Hollywood Madonna (35 page)

An invitation to appear on Louella Parsons’s show, even though it only aired for fifteen minutes, was a command performance—particularly since the influential Parsons had given her imprimatur to the scenario Loretta had fabricated about Judy’s adoption. Loretta owed Parsons, and when Parsons beckoned, Loretta obeyed. However, appearing on the show worked to Loretta’s advantage. Parsons always promoted her guest’s latest or forthcoming picture; it was payment for speaking silly, scripted lines that allowed the voice of Hollywood to gush over an actor, who would humbly accept the compliment in words that others had written.

Loretta’s more discerning fans must have wondered why she agreed to be a guest on
The Burns and Allen Show
(23 November 1943). But Loretta was savvy enough to realize that not everyone was tuning in on Monday nights to
Lux Radio Theatre;
others preferred comedy shows that did not require an hour’s investment of their time. The offbeat humor of George Burns and Gracie Allen—particularly Gracie’s—was the main attraction of
The Burns and Allen Show
, which premiered on CBS in 1932, moving in 1950 to television, where it delighted audiences until 1958, when Gracie, whose heart condition had worsened, announced her retirement, dying that same year. But even in 1943, Burns and Allen were household names. Loretta would have been foolish to pass on a chance to appear on their show, especially since her movie career had shifted into low gear. In 1943, Gracie was at her zany peak, and Loretta knew that her sole purpose was to play “straight man” to Gracie, providing her with set-ups for the punch lines. Burns did likewise, knowing that he could not compete with Gracie’s brand of humor, which belonged to a tangent universe, where everything is inverted, the lingua franca is the non sequitur, and illogic has displaced rational discourse. Sample:

BOLINGBROKE (TO GRACIE). I have great news for you, dear lady! The
Bolingbroke
Little Theatre is about to open its winter theatrical season. I shall want you as the leading lady, naturally.

GRACIE. Oh, naturally. Say, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could get Charles Boyer for my leading man?

GEORGE. Oh, sure, sure. You could get him easy for around twenty-five thousand dollars.

GRACIE. We wouldn’t have to pay him a cent, George—he’s Free French.

In the 23 November 1943 broadcast, Gracie’s obsession with supplementing the family’s income by writing lurid pieces for exposé magazines leads to a lawsuit when her article, “The Secret Love of
Loretta
Young,” is published. Even more libelous was the accompanying question: “Does Her Son, Robert Young, Know About This?” The two Youngs were not related, although they ended up achieving greater fame on television than they did in film—Loretta, in her own show, which ran for eight years, and Robert in
Father Knows Best
(1954–63) and
Marcus Welby, M.D.
(1969–76). The loopy dialogue did not faze Loretta. When she slaps Gracie with a $50,000 libel suit, Gracie makes George the culprit, insisting that he is mad.

LORETTA. George always looked all right to me, mentally, of course.

GRACIE. Oh, you can’t go by appearances, Loretta. Think of George as a chocolate. Yes, you can’t tell by looking at him whether inside he’s plain or nut.

Corny? Of course. But it got a laugh.

This was not Loretta’s finest hour on radio, but at least announcer Bill Goodwin plugged her forthcoming movie: “Our guest tonight … is currently working in the Paramount Picture, ‘And Now Tomorrow.’” It did not matter if Loretta’s appearance on
Burns and Allen
sold more tickets to
And Now Tomorrow
. What mattered was that Loretta was a guest on a radio show that drew more listeners than
Lux Radio Theatre.
And when
Burns and Allen
became
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
(1950–58) on television, it lasted as long as
The Loretta Young Show
(1953–61), eight years
.

If Loretta were asked to name the radio program that gave her the greatest satisfaction, she would not have answered “
Lux Radio Theatre
”—despite her record number of appearances on the program—but
Family Theatre
, the inspiration of Father Patrick Peyton. Loretta had great rapport with priests. Among her closest friends was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, America’s first television evangelist, whose CBS show,
Life Is Worth Living
(1952–57), became so popular that it caused defections from its only competition on Tuesday evenings,
The Milton Berle Show
. Bishop Sheen was the epitome of panache. He turned his monsignor’s cape into a costume, as if he were an ecclesiastical Batman; he handled the blackboard, his essential prop, like a seasoned teacher, which he was (more or less).
Television, more than the pulpit, released the actor within whenever he had the opportunity to dramatize, as he did when he used as his text Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
A year after
Life Is Worth Living
went on the air,
The Loretta Young Show
debuted. Bishop Sheen’s theatricality matched hers. But as television personalities, they were not competitive: He was on CBS on Tuesdays; she, on NBC on Sundays.

Loretta had known Bishop Sheen since the 1940s. In November 1944, she wrote to him, asking that he see “
a friend
… fearful of dignified persons,” a rather quaint way of saying “celebrity-priest.” Who the friend was is difficult to say. The letter is part of the Gladys Hall Collection, and the friend may have been the prolific magazine writer, Gladys Hall herself. Another Gladys, Loretta’s mother, also sought his advice. “Do as you truthfully and honestly feel about it,” was his oracular reply. When Loretta’s first son arrived, he congratulated her on the “beautiful fruition of your mutual love,” an equally quaint, if not euphemistic, way of attributing a birth to something more spiritual than physical. With Bishop Sheen, rhetoric was all; with Loretta, it was discretion.

Fr. Peyton was the antithesis of Bishop Sheen—a crusader with a mission, not a charismatic showman. Patrick Peyton was born in 1909 in “
the bleak western part
of County Mayo, Ireland.” Having grown up with the ritual of the after-dinner family rosary, he was convinced that the nightly recitation of the rosary would produce harmony in the home and throughout the world. Naturally, his message was directed at Catholics, who were familiar with the rosary and understood its function as an instrument of prayer. The rosary is a five-decade string of beads that Catholics would finger while meditating on significant events in the Greek New Testament, such as: the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, informing her that she was chosen to be the mother of the Messiah; Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth; and Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. These events were divided into the
Joyful
, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries, each of which commemorated five such incidents. Traditionally, Mondays and Wednesdays were devoted to the Joyful Mysteries (events preceding and following Christ’s birth); Tuesdays and Fridays to the Sorrowful (details of Christ’s Passion); and the Glorious (post-crucifixion events such as the Resurrection and Ascension). This was the sequence that Fr. Peyton, Loretta, and countless Catholics knew until 2004, when a slight change was introduced: the Joyful Mysteries were relegated to Mondays and Saturdays; the Glorious to Wednesdays and Sundays. The Sorrowful were unchanged, but a new category was created for Thursdays: the Luminous Mysteries,
commemorating other important events such as the turning of water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana and the institution of the Eucharist.

Fr. Peyton and Loretta had much in common, not just the rosary. They were destined to meet. Patrick Peyton emigrated to America in 1928, intending to join the Congregation of the Holy Cross. His dream was deferred when he was stricken with life-threatening tuberculosis. On his sick bed, he vowed that if he lived, he would spread devotion to the Virgin Mary and the rosary. He recovered and was ordained in 1941. Determined to keep his promise, he learned that the Mutual Broadcasting System—
a network made up of four stations
, three from the Midwest (WGN in Chicago, WLW in Cincinnati, WXYZ in Detroit), and the best known, WOR in Newark, New Jersey—would offer him thirty minutes of air time if he could come up with a star-driven program that was not exclusively Catholic like NBC’s
The Catholic Hour.
What Father Peyton envisioned was
Family Theatre
, a half-hour dramatic series consisting of original stories and literary adaptations, geared to the entire family and subtly promoting his Rosary Crusade.

Fr. Peyton knew he needed a Hollywood contact. A friend furnished him with a letter of introduction to Loretta’s husband, still Lieutenant Colonel Tom Lewis, head of the Armed Forces Radio Service. After learning that Lewis was a devout Catholic, Fr. Peyton persuaded him
to kneel and recite
the
Memorare
, St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin Mary, followed by the rosary. Lewis was speechless; he had never encountered anyone—not even Loretta—who was so devoted to the Virgin. Confident that Loretta would be similarly impressed with Fr. Peyton, Lewis put him in touch with her. However, Loretta had just given birth to their second son, Christopher Paul, on 1 August 1945. That did not deter Father Peyton. Not one for wasting time, he called on her three days later. Loretta could not say “no” to a priest, particularly one so committed to spreading devotion to Mary.

When Loretta was a child,
Gladys advised her
to turn to Mary, her only solace during the trying years of her marriage to John Earle Young. Mary also became an integral part of Loretta’s spiritual life: No matter where she lived, a statue of the Virgin was prominently displayed in her bedroom. When her godchild, actress Marlo Thomas, was confirmed,
Loretta presented her
with a statue of the Virgin and the Christ Child on a jade base. On a visit to Mexico, she spotted a wayside shrine of the Virgin and instinctively dropped to her knees. Loretta traveled to Lourdes, where Mary’s appearances to the fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a day laborer’s daughter, culminated in a spring gushing out of the
earth, whose waters could cure the infirm and gravely ill who traveled there from all over the world. Loretta’s visit to Lourdes inspired an episode on
The Loretta Young Show
,
The Road to Lourdes
(1959).

In 1981, Loretta read that the Virgin had appeared in the village of Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia. That was all she needed. Determined to go there, even though it was not the most accessible of places, Loretta persuaded her son Peter to accompany her.
Loretta may well have had a vision
there herself. Supposedly, she saw the sun change color and shape, until there was a communion wafer in its center. A foot injury, later diagnosed as a fracture, did not deter Loretta from ascending the hill where the Virgin appeared, even if she had to be transported on a stretcher. To Loretta, Mary was more than Christ’s mother. She had mythologized the Virgin to the extent that Mary became the standard by which Loretta measured herself, knowing she could never achieve such perfection. But she was satisfied with the title that Mary used of herself when she consented to be the mother of the Messiah: “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Luke: 1.28). Actually, Loretta was the handmaid of Mary.

“Medjugorje solidified everything.” The solidification, by which Loretta meant the harmonious blending of the tensions that once polarized her life (career vs. family, actress vs. wife/mother, star vs. business woman, past indiscretion vs. saintly persona). It began in the mid 1940s when she became active in St. Anne’s Foundation, noted for its support of St. Anne’s Maternity Hospital for Unmarried Mothers. Loretta was a four-term president of the foundation, whose mission she championed. She was rewarded for her efforts in 1961, when the Board of Trustees staged a testimonial reception at which she was honored for “
her Noble Contribution
to the Unknown World of the Unwed Mother and Her Body for the past fifteen years.” The citation was not entirely accurate; Loretta was quite knowledgeable about the world of the unwed mother. For a time she lived in it. But by 1961, the myth of Judy’s origins had become part of Hollywood lore, neither provable nor deniable. For the time being, an exposé was out of the question. Loretta had been enshrined in her own niche, and no one had come forth to dislodge her from it. Not in 1961, anyway.

In 1947, anyone promoting devotion to Mary had Loretta’s endorsement. It did not matter if she considered Fr. Peyton part of her ongoing penance for her mortal sin or a fellow Marian in need of her help. Probably the latter, although guilt has a way of coloring decisions. Whatever the case, in the mid 1940s, Fr. Peyton had become Loretta’s latest
cause. Knowing that he would be the guest celebrant at a Sunday mass at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills—the church most frequented by Hollywood Catholics, including herself—Loretta advised him, as a visitor, to defer to the pastor, who would invite the stars in the congregation to meet him after mass. “
Then, when you get them
one by one in the sacristy, close the sale.” Loretta knew Church politics. As a visiting priest, Fr. Peyton must not steal the pastor’s thunder. Such was the advice of a shrewd woman, who, in a less patriarchal era, could have been a CEO in the corporate sector or a studio head.

Loretta’s advice paid off; stars, not just Catholics, signed on. Fr. Peyton, with Loretta’s help, recruited Irene Dunne, James Stewart, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Ethel Barrymore, Pat O’Brien, Ruth Hussey, Ann Blyth, Maureen O’Sullivan, Ricardo Montalban, Vanessa Brown, and Rosalind Russell. Loretta was on board from the beginning. Loretta may have taught Fr. Peyton how to work the Hollywood circuit, but others were equally helpful. Ruth Hussey introduced him to her producer-husband, Robert Longenecker, who “
proved an essential cog
in the machine I was laboriously building.” So did screenwriter Fred Niblo, who drew up contracts in which the actors agreed to donate their services. Tom Lewis was far from a bystander. He persuaded Al Scalpone, a copywriter at Young and Rubicam, to come up with sign-off maxims, the most famous being, “
The family that prays together
, stays together.”