Hollywood Madonna (40 page)

CHAPTER 21
The Road to Retirement

When Loretta initiated a separation from Lewis in spring 1956, she secretly hoped their marriage could be salvaged—not for personal reasons, but because she feared the stigma of divorce, a word that was anathema to devout Catholics. Her mother avoided the problem by not remarrying after her divorce from Belzer. Loretta’s marriage to Lewis, on the other hand, was a media event, and a divorce would be a bigger one, particularly since it involved two exemplary Catholics. Thus, Loretta was careful to give the press the impression that she and Lewis were only separated, appearing together, if necessary, at important social functions. In 1962, Loretta and Lewis were invited to a fundraiser for Father Peyton. As close friends of the priest, they would be seated on the dais with him. It may not have been a command performance, but their absence would certainly have been noticed. It was one of those starry evenings with yesteryear’s favorites (Dorothy Lamour, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Jack Haley, Dorothy Malone, etc.) processing into the Beverly Hilton to the sound of cheering fans, clicking cameras, and popping flashbulbs. If Loretta thought that her first public appearance with Lewis in four years would be interpreted as a sign of a possible reconciliation, she was mistaken. One reporter referred to Lewis as Loretta’s “
estranged husband,” adding that, “[T]heir estrangement
, never officially admitted, long has puzzled Hollywood.” Although she and Lewis declined to be interviewed, some of the attendees expressed confidence that the couple would resolve their differences. Reconciliation, however, was highly unlikely, since they were embroiled in litigation, with charges of mismanagement, deception, and chicanery coming from both parties.

The future of their marriage, if there was one, rested with a higher authority. Loretta needed guidance, not just from a parish priest or her confessor, but from the highest possible source: the vicar of Christ on
earth, Pope Pius XII. It doesn’t seem likely that Loretta herself negotiated a private audience with the pontiff; she had powerful allies in Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Claire Boothe Luce, who may have acted as intermediaries. Loretta’s audience with Pius XII on 27 April 1957 was
front-page news
in Los Angeles. But Loretta was really on a pilgrimage, using her visit to Rome to meet those chosen few who had the stigmata—physical manifestations of the wounds that Christ sustained at the time of his crucifixion (impressions on the brow from the crown of thorns, the hands and feet from the nails, and the side from the centurion’s lance). Loretta had become obsessed with the stigmata, believing that by consulting with those who had been blessed with it, she could better understand it and perhaps experience it vicariously.

While in Italy, she met the mystic and stigmatist, Padre Pio, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Although he purportedly understood only Latin and Italian, Padre Pio was said to be able to hear confessions in any language, as if, like the apostles after Pentecost, he were endowed with the gift of tongues. Then Loretta flew to Germany to meet Teresa Neuman who, since she was twenty-nine, reportedly never ingested anything but the Eucharist. She too was a stigmatist, speaking, when questioned, in Aramaic, Christ’s dialect. After hearing Loretta’s rapturous description of her spiritual odyssey, an interviewer noted in a cynical aside that Loretta “
had assumed an aura
of inspiration … as if she were in a state of mystical repose.” Still, the interviewer could not conceal his respect for Loretta and her unshakable belief in experiences that would strike many as too bizarre to be credible.

But Loretta was a convent school product who never shed her fascination with stories about the saints, true or apocryphal—especially those about their miracles and martyrdoms. Taught by the nuns that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians,” Loretta learned that, according to tradition (a phrase rarely used in her day): St. Peter was crucified upside down; Cecilia was beheaded after she survived suffocation in her bath; Ignatius of Antioch was thrown to the lions; Agatha was dragged over burning coals; Lawrence was roasted to death; and Bartholomew was flayed alive. Loretta must have graduated from convent school convinced that Catholicism was a religion written in blood, which courses liberally through its liturgy, devotions, and feasts: meditations on the Seven Last Words of Christ on Good Friday, and commemorative feast days such as The Finding of the Holy Cross (3 May), The Precious Blood of Jesus (1 July), The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary (15 November). Each month of the liturgical calendar has its share of martyrs and their
special masses, for example: the beheading of John the Baptist (29 August), the Forty Holy Martyrs (10 March), and the Holy Four Crowned Martyrs (8 November). The nuns had transformed Gretchen Young into the layperson’s equivalent of themselves.

Loretta Young, however, was not Gretchen Young. Gretchen was the private self that Loretta revealed episodically, like a serial: the devout Catholic, patron of unmarried mothers, the actress with the swear box, friend of the clergy. Gretchen never lost her childhood fascination with the miracles in
The Greek New Testament
, which expanded her imagination into a stage—soon, a sound stage for Loretta—where truth mingled freely, sometimes playfully, with illusion, legend with doctrine, and apocrypha with the canon. Loretta Young was Gretchen’s public self, her persona: film, radio, and television star; glamour queen; Oscar, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner; the exquisite butterfly that men tried to net until they discovered her wings could cut; the canny business executive whose manicured nails could spout claws, if necessary. Gretchen’s first encounter with narrative came from the Bible, which provided ballast for some of the sinkable films that Loretta kept afloat by convincing first herself, and then the audience, that the movie was worth their time. Was the real Loretta the miracle-believing devotee of the Virgin Mary, who had become the equivalent of her role model? Or was she the actress who bore Clark Gable’s daughter out of wedlock and, with the help of her studio, a gossip columnist, and a loyal and well-connected physician, devised a cover-up worthy of a woman’s film? Gretchen was the child who never outgrew convent school; Loretta was the actress, who, finally at seventy-four, revealed that Gretchen would always be a part of her.

She did so in the interview that she gave Gregory Speck in 1987, in which she rhapsodized about Pope Pius XII, Padre Pio, and Teresa Neuman. She also spoke with the utmost candor about sex. Loretta was forty-three when she separated from Lewis. She did not remarry until 1993, when she was eighty and Lewis had been dead for five years: “
I must say
that for the first ten years I thought I would go crazy. It was very difficult going without sex. And you never lose that need until you die.” Loretta felt the same need, perhaps even more strongly, when she was in her early twenties and on location with Clark Gable for
The
C
all of the Wild.
Inevitably, Speck broached the subject of Gable, to which Loretta replied more honestly than she had ever done before: “One could very easily fall in love with him, and if we did it was nobody’s business but ours and clearly nothing to discuss, for he was married.… I will confess I love the idea of Clark and me falling in love and having Judy. I have to admit it’s
really a charming idea, very romantic.” It was more than an idea, as Judy revealed and as Loretta confirmed shortly before her death.

Speck had a much higher regard for Loretta at the end of the interview than he did at the beginning, when he was greeted by a woman in her early seventies, swathed in green silk to match her eyes, with a rope of beads dangling from her long neck—as if, like
Sunset Boulevard
’s Norma Desmond, she was ready for her close up. He left, realizing that what he saw was an eidolon, an image that emanated from the actress to the camera—or, in this case, to the interviewer. Although he did not share Loretta’s religious convictions, he understood from the look on her transfigured face, that she believed every word she uttered about the pope, the stigmatists, and the miraculous. He heard Gretchen speaking through Loretta, the fervent believer in signs and wonders decked out like a movie queen.

The 1957 trip to Europe was one of Loretta’s defining moments. Whatever transpired between Loretta and the pontiff, or Padre Pio and Teresa Neuman, was too private to divulge. But it is clear that Loretta was spiritually rejuvenated and ready to embark on a mission to prove that miracles come in various forms, including the spiritual kind that scientists would dismiss for lack of proof, because they have no access to another’s inner self—much less to a divine plan.

The year 1958 marked the Lourdes centennial, commemorating the apparition of the Virgin to Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto of Massabielle near Lourdes in 1858. The waters that sprang forth from the earth formed a pool, where millions have come, hoping to be cured of chronic ailments or terminal illness. Unusual cures, perhaps even miraculous ones, have been reported. But the real drama, the human drama, did not lie in miracles, the equivalent of deus ex machina endings, but in nonmiracles—or rather miracles of a different sort—the serenity that comes with the acceptance of the ultimate reality, particularly from someone who had treated mortality lightly until, quite by accident, she came to Lourdes.

This was the kind of script Loretta wanted: an hour-long teleplay, a first for her show, about a converted agnostic.

In summer 1959, Loretta and her television crew flew to France for on-location filming. Richard Morris had written the kind of script she requested: a philanderer’s wife, aware of her husband’s dalliances with secretaries, but choosing to ignore them, books a flight to Paris for a second opinion about her diagnosis of brain cancer, only to hear a French neurologist confirm that she has an inoperable tumor. When cognac and
painkillers prove to be only stopgap measures, she rents a car and heads for Spain, meeting on route a boy, who persuades her to visit Lourdes. The Lourdes sequences are impressive in their documentary simplicity, with the infirm in wheel chairs, stretchers, and mobile beds, lined up in rows, waiting to be brought to the pool. Lourdes transforms the woman from a denier to a believer; she accepts the inevitable with a newly found serenity. The miracle of Lourdes is not that the character became cancerfree, but that she became free of cancer and the fear that it engendered, which she tried to banish with alcohol.

The Polish-born Rudolph Maté was Loretta’s personal choice for director. He had directed an earlier woman-with-terminal cancer picture,
No Sad Songs for Me
(1950), with great sensitivity, which he also revealed in the one film he and Loretta made together,
Paula
(1952), in addition to a number of her television shows. Maté could also take material that another director would have reduced to treacle and treat it with respect, as he did in
Sally and St. Anne
(1952), in which Ann Blyth’s devotion to the saint had a disarming sincerity about it. Shooting on location posed no problem for Maté, who had proven in
D.O.A.
(1950) that he could deal with a gritty urban landscape—specifically, the dark streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco—without prettifying it. Under his direction, Loretta gave an extraordinary performance, revealing each facet of the character: the wealthy wife of a cheating husband who hides her humiliation behind a stoic façade; the terminal cancer patient who confronts mortality by drinking her way into the safety zone of denial; the second opinion seeker who jets across the Atlantic to Paris, only to receive a confirmation of the original diagnosis; the doubter who turns believer after being sidetracked to Lourdes. The role allowed Loretta to shed the veils of self-deception in which the character had wrapped herself. One scene in particular attests to the subtlety of which she was capable (and which critics so often ignored). Drinking one cognac after another in a bistro, she piles the glasses on top of each other as she flirts with the non-English- speaking bartender across the glass façade that she has erected. Beckoning to him to join her, she at first seems to be taking advantage of his inability to understand English. But when she realizes that, from his point of view, there is no language barrier if all she wants is sex, she merely wags her finger, signaling that a drinking companion, not a one-night stand, is all she is seeking. Richard Morris’s script enabled Loretta to trace a real character arc, as a skeptic gradually becomes a believer, achieving a spiritual transformation that she does not fully understand but that is visible in her face, which is finally at peace.

The show aired on 20 September 1959. Morris’s script was nominated for an Emmy, but lost to
The Twilight Zone
’s Rod Sterling. Still,
The Road
was notable for its adherence to the terminal illness template, epitomized by
Dark Victory
(1939), in which Judith Traherne (Bette Davis), diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, learns to meet death “finely, beautifully,” as if dying were somehow an art that could be mastered. In this kind of script, there can be no last-minute wonder drug or a misdiagnosis. The 1979 television update of
Dark Victory
with Elizabeth Montgomery and the film remake,
Stolen Hours
(1963), with Susan Hayward in the Bette Davis role adhered to the rubric, which resembles a Greek tragedy, with the protagonist’s fate determined at the outset, and the audience waiting for the inevitable to occur. When it does, it brings with it the catharsis that comes from the portrayal of death faced “finely, beautifully.” Other such films—
No Sad Songs for Me, The Miniver Story
(1950),
Terms of Endearment
(1983), and
My Life
(1993)—scrupulously observe the “no
deus ex machina
” rule. In view of Loretta’s belief in miracles, it was to her credit that she asked for a spiritual, not a physical, cure for her character. Significantly, when Loretta was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she behaved no differently than the wife she played in “The Road.” Loretta had also experienced the miracle of faith that allowed her to maintain a beatific tranquility in the face of death, as if, like Judith and her successors, she had mastered the Stoic
ars moriendi
, the art of dying.