Myrna Loy (2 page)

Myrna Loy had a well-spoken, relaxed but classy manner that eventually steered her into genteel roles, usually as someone’s wife. Darryl Zanuck tried to put her in a few tough-girl parts at Warner Bros. in the late 1920s, but they didn’t fit. As one writer put it, caviar suited her, not corned beef and cabbage. At the peak of her stardom in the late 1930s she once asked her boss at MGM, Louis B. Mayer, for permission to play a scrubwoman character. Mayer forbade it, telling her, “You always gotta be a lady.”
¹

Loy became known as “the Perfect Wife,” a tag she came to despise, in part because it clashed with her record of failed marriages. Even before her first divorce, from producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., Myrna came to feel that the epithet set up impossible expectations. No wife should expect to be perfect. One female fan complained to a reporter that any real husband would look at the movies’ all-forgiving, never cranky, and never overworked Nora and inevitably find his own wife wanting.

Ultimately, the repeated Perfect Wife roles began to grate on Loy, all the more so because type casting was boxing her in for the second time. Her first typing occurred at Warner Bros., where she was asked to play dangerous, bizarre, and outré characters. Her widely spaced almondshaped eyes could easily be made up to appear exotic. In real life she had Celtic ancestry, freckles, and red hair, but makeup, costumes, and black-and-white photography made it possible for this Montana native to be transformed into a seductively sinister other woman, usually an Asian but sometimes Hispanic, mulatto, Gypsy, or Polynesian. Dressed in a sarong, grass skirt, or high-collared sheath, and bearing a name like Azuri or Nubi, she tossed her hips and perfected sloe-eyed come-hither glances. Loy longed to play a more authentic character, someone more like her real self—wholesome, with a sense of humor. MGM’s Woody Van Dyke, the director who fought to cast her as Nora, helped her to realize her wish, but she shed the vixen mantle only to be subjected to the casting straitjacket once more. Until she aged into mother roles and then soused old ladies, she continued to play upscale married women. Even her triumph as Milly Stephenson in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, made for Goldwyn after she’d left MGM, affirmed her status as a privileged, steadfast wife.

In her lifetime Loy was underappreciated. She never was nominated for an Academy Award. Other honors came late, as partial compensation. In the 1980s she received a Kennedy Center tribute, a special Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences celebration at Carnegie Hall of her screen career, and at last an honorary Oscar. Although many of her films are available on DVD and are shown regularly on cable television’s Turner Classic Movies, she remains relatively unsung, which helps explain why she has never before been the subject of a biography. Another reason is that, by Hollywood standards, Myrna Loy led a relatively quiet life. Though she made headlines when she sued the
Hollywood Reporter
for calling her a fellow traveler, she steered clear of scandal. She never ran off with her leading man (although Leslie Howard and Tyrone Power were temptations), nor did she chatter about the indiscretions and failings of others. When John Ford, who had a yen for her, teased her by calling her “the only good girl in Hollywood,” he meant that compared to other alluring young actresses, she stayed on the straight and narrow and avoided bed-hopping. Because she showed abiding concern for the world’s problems and for other people, the good girl label resonates beyond Ford’s original meaning.

She and her coauthor, James Kotsilibas-Davis, did such a good job with her autobiography,
Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming
, that other biographers may have feared they couldn’t match it. Based on extensive interviews with Loy herself, as well as with friends and colleagues, it reveals an intelligent, sensitive, woman with a fierce sense of commitment to her favorite people and beliefs, a woman who after four failed marriages had learned to trust herself.
Being and Becoming
does venture into private territory, illuminating otherwise hidden corners. But it goes only so far. Full disclosure is never attempted, and some events and people get short shrift. She discusses her abortion but leaves out the crushing news that an infection rendered her sterile at age thirty, before her first marriage. The persistent problems she had with her only sibling, her younger brother, David, are never touched upon, even though he died several years before the book was published.

By temperament, Myrna was shy, reserved, and reticent. A good listener who always had just a few close friends, she remained a decidedly private person. Among reporters who covered the film beat, she had a reputation for being a tough interview, a public figure unwilling to disclose much about her personal life. The record she left is full of gaps. She never kept a diary, and very few letters of hers that could be called intimate have survived. She left a large archive at Boston University, but she carefully removed from it every letter from her first husband, Arthur Hornblow Jr., whom she described in her autobiography as the love of her life. The only letters from her mother in the archive were addressed to an agent, not Myrna. Letters from her closest friends are also absent. Myrna Loy wanted to die with many of her secrets intact, and to some extent she achieved that goal.

From day one Myrna Loy’s screen image has conjured mystery, a sense of something withheld, something intriguing because it seems unknowable. “Who is she?” was a question posed in the very first published fan magazine article about her, in 1925. This book attempts to fill in some of the gaps and to counter the relative neglect that has befallen her abundant legacy. I want to remind people of Myrna Loy’s prodigious achievements onscreen and of the remarkable person she was.

CHAPTER 1

The Climb

In the spring of 1905 Della Mae Williams, pregnant with the baby girl she and her husband, David, would name Myrna Adele, decided to take a hike. While David journeyed by rail to Chicago to sell cattle, she set out with friends from her home on the Williams family’s ranch in southwestern Montana’s Crow Creek Valley, traveling south, probably in a wagon pulled by a team of ranch horses. She packed a knapsack, donned sturdy boots and a sunbonnet, tied a rope around her thickening waist, and joined a group of climbers determined to scale the highest peak in the southern Rocky Mountains. Della climbed all the way to the top, a triumph that someone in the party not only recorded with a Kodak but also made public. A photograph of Mrs. Della Williams, the first white woman known to have packed through to the mountain’s summit, would soon adorn the cover of
Field and Stream
(
BB
, 10).

When he saw his wife’s picture smiling from the front of a popular magazine, David exploded. Although a genial man, and a free thinker when it came to religion—after being elected to the Montana state legislature in his early twenties, he wrote “none” when asked to name his church—“Honest Dave” ’s ideas about womenfolk had always been more conservative than those of his strong-minded, high-spirited wife. He never did come to terms with Della’s habit of taking off without him every now and then, a tendency she would indulge periodically during their fourteen years as man and wife. Her love affair with California would one day threaten the stability of their marriage. This spring he soon got over his pique. An openhearted man, he rarely held a grudge.

On August 2, 1905, several months after Della’s audacious hike, she and David welcomed their first-born, a child who would share Della’s spunk and David’s concern for others. The robust infant came into the world in the city of Helena, not at the ranch, and the facts that she was born in a hospital and “attended by a physician” hint of her family’s relative prosperity. Doctors were scarce in sparsely populated Montana.
¹

The baby’s Celtic good looks immediately commanded attention. She had a well-knit, long-limbed body, gray-green almond-shaped eyes, wide cheeks, a rosebud mouth, fair skin that would freckle easily, and abundant carrot-colored hair. Her pert nose tilted up, like the nose of her Welch-born paternal grandmother, Ann Williams, who also had red hair. Della’s Scottish mother, Isabella Johnson, who lived four miles from the ranch in the tiny town of Radersburg, used to press down on that up-tilting nose every time she rocked the baby to sleep, trying in vain to flatten it and make it more like the noses in
her
side of the family. The nose would one day become a movie star’s signature, coveted by many women and even copied by some with access to plastic surgery. Though David would never have approved, had he survived to see it, his daughter’s adult face would be recognized around the world, adorning the covers of countless popular magazines.
²

Della and her mother, Isabella, wanted to name the baby Annabel, combining Isabella’s name with “Ann,” the name of David’s recently deceased mother, but the women lost out this time, to David. On one of his frequent trips by railroad to sell livestock, he’d taken a fancy to “Myrna,” the name of a whistle-stop town his train clamored through. He insisted that his daughter be called Myrna. There was consensus about the baby’s middle name, Adele, a version of “Della.” Being named after a train station would turn out to fit the restless Myrna, who would travel widely and change her address often. “I don’t like to stay very long in one place,” she once told a reporter.
³

Wanderlust ran in both the Johnson and Williams families. Seeking a better life, all four of Myrna’s grandparents had crossed the Atlantic from Europe to the United States in the 1850s or 1860s: two came from Wales, one from Scotland, and one from Sweden. Myrna’s personality, a writer for a fan magazine would claim, mingled the national traits of her forebears. “She has the reserve of the Welsh, and a good deal of the canniness of the Scot. Didn’t Sweden produce Garbo, the exotic?”
⁴

Myrna’s wayfaring grandparents, ever on the move as they sought abundance on the western frontier, traveled by ocean steamer, covered wagon, stagecoach, freight wagon, ox train, horseback, riverboat, railroad, and even by foot before all four landed forty miles southeast of Helena, where the Bozeman-to-Helena stage road crossed Crow Creek at the gold-rush mining town of Radersburg. At the time they arrived, the sprawling Montana Territory—559 miles long along the Canadian border—was both isolated and “practically uninhabited. One could travel for miles without seeing so much as a trapper’s bivouac. Thousands of buffalo darkened the rolling plains. There were deer, antelope, elk, wolves and coyotes on every hill.” Before the 1883 arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the railroad station nearest to Radersburg was more than six hundred miles distant, in Corinne, Utah, a stopping place for stagecoaches and freight teams.
⁵

The population of Radersburg, located on the plains in the shadow of the snowcapped Big Belt and Bitterroot mountains, never amounted to much. At the peak of the gold rush, in 1869, it reached its high point: one thousand residents. This was the period when Myrna’s grandparents arrived, joining other settlers descending on the boomtown from all over the map. The number of citizens in Radersburg had dwindled to 169 by 1880, the year Della was born, compared to three thousand in Helena. With a population of seventy in the 2000 Census, it seems well on its way to becoming a ghost town.
⁶

To get to Montana Territory, Myrna’s pioneer grandparents braved blizzards, rockslides, wind, rain, insects, sleet, and dust storms. They forded streams, coaxed rickety wagon wheels out of muddy ruts, and urged fly-plagued mule trains and recalcitrant livestock over makeshift bridges. They ascended mountain passes on treacherous trails, camped out on the open prairie, nursed sick children, and left behind injured or dead horses and cattle. On the overland trail they encountered Indians, both friendly and not. On a freighting trip to Montana Myrna’s grandfather D. T. Williams “met friendly Indians at Campbell’s Creek; they showed many scalps of white men on long poles.” Williams and his party bowed their heads in prayer as they drove past gravesites marking recent burials. By the end of their journey each weathered immigrant surely knew, if he or she hadn’t known before starting out, how to skin a buck, tan a hide, hitch a wagon, dress a wound, and fire a gun. Among the family treasures that Myrna still owned in the 1940s was a pair of pistols and a flintlock rifle.
⁷

The adversity the new settlers faced once they arrived in Montana Territory began with the struggle to get water, which had to be hauled from Crow Creek, “unless there came a drifting snow and one went to the work of melting it.” They quickly built houses made of logs, with sod roofs and dirt floors. Eventually they constructed more substantial dwellings, where kerosene lamps or candles supplied light after the sun went down. Wood served as fuel and cost six dollars a cord, unless you felled the trees yourself. Chamber pots or the outhouse—not a friendly place when the temperature plunged below zero—made do as bathrooms. Unless you were a fearless rider with a good horse, or commanded your own buckboard, getting out of town could present a challenge. Roads were few, unpaved, and for many months in the year were buried under snowdrifts. The stagecoach from Bozeman to Helena stopped in Radersburg only three times a week. Hiring a livery to Helena would cost you a day’s time and set you back thirty-eight dollars.
⁸

Della’s father, John Johnson, was a carpenter who hailed from Göteborg, Sweden. His first stopping place in America had been Chicago. In 1867, at age twenty-seven, he had walked the 150 miles to Radersburg from Fort Benton, where the Missouri River steamer from St. Louis had deposited him. He and his friend Albert W. Sederburg, also a Swede and a carpenter, gallantly gave up their seats on the stagecoach to two ladies in need; hence the long hike (
BB
, 7). John Johnson headed for Radersburg after gold had been discovered at the Keating and East Pacific mines, hoping for a lucky strike at a time when fortunes could be made with a flash in the proverbial pan.