Hollywood Madonna (28 page)

Tired of playing the crown prince to the clown king, Wallis moved to Paramount, where he set up his own production company with Joseph Hazen, a lawyer friend from his Warner Bros. days. With the formation of Wallis-Hazen, Inc., which by 1952 would be Hal Wallis Productions, and with backing from Paramount, Wallis began recruiting talent that would form the basis of a repertory company. He fancied himself a “
star
maker,” the title he gave his highly selective autobiography. But his stars could not equal the Warner galaxy that he once had at his disposal. Wallis discovered some promising newcomers, such as Lizabeth Scott, Wendell Corey, Kristine Miller, and Douglas Dick. But, with few exceptions, he failed to find starmaking vehicles for them, even though Dick and Corey delivered standout performances—Dick in
The Searching Wind
(1946) and
The Accused
(1948), and Corey in
The File on Thelma Jordan
(1949) and
The Furies
(1950). Three of his discoveries—Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Charlton Heston—appeared in a few Wallis productions, but defected once they achieved stardom. The films for which they will be remembered—
The Bad and the Beautiful
,
Paths of Glory
,
Lust for Life
(Douglas);
Sweet Smell of Success
,
Elmer Gantry
,
Birdman of Alcatraz
(Lancaster);
The Greatest Show on Earth
,
Touch of Evil
,
Ben Hur
(Heston)—were not Wallis’s. It was not until 1949, when Wallis discovered Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and later Elvis Presley, that he could truly claim to be a starmaker. Most of the others were stars in the making who never made it to the firmament.

Wallis was a regular theatergoer, who found Lancaster and Douglas in short-lived Broadway plays that revealed a talent that could be transferred to the screen. Significantly, some of Wallis’s best films were stage adaptations:
Tovarich
,
Jezebel
,
The Male Animal
,
Watch on the Rhine
,
The Searching Wind
,
Come Back, Little Sheba
,
The Rose Tattoo
,
Summer and Smoke
, and
Becket
. Naturally, quality mattered, but even if the play were not a masterpiece, Wallis would option it if he thought it could work as a film. Samson Raphaelson’s
The Perfect Marriage
, costarring Miriam Hopkins and Victor Jory, had a respectable, but not impressive run during the 1944–45 season. The play had a promising premise, involving a couple on the verge of divorce after ten years of marriage. Wallis thought
The Perfect Marriage
(1946) might be another
Skylark
(1941), which was also based on a Raphaelson comedy about an imperiled marriage. When it came to casting the film, Wallis decided that none of his discoveries had the style for the leads—but Loretta Young and David Niven did.

Wallis knew that Loretta could handle repartee, and Niven could exude a sophistication that moviegoers would not find snobbish. Wallis and Loretta were also not strangers; their relationship had been forged at Warner’s, where Wallis witnessed Loretta’s versatility and later acknowledged her as not just a “star” but also a “friend.” In 1946, Loretta was not a prima donna, nor would she ever be; but she had reached a stage in her career when she could insist, as she did when she signed on for
China
, on a 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (sometimes 5:00 p.m.) schedule. She had to make an exception for Orson Welles when she did
The Stranger
. Loretta’s policy was meant for mortals, not for Welles. She accepted his erratic shooting schedule, even if it meant working past midnight. She had often done so during her apprentice years and now found herself marching to the beat of a drummer whose tempo was like no other’s. Although Loretta
gave her usual professional performance, she could not compete with the boy wonder of Hollywood, who was no longer a boy but would always be a wonder.
The Perfect Marriage
contracts imply
that Niven was the bigger draw (compare his $150,000 for ten weeks, and $15,000 per week thereafter to Loretta’s $100,000 for the same period and $10,000 per week thereafter). The reason, however, was that Niven was under contract to Goldwyn, who determined salary when he loaned the actor out to Paramount.
The Perfect Marriage
turned out to be a twelve-week shoot beginning on 2 January 1946, with Niven and Loretta receiving an additional amount ($30,000 and $20,000, respectively) for additional filming.

Loretta had a genuine flair for sophisticated comedy—as opposed to a flair for comedy as a genre, a characteristic shared by Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, and Claudette Colbert, all of whom were especially adept comediennes. But if Loretta had lines that were elegantly crafted, without sounding sententious or pompous, she could toss them off with aplomb. She was at her best with dialogue that was more parlor than drawing room, more town house than penthouse. Samson Raphaelson was not Philip Barry, but he could write dialogue that, if it did not conjure up the image of cut glass, at least suggested a 60-watt chandelier.

Skylark
was a better play than
The Perfect Marriage
and enjoyed a longer run. Leonard Spiegelgass adapted
The Perfect Marriage
, opening up the single-set play in the interest of realism and moving the action toward a believable conclusion, in which the couple’s fathers, each of whom disliked his child’s choice of spouse, became co-conspirators, pooling their wiles to save the marriage. Wallis assembled an excellent supporting cast: Virginia Field, the “other woman” angling to become Niven’s second wife; Eddie Albert, who has similar designs on Loretta and is already planning to send her ten-year-old daughter to boarding school; and Zazu Pitts, as the maid whose pixilated expression got a laugh with every entrance.

Loretta made one more film for Wallis,
The Accused
(1948), which tested her ability as a serious actress in a way that no other film had.
The Accused
begins with a shot of a car at the edge of desolate cliff, overlooking the Pacific. A woman emerges in a trench coat, clutching a briefcase. She heads for the Freeway, shielding her face from the glare of the headlights. She finally accepts a ride from a truck driver, who drops her at a bus stop. The woman is Dr. Wilma Tuttle, a Los Angeles psychology professor, who has just killed one of her students. In a flashback, the cliff is
revealed as the murder scene, the car, as the student’s, and the motive as self-defense. The flashback also explains why Wilma was with a troubled student at such a lonely place.

Ketti Frings’s screenplay is a model of criminal detection, until the denouement. Academics might quibble about Wilma’s way of dealing with Bill Perry (menacingly played by Douglas Dick), a brilliant but disturbed student who studies her in class, mimicking her mannerisms. Although Perry makes Wilma uneasy, she has no qualms about accepting a ride, as well as a dinner invitation, from him in her naïve belief that she can rehabilitate him. Or is the coolly dispassionate professor intrigued by Perry’s penetrating stare, as if he can see through her emotionally calcified exterior to the unfulfilled woman within? Loretta played Wilma with startling ambivalence, as if dinner with Perry was as much of an adventure as a form of therapy. Perry, however, has other plans. He drives her to the fatal cliff and changes into a tight-fitting bathing suit. Although Wilma is fascinated by the swirling water below and perhaps by the buff Perry, she also suspects his intentions. Loretta now makes it clear that Wilma is alternately attracted to, and repelled by, the libidinous Perry, who pins her down on the back seat of the car, kissing her passionately. The kiss restores the professional virgin to her senses; realizing what comes next, she reaches for the steel bar on the seat and clobbers Perry to death. Anyone hoping Wilma would get away with ridding herself of a creepy kid had more plot to contend with. Perry’s guardian, Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), a San Francisco lawyer, comes looking for his ward but falls for Wilma instead. Police detective Ted Dorgen (Wendell Corey) starts building a case, at first suspecting a lovesick student (Suzanne Dalbert), but finally settling on Wilma, who eventually confesses.

The plot twists and counter twists keep the action from flagging until the courtroom ending, when Ford delivers an impassioned but morally flawed speech to the jury, admitting that Wilma was guilty of concealing evidence out of fear but not of committing homicide. Cummings sounds so persuasive, that, although the film ends before the verdict comes in, audiences assumed that Wilma would not do time for defending herself against a rapist.

Edith Head designed a wardrobe for Loretta that was faithful to her character. At the beginning, she looks like a typical unmarried professor, with hair piled high, sexless suits, and an austerity that keeps her from enjoying the give-and-take of the classroom. To avoid being recognized as the woman on the freeway, Wilma abandons the academic look, morphing into an ultra feminine, even alluring, woman, with hair framing
her face and a wardrobe that few academics could afford. The transformation from uptight professor to woman in love is even reflected in her relaxed classroom manner.

The director, William Dieterle, who with his white hat and gloves behaved like a Prussian general, was known for his habit of subjecting one member of the cast (never a star) to withering criticism, whether it was merited or not. In
The Accused
, the scapegoat was Suzanne Dalbert, and
according to Douglas Dick
and Wallis’s publicity director, Walter Seltzer, Dieterle almost succeeded in breaking her spirit. Loretta had no problem with Dieterle. Wallis was another matter.
She now insisted
on not working after 5:00 p.m. and even refused to do an over-the-shoulder shot favoring her. She and Wallis also disagreed on a variety of issues: stills (“old fashioned”), close-ups, and even the soundtrack. Wallis was unsympathetic, accusing her of taking an “
arbitrary stand
”; when she persisted, he reminded her in no uncertain terms that there were “legal steps” he could take if she continued to be uncooperative. Loretta understood; she was in no position to challenge Wallis. All Loretta wanted was to be recognized as a serious actress, as if that was necessary. But Hollywood has a short memory; in 1948, few remembered her extraordinary performances in
Life Begins
,
Man’s Castle, Platinum Blonde
, and
Midnight Mary
.

Loretta was also briefly reunited with Samuel Goldwyn, for whom she had last worked in 1930, when she replaced Constance Cummings in
The Devil to Pay
, which was not a happy experience for either party. At seventeen, Loretta had been out of her element, unable to master a British accent and still in awe of the star, Ronald Colman, who had been one of her fantasy lovers. Since Goldwyn disliked both
The Devil to Pay
and Loretta’s performance, he had no intention of rehiring her, even though he must have known that she had improved considerably since 1930. Goldwyn desperately wanted Teresa Wright for
The Bishop’s Wife
(1947). He had a great affection for Wright, whom he considered one of his protégées. Wright made her film debut in his production of Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes
(1941), for which she received a best supporting actress nomination. The following year she was nominated again—but as best actress—for another Goldwyn film,
Pride of the Yankees
(1942). However, the movie that brought Wright an Oscar was not one of Goldwyn’s; it was MGM’s
Mrs. Miniver
(1942), for which she was voted best supporting actress. In 1946, Wright appeared in one of Hollywood’ s most time-honored films, Goldwyn’s
The Best Years of Our Lives
, which received eight Oscars, including best picture, actor (Fredric March), supporting actor (Harold Russell), director (William Wyler), and screenplay (Robert E.
Sherwood). Teresa Wright was Goldwyn’s first—and, in 1947—his only choice for the title character.

Just before filming began, Wright, then married to author Niven Bush, discovered that she was pregnant. Goldwyn had to find a replacement—and quickly. He needed a “name” who looked as if she could be the wife of an Episcopal bishop. And who could better fill the bill than Loretta? David Niven and Cary Grant had already been cast as the bishop and an angel, respectively. Goldwyn recalled that Loretta and Niven worked well together in
Eternally Yours.
When he read that they would be re-teamed in
The Perfect Marriage
, which began filming during the first week of January 1946, he assumed that, once it was finished, Loretta would be available. She was, but not immediately. She had signed on for
The Farmer’s Daughter
at RKO, having no idea that it would result in her one and only Oscar.

Later, when Goldwyn finally met Niven Bush, he berated him for making Wright a mother: “
When you were
fucking Teresa, you were fucking me.” Actually,
The Bishop’s Wife
, despite its title, would have done nothing for Wright’s career. After two forgettable 1947 Paramount films (
The Trouble with Women
and
The Imperfect Lady
), Wright returned to the Goldwyn fold, giving an eloquent performance in
Enchantment
(1948), opposite Niven. At least they costarred once.

Loretta was wasted as Julia Brougham, whose husband’s dream of building a new cathedral could only happen through some form of divine intervention.
The Bishop’s Wife
is one of several post–World War II films suggesting that America was in need of spiritual renewal—if not from the clergy, then from above. In 1946, two films were released with angels in major roles:
A Matter of Life and Death
(also known as
Stairway to Heaven
), and the most famous of all heavenly messenger films,
It’s a Wonderful Life
. The following year,
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
(1941) was remade as
Down to Earth
(1947), a Rita Hayworth musical in which an angel (Edward Everett Horton) and the muse Terpsichore (Hayworth) turned a troubled Broadway show into a hit. There were other films that were intensely spiritual without invoking an angelic presence. Henry Fonda played a priest who risked his life to minister to Mexicans during a time of religious persecution in
The Fugitive
(1947), John’s Ford dark and brooding version of Graham Greene’s
The Power and the Glory
. Frank Sinatra donned a Roman collar for
The Miracle of the Bells
(1948). In
Winter Meeting
(1948), a naval hero (Jim Davis) confesses to a lonely poet (Bette Davis), with whom he has fallen in love, that their relationship must end because he has decided to become a priest. And in
Joan of Arc
(1948),
Ingrid Bergman hears heavenly voices, urging her to help the dauphin, Charles VII, reclaim his throne.