Hollywood Madonna (3 page)

The received version: In her autobiography, Colleen Moore recalled the time she was making
Her Wild Oat
(1927) at First National. Among the extras, was “
the most beautiful little girl I had
ever seen.” “Little” was not the right word: Loretta was then fourteen. Like Mae Murray, Moore was enchanted by Loretta who, even as a teenager, had the look of a fairy child. Moore arranged for a screen test and was elated with the results. So was First National, but the studio was not happy with Loretta’s teeth, which were too obtrusive. Braces were recommended, to be followed by dental work. But Loretta remained a bit toothy until the early thirties, when her perfectionism—perhaps enhanced by creative dentistry—completed what nature had left unfinished.

Moore, not incidentally, also took credit for the name change: “
I named her
after the most beautiful doll I had ever had: Loretta.” Loretta, who appeared in two films that starred Moore, was unbilled in both. The second was
Naughty but Nice
, released in June 1927, six months before
Her Wild Oat
, which premiered at the end of the year. In all likelihood, the former film made Moore aware of Loretta.

Moore may not have known that shortly after Loretta’s one-day stint in
Naughty but Nice
, she was at Paramount playing a supporting role in
The Magnificent Flirt
, filmed between March 6 and March 27, 1928, but released in June of that year. Loretta’s days as an extra had ended,
as her Paramount salary showed
: She received $633 for three weeks of work. Now billed under the name that Moore had given her, Loretta played Denise Laverne, the daughter of the glamorous Florence Laverne (Florence Vidor), a widow whose flirtatiousness sets the plot in motion: the mother is wooed by a bachelor, the daughter by his nephew. As in a typical boudoir comedy, true love travels a rocky road: The bachelor jumps to the conclusion that Florence is a cocotte when he sees her embracing his nephew, little knowing that she is expressing her happiness about the younger man’s engagement to her daughter. But soon the ground levels off, and the two couples embark on a smooth journey into a world where marriages are made not in heaven, but on Mount Olympus.

Moore may have renamed her, but after
The Magnificent Flirt
, Loretta was no longer anyone’s protégée. Indeed, she even surpassed her patron. Although Moore proved she was a serious actress in such films as
So Big
(1925),
Lilac Time
(1928) and finally
The Power and the Glory
(1933), the public and critics preferred Colleen Moore, the embodiment of the 1920s flapper, who was wholesomely sexy, but neither as voluptuous nor as brash as Clara Bow. Loretta even became more versatile than Moore, taking on roles seemingly unrelated to her persona and proving that a star’s screen image is a composite of many faces, each of which can be superimposed on a character. The script determined the face, and Loretta’s portrait gallery continued to grow.

The alternative version of Gretchen Young’s metamorphosis is suspect, even though it comes from one of Hollywood’s premier directors. In his autobiography, Mervyn LeRoy (
Little Caesar
,
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
,
Waterloo Bridge
, etc.), recalled the time he phoned the Young home, inquiring about the availability of Sally Blane for his film,
Too Young to Marry
(1931)
.
Sally, Gladys informed him, was working in another film; however, Gladys had a daughter who was available and more attractive than Sally. Even then Gladys knew which of her
daughters would achieve stardom. LeRoy was an outstanding director, who launched the Warner Bros. gangster cycle with
Little Caesar
(1930). His memory is another matter. LeRoy wrote that when he took one look at the teenager in his office, he knew automatically that she was no Gretchen: “And so Loretta Young was born that day in my office.
She was my first discovery
.”

Here the story bifurcates. According to Loretta’s daughter, LeRoy did call the Young residence, asking to speak not to Sally Blane, but to Polly Ann Young. However, Loretta was the one who answered the phone, claiming that her sister was on location, and then asking demurely, “Will I do?” “
He must have been very surprised
when a fourteen-year-old arrived in his office, but he hired her anyway, as an extra in a movie starring Colleen Moore.” The phone call is not the issue; one could easily imagine Gladys promoting Loretta or Loretta promoting herself. But which sister did LeRoy want, and for what film? Polly Ann had a paucity of credits; she was unbilled in all but two of the seven films she made between 1929 and 1931. By contrast, Sally had appeared in 63 films between 1917 and 1930. LeRoy must have phoned about Sally, who would have been unavailable, going from picture to picture and ending up with sixteen credits in 1931 alone. But Loretta as an extra in a Colleen Moore film directed by Mervyn LeRoy? Loretta appeared in two 1927 Colleen Moore movies, neither of which was directed by LeRoy. The only film LeRoy made with Moore was
Oh, Kay!
(1927), in which none of the Young sisters appeared. LeRoy wrote that the film he phoned about was
Too Young to Marry
(1931), based on
Broken Dishes
, the play that brought Bette Davis to Hollywood. The movie version starred Loretta and Grant Withers. In 1931, neither Loretta nor Sally was working as an extra;
for
Marry
, Loretta received
$2,750; Withers, $1,650. When it was released in May 1931, Loretta had been going by her new name for three years. Furthermore, Loretta and Withers met when they were cast in
Second Floor Mystery
, released in April 1930 and directed by Roy Del Ruth. (Loretta fell madly in love with Withers, and the couple eloped in January 1930, divorcing the following year.)

Who called whom, when, and about what film? If it was
Too Young to Marry
, the phone call would have been made in fall 1930, with LeRoy inquiring about Sally Blane, not Polly Ann Young. If it was
Naughty but Nice
, the call would have been made in early 1927, and the caller was most likely the director, Millard Webb, or his designee. Assuming there was such a call (and it’s hard to imagine anyone calling about an extra), Loretta, then fourteen, would have answered the phone in the same
way, purring, “Will I do?” in a voice bound to get her an interview. And if the call were intended for Sally, the film would not have mattered. Loretta came first.

The sisters were fiercely competitive. Loretta had just started at First National when she discovered that Sally was making $65 a week at Paramount. Loretta immediately demanded the same—and got it. Of the two, Loretta was Gladys’s favorite. When Loretta received her
weekly check
, she immediately handed it over to her mother; Sally, on the other hand, only gave Gladys two-thirds of hers. When Sally’s son was mauled by a dog, the damage to one of his eyes was so severe that doctors thought he might lose it. Instead of comforting her distraught sister, Loretta shrugged: “If he loses it, he loses it. That’s up to God.” Loretta and Sally appeared together in
The Show of Shows
(1929), a tedious musical revue designed to showcase First National’s talent roster, which included Louise Fazenda, Bea Lillie, Lupe Velez, John Barrymore, and Myrna Loy. Chester Morris introduced a number called “Sister Acts” that featured, among others, Loretta and Sally in a Parisian setting, cavorting as mademoiselles and performing as if they were seasoned professionals. Each sister vied for the spotlight, which played no favorites; theirs was, after all, a “sister act.”

Even as a teenager, Loretta understood the importance of self-promotion. She was not so much interested in being an actress as being a star, yet she became both. Stars have their own code of ethics: survival at any cost, even at the expense of a sibling. “It’s not personal, just business,” Loretta might have reasoned. Besides, it was God’s will. Blane did not fare badly. She worked steadily throughout the 1930s. With the advent of television, she easily adjusted to her sister’s new medium, appearing in a few episodes of
The Loretta Young Show
, in addition to other series that gave her a new life, even if it was on the tube.

Exactly when audiences became aware of a newcomer named Loretta Young depends on when they saw First National’s
The Whip Woman
,
The Head Man
, and
Scarlet Seas
;
or
MGM’s
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
; or Paramount’s
The Magnificent Flirt
. All of the films were released within a few months of each other in 1928:
Woman
in January,
Clown
in April,
Flirt
in June, and
Head Man
in July.
Scarlet Seas
opened in New York on 31 December and went into wide release the following year. “Loretta Young” was becoming increasingly familiar. In
The Whip Woman
, she was merely billed as “the Girl”—but at least she had a credit. In the others, she played a character: Denise Laverne in
Flirt
, Carol Watts in
Head Man
, and Simonetta in
Clown.

Of the five,
Clown
was the most important, if for no other reason than its star, Lon Chaney. Although First National’s
The Whip Woman
was directed by the indefatigable Allan Dwan, it was virtually ignored. Loretta was cast in it because First National was also Colleen Moore’s home studio and the logical one for Loretta. In
Head Man
, Loretta appeared as the daughter of a senator (comic actor Charles Murray) whose bid for the mayoralty is almost sabotaged by the local political machine. The
New York Times
(28 May 1928) reported that in
The Magnificent Flirt
, Loretta responded “nicely” to the “imaginative direction” of H. d’Abbadie d’Arrast. The
Times
(31 December) also observed that as the sea captain’s daughter in
Scarlet Seas
, Loretta “spreads pathos,” an emotion that came naturally to her.

Although Simonetta in MGM’s
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
was Loretta’s biggest role to date, the
New York Times
’s formidable film critic, Mordaunt Hall, wrote that “
her talent as an actress
is not called for to any great extent in this picture.” That Loretta even made a film at MGM, the “Tiffany of Studios,” with “More Stars Than There Are In the Heavens” emblazoned on the stationery, had to do with the script.
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
required a teenager (Loretta was going on fifteen) to play opposite Chaney. The director, Irish-born Herbert Brenon, may have seen Loretta in
The Whip Woman
and believed she could handle the role; perhaps Moore even used her connections to get Loretta the part. What mattered was credibility. Since
Clown
was one of MGM’s last silent films, it required the kind of expressive acting that exponents of the art such as Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Chaplin, and, of course, Lon Chaney, had perfected.

Although Loretta was a natural actress, the silents were never her forte. Perhaps if she had been given major roles earlier, she might have mastered—and probably would have, given her fierce determination—the art of using her body as her medium of dramatic expression. For Loretta, stardom coincided with the coming of sound. In the beginning, hers was a singsong voice, no different from that of most adolescents who confuse rhythm with accentuation. Loretta may well have had a vocal coach, but more likely, her obsession with perfection drove her to develop a voice that was hailed as a paradigm once it took on the measured cadences of maturity. In the mid 1950s, she was honored for three consecutive years by The American Institute of Voice Teachers for possessing “
the finest feminine speaking voice
“ in television.

MGM envisioned
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
as the successor to
He Who Gets Slapped
(1924), which had a similar circus theme and trio of characters: a clown (Lon Chaney), a bareback rider (Norma Shearer), and a lecherous
baron (John Gilbert). Their replacements were a clown (Chaney), a tightrope walker (Loretta), and an amorous but basically decent count (Nils Asther). Like
He Who Gets Slapped
, which was based on a play by Leonid Andreyev,
Clown
was a stage adaptation, inspired by the David Belasco–Tom Cushing drama that starred Lionel Barrymore. MGM purchased the rights shortly after the play opened on 28 November 1923, but preferred to see how
He Who Gets Slapped
fared. When it proved a critical and financial success,
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
went into production.

The film begins with a close-up of a drum inscribed with the name of a company of traveling players:
Ridi, Pagliacci.
The name was inspired by the climax of the great tenor aria, “Vesti la giubba,” from Leoncavallo’s
Pagliacci
, in which Canio, the head of a similar troupe, prepares for a commedia dell’ arte sketch in which his character, Pagliaccio, discovers that he has been cuckolded by his wife, Columbine, who has taken Harlequin as a lover. In Canio’s case, art has mocked life: Canio discovers that his wife Nedda is having an affair with Silvio. In the opera, the convergence of life and art brings the performance to a halt, as the crazed Canio stabs Nedda, and then Silvio. The film also ends tragically, but without any murders. Tito (Chaney), the company’s head, comes upon an abandoned baby girl, whom he names Simonetta (Loretta) and trains to be a tightrope walker. When Tito discovers that the count is in love with Simonetta, he refuses to stand in their way, even though Simonetta swears that she really loves Tito. In fact, what she feels is a combination of indebtedness and sympathy for a man who can bring happiness to others but not to himself. Tito yields to his death wish. While rehearsing in an empty theater, he imagines he is performing before an audience. He launches into his slide act, scrambling up to a box and onto a wire anchored to the stage. In the past, Tito would coast down the wire as if it were a chute; this time, he crash lands. Chaney plays the scene as if Tito has willed his own death. The closing title is the final line of the opera: “The comedy is ended,” a literal translation of “
La commedia è finita
.” Fearing that the tragic ending might alienate audiences, MGM shot an alternative in which Tito does not die. It would have been the equivalent of a
Pagliacci
in which Nedda dumps Silvio and returns to Canio. Fortunately, the studio went ahead with the original ending, and audiences concurred. It was a coup for Loretta to receive second billing. But no newcomer could compete with Chaney, who used his body as if it were clay for sculpting and he the sculptor.