Myrna Loy (16 page)

Hornblow was friendly with the French-born director of
The Devil to Pay
, George Fitzmaurice, brought in by Goldwyn to replace the original director, Irving Cummings, after two weeks of shooting, and with the star, Ronald Colman, Goldwyn’s dashing, British “King of Romance.” The Hornblows, Fitzmaurice, and Colman, as Myrna remembered it, were “all very chummy” (
BB
, 62).

The first time they met, Hornblow greeted Myrna by telling her straight off that she’d been absurdly miscast in the past, that she was no China doll. “You don’t look anything like those silly parts they’ve been giving you” (
BB
, 62). For
The Devil to Pay
he awarded her the delectable part of Mary Crayle, a glamorous London actress and mistress of the charming and profligate nobleman’s son, played by Ronald Colman.

The Devil to Pay
is a talkie that really talks. It introduced Myrna Loy to a screen milieu she would make her own, the comic world of upper-class urban sophisticates who converse in breezy, literate dialogue and seem to live on air. This sort of drawing-room high comedy had its roots in theater. Although the British playwright Frederick Lonsdale created the script for a motion picture, his background was in writing for the London dramatic stage and musical theater. One of his best-known plays is
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
(1925). Arthur Hornblow Jr. had introduced Lonsdale to Goldwyn and brought him to California to work on
The Devil to Pay
.
¹⁰

Myrna’s role isn’t large, but she comes across—British accent and all—with great flair and aplomb. For a change her character isn’t menacing. She’s an alluring woman of the world, affectionate, fun-loving, and light-hearted, who yields gracefully when informed by the man in her life, Ronald Colman’s Willie Hale, that he’s become engaged to another (Loretta Young) and must stop meeting her for romantic midnight suppers. Louella Parsons praised her performance as “the best and most natural Miss Loy has ever given.” Naturalness in acting mattered now in a way it hadn’t during the silent era and the earliest days of the talkies. Myrna Loy was finding her element.
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Myrna’s dissatisfaction with her previous roles implied an argument with characterization by formula and with simplistic moral distinctions. She disagreed with the binary thinking behind movies that divided people into one of two categories: good or bad. Although she’d already appeared in plenty of sound pictures that depended on exaggerated, one-note character types, she believed that talkies were evolving in a direction that allowed for a truer, more nuanced, view of humankind, a broader outlook. In
The Letter
, she pointed out, “Jeanne Eagels wasn’t a good woman, neither was she bad. She was a victim of circumstance.” The more varied and shaded possibilities afforded by talkies would offer her salvation as a screen actress. “It was only when I spoke lines that I persuaded directors to give me a chance to play roles of a less stereotyped nature.”
¹²

Myrna considered her role in
Transatlantic
, a visually spectacular melodrama set on a luxurious ocean liner bound for Europe, another breakthrough. Partly, this was a matter of her new screen identity as a soignée, respectable, and wealthy American wife instead of a scantily clad foreign hussy; partly it was about being showcased in an important film. Displaying “a restraint and poise that she has not touched before,” she brought class to the role of Kay Graham, the sympathetic and forgiving wife of a successful banker (John Halliday) who is openly carrying on a shipboard affair with a sexy Swedish dancer (Greta Nissen). Loy, to her relief, at last plays a lady sinned against, not sinning. “Myrna Loy, who has wrecked hundreds of homes in the movies,” wrote Louella Parsons, “occupies the other place this time.”
¹³

Transatlantic
had a high profile. It opened at the Roxy in New York and Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood, and it was widely reviewed. With a cast that included Edmund Lowe as a rakish gambler and Jean Hersholt as a European-born lens grinder, it boasted lavish art deco sets by Gordon Wiles that would garner an Academy Award. It also benefited from the controversial cutting-edge photography of James Wong Howe, who made innovative use of deep focus. Howe and Wiles clashed often on the set, arguing about lighting and the size of the sets. “I wanted ceilings to give the claustrophobic feeling of a ship,” Howe recalled. “[Wiles] did full ceilings and half ceilings for me, and I used special lights in the engine-room to give an illusion of depth.” Not everyone liked Howe’s avant-garde shooting techniques, but Myrna did. She said at the time that she found the opening sequence, for which Howe used a long tracking shot and montage to show passengers boarding as the boat smokestack belches steam, “one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever seen,” adding that she recognized that throughout the picture “the people in the story are not as important as the boat.” Howe shot most of the picture using a wide-angle lens, which he said “pushes everything back, scatters everything,” but not for the scenes involving Myrna Loy or Greta Nissen. “Of course, women couldn’t be photographed with a wide-angle lens,” Howe remembered. “It distorts, and they don’t like that.”
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Because
Transatlantic
created quite a buzz, Myrna’s good notices counted for something, and she believed that her director, William K. Howard, respected her in a way previous directors had not. She also worked well with James Wong Howe, who would photograph her in a total of seven films. Howe considered her a very savvy screen actress whose “cleverness is that she knows just as well as I do what effects to get. Unlike the many sudden upstarts in Hollywood, she has had long experience, and she meets a cameraman half way.”
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A newspaper reporter, Hal Wiener, interviewed Myrna after the opening of
Transatlantic
, and the resulting article emphasized how American she looked in the flesh, with fair skin and titian colored hair. “Myrna Loy, as I met her on this particular afternoon, typifies the American girl. . . . When I met her she was garbed in a tennis outfit—white sweater and skirt and green tennis shoes.” She told Wiener she had said good-bye to all those previous roles as a home wrecker and had turned a corner. No longer would she labor to keep the sin in cinema. “I have lured other women’s husbands away from their happy homes. I have been the cause of suicides. . . . But that is all past now.
Transatlantic
was the turning point of my career. I have reformed. The scarlet woman of the screen is a thing of the past for me.”
¹⁶

She spoke too soon. In three of her next four films she was back to stealing husbands, and in the one exception,
Skyline
, she did her best as a sophisticated society blonde to seduce the boyfriend of sweet, pure Maureen O’Sullivan.

In
Rebound
she makes off with Ina Claire’s husband during his Paris honeymoon, no less. In this comedy of manners, based on a Broadway play by Donald Ogden Stewart, the champagne-quaffing upper-crust players trade quips as they flit between New York mansions and Paris hotels. They choose their marriage partners as casually as if they were arranging a whirl around the dance floor. Loy’s Evie Lawrence has married a rich man she doesn’t love, leaving her steady beau, Bill (Robert Ames), in the lurch. On the rebound Bill marries Sara, Ina Claire’s arch and witty character, and off they trot to Paris. There Bill takes up with Evie again. The selfish Evie and the obtuse Bill flaunt their liaison, and Sara only estranges Bill further when she shows him her pain, weeping openly and begging for his love. When she asserts herself and decides to divorce him, though, Bill claims he wants her back and forgets Evie. In his autobiography Donald Ogden Stewart, author of both the screenplay and the play
Rebound
, reveals that as playwright he’d allowed Sara to express his own hard-won conviction that a balance of power must be maintained within a couple; one lover should never surrender power by kneeling as a supplicant before the other.
¹⁷

Edward H. Griffith, one of Myrna’s favorite directors, had to sneak her into the picture just a few days before shooting began. Florence Eldridge had been signed to play Evie and had to be bought out of her contract. Ina Claire didn’t want Myrna at all, and Claire ranked as a star who commanded $30,000 to play Sara, in contrast to Myrna’s $750 a week. After watching Myrna’s screen test, Claire dismissed Myrna as “Sunbonnet Sue” and proclaimed, “That woman could never take a man away from me.” Thirteen years older than Myrna, recently divorced from John Gilbert, and far better known to theatergoers than to movie fans, Ina Claire found Myrna’s fresh beauty a threat, and she shared with many other stage actors an unabashed condescension toward mere screen players.
¹⁸

Rebound
is a dialogue-driven movie, not terribly cinematic and very much a filmed theater piece. RKO’s gamble that Depression-era audiences would flock to an escapist romp with the smart set didn’t pay off in this case, and the company lost $215,000 on the film. Myrna, however, believed that the role of Evie helped prepare her for her future in comedy. “I had a part that was not exactly comic, but [Evie] was the naughty girl in it, . . . and she had a very funny drunk scene.” It didn’t hurt that she came off as a credible rival to the accomplished Ina Claire, and that her name in the print credits appeared just slightly smaller than the star’s.
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Although earthbound and heavy-handed, her next RKO film,
Consolation Marriage
, shares with
Rebound
a preoccupation with the pull former lovers can exert on a married pair. When their true loves marry richer mates, castoffs Irene Dunne and Pat O’Brien console each other and decide to wed but agree not to expect fidelity. Myrna, of course, was cast as the vain, unfeeling former girlfriend. Arriving at the home of married ex-beau Pat O’Brien, she steals into the garden for a kiss while O’Brien’s wife, Irene Dunne, sheds stoic tears in the baby’s room upstairs. This film at first seems to daringly condone marital permissiveness by placing Dunne and O’Brien in an open marriage, but it backs away in the end, attempting to prove that such unconventional arrangements can’t compete with the traditional comforts and rewards of fidelity, hearth, and cradle. Loy’s character, Elaine, ends up rejected and, at least for the moment, alone.

Again in
Arrowsmith
, a Goldwyn film based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Sinclair Lewis, Loy is the alluring other woman who entices a happily married man away from his wife. She plays Joyce Lanyon, a worldly New York divorcée visiting the West Indies, where her wealthy father owns a plantation. During an outbreak of the bubonic plague, Dr. Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman), temporarily parted from a self-sacrificing wife, meets Joyce, coolly elegant even in the tropics, when she offers her white arm to be inoculated after many black arms have been similarly offered. Soon Martin is bunking at the plantation, and Joyce is offering the idealistic doctor more than her arm. What we see of their adulterous relationship onscreen is far less explicit than what was written into the script by the adapter, Sidney Howard, but cut. Joyce’s words addressed to Martin Arrowsmith, “I have fallen terribly, insanely in love with you. . . . I’m not a child. I’ve been married,” were removed, as was Dr. Arrowsmith’s response, “You make my life seem suddenly rather empty. But terribly exciting.” Publicity stills show Martin Arrowsmith and Joyce embracing, but no such scene made it to the final cut. All we see are two adjacent bedrooms, Joyce’s and Martin’s. In one Joyce spreads out her negligee on a bed. In another Martin sits on his bed and ponders. We’re shown the light under the door of Joyce’s room, and left to fill in the blanks. John Ford may have feared that showing more would subject his film to cutting by the censors, even in this supposedly permissive pre-Code era. It is also possible that cuts were made at the last minute, without the director’s consent.
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Produced by Samuel Goldwyn, with Arthur Hornblow Jr. as the uncredited executive producer,
Arrowsmith
was nominated for four 1931 Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture, and elicited stellar reviews. Mordaunt Hall of the
New York Times
tipped his hat to Goldwyn for leading the public rather than following it and for producing an “intelligent and forceful film.” Some critics thought that the very British Ronald Colman, although a fine actor, had been miscast as an American midwesterner. They were right. Everyone applauded Helen Hayes’s moving performance as the nurse who becomes Dr. Arrowsmith’s doomed, adoring wife. Sinclair Lewis himself endorsed the film as true to the spirit of his novel. He attended the Los Angeles premiere and admitted that he had wept throughout the screening.
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Myrna sensed Arthur Hornblow’s growing interest in her during the filming of
Arrowsmith
. She returned his admiring glances, but they held back, not acting on their mutual attraction until after Arthur separated from Juliette Crosby.

John Ford, too, made known his own special yen for Myrna. Before retakes he abruptly left the set after a dispute with Goldwyn. Ford sent a telegram to Myrna, putting her in the position of being the only one who knew his whereabouts at a time when everyone involved in the production was desperate to locate him.

Helen Hayes also thought that Ford was attracted to
her
. “He got stuck on me a little,” she reported, and he kept phoning Hayes after the day’s shooting. Edgy and conflicted, he was looking for a liaison outside his marriage and, according to his biographer, Joseph McBride, was acting out his personal conflicts on the
Arrowsmith
set.
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