it? Oh, everyone’s in it. I’m in it. Thalberg brought me to MGM, but I didn’t know that until years later. He had seen me in one of my Chinese temptress roles, I guess. I played a lot of those, first in silent films and later when sound came in. I didn’t always play perfect wives and mothers, you know. For years I played nothing but wretched women with knives in their teeth.” The smile in her voice is touched with sage. It seems queer, the thought of Teresa Wright’s mother in The Best Years of Our Lives with a knife in her teeth. She puts her forefingers to her eyes and slants the eyelids. Shazam! Instant Anna May Wong. “See? It wasn’t hard. I must have some Mongolian ancestry. Something sneaked in there.”

  Not really. She was born Myrna Williams 64 years ago on a cattle ranch in the Crow Creek Valley of Montana. Real pioneer stock. Her grandfather was a Welsh boy who came to America and started a pony express. Her father was a rancher who served in the Montana legislature. “That’s where I got my interest in politics. He was quite a gourmet for Montana. He used to import cracked crab on ice from Chicago.” Her mother wanted to name her Annabelle, but from a train window her father had once seen a sign with “Myrna” written on it, so she was named after a railroad whistle stop. After her father died in the flu epidemic of 1918, her mother moved her to California where she attended Venice High School. Venice is a slum now, but on the cracked and brown lawn of its old high school a statue still stands of the young Myrna Loy. “One of my teachers made a sculpture of me to represent ‘Aspiration.’ I went back to see it once. My arm had been knocked off. I had been mutilated. Every time the football team came from Santa Monica they’d hang a rubber tire around my neck. It’s a wonder I survived, but I’m still there.”

  She studied dancing and landed in the chorus line at Grauman’s Chinese Theater when she was 17. Rudolph Valentino saw her photo and invited her to test for the lead in something called Cobra. “I went to the studio and met him and his wife Natacha. They were wonderful to me, but I was just a skinny kid with no experience. I didn’t get the part, but I did play some bits in girlie movies. I tested for the Virgin Mary in Ben Hur, but ended up playing an exotic. There were fashions in leading ladies. Mary Pickford was the rage and nobody thought of me as the virgin, I guess. I had these slinky eyes and a sense of humor.” So they changed her name to Loy because it sounded Oriental and for seven years she played nothing but Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Malayan and Hindu sirens, with an occasional quadroon thrown in for luck.

  When sound came in, she had to talk pidgin English to go with the slanty eyes. “Many of the stars fell by the wayside because of their voices. There was no reason for throwing John Gilbert away the way they did. But it was a matter of life and death; either you made it or you didn’t. I finally got fired because they ran out of hussies for me to play. I see the same thing happening today. Young people get miscast and they’re stuck with the wrong images, playing the wrong roles. People are so blind. That girl in Baby Doll, Carroll Baker. She’s a marvelous comedienne, but they never give her a chance.”

  She finally played a Caucasian with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in Love Me Tonight and MGM began to throw her a few sophisticated bones. In 1934 a low-budget “B” flick was organized in 14 days for William Powell. She was to play his wife. It was called The Thin Man and the rest, as they say in the Polo Lounge, is history. “We made that one on a small budget and 21 days of shooting, but it was such a hit we went on for ten years and made five sequels. There isn’t a day of my life that someone doesn’t ask me about the roles of Nick and Nora Charles, about Bill Powell, or about that dog, Asta. He was a wire-haired terrier, and they were not popular at all at the time. His name was really Skippy and he was highly trained to do all of his tricks for a little squeaky mouse and a biscuit. He’d do anything for that reward. But the minute his scenes were over, it was definitely verboten to hug him or have any further contact with him off the set. I don’t see Bill Powell any more. He retired and moved to Palm Springs and you can’t get him out of that air-conditioned house. But we’re great friends and we talk on the telephone.

  “It was really Clark Gable and I who were the ‘King and Queen of the Movies.’ I still have the crown they gave me somewhere. We all had nicknames on the set. Clark called me Queenie, Spencer Tracy was the Iron Duke, and Victor Fleming, who directed all three of us in Test Pilot, was the Monk. We never had a name for Jean Harlow, but she was a very dear friend of mine. I seldom get angry, but that book about her life was a pack of lies. The part about her alcoholic trip to San Francisco was a complete lie; she was with me the whole time. She and Bill Powell were very much in love and when Bill and I went on location to make one of the Thin Man pictures, Jean went along with us. Everyone in America thought Bill and I were married anyway, and when we arrived at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco they had reserved the bridal suite for us. Jean and I moved in there, but there was a convention in town and Bill had to sleep in a pantry. Jean was very tragic and very, very ill, but she was none of the things in that book! I remember she looked very ill in San Francisco. I didn’t like her color and I told Bill. She promised to see a doctor, but she never did. Then when she really became ill with that kidney infection, I told Bill I thought we should get her to a hospital, but by the time she finally got there it was too l
ate.”

  In Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal describes Myrna Loy’s Hollywood image as “the good-sex wife,” but when she tired of the image after all those years, she got into politics. “One morning in 1948 I picked up the paper and read that a vice-president of the American Federation of Labor was calling me a Communist! I sued for a million dollars and he had to retract it all. I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t even left my car parked in front of the wrong person’s house! All I did was have my picture taken with red roses in my arms reading the preamble to the United Nations Charter at a Slav meeting at Carnegie Hall. You could do the most innocent thing and get ruined in those days. So a group of us joined together and fought to abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities.”

  With her name cleared, she moved to Washington and worked actively for UNESCO for five years. She campaigned with Eleanor Roosevelt for Adlai Stevenson and, recently, for Senator Eugene McCarthy. She is a member of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, a loud voice in the fight for civil rights, and, all told, a well-adjusted law-abiding Democrat. The only time she gets testy is when she is asked about her four marriages (one to Mr. Hertz of the rent-a-car world). “Yes,” she mocks, like a child playing Red Rover, then blushes, as though sensing she has bordered on rudeness. Then she adds quietly, “I don’t talk about that.” Perfect wife on screen. Four childless marriages ending in divorce in real life. I can’t blame her.