Myrna Loy (12 page)

Myrna was thrilled to find herself a contract player at Warner Bros., but she soon learned that her job amounted to slave labor. Working under banks of Cooper-Hewitts, hissing sun-arcs, and blazing Klieg lights was hot, exhausting, and dangerous to the eyes. She had to rise at 5:30 six days a week in order to be camera ready by 9:00, and she sometimes had to work through the night. Because she portrayed so many characters with brown or yellow skin, her makeup regime took an especially long time. She got to know the makeup crew well, and her dyed and greased body made her feel anything but erotic under the lights. Often she worked on two or three films at one time.

Not yet a major studio, Warner Bros, specialized in low-budget, quickie productions turned out at breakneck speed. It spent roughly half as much money as MGM did on an average production and made a big success of its extremely low-budget Rin Tin Tin films, starring a German Shepherd dog. In these days, before there was a Screen Actors Guild, film actors could be and were summoned to work at any hour of the day or night and for any length of time. Vacations, breaks for meals, sick leaves, or days off were not mentioned in contracts. The studio owned the exclusive rights to the player’s acting services, as well as to her or his photo sessions and personal appearances. Myrna could work for another studio only when Warners chose to rent her out, not otherwise. Illness or physical disability alone might excuse her from the set, and the studio reserved the right to investigate the alleged cause of any absence. She had to agree to repay the producer for any financial losses incurred by her absence. At the studio’s discretion she could be (and was) laid off without pay for periodic two-week intervals. The pay, most of the time, was good. She began at only seventy-five dollars a week but got a raise every six months, with each renewal of her contract. By 1927 she was earning $500 a week and had purchased a house and a car. By 1929 her salary was $700 a week.
⁸

Myrna continued to hand over her money to controlling Della, who allotted her small amounts for spending money. Myrna’s reluctance to take charge of her own finances would remain a lifelong trait. In some ways this let-someone-else-do-it attitude liberated her, but in others it served her poorly. If she’d had more of a Mary Pickford-like hard head for business and money management, she would have exercised far more control over her career. Perhaps her avoidance of handling her own money had something to do with her father’s wild spending and a fear that she might go the same route if she had the chance.

Soon after signing with Warners she took an apartment in Beverly Hills so that she wouldn’t have to commute far in the wee hours. Della, Aunt Lu, and young David remained on Delmas Terrace but without cousin Laura Belle, who had died at the age of twenty-six. (She is buried in Radersburg.) Myrna soon returned to Delmas Terrace, but after her brother graduated from high school in 1929, she bought a Beverly Hills home at 221 North Crescent Drive. Della sold the Delmas Terrace house, and the family moved in with Myrna. Her attempts at independent living never lasted for long.

Despite the grueling pace at Warner Bros., Myrna Loy initially felt upbeat and excited to find herself working at full tilt as a movie actress. “I was having a ball” (
BB
, 48). The exotic roles were initially fun to play, and she took them seriously, attempting to get beyond stereotypes by reading up on the customs of China, Java, and the other countries whose women she portrayed. Everything felt new to her, and she relished the chance to learn while doing. Eager and uncomplaining, with a sturdy constitution she once likened to that of a peasant, she was a quick study who believed that she’d lucked into her main chance. Since Myrna had no stage experience as an actress, and had not studied acting except in high school, Warner Bros, would provide her apprenticeship. There were plenty of talented people around from whom she might pick up pointers, although no single person took charge of tutoring or mentoring her.

The cigar-chomping dynamo Darryl Zanuck, who walked around carrying a sawed-off polo mallet, created many of her roles. A lowly screenwriter who was only twenty-three at the time Myrna was hired, he penned so many Warners scripts that he invented a slew of pseudonyms to hide behind: Melville Crossman, Mark Canfield, Gregory Rogers. A shrewd, hard-driving Nebraskan who’d been on his own from the age of thirteen, Zanuck had an instinct for both action-packed, tabloid-style storytelling and the marketplace. He would soon take control at Warners as head of production and become a major force in Hollywood, going on to found 20th Century Pictures, which in 1935 would merge with the Fox Film Corporation to form 20th Century–Fox.

Zanuck wrote the script or story for nine of Loy’s early vehicles, including
Across the Pacific
, which a few critics singled out for praise because of Myrna Loy’s exotic charm. Zanuck must have been impressed, so much so that he continued to confine her to similar sarong roles, relieved only by the occasional excursion into the equally marginal world of American big-city crime. He had a definite impact on Loy’s career, but because at Warners he couldn’t picture her as anything but an exotic temptress or a gun moll, she came to see that impact as a negative one. She believed he limited her. Myrna once caught him, a married man, at the studio with a starlet on his lap, and she always wondered whether the rift she felt existed between them had anything to do with that. But Zanuck’s numerous infidelities were no big secret. Even his wife, Virginia Fox, a former actress in Buster Keaton comedies, seems to have been aware that her husband played around, although she was spared the particulars. Zanuck, despite his many talents, apparently had all the emotional maturity of a frisky fifteen-year-old. He and his office mate, the director Roy del Ruth, drilled holes in the office wall so that they could spy on the screenwriter Bess Meredyth next door.
⁹

Zanuck, who would later produce gritty Depression-era underworld dramas such as
The Public Enemy, Little Caesar
, and
Baby Face
as vehicles for the likes of Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Barbara Stanwyck, tried to squeeze Myrna Loy into the tough-girl mold, with little success. He wrote the story for 1928’s
Midnight Taxi
, “about cheating cheaters, rum runners and plain crooks,” where Loy, looking smashing in furs, played Gertie, the wife of a bootlegger, and for the same year’s
State Street Sadie
, where she was a Chicago policeman’s daughter who pretends to be pistol-packing gangland cutie Sadie in order to avenge her father’s murder. “I’m on the other side of the law again,” Loy joked to the
Los Angeles Times
. “I have had an almost steady job carrying a .38 and dodging machine gun bullets.”
Variety
found her miscast as Sadie. “Myrna Loy, with her exotic style, doesn’t suggest the daughter of a policeman.” The movie acknowledged her essentially ladylike quality by providing her an out: she’s really a well-bred girl, only pretending to be bad. The same trick had been used in Loy’s first venture into gangland, 1927’s
The Girl from Chicago
, where she was a southern belle masquerading as a crook’s girlfriend to save her wrongly imprisoned brother. Archie Mayo, director of
State Street Sadie
, called her “the dual personality girl,” an actress who could vamp it up in one sequence and play “the demure home girl” in the next. The tough-girl roles never carried much conviction. Gum chewing didn’t come naturally. As Delight Evans put it in a fan magazine, Myrna Loy is “caviar, not corned beef and cabbage.”
¹⁰

Zanuck also wrote the story for
Ham and Eggs at the Front
, a racist “Negro comedy” requiring Loy and all the other white actors playing blacks to wear blackface makeup. Spoofing
What Price Glory?
, it was set in France during the Great War and concerned an all-black American regiment. Myrna’s role as Fifi, a Senegalese waitress spying for the Germans, caused her profound embarrassment and regret when she looked back at it.

Several directors who were or would become celebrated—Ernst Lubitsch, Lewis Milestone, Howard Hawks (at Fox), and Michael Curtiz—helmed movies in which she appeared, but in every case she played a small role and was rarely singled out for special directorial attention. Lubitsch cast her as a plain-looking maid in
So This Is Paris
. He instructed her on the proper way to lightly knock on a boudoir door, but that was it. In
The Caveman
Lewis Milestone also cast her as a maid, this time an enticing French soubrette in a black uniform and a frilly white apron and cap, whose lines (given in the intertitles) include such gems as “ze lunch ees sairved.” Warner Bros. movies tended to be class conscious, and
The Caveman
, adapted by Zanuck from a Gelett Burgess story, fits that description: a bored Park Avenue debutante, deftly played by Marie Prevost, transforms a crude coal heaver into a gentleman by scrubbing him down, barbering his hair, teaching him elementary manners, and dressing him in tails and a top hat. Myrna Loy had little to do in the film beyond answering the phone, responding to the doorbell, and serving drinks while looking adorably saucy. She wasn’t a vamp in this picture, but
Variety’s
reviewer nonetheless named hers “one of the best vamp bits yet revealed. She is tall, has a provocative face.”
¹¹

Although she continued to be singled out in the press, at Warners she still sometimes played parts so insignificant she didn’t even merit a listing in the credits. Harry O. Hoyt wrote and directed her first outing with star billing, the 1927 melodrama
Bitter Apples
, which was set on the high seas but was in fact shot by photographer Hal Mohr on a boat plying the waters between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Here she played another in a long list of evil beauties, this one part Sicilian and bent on revenge. Determined to torture the man she holds responsible for ruining her banker father and prompting his suicide, she marries him, but guess what? After a shipwreck, she and her victim husband (Monte Blue) fall in love. Warners advertised
Bitter Apples
as “A Stupendous Dramatic Spectacle of Realism—Elemental Passion—Daring Heroism—Torrential Force—and Vengeance on the High Seas.”
¹²

Most of her coplayers in her early movies—Warners regulars such as Clyde Cook, John Miljan, the comedienne Louise Fazenda, and Patsy Ruth Miller—ranked as team players rather than shining stars. An exception was Conrad Nagel, a popular leading man featured in four of Loy’s Warner Bros. films and one of the founders of the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Myrna admired his acting skills, honed on the stage, and appreciated his patience with her as she learned her craft on the job. But when it came to status, no actor in any of her films held a candle to John Barrymore.

Along with the recently imported German director Ernst Lubitsch, John Barrymore stood out at Warner Bros. as a prestige talent hired by a company scrambling to upgrade its image and badly in need of class acts. The most admired stage actor in the English-speaking world, and among the theater’s most commanding presences, Barrymore came to Warners on the heels of his stage triumph in New York and London as Hamlet. Dashing, swashbuckling, and worthy of his moniker “The Great Profile,” he had starred in 1924 in Warners’
Beau Brummel
, filmed in New York, and during shooting had become the lover, at age forty-two, of Mary Astor, an eighteen-year-old ingénue with a dictatorial, exploitative father. Although Astor’s parents controlled her every move and pocketed her every dollar, they allowed her, during filming of
Beau Brummel
, to visit Barrymore’s Manhattan hotel for daily coaching sessions on acting, interspersed with lovemaking. When Barrymore moved to California after signing a lucrative three-picture contract with Warners—he would receive at least $76,250 for each picture and had the right to approve each script and each costar—Mary Astor expected to resume their romance in Hollywood, where her career was flourishing. But shortly before shooting of
The Sea Beast
, he fell in love with another eighteen-year-old, his chosen leading lady, Dolores Costello, who according to Myrna was so lovely she looked more like an orchid than a person. On the set of
Don Juan
, a costly costume drama, Mary Astor sensed immediately, despite Barrymore’s insistence to her that Dolores Costello was “just a chicken,” that she’d been unceremoniously dumped.
¹³

Barrymore’s habit of scanning the cast list for the most delectable female morsel and springing for her was standard operating procedure for a major male star, a ranking producer, or a director who happened to be vehemently heterosexual. In her autobiography the actress Gloria Stuart describes being goosed by a buzzer—to much hilarity on the set—on her first-ever day of shooting. The man with the buzzer turned out to be her director, Archie Mayo, also Myrna’s director in
State Street Sadie, Crimson City
, and
Beware of Married Men
, all from 1928.
¹⁴

Myrna had a chance to observe the Barrymore-Astor backstage melodrama at close range because she had a role in
Don Juan
, in which the brokenhearted Mary Astor played pure and lovely Adriana Della Varnese opposite Barrymore’s flamboyant Don Juan. During the shooting of that film Myrna, costumed as Lady-in-Waiting to Estelle Taylor’s Lucretia Borgia, stumbled into Dolores Costello’s dressing room one day and was astonished and chagrined to find not Dolores, who didn’t appear in this movie, but a weeping Mary Astor, surrounded by Dolores Costello’s collection of photographs of John Barrymore (
BB
, 50).

Barrymore was a busy man during the shooting of
Don Juan
. While courting Dolores Costello (whom he would marry in 1928) and doing his best to avoid Mary Astor, except when he had to kiss her passionately on camera, he also made a play for Myrna. In his cups he would call her late at night from some watering hole in Culver City, saying, “This is the ham what am” and inviting her to join him. At the Warners studio he teased and tormented her. She had tested for the large role of Lucretia Borgia in
Don Juan
, and while she wore the costume for the test, Barrymore had kidded her for being too skinny and flat-chested. Insisting that she needed more padding, he asked the seamstress for pins and began sticking pins into the padding that was in place, telling the seamstress, “You’ve got to fill her out.” On another occasion he swore at Myrna in the middle of a scene because she chose to listen to the director, Alan Crosland, instead of obeying Barrymore’s improvised instructions for changes in the blocking. Myrna responded by walking off the set, a daring move for a novice, and Barrymore subsequently apologized (
BB
, 40). Barrymore might have taught Myrna a lot about acting, but what he mainly taught her was to watch her back.