Hollywood Madonna (33 page)

Paula
is a twist-counter twist film. First, Paula encourages the boy to resume his lessons, with the understanding that once he can speak, he can disclose her identity. Then the truck driver (venerable character actor Raymond Bascom in a frighteningly self-righteous performance)
reappears. But just when it seems that Paula is doomed, the boy, now able to speak in rudimentary English, addresses Paula as friend, and then as mother. The detective, who thought he had nabbed Paula, relents, reminding her that she will get the DA’s sympathy. Obviously, Loretta would not be going to jail.

In case anyone felt that Paula should have been prosecuted for leaving the scene of an accident, the writers covered themselves by showing that she would have followed the driver to the hospital if she had not encountered a series of delays. There is a moral issue here, the kind that might be debated in an ethics class: namely, her refusal to identify herself as the driver. Paula, however, chooses retribution over confession, and the boy’s magnanimity suggests that even a child is capable of forgiveness. Naturally Paula should have come forward, but that would have resulted in a different kind of film: a courtroom melodrama, in which the boy, who had now progressed to grandiloquence, would deliver an impassioned speech in Paula’ s defense. The film’s ending is as believable as
The Accused
, in which Loretta got away with homicide, thanks to Robert Cummings’s powers of persuasion.

Paula
was one of Loretta’s better, if unheralded, late-career performances. Especially impressive was the maternalism she lavished on the boy (sensitively played by Tommy Rettig). When Loretta prepared him for his bath and taught him the rudiments of speech, she did more than just play a mother surrogate; she was the dream mother, the kind to whom any child would gravitate. Loretta may not have been that way to Judy, but one would like to think she was to Christopher and Peter.

As Loretta approached 40, she found herself, like other stars in the same or an older age bracket (e.g., Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford) playing opposite younger actors. She committed herself to two pictures for Universal-International (UI):
Because of You
(1952) and
It Happens Every Thursday
(1953).
Because of You
was
a low budget production
that cost $625,690 and filmed over a five-week period (21 April–26 May 1952). Loretta received $75,000, and Norman Brokaw, her agent at William Morris, arranged for a 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. time clause in her contract.
Because of You
was a shamelessly manipulative woman’s film with a victimized heroine and a target audience of female moviegoers who had suffered at the hands of unscrupulous (played in the film by Alex Nicol) or unforgiving (played in the film by Jeff Chandler) men. Chandler was thirty-four, but his prematurely gray hair made him seem older and at the same time enhanced his sex appeal. Nicol was thirty-three, but his character’s brand of sleaze is ageless. Fortunately, Loretta’s
still milky complexion only needed some carefully applied makeup and subtle lighting to place her character, Christine, in her twenties. Loretta took care of the rest, which, for a thirty-nine-year-old actress, was no easy feat. In the opening scene, as the camera tilts up her back while she is dancing with Nicol, it seems to be ogling her every curve. Loretta is wearing a form fitting dress and sporting an obvious platinum blonde wig. Breathy and clueless, she appears to be channeling her inner Marilyn Monroe. Christine is the mistress of drug dealer Nicol, who sets her up for a prison sentence when he gives her incriminating evidence for safekeeping. In jail, her hair returns to its original—and natural—color. She also acquires a marketable skill that she can use on the outside: She trains as a nurse’s aide. Once she gives Chandler a rubdown, which she performs with a soothing eroticism, he is smitten. They marry, have a daughter, and are enjoying domestic bliss until Nicol crops up. So much for happily-ever-after, at least for the moment.

The screenwriter, Ketti Frings, must have seen
Eternally Yours
, in which Loretta became a magician’s assistant. In fact, the working title of
Because of You
was “Magic Lady.” Once Chandler dumps her and takes their child, Loretta masters a repertoire of magic acts that she performs at children’s birthday parties, one of which happens to be her own daughter’s. Since her former husband is now engaged, she runs off to Oregon, and works on a farm (shades of
The Farmer’s Daughter
). A repentant Chandler tracks her down, scoops her up in his arms, and the reunited couple go bounding through the field—an idyllic ending to a film that may have convinced Loretta that her movie career was coming to an end, which it did the following year. It was not that Loretta gave a bad performance, only that
Because of You
was a 1930s-type movie that should have been made around the same time as
Midnight Mary.
A twenty-year-old Loretta would not have had to work as hard playing a woman in her twenties as Loretta did when she was pushing forty.

Her Hollywood swan song was somewhat better. At least it didn’t occasion disbelief like Irene Dunne’s envoi,
It Grows on Trees
(1952), in which the “it” was real paper money sprouting on Irene’s trees; Joan Crawford’s in
Trog
(1970), in which the star was upstaged by a gorilla; or Bette Davis’s cameo witch in
Wicked Stepmother
(1989). Like an augur, Loretta could read the signs.
It Happens Every Thursday
, which ran a mere eighty minutes, a little longer than
Cause for Alarm!
, and looked distinctly low budget, was
filmed over twenty-five days
(5 January–3 February 1953) at a cost of $617,085. Loretta received her usual $75,000, but despite the time clause, the
Daily Production Reports
show that for half of the
shoot, she started at 8:00 a.m. and finished at 4:30 p.m., which still gave her time to recoup for the next day. UI considered the film a potboiler that might attract Loretta’s aging fan base—but certainly not that of her costar, John Forsythe who achieved stardom in another medium, television. While Forsythe went on to
Bachelor Father
and
Dynasty
, and had his own show for a season, Loretta also found her niche on the tube where, for eight years, she attracted the biggest audience of her career.

The “it” in
It Happens Every Thursday
is a local paper,
The Eden Archives
, that a journalist (Forsythe) and his wife, pregnant with their second child (Loretta) take over. Loretta plays the dutiful wife, using her ebullience to increase circulation, until Eden suffers a serious drought. Forsythe does some research and finds a scientific way of ending the drought, but before he can, nature intervenes and delivers five days of rain. The once rain-hungry populace turns on the couple, demanding compensation for their losses. In this deceptively feminist film, Loretta saves the day by bringing in a meteorologist, who explains that nature alone was responsible for both ending the drought and causing the excessive rain. In Capraesque fashion, the formerly vindictive citizens rally around their editor and his wife, as small town pettiness evaporates in the presence of a husband and wife without an ounce of guile.

It Happens Every Thursday
may not have been Loretta’s shining hour, but it was far from embarrassing. Loretta was totally credible as a homemaker, believing so strongly in her character that she gave the wife a blazing integrity that put her husband to shame—particularly since he could not bring about the resolution that audiences expected. Loretta could at least claim that her last film portrayed a woman who may have been her husband’s intellectual inferior, but who could do for him what he could not do for himself: restore the people’s confidence, and from the audience’s standpoint, guarantee a happy ending.

CHAPTER 19
Radio Days

When Loretta closed the book on her film career, she could say with justifiable pride that for someone who started in pictures at four and stopped at forty, she had left behind an impressive gallery of characters. Her beauty made her difficult to cast; it was obvious that she was neither a femme fatale nor a musical comedy diva. In fact, Loretta never made a musical; the closest she came was the vaudeville bit she did with her sister in
The Show of Shows
. She was not a character actress as such, but an actress able to grow into her characters, and, for the most part, fit into their skin, whether they were tight rope walkers, orphans, champion bridge players, ballerinas, academics, criminals, socialites, waitresses, royalty, actresses, reporters, authors, politicians, aviators, homemakers, or nuns. She could be white, Asian, or mixed race.

Loretta was at her best when she was playing either a reflection of her real self (iron butterflies like Katie and Sister Margaret), or her anti-self, women at the other extreme (waifs, shop girls, molls)—the kind she might have encountered if, at four, she had never been exposed to the world of make believe on Catalina Island. But when she had to play someone in that intermediate zone, the no man’s land between those selves (a middle-aged college freshman, a sleep walker, a screwball sleuth), she found herself caught between knowing how the role should be played and being unable to play it convincingly. At least none of her films was an embarrassment, unlike
The Iron Petticoat
(1956), which featured the unlikely team of Katharine Hepburn and Bob Hope, with Hepburn as a Soviet commissar with an Russian accent that sounded like a Muscovite’s idea of Bryn Mawr English; or
Beyond the Forest
(1949), in which the forty-year-old Bette Davis, vampire-like in a black fright wig, tried to pass for a woman in her late twenties.

Loretta was always looking for ways to expand her repertoire. Her growing fame as a movie star paralleled the rise of live radio drama. Arguably, the best and most popular of the dramatic shows—at least for moviegoers—was
Lux Radio Theatre
,
which aired on CBS
from 1934 to 1955. Until June 1936, the show was broadcast from New York, after which it moved to Hollywood, where it originated from the Music Box Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, and then from the Vine Street Playhouse. Tickets were always at a premium. Movie lovers, both Angelenos and tourists, relished the opportunity to see their favorite stars in front of a microphone either re-creating one of his or her own roles or taking on another’s. The program allowed for both; availability was the key. If the original actor had a prior commitment, usually a film, another substituted who could play the part—if not as well, at least believably. When Loretta was unavailable for the 17 December 1949 broadcast of T
he Bishop’s Wife
, Jane Greer filled in. Similarly, Loretta assumed Claudette Colbert’s role in
Arise, My Love
(18 June 1942). The replacements were at least adequate, and occasionally better than the originators. Sometimes, an actor missed the point of the script, which was the case in the 12 April 1948 broadcast of
The Perfect Marriage
. Loretta knew how to play a stage actress without overdoing the histrionics. Lizabeth Scott, of the darkly sensuous voice, alternately throaty and husky, did not. Scott was the perfect standby for Tallulah Bankhead in
The Skin of Our
Teeth on Broadway, but not for Loretta in
The Perfect Marriage
. Scott, a good enough actress, was unable to locate the fine line between theatricality and flamboyance and aimed for the latter.

Although Loretta appeared on other radio shows,
Lux
was special: It was the one on which she performed more often than anyone else—twenty-six performances, followed by Fred MacMurray (twenty-five) and Claudette Colbert (twenty-four). Live radio, unlike theatre, made it relatively easy for a working actress. For
Lux
,
t
here was a read-through
on Thursday afternoon, a noon rehearsal on Friday, and another on Saturday. Two dress rehearsals were scheduled for Monday: the first at 10:00 a.m., the second, ninety minutes before airtime. Salaries varied: Established stars received $5,000 a week, except for Clark Gable, who received $5,001. The director Cecil B. DeMille was the program’s host from 1936 to 1945, followed by another director with a sonorous voice, William Keighley, from 1945 until the show went off the air ten years later.

Loretta joined the program the year after
Lux
premiered, making her last appearance in 1952. She re-created some of her roles (
Man’s Castle, Bedtime Story
,
The Lady from Cheyenne
,
China
,
And Now Tomorrow
,
Mother Is
a Freshman
, and, of course,
The Farmer’s Daughter
and
Come to the Stable
). But more often, she appeared in roles originated by others. Her first
Lux
appearance was in
The Patsy
(16 June 1935) in the Marion Davies part. She also took on another Davies role, the bareback rider in
Polly of the Circus
(30 November 1936).

But her greatest challenge was assuming roles made famous by others, especially Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. Loretta played four of Davis’s parts. The first was Miriam Brady in
The Girl from Tenth Avenue
(16 May 1938), a sympathetic woman lacking in social grace who consoles an attorney jilted by his fiancée, marries him, and then discovers he is still infatuated with his ex until he learns to appreciate Miriam’s decency. This was the kind of part Loretta could handle; it was lesser Davis, minus the mannerisms. But Loretta was only partially successful when she played Julie in
Jezebel
(25 November 1940), the role that brought Davis her second Oscar. Julie is kin to Scarlett O’Hara, a pampered Southern belle who flaunts convention and matures only after her lover marries another and is stricken with yellow fever. At the beginning Loretta’s Southern accent was inconsistent, and her simpering was grating. But when Pres (Jeffrey Lynn in Henry Fonda’s role) marries Amy, an Easterner, Julie grows in stature. After Pres becomes a plague victim, Julie begs Amy to allow her to become his caregiver and accompany him to that “desolate island, haunted by death,” where the infected are quarantined. Loretta delivered her lines as if they were poetry—not like a woman with a martyr complex, but like one desperate to perform a selfless act to compensate for her selfish ways. Julie reminds Amy that she understands Creole, while Amy does not, and, therefore, can be of greater help. “Give me the right to be clean again, as you are clean,” she implores Amy. At the end, Loretta is every bit as effective as Davis—so much so that one can forgive the unpromising beginning.