Myrna Loy (15 page)

The artificiality of these roles rankled, especially when she was assigned to impersonate an Asian character in a cast that included actors who were actually Asian American. Next to Anna May Wong, with whom she appeared in
The Crimson City
, Myrna said, “I looked about as Chinese as Raggedy Ann” (
BB
, 52).

She didn’t want to be limited to one type of part, but she did want to keep acting in pictures. When Darryl Zanuck called her into his office one December day to tell her that Oriental roles were going out of style, that they didn’t have much call for her type any more, and that Warners would not renew her contract into the new decade, her blue mood turned to black. Zanuck would later tell an interviewer that his failure to discover Myrna Loy was the worst error of his career.
³⁹

CHAPTER 6

Breakthrough

Myrna began the 1930s at a low ebb. At age twenty-five she still lived in a modest Beverly Hills home with her mother, brother, and aunt, and she remained very much under Della’s thumb. Although Myrna supplied the money to buy it, the house they lived in legally belonged to Mother, not Myrna. Clinging to her maternal identity, Della had turned down a marriage proposal because she wanted to “devote herself to her children,” but Myrna had begun to wish that some of her mother’s devotion would find other outlets. Balking at the tightness of Della’s grip, Myrna tried to persuade her mother to allow her younger brother, David, who’d recently finished high school, to study art in Europe, but Della wouldn’t hear of it.

Myrna continued to support her family, doing so with a growing sense of insecurity as the Depression took hold. The ranks of the unemployed swelled, and breadlines formed in cities all over the country. Banks were failing, businesses closing. As Broadway theaters went dark in New York, more and more stage actors and vaudevillians flocked to Hollywood seeking work, just as studios reduced the number of contract players they employed. “Los Angeles is a good place to stay away from for those who must work to eat,”
Variety
warned its readers. Warner Bros. had given Myrna Loy the boot around the time it signed on Jimmy Cagney, Joan Blondell, and Edward G. Robinson, stars with Broadway credentials who would help define that studio’s gritty, crime-driven, street-smart, and slangy style, custom made to fit the Depression. Myrna had no new studio alliance and no contract.
¹

She did have an agent in her corner, however—Minna Wallis, who now ran a talent agency in partnership with Ruth Collier. With Minna’s help Myrna continued to freelance as a screen actress, sometimes working for obscure Poverty Row studios such as Sono Art or Chesterfield, and she despaired of ever getting beyond hackneyed, bad-girl roles in B pictures. Her dance background helped her stay afloat. In 1930’s
The Truth about Youth
she was Kara, known as “The Firefly,” a shady cabaret entertainer who sashays seductively with a practiced air but whose singing had to be dubbed. The same year, in the Technicolor operetta
Bride of the Regiment
, she donned a blonde wig and gyrated with abandon on a banquet table to win back Walter Pidgeon’s affection. “The directors could see me as a dancing girl or a heavy, but never as an actress.”
²

She jumped at the chance to play the suicidal wife of a gigolo violinist in
Cock o’ the Walk
because her leading man would be an actor she admired, Joseph Schildkraut. Newly divorced, Schildkraut took her out a few times, dazzled her with stories about his Berlin days with Max Reinhardt, and made a pass (
BB
, 60).
Cock o’ the Walk
was universally panned, but Loy’s performance opposite Schildkraut won her plaudits from
Variety
, which proclaimed, “Myrna Loy makes a dumb and passive role look graceful and seem real.”
³

In
Renegades
, a burning-sands action picture directed by Victor Fleming for Fox, she played Eleanore, a European spy of the blackest dye determined to destroy the Frenchman she once loved, Deucalion, portrayed by Warner Baxter. Exactly why she hates Deucalion goes unexplained; it’s a case of motiveless malignancy. Betrayed by Eleanore, who sold his secrets to the Germans during the Great War, Deucalion becomes a deserter of the French Foreign Legion and along with three fellow deserters joins the Riffs in Morocco. He kidnaps Eleanore and forces her to serve as a camp follower. She’ll go with any man, even the Arab Marabout (played by Bela Lugosi), who keeps her in his harem. This clear violation of the newly articulated Production Code edict prohibiting miscegenation got by the censors, who were not yet rigorously enforcing the rules. In the end Deucalion resumes his allegiance to the French and turns his weapons against the Arabs. Pretending to cozy up to him in the sand dunes for a climactic clinch in the violent finale, Eleanore shoots him dead with a machine gun as the camera closes in.

Although Loy’s Eleanore had white skin and spoke English without a foreign accent, this was a role she’d often played before, another slinky and exotically costumed vixen, an all-too-familiar menace devoted to seduction and treachery. Myrna’s own comment on Eleanore suggests that she had been reading about psychoanalysis. “Eleanore is a complex of complexes,” she told an interviewer. “I’m afraid she’s a case for international psychology. To enumerate her psychoses would break down the combined vocabularies of Brill and Freud.”
⁴

Shot in three weeks in the blistering heat of the Mojave Desert,
Renegades
tested the mettle of both cast and crew. Crawling in the dunes, drenched in sweat while clutching a machine gun, Myrna got sand in her teeth, and her makeup kept melting away. Warner Baxter remembered that it was so hot “they had to keep the cameras packed in ice-bags like a fever patient, so the celluloid wouldn’t catch fire.” Myrna liked and respected Baxter, a high-salaried (because he’d won an Oscar for his work in 1928’s
In Old Arizona
), competent, and darkly handsome but rather stiff and bland Ohio native with whom she would appear in three more pictures, and she no doubt enjoyed being the much doted upon sole female in the cast. After the film was released, the critics complained justly about the confusing plot and absence of motivation in Jules Furthman’s screenplay, but they succumbed to Myrna Loy’s allure. One confessed, “Her strange eyes start heat waves dancing in the Moroccan desert for me.”
⁵

Her work in
Renegades
elicited a slam from Louella Parsons, who snidely commented, “Miss Loy is one of the best-looking girls on the screen, and maybe one of these days her acting will match her looks.” But the same performance prompted Fox to sign her to a six-month contract at $750 a week in the fall of 1930, a drop from the $850 a week she commanded for her work in
Renegades
. “This brings to an end a long period [it was actually less than a year] in which [Loy’s] fate hung in the balance,” a Los Angeles daily reported. “She was gaining prominence at Warners when the movies found their tongues. For a while it appeared as if she might fade away with a number of other silent favorites. Recently, however, she has had several good roles.” “Good” here means prominent rather than high quality.
⁶

Myrna signed with Fox during a time of turmoil at that studio after its founder, William Fox, had been forced out. He’d borrowed more than $40 million to purchase Loew’s, Inc., but a Justice Department antitrust suit prevented the merger. In addition to his financial woes, William Fox was recovering from serious injuries suffered in a 1929 car crash. Although under its founder the Fox Film Corporation had pioneered sound-on-film technology, had broken ground with its Movietone newsreels, had attracted top directors such as John Ford and F. W. Murnau, had built a new all-sound studio in Westwood, and in 1930 controlled more than five hundred theaters, a new mogul, the utilities magnate Harley Clarke, now sat at the helm. Clarke’s tenure lasted only a short time. He left Fox in 1931, a year that saw movie ticket purchases drop by 40 percent, contributing to what was called “the worst year financially in the history of pictures.” Fox profits plummeted, the studio losing more than $4 million. That year Myrna Loy, too, would part company with Fox.
⁷

While at Fox, Myrna became more socially confident and more visible than she’d previously been, turning up at gala movie premieres, at a filmed reception for Fanchon and Marco, and at an Embassy Club dinner where she sat at Jack Warner’s table, along with Clark Gable, William Powell and Carole Lombard (who would soon marry), Jimmy Durante, and the screenwriter Gene Markey. Ira and Lee Gershwin invited her to an A-list party at their home, where Oscar Levant bestowed on her a red rose from a vase as she shyly walked by the piano. The European-born stage actress Elissa Landi, who made her Hollywood screen debut in a 1931 World War I film called
Body and Soul
, in which young Humphrey Bogart played an air force pilot and Myrna Loy had a small role as a sexy spy, was her hostess at several cocktail parties where guests from all over the world shared wide-ranging conversation. Myrna found Landi “lean and bright, with wonderful humor” (
BB
, 62). They would work together again, further down the road.
⁸

Fox and Myrna Loy were not particularly well matched. The studio was known for its folksy, down-home style, while Myrna was still associated with sin and exoticism. Fox’s biggest female star at the moment was the sincere, all-American, no-frills Janet Gaynor, and the top-earning king of the set was the gently satiric, aw’ shucks Oklahoman Will Rogers.

Myrna had a chance to get to know Rogers when she played Queen Morgan le Fay to his time-traveling Yankee in
A Connecticut Yankee
(1931), a box-office winner with rentals of $1.3 million and among the
New York Times
’ ten best films of the year. In this adaptation of the Mark Twain novel, Fox’s second go at the story, most of the laughs come via anachronisms, the jarring juxtaposition of things medieval and things ultramodern. Radios, helicopters, cars, telephones, factory time cards, and a reference to
Amos ’n’ Andy
invade storied Camelot, with its turreted castle, massive banquet tables, dark dungeons, and jousting knights. Will Rogers starts out as a small-town radio mechanic, Hank Martin, braving a stormy night drive to deliver a battery to a spooky mansion. These are hard times, and Hank needs the business, “if they pay cash.” At the mansion, knocked on the head by a suit of armor, Hank wakes up in the court of King Arthur, where he earns the title “Sir Boss” by making fire with a cigarette lighter and then successfully predicting an eclipse of the sun with the invocation “Prosperity, Farm Relief, Freedom for Ireland, Light Wines and Beer.” Impressed by Sir Boss’s ability to make the sun vanish and the kingdom go dark, King Arthur (William Farnum) asks him if he’s a magician, and Rogers replies, “I’m just a Democrat. You have to be a magician to make a living these days.”

As the lavishly gowned Morgan le Fay, sister of King Arthur, Myrna Loy is once again an evil beauty, this time a sexual aggressor with a yen for Will Rogers’s laid back, lasso-throwing Sir Boss. In the scene where she comes on to Sir Boss and plants a kiss on him, he protests, “I ain’t used to messin’ around with any queens,” and blushes a deep crimson. The film was shot in black and white, but for this scene hand tinting was used to show Rogers’s face going red. According to Myrna, Will Rogers truly was a shy man, ill at ease in love scenes. Off camera, though, he gently flirted with her, whistling and hollering in her direction whenever he caught a glimpse of her as he drove by (
BB
, 63).

Because she says she saw only more vixen roles in her future if she remained tied to Fox, Myrna reports in her autobiography that she broke her contract to begin freelancing once again. Press accounts reported that it was Fox that failed to pick up her option. What really happened is that Fox dropped its option on her initial contract, which would have raised her salary; it did offer to keep her on for another six months at her starting salary of $750 a week, and Myrna rejected those terms. She felt she could do better, perhaps at a studio with deeper pockets, and her agent, Minna Wallis, must have encouraged her to go independent.
⁹

Leaving Fox after one year proved far less traumatic than leaving Warners after five years had been. Myrna now had enough self-assurance to trust she could cut a swath in the movies, with or without the backing of a single studio. The ensuing months would find her frequently back at Fox as a freelancer, in addition to working twice for Goldwyn, once for Paramount, and once, as Becky Sharp in a low-budget, modern-dress
Vanity Fair
, for the obscure Allied Pictures.

She was hired on a picture-by-picture basis by the smallest major studio, RKO, where Irene Dunne was being heavily promoted as the top female star. In
Consolation Marriage
(1931), the first of two RKO pictures Myrna made featuring Dunne, Irene Dunne’s name appears above the title and Myrna Loy is billed fourth—a situation not calculated to promote warm feelings on Myrna’s part toward the star. Myrna continued to view Irene Dunne, a brilliant, justly celebrated comic actress, as a rival who often got parts she wished she could have landed for herself. In later years they had political differences, too, and never seem to have bridged the gap.

The chance to appear in a film quite different from any on her list of previous credits arrived with a role in a Samuel Goldwyn production,
The Devil to Pay
. The man who cast her was Arthur Hornblow Jr., an urbane, impeccably tailored ex–New Yorker who had a Columbia University law degree. Initially hired as a screenwriter, Hornblow had come to Goldwyn’s attention as the adapter and Broadway producer of a scandalous French play about lesbians called
The Captive
. He now held a job as Goldwyn’s chief of production. Hornblow was married to the stage actress Juliette Crosby, a frequent visitor to the
Devil
set, and they were expecting a baby. They lived a few blocks away from Myrna, on the very same street, North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills.