Myrna Loy (11 page)

But publicity for
What Price Beauty?
brought it some positive attention in the summer and fall of 1925, before the Valentino divorce and near the time of the actual shooting of the picture. The
Los Angeles Times
, in an article that included pictures from the production, called the movie “a rather adroit answer to the critics who have made the assertion that Miss Rambova has been influencing too much the career of her husband. It is . . . her declaration of independence.” And what a resounding declaration it was. “Some of the sequences,” reported the
Times
, “incline to be quite ultra and fantastic.”
¹⁷

With Parisian taste, a penchant for the avant-garde, and the experience of designing the outré sets and costumes for Nazimova’s
Salome
behind her, Rambova decided to indulge her adventurous proclivities to the hilt in this picture, her sole independent cinematic venture, which unfortunately has not survived. The designer Adrian Gilbert, later known simply as Adrian, had come to Hollywood with the Valentinos to create costumes for their failed project
The Hooded Falcon
, but he stayed on to work on
What Price Beauty?
He would soon be launched as a rising star among Hollywood designers. Natacha gave him carte blanche on her picture, which she wrote as well as produced. A satire of the beauty industry,
What Price Beauty?
starred Nita Naldi, the voluptuous, flashing-eyed, dark-haired veteran of many temptress roles, as a vamp who vies with a country girl for the love of the manager of a beauty parlor. In a dream sequence the heroine dreams she’s in a surreal beauty parlor where she must choose among several different types of women, represented by different models wearing various wild Adrian getups. Myrna played the “intellectual vamp.” Natacha supplied a wig, giving her a short blonde “do” with bangs that formed points on her forehead, pixie style. Adrian created turtle-necked, formfitting red velvet pajamas for her tall, slender form, adding a sarong at the waist, long sleeves, and a fur-trimmed train. Natacha also oversaw Myrna’s makeup. “She slanted my eyes and—unquestionably—that bizarre role was the beginning of my artistic career.”
¹⁸

Although Myrna’s part in the dream sequence was small, media attention now came her way. Images of her wearing her
What Price Beauty?
costume, captured in still photos taken by Henry Waxman, became the basis of a picture spread in the September 1925 issue of the fan magazine
Motion Picture
. “There’s a great buzzing and roaring in our ears,” ran the copy that accompanied the photos. “It’s thousands of readers asking ‘Who . . . is she? Who Is She?’ ” Describing Myrna as “piquant, elfin, boyish, lithe, the essence of grace,” the anonymous fan magazine writer seemed all in a dither over this new screen discovery. “You don’t know whether she’s innocent or sophisticated; whether she’s a low-brow or a high-brow,” he or she sputtered. “But you know that she is very, very young and very, very fascinating.” The article quotes Natacha Rambova heralding Myrna as “the 1926 flapper model.” It advises all “breezy, tom-boyish flappers” from 1925 to “practice changing your type, or on New Year’s Day you’ll find yourselves frightfully out of date.” For the first time, but not the last, Myrna was touted as the prototype of modern young womanhood.
¹⁹

The
Motion Picture
magazine article referred to this fascinating, streamlined young actress by a new name, not Myrna Williams but Myrna Loy. Myrna let herself be persuaded that Williams was simply too prosaic a surname for her, and besides, there were already plenty of Hollywood actresses around with the name “Williams”—Kathlyn Williams, for instance, also of Welsh descent and also from Montana. A poet friend, Peter Rarick, probably aware of the modernist poet Mina Loy, came up with the name “Loy.” When discussing the name change, Myrna never mentioned Mina Loy. She told Gladys Hall that Peter Rarick, an avant-garde sound poet who was part of a group of artists she befriended, had visited Henry Waxman’s studio once when she was there. “He told me that I should change the name of Williams. It was a very good name, he said, for a little girl from Montana, but it didn’t fit the pictures Henry had made of me. It wasn’t exotic enough.” Myrna said she believed that “he got the name Loy from a book of Chinese poems.” She immediately signed the Waxman photos with her new, exotic name, and used it from that point on. When Myrna was told decades after choosing the name “Loy” that the word means “to float” in Thai, she was delighted with the information.
²⁰

Myrna sometimes missed her real name and the family history it conjured. People she knew of Welsh descent, like Richard Burton, would insist on addressing her as “Miss Williams,” and she rather liked that (
BB
, 42). Myrna Loy knew that the real Myrna was a freckle-faced, auburn-haired girl from Crow Creek Valley and that Williams fitted very snugly “the girl who walked to and from work because she didn’t have any other means of locomotion, the girl who helped with the dishes and pressed her own clothes.” But Natacha Rambova had fashioned her as Myrna Loy and pointed her in a new direction, facing east.
²¹

By July of 1925, that all-important year, a month before her twentieth birthday, Myrna Loy had signed a contract with Warner Bros.

CHAPTER 5

Warner Bros.’ Exotic Vixen

There are at least two versions of the story explaining how Myrna Loy came to be signed by Warner Bros. Myrna’s autobiography credits her first contract as the coup of Minna Wallis, older sister of the studio’s publicist and future producer Hal B. Wallis. Minna, a single woman who got around in social Hollywood, served at the time as private secretary to Jack Warner but would soon become a talent agent representing Myrna Loy, as well as Clark Gable and George Brent. She had an office on Sunset near Bronson, close to Henry Waxman’s photography studio, and Waxman eagerly showed her the pictures he’d taken of Miss Loy, suggesting to Minna that she set up a screen test for his discovery. Minna agreed to try to get the photogenic dancer a Warners contract, but she believed that a screen test would not show her to best advantage. Instead, she simply snuck Myrna into a scene in a Lowell Sherman movie called
Satan in Sables
, whose director, James Flood, happened to live on Delmas Terrace right across the street from Myrna and her family. During shooting, Minna seated Myrna beside, then on the lap of, the rakish Lowell Sherman in a banquet scene, making sure that in a close-up of Sherman, Myrna’s face would show up distinctly in the frame. In
Satan in Sables
, a lost film, Myrna Loy turned up in more than just the banquet scene. “I was the trollop,” said Myrna, “who lured [Sherman] to parties, broke champagne glasses and was the hell-cat in general.” The ruse worked. Jack Warner, after seeing the rushes, asked, “Who’s that next to Sherman?” His next words were, “Sign her” (
BB
, 43).

Another explanation comes via an unpublished interview with Alma Young, who worked as a script supervisor at Warners for decades, beginning in 1923. Young described Myrna Loy at the time she arrived at Warners as “tall and thin,” with eyes that “had a regular slant.” She believed that Myrna and Irene Rich were brought to the Warner Bros, studio at the urging of the debonair, mustachioed investment banker Motley Flint, a major financial backer of Warners as it expanded and a close friend of Jack Warner. Alma Young hinted that Motley Flint promoted Myrna Loy because he had a romantic interest in her. That’s easy to believe, but since he was forty years older than Myrna and not divorced (although separated from his wife), his interest was almost certainly not reciprocated by Myrna. At this point she was still very much the good girl in her private life, “the only good girl in Hollywood,” John Ford would call her, because she didn’t sleep around (
BB
, 58). Motley Flint, a bon vivant with deep pockets, often hosted lavish parties attended by Warner Bros, players and executives. Although not a big partygoer, Myrna surely attended some of them. She makes no mention of him in her autobiography, not even noting Flint’s role in the notorious Julian Petroleum scandal of the late 1920s, involving the bilking of small investors, or the rather spectacular fact that an aggrieved purchaser of overissued Julian Petroleum stock who held Flint responsible for his financial ruin murdered Flint in court in 1930. Although Flint may have encouraged Jack Warner to hire Myrna, it was Minna Wallis who made the contract happen.
¹

“Myrna Loy has been signed by Warner Bros, because of her distinctly unusual and Oriental type,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported, a few months after she had actually signed her seven-year contract in July of 1925. Warners’ publicity department touted its new find as the Oriental type before she had played a single exotic role. Even though
What Price Beauty?
had not yet been officially released, and only a few people had seen it, Jack Warner, the youngest of the four Warner brothers and the one in charge of day-to-day production at their Sunset Boulevard studio, was apparently among those who had. Without access to the movie, a wider public
had
seen the spread on Myrna Loy in
Motion Picture
magazine with the Henry Waxman photographs of her, clad in body-hugging pajamas designed by Adrian, and it associated the slinky young starlet with Rambova, the dark-haired, kohl-eyed beauty who had cast Loy in
What Price Beauty?
Popular opinion held that Rambova’s “entire life was motivated by the distant ringing of temple bells and flavored by the fragrance of incense.” In Myrna Loy, fans were led to believe, “Rambova’s Svengali” had created “a Trilby who retains the best features of Theda Bara,” the celebrated screen vamp of the 1910s who had supposedly been born in the shadow of the Sphinx, “and Sadie Thompson,” Maugham’s tawdry fallen woman in the play
Rain
, based on his short story.
²

During the silent era, typecasting based on an actor’s physical traits was common, and there were just so many types available to young screen lovelies. Shapely, intense, dark-haired actresses like Nita Naldi tended to be cast as vamps. Colleen Moore and Clara Bow, soon to be joined by Joan Crawford, had dibs on flapper roles: peppy, flirty, modern, and all-American. Rambova had cast Myrna Loy as the “intellectual flapper,” but that label didn’t stick in the way the association with Rambova did. The name
Loy
, which sounded Chinese, provided another clue to her exotic status. Myrna’s sophisticated air ruled out ingénue roles, in any case. She didn’t have the girlish, blonde, virginal quality of a Mary Pickford, who wore “a kind of halo,” or of Warners’ newest star, the blonde, angelic-looking Dolores Costello, who was still in her teens.
³

Myrna, a reed-thin, redheaded dancer who photographed as a brunette and whose makeup concealed the freckles that might have qualified her to play country bumpkins, possessed widely spaced almond-shaped eyes. Her brows could easily be shaped to look Asian, the effect enhanced by whitening her ample eyelids. “Myrna Loy never looks like anyone else,” ran the caption under a photo of her published in the
Los Angeles Times
. It claimed, “She is able to achieve an oriental atmosphere with the slow lift of her eyelids.” She seemed destined to be seen not as an American girl next door but as a foreign outsider and a temptress, often one who lives in a city and traffics in sin.
⁴

In
Across the Pacific
, her first Asian role, she donned a sarong, put a flower in her long dark tresses, and did her best during shooting in Malibu to convey seductiveness tinged with menace. This hardly original combination was a cliché of the Yellow Peril thinking rampant in 1920s America. Released in October 1926,
Across the Pacific
cast her as a spy, a Philippine “native love girl” who tangles with the American soldier Monte Blue during the Spanish-American War, trying to lure him away from the white woman (Jane Winton) he really loves. Critics took note. Edwin Schallert of the
Los Angeles Times
wrote, “Myrna Loy is a revelation. If there is a more sinister type than she on the screen I do not know who she might be. The charm of her personality is that for all its seeming menace it remains alluring.” Carl Sandburg, at the time a film critic for the
Chicago Daily News
, seemed smitten. “This here Myrna Loy is the star player,” he averred. “She is the subject of a thousand poems and stories of the orient” (quoted in
BB
, 45).
⁵

In
Crimson City
(1928), a “lost” film recently rediscovered in Argentina, she was a Chinese love slave in a Shanghai waterfront dive, “where crime is curtained behind glamorous silks.” She ends up stabbing her Chinese keeper, saving the white man she loves, but sacrificing herself by jumping off a boat. Said Myrna, who almost drowned after leaping from that boat, “Nobody thought of me as the virgin, I guess. I had these slinky eyes and a sense of humor.” The sense of humor would go unnoticed by producers and directors for a while; for now her eyes, “look,” and body type set the tone.
⁶

When
Photoplay
included Myrna Loy in a picture story on the current crop of fetching new starlets, it photographed her in a brief sarong, a lacy see-through top, with a long, trailing silk scarf cascading from her hip. Despite her piano legs and thick ankles, which would later prompt sniping in the trade papers, the article called hers “the most beautiful figure at Warner Studio” and claimed she was “modeled like a statuette.” To judge by this and other publicity shots of Myrna at age twenty, the formerly highbrow
artiste
had morphed into a pinup girl adept at cheesecake poses. She showed up in a black bathing suit in newspaper photos, spunky, pert, outdoorsy, and svelte, tossing a beach ball to another pretty girl. The trailing mass of curls had vanished; in its place came a stylish flapper mop, curly as ever but now bobbed to look altogether modern. The straight, lanky, well-proportioned figure that became exotic when draped in a sarong or mandarin-collared sheath could easily sport a knee-kissing fringed dress just right for kicking up your heels to the Charleston.
⁷