Hollywood Madonna (32 page)

The title is misleading;
Half Angel
is a comic variation on the dual personality film that could have been called “The Two Faces of Nora.” Loretta played Nora Gilpin, a nurse by day, who has relegated her infatuation with a prominent lawyer, John Raymond (Joseph Cotten), to the depths of her unconscious, only to find it surfacing at night. Like her mother, Nora is a sleepwalker who, at night, becomes the woman she imagines herself to be. Once Nora the vamp—slinky, provocatively dressed, and coquettish—takes over, she literally stalks Raymond, who is fascinated by the fey creature who has entered his life. The problem is the discrepancy between Nora the vamp and Nora the nurse. Loretta gravitated to the former, reveling in her low cut aquamarine dressing gown that revealed the lacy edge of her petticoat, which she had no qualms about displaying as she assumed an enticingly recumbent position. Neither she nor director Richard Sale, Dassin’s replacement, seemed to have any interest in the daytime Nora, whose troubled psyche eluded both of them. When day breaks, all Loretta can manage is a reversion to Nora’s dull professional self, much to Raymond’s confusion. The film can stand only so much role reversal. The ending is a variation on the “flight from the altar” movie (
It Happened One Night
,
Cover Girl
,
It Had to be You
,
The Runaway Bride
): The sleepwalker ends up marrying Raymond, then upon wakening, she realizes there is a man in the next bed, who indeed is Raymond. (Twin beds were the norm then.) Nora also awakens on the day of her wedding to dull Timothy McCarey (John Ridgley), which Raymond interrupts, causing Nora to faint and the film to expire.

If Capra had made
Half Angel
in the 1930s with a screenplay by Riskin, it would have been a model screwball comedy, a genre that was never Loretta’s forte. Ideally, it needed an actress like Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert, who could slip in and out of Nora’s two selves more effortlessly than Loretta, who could handle the sexy, but not the sexless self. What
Half Angel
became in 1951 was a depressingly unsophisticated and humorless movie, unworthy of Riskin, Cotten, or Loretta. If Riskin had ever planned to enrich the script with the same wit and humanity that he brought to his Capra films, it would have been impossible after 27 December 1950, when he suffered a major stroke, leading to his death five years later. The Riskin touches are few: a father-daughter relationship in which “father knows best”; an interrupted wedding (
It Happened One Night
); a trial in which Raymond is discredited (
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
) until his marriage to Nora is authenticated. But Riskin, always one to tie up loose—not to mention dangling—ends, could not do so after his stroke. And so, what should have been an important plot point is never resolved: Raymond ignores his opportunity to plead a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to pursue the nocturnal Nora. If any lawyers saw the film, they would have been disgusted at such indifference to an occasion that could have been a milestone in his career. But the moviegoers who saw it—and could remember it a few weeks later—went for the stars. And those, who saw it in June 1951 at New York’s Roxy, “the cathedral of movie palaces,” were at least treated to a stage show that included the Andrews Sisters—perhaps not as popular as they were during the World War II years, but still able to draw an audience.

Sadly, Zanuck felt the film had potential, and he expressed his views in an eight-page summary of a May 1950 story conference with Blaustein, Dassin, then set to direct, and Riskin, seven months away from his debilitating stroke. All Zanuck seemed to want from the script was more humor: “
My only worry
about this story now is—is the last act funny enough?” He should have asked the same question about the first two. The only moviegoers who found
Half Angel
humorous were those who were amused by the idea of a plain Jane by day morphing into a sex symbol at night. Loretta did not play the role for its humor because she did not find any in it. Actually, there wasn’t.

CHAPTER 18
Slow Fade to Small Screen

It was probably Dore Schary’s idea to reunite Clark Gable and Loretta in MGM’s
Key to the City
(1950). In July 1948, Schary, realizing he could never work with RKO’s new owner, Howard Hughes, left the studio and accepted Louis Mayer’s offer to become MGM’s vice president in charge of production. Schary does not mention
Key to the City
in his autobiography,
although he includes it in his filmography
as one of the movies made under his “executive supervision.” The credited producer was Z. Wayne Griffin, whose chief function was dealing with logistics (schedule, budget, daily reports). George Sidney, the versatile director who was equally at home with musicals (
The Harvey Girls
,
Annie Get Your Gun
,
Show Boat
), costume dramas (
The Three Musketeers
,
Scaramouche
,
Young Bess
), and comedies (
Who Was That Lady?
,
A Ticklish Affair
) was more than competent to handle the creative end of the production. Reuniting
The Call of the Wild
stars could only have been the inspiration of MGM’s new production head.

Gable was still an MGM contract player, but he would leave the studio four years later. Loretta was freelancing, interested only in two or three picture commitments. She could have declined, but she owed much to Schary for her Oscar. Although she knew
Key to the City
would win no awards (she was right), she was intrigued about a reunion with the actor who changed her life in 1935.

The film itself is a sporadically witty comedy about two small town mayors: Steve Fisk (Gable), an ex-longshoreman from California, and Clarissa Standish (Loretta), a Harvard Law School alumna from Maine, who meet at a convention in San Francisco. For budgetary reasons, San Francisco’s unique ambience was only suggested.
Key to the City
did not require on-location filming; whatever significance it has lies in its contrast with
The Call of the Wild
shoot on Mount Baker in 1935, when Loretta
costarred with a man who could not just provide her with romantic fantasies, but with the real thing and all its trappings. That was her first encounter with raw masculinity, not the madras silk kind that colored her dreams. But in 1950, Loretta was the mother of three children, two of whom she acknowledged as her own. History would not repeat itself.

In
Key to the City
, Loretta is at first the paragon of propriety—a by-the-books conventioneer, committed to agendas and parliamentary procedure and chastising those like Fisk, who do not adhere to them. Irene’s costumes, influenced by Christian Dior’s “new look” (tailored jackets, full-length skirts with tapered waists) reflected Loretta’s character, suggesting that Clarissa’s libido had disappeared into the fabric. Loretta played Clarissa as if clothes were her personal armor, easily removable under the right circumstances. When Fisk suggests a night on the town, Clarissa demurs: “I only want to uphold my title of honorable mayor,” to which Fisk replies—as only Gable could—with a skeptical smirk and mischief in his eyes: “How honorable can you get?” The battle of the sexes is on, and Fisk frees Clarissa’s libido from the folds of her skirt, returning it to its proper location. Watching Gable break down Loretta’s virginal façade (forget the characters’ names for a moment), knowledgeable viewers—and there were enough in Hollywood—could make the connection with
The Call of the Wild
, except that this time, Loretta, who would atone for her “mortal sin” until the end of her life, did what only a true artist can: She summoned up the emotions needed for the scene, however personal they may be. When Gable presses his lips against the back of Loretta’s neck, then her ears, and finally her face, the foreplay becomes a replay of the earlier event, with the eroticism intact. Nineteen fifty dissolves into 1935, as the witchcraft in Gable’s eyes overlaps with the willingness in Loretta’s.

However, the foreplay in
Key to the City
does not lead to consummation. Fisk holds off kissing Clarissa on the mouth, expecting her to ask him. She does, indicating that she is ready for what comes next. “I respect you,” Fisk admits guiltily. “I don’t want to be respected,” Clarissa answers defiantly. As they kiss in silhouette, the camera slowly tracks back, and the audience can assume what it wants. The professionalism that Gable and Loretta brought to the seduction (or would-be seduction) scene that evoked their short-lived affair is a tribute to their ability to re-enact so convincingly the collision between a highly sexed male and a sexually unemancipated female.

Although Loretta did not owe MGM another film after
Key to the City
, Tom Lewis, sensing that his wife’s Hollywood days were nearing the end,
decided to try his hand at producing. He found an original story based on a radio play by Larry Marcus about a wife whose husband, convinced that she and his doctor are lovers and plotting his death, sends a letter to the district attorney implicating both of them. Lewis hired Mel Dinelli to write the screenplay, which became
Cause for Alarm!
(MGM, 1951). In selling the package to MGM, Lewis insisted on co-screenplay and producer credit in addition to copyright ownership.

Lewis may not have known that most of Dore Schary’s productions were under his “executive supervision” even when Schary’s name did not appear in the credits, which was often the case. It was the same with
Cause for Alarm!
Exactly whom Lewis envisioned for the wife is unknown, but
it was not Loretta
, perhaps because he knew that she was more knowledgeable about moviemaking than he and could usurp his authority. Schary felt otherwise, and cast Loretta, who gave a riveting performance—one of her best, in fact, though unappreciated at the time.

There is no way of knowing what Lewis contributed to the script, particularly since Dorothy Kingsley, an accomplished screenwriter (
Neptune’s Daughter
,
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
,
Pal Joey
, etc.) did a rewrite. The imperiled heroine script was a Dinelli specialty (
The Spiral Staircase
;
Beware, My Lovely
, which he adapted from his play,
The Man
;
Jeopardy
) Despite Lewis’s co-screenplay credit,
Cause for Alarm!
is classic Dinelli. Auteurists, on the other hand, would call it a Tay Garnett film. Garnett worked in various genres, including romantic comedies like
Eternally Yours
, his first film with Loretta. He was especially good at building suspense in films where dashed hopes result in either deliverance or death (
Bataan
,
The Cross of Lorraine
,
Mrs. Parkington
,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
). Lewis brokered the deal with MGM and probably helped shape the screenplay, but
Cause for Alarm!
is a Dinelli-Garnett film, acted by a first-rate cast.

Loretta, looking like a typical 1950s homemaker, is married to a mentally unstable man (Barry Sullivan) with a heart condition. The husband, convinced his wife and doctor are planning to murder him, devises a diabolical scheme to trap them. He deliberately spills some of his heart medication, making it difficult for the prescription to be renewed, and making it look as if he is being overmedicated. The husband then writes an incriminating letter to the district attorney, which his unsuspecting wife gives to the mail carrier. Growing increasingly irrational, the husband boasts about the letter, attempting to shoot his wife but collapsing before he can pull the trigger. Except for a flashback showing how the
couple met,
Cause for Alarm!
unfolds in real time. The film was a tour de force for Loretta who, in order to retrieve the letter, must deal with a skeptical mail carrier, his sympathetic supervisor, her husband’s nosy aunt, a curious notary, and an intrusive child. Everything leads up to the denouement in which the mail carrier informs the wife that the letter has to be returned because of insufficient postage. The tension that had been building up in her erupts in hysterical elation, which Loretta conveys convincingly, sounding almost inarticulate as she gropes for words to express her relief.

Schary had little faith in
Cause for Alarm!
, which clocked in at a mere seventy-four minutes. The 1951 films that he was championing were
The Red Badge of Courage
(which failed miserably at the box office),
The Great Caruso
,
Quo Vadis
,
Show Boat
, and
An American in Paris. Cause for Alarm!
was a low-budget movie that generated enough suspense to sustain audience interest and enough money to justify its being made. Except for
Paula
(1952),
Cause for Alarm!
was the last film that made demands on Loretta. The other two were cut from an old, now frayed, fabric.

After Loretta and Harry Cohn reconciled, she returned to Columbia for the first of her final three films. Larry Marcus, who wrote the original story that became
Cause for Alarm!
, came up with another that James Poe and William Sacheim turned into
Paula
(1952). Dismissed at the time as a three-hankie flick,
Paula
is as engrossing as it is morally disturbing. In her haste to attend a reception for her husband (Kent Smith), Paula (Loretta) accidentally runs down a young boy (Tommy Rettig). The accident is not a typical hit and run; Paula pulls up, rushing over to find the boy conscious but aphasic. Despite his condition, the boy notices Paula’s necklace, which becomes an important plot point. A truck driver stops and assumes the worst: drunk driving. He orders Paula to follow him to the hospital where he is taking the boy. Too many traffic problems intervene, and the driver informs the police that the boy was a hit and run victim of a drunk driver. The script is crafted in such a way that audiences know it is only a matter of time before Paula will be found out. Instead of turning herself in, Paula atones for what she has done by teaching the boy to regain his speech. Naturally, at some point, Paula will wear the incriminating necklace, causing their relationship, originally based on trust, to deteriorate, as the boy grows sullen and fearful.