Hollywood Madonna (10 page)

In addition to Wellman, the other director of note with whom she worked during her last year at Warner’s was the German-born Wilhelm, later, William, Dieterle, with whom she made two films. They would team up again in 1948, but at another studio, Paramount, for
The Accused
. Dieterle, with his white gloves and riding crop, tended to single out one of the featured players, generally a novice, for criticism bordering on harassment. He steered clear of the stars, either because they were seasoned performers or because he knew they would not tolerate such behavior.

The Devil’s in Love
(1933) is more revelatory of Dieterle’s ability as a director than Loretta’s as an actress. If the misleading title attracted moviegoers expecting a steamy love story, they saw instead an imaginatively made film set in North Africa, where a French doctor, André Morand (Victor Jory), selflessly tends to the wounded, including a sadistic major who belittles his subordinates, including Salazar (J. Carrol Naish, Hollywood’s ethnic specialist). When Morand is falsely accused of the major’s murder, he escapes with the help of his boyhood friend, Jean Fabien (David Manners), to a port city, where he practices medicine under an assumed name, favoring the needy over the privileged. A friar prevails upon Morand, who, in another age would have belonged to “Doctors without Borders,” to volunteer at his mission, where he meets and falls in love with Margot (Loretta), the friar’s niece and Jean’s fiancée. For the trio to become a duo, one of the men has to die.
The Devil’s in Love
could end either way, particularly since Manners exudes more sex appeal than Jory, the better actor. Appearances are deceiving, and the ending does not disappoint. Truth triumphs, Salazar confesses to the murder, and Jean dies in battle, freeing Margot for Morand.

There have been better desert dramas than
The Devil’s In Love
, such as
Under Two Flags
,
Beau Geste
, and
Gunga Din
. But the chief reasons the film is worth viewing are Dieterle’s direction and Hal Mohr’s poetic photography. Because Dieterle understood German expressionism, he was able to modify it for American consumption, purging it of its excesses and leaving in its place a monochrome palette, with subtle gradations of black and white. Photographed in the evening, Loretta did not so much look backlit as moonlit. The nighttime insurgency, with a disproportionate distribution of light and shadow—the only light sources being torches, the moon, and the natives’ white robes—and the rebels on horseback, streaming over the sand as if they were riding the waves, was so breathtaking that one ceases to care whether Morand will be exonerated and marry Margot. Dieterle knew audiences expected the insurgency to be
crushed, as indeed it was. But in the movies defeat can be ignominious or glorious. Here, the rebels do not so much die as make a graceful exit into another realm. A director can only achieve such visual poetry with the help of a sympathetic cinematographer, like Mohr, who also seems to have heard the siren call of the desert and to have responded with as much mystery as the budget allowed—which was enough to make the dark of the moon more romantic than ominous.

Dieterle’s
Grand Slam
(1933) was a “triumph of the underdog” movie, set in the world of contract bridge, portrayed as if it had replaced baseball as the national pastime. One could get that impression from the tournament headlines that blazed across the screen, as families huddled around the radio to hear whether Stanislavky (Paul Lucas) would beat Van Dorn (Ferdinand Gottschalk) to regain his title as bridge champion. Since both share a lower middle class background, they would seem to have come up the hard way. The difference is that Stanislavky never denied his origins, while Van Dorn buried his. When Stanislavky publishes a book on contract bridge (which was ghost written), he proves, with his wife Marcia (Loretta) as partner, that his book can bring bridge-playing couples closer together. However, a cross-country tour creates such friction between the two of them that the Stanislavsky method seems to be a failure. The marriage is on the verge of deteriorating after the press learns the truth about Stanislavsky’s bestseller. Determined to challenge Van Dorn one last time, Stanislavsky is losing until Marcia sweeps into the room and becomes his partner. Naturally, he wins, the marriage remains intact, the couple give up bridge, and Stanislavsky does what he always wanted to do: He writes political treatises.

Although Lucas was the star, turning on enough continental charm to air out Stanislavsky’s stuffiness, Loretta played Marcia as if she were an experienced bridge player, and she looked enticing in her pre-code décolletage. Capra might have found a heart somewhere in the manipulative script, but Dieterle knew enough about plot templates to follow the rubrics.

Loretta’s last Warner Bros. film,
She Had to Say Yes
(1933), had her playing a “working girl,” Florence, a garment district secretary, expected to entertain buyers by dining and clubbing with them but shopping short of one-night stands, although that caveat was never enforced, as long as the buyer signed the contract. Loretta’s costars were two competent but uncharismatic actors: Regis Toomey, as her supervisor and would-be fiancé, and Lyle Talbot, never intended to be a leading man, as a buyer, who respects Florence until he mistakenly concludes that she is damaged
goods and therefore available. A near rape in a darkened bedroom, with the only light coming from a moonlit window, is averted when the buyer realizes that Florence is not playing hard to get, but only preserving whatever remains of the dignity she has had to sacrifice to entertain buyers without making herself part of the entertainment. Although the role did not call for an elaborate wardrobe, Loretta looked her beatific self, as if she were slouching toward sainthood, needing only a nimbus to encircle her head upon arrival.

Loretta was not sorry to leave Warner’s. Like Coriolanus, she believed there was a world elsewhere, with better roles awaiting her. There were, but not as many as she had hoped.

CHAPTER 7
Darryl Zanuck’s Costume Queen

In 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression, Darryl F. Zanuck resigned as production head at Warner’s. The previous year,
the studio had suffered a net loss
of over $14 million, twice that of the 1931 deficit. Warner’s was not alone;
RKO reported a loss
of almost $4.4 million, and Paramount declared bankruptcy. The studios knew that the only way to survive was to adopt a policy of temporary salary cuts. Although opposed to the decision, Zanuck voluntarily went on half salary. Even after Price Waterhouse and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed that salary reductions were no longer necessary, Harry Warner continued enforcing the policy. As president, Harry held the purse strings. Rather than renege on his promise that everyone’s salary would return to what it had been, Zanuck left. It was time, anyway. Zanuck was meant to give orders, not take them.

If any of the 15 million unemployed Americans learned that, on 15 April 1933, a movie executive left his $5,000-a-week job at one studio to move to another that had just started up, he or she would have wondered if Zanuck were living in a utopia where there were no bank runs, foreclosures, breadlines, rioting farmers, store windows smashed in frustration, lootings, school closings, and suspension or curtailment of garbage collections. Didn’t he have faith in the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been inaugurated less than a month earlier? Zanuck had faith in himself. In terms of religion he was atypical of the movie moguls. He was not born in eastern or central Europe, or even New York, but in Wahoo, Nebraska, to parents with Swiss and British roots. Zanuck was a Christian in an industry founded by Jewish immigrants or their sons. When he formed Twentieth Century-Fox in 1935, the amalgamation of the Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century, it was nicknamed the “Goy Studio.”

Zanuck had no dearth of offers after leaving Warner’s. Columbia beckoned, but he would be facing the same problem he just left: two brothers, Jack Cohn in the New York office, and Harry in Los Angeles. And then there was the location: Gower Street, in the shadow of Poverty Row. Jack Cohn would have been easier to deal with than Harry Warner, but Harry Cohn could not brook a superior; he was president and production head. Exactly what Zanuck’s title would have been is another matter. Executive producer, perhaps. Titles would not have mattered to Harry; he ran the show.

By now, Zanuck had changed jobs more often than some countries changed boundaries. At seven he was a movie extra; at fourteen, an underage army recruit; then a writer for the pulps; a gag writer for Charlie Chaplin; a short story writer; and a screenwriter who did not think it was beneath his dignity to write for Lassie’s predecessor, the canine star Rin-Tin-Tin. In 1933, Zanuck knew he was one of the haves and would not suffer the fate of the have-nots. When MGM’s production head, Louis Mayer, wanted to find a place for his son-in-law, William Goetz, later a distinguished producer (but not as famous as Mayer’s other son-in-law, David Selznick), Mayer and Joseph Schenck of United Artists joined forces
to create a new studio, Twentieth Century
, with Goetz owning one-third of the stock, and Zanuck serving as vice president for production.

Zanuck needed talent. Even then, he was thinking of his own studio, not Twentieth Century, even though Joe Schenck was an improvement over the brothers Warner. He wanted contract players, recognizable names. Zanuck was well aware of Loretta. As one familiar with stars both in their ascendancy and their decline, he knew Loretta was destined for the firmament. Any producer would have been impressed by her work in
Platinum Blonde
,
Man’s Castle
, and
Midnight Mary
. Zanuck also knew she was studio-shopping and therefore available. What Loretta did not know is that Zanuck thought of her as an actress who could shuttle between the ordinary and the exotic—a course she had run for the past five years. At Twentieth Century, it was more of the same, but the schedule was less hectic, the productions costlier, the costumes more elaborate, and the scripts, for the most part, more literate—as one might expect from Zanuck, a published author and occasional pseudonymous screenwriter. The problem was the leading men, many of whom (e.g., Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, even Don Ameche) stole the spotlight from her.

Her first year at Twentieth Century seemed no different from her last year at Warner’s, except that instead of nine movies in one year, she only made five, none of which tarnished or enhanced her reputation.
Zanuck—hoping to cash in on the popularity of the “tough dame” movie (e.g., the Barbara Stanwyck films,
Ten Cents a Dance
,
Ladies of Leisure
, and
Baby Face
), and perhaps inspired by the offbeat casting of Loretta in
Midnight Mary
—thought she would be a natural for the lead in
Born to Be Bad
(1934). Loretta’s character, Letty Strong, was an unwed mother with an incorrigible son she is raising to be a survivor like herself, even if it means conning, finagling, and stealing. Despite the presence of Cary Grant who, compared to Loretta, was a newcomer (he made his first movie in 1932),
Born to be Bad
was the kind of film in which “bad” was applicable to both Letty and the film. Loretta was mired in an impossible role, in which the character alternates between neurotic possessiveness and motherly gush. The problem is the bratty son, who should have been sent to reform school, so his mother could ply her trade, flirting and teasing to get her way—and steering the script in another direction. But smother love wins out over promiscuity, and the son’s fate becomes more important than Letty’s, even though, dramatically, it is of little interest.

When the boy is slightly injured by a dairy truck, Letty, with the help of a wily lawyer, turns the incident into a major accident that has impaired his ability to think and walk. When the defendant company provides evidence that the boy is mobile enough to jump down steps, Letty is judged morally unqualified to raise her son, who is then sent to an orphanage. At this point, the script turns sappy: Grant proposes to adopt the boy because he and his wife cannot have children, offering him a dream life that the boy sneeringly rejects. Letty, the professional mother, still wants him back and even crashes a party, dragging Grant onto the dance floor and pressing against him so tightly that they seem to be lovers.

What happens next makes verisimilitude seem like an academic artifact. Letty spends the night with Grant, who then confesses his infidelity to his wife. For no apparent reason; other than to resolve the plot, Letty has a change of heart and leaves the couple to patch up their tattered marriage, while she returns to her old job in a book store—and presumably begins a new life. Even at Warner’s, Loretta was never saddled with such a script. Except when she turned shrill at any attempt to separate Letty from her son, Loretta knew exactly how to play the role: coy, when required; seductive, when necessary; and maternal, when warranted. In the early scenes, she looks as if she were “on the town”—glamorous, inviting, and available. But Letty is also a tough dame, who uses her classy wardrobe as bait for unsuspecting males so she can provide a comfortable life for her son. The problem was that the son does not deserve it.
But that did not prevent Loretta from playing the role as if he merited the moon. Lowell Sherman, who directed the Mae West classic
She Done Him Wrong
(1933), also costarring Grant, could do nothing with
Born to be Bad
, except shoot it. The film was atypical of what Loretta would be offered at Twentieth Century. Her other films received more elaborate productions, but never measured up to what she had expected. Understandably, her tenure at Fox would be brief, lasting from 1934 to 1939, with three return engagements.

The most interesting of Loretta’s 1934 films was not
The House of Rothschild
, but
Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back
, in which she plays the proverbial damsel in distress to the true star, Ronald Colman, as the former British army officer turned adventurer and amateur sleuth. Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond first appeared in 1920 as a series character in the novels of “Sapper” (H. C. McNeile), which inspired a similar series of films, lasting from 1922 to 1971. There were various movie Drummonds (Ray Milland, John Howard, Ron Randell, and even Walter Pidgeon and Ralph Richardson), but the actor who captured the suavity and worldliness of Sapper’s Drummond was Ronald Colman. His devilish urbanity was even reflected in his eyes, which looked amused by all the plot twists, never mocking them but simply treating the preposterous goings on as a parlor—or rather, drawing room—game.