Myrna Loy (39 page)

Myrna complained in her autobiography about the way Harlow was distorted beyond recognition and maligned in the press, as well as in sensationalized biographies and biopics. Just as she would jump to Joan Crawford’s defense after Christina Crawford’s tattle-tale book
Mommie Dearest
(and the 1981 movie based on it) came out, she stood up for Harlow, who was indeed subjected to tabloid-style smears too many times. But Myrna’s defense went overboard. She sanitized Harlow, overlooking the frank sexuality that had catapulted her to stardom and the questions that Paul Bern’s probable suicide raised. She characterized her friend as the good-girl victim of exploiters and gossipmongers bent on tarnishing an idol. Myrna’s cleansed Harlow is intelligent, well-mannered, joyful and easy to be with, “a sensitive woman with a great deal of self-respect” (
BB
, 143), not the cheap sexpot she’d often been taken for. But in her zeal to protect her friend, Myrna denied Harlow’s zesty essence. What happened to the free spirit notorious for going without underwear, the secret drinker, or the promiscuous blonde who’d dallied with the married Max Baer and (the also married) Howard Hawks? Harlow grew up a lot during her last few years and evolved into a brilliant screwball comedienne, but she was never prim.

Dr. Saxton Pope and his wife, Jeanne, kept in touch with Myrna through the decades. Myrna would see them on visits to the Bay Area. The doctor wrote in anguish to Myrna the moment he read the headlines about Harlow’s passing. Addressing Myrna by the nickname Victor McLaglen had conferred, “Minnie,” he broke out, “How horrible about Jeansie. Thoughts come thronging back to me. Her fatigue. Your insistence that she be examined (and we let her talk us out of it).” He sympathized with Powell, he said, “But most of all I am inexpressibly sorry for Jeansie. How she must hate being dead. How she must hate being away from Bill. No lap to sit on, nobody to shower with that mad, complete, childlike love.” The letter confirms what others have said about Harlow and her feelings for Powell.
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If Myrna found Harlow’s death hard to bear, Bill Powell found it totally devastating. Behind dark glasses, and leaning on his mother’s arm, he sobbed without stint at her Forest Lawn funeral, an MGM production at which Jeanette MacDonald broke down while trying to perform “Indian Love Call” and Nelson Eddy sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” Clark Gable, Eddie Mannix, the photographer Ray June, and directors Jack Conway and Woody Van Dyke served as solemn pallbearers. Myrna took her place among the 250 invited attendees, most of them tear-drenched. Just nine months back she and many of the same mourners had gathered at the funeral of Irving Thalberg, who with Paul Bern had launched Harlow’s MGM career. In honor of Harlow, Anita Loos recalled, “L. B. Mayer sent a heart of red roses five feet tall pierced by a golden arrow. Bill Powell strode up to the coffin to place a single [gardenia] on her breast.” Carole Lombard muttered inside the flower-decked Wee Kirk o’ the Heather that she hoped there would be no such superproduction when her turn came.
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Guilt infused Powell’s despair: not only had he dashed Harlow’s hopes to marry him, but he had also failed to recognize how sick she was, refusing until near the last moment to fully credit the alarm that others who saw her, including Myrna, had expressed months earlier. He spent $25,000 on Harlow’s “mortuary chamber” at Forest Lawn, lined in marble and fitted with a stained glass window. Soon after
Double Wedding
wrapped up, with his last picture on his current MGM contract behind him, Powell took off on an extended trip to Europe.

When he returned to California, he had to brace for another blow: at age forty-five he had been given a diagnosis of cancer of the rectum, a fact he chose not to advertise. A man of inherent formality and reticence about private matters, Powell was the sort who doesn’t even admit to having a rectum. Not until the 1960s would he talk for the record about his ordeal, which involved a “temporary colostomy” followed by the implanting of platinum needles containing radium. At the time he underwent his first surgery, in March 1938, the nature of his malady was left undefined, but it was characterized as serious. He had to undergo a total of three surgeries. Myrna visited him in the hospital and was amazed to be greeted by a salt-and-pepper-haired Powell; he’d managed to conceal his true hair color from her and everyone else, and he turned out to be touchy on the subject of his age. He joked, “There’s a factory down here that gives off silver dust,” blown in through an open window (
BB
, 162). Some weeks later, Harrison Carroll reported in the
Los Angeles Evening Herald Express
, “Bill Powell was well enough to pay a surprise call the other day on Myrna Loy. The maid sneaked him into the house and Myrna found him sitting in the living room with a bouquet of flowers in each hand, picked from her own garden.”
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Powell would visit no soundstage for close to two years, another costly absence for MGM, ever eager for another Powell-Loy bonanza. At the beginning of 1938, according to
Variety
, the team of Powell and Loy ranked as the fourth biggest box-office champs, worldwide, among American stars, beating out Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Only Gary Cooper, Garbo, and Clark Gable surpassed them. For a time, no one knew when, or if, Powell and Loy could be redeployed as Nick and Nora Charles. Other actors—Reginald Gardiner and Melvyn Douglas—were considered to play Nick, in case of Powell’s continued absence. Myrna declared that she chose not to be Nora to a new Nick. She thought “a complete change of faces would be better than a partial switch.” Virginia Bruce was named as a possible substitute Nora.
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As it turned out, no substitutes needed to be chosen. Powell had recovered enough to begin filming
Another Thin Man
in July of 1939, but he still tired easily. Woody Van Dyke accommodated his special needs by reducing the number of hours of shooting to six each day, working with four soundstages, each already equipped with a setup, so that he could go forward speedily. He also increased the size of the crew and hired doubles for the key actors, to ensure rapid-fire shooting.
Another Thin Man
emerged as a confused film that attests to Hammett’s dysfunction at the time he worked on the story. The presence of the Charleses’ new family member, baby Nick Jr. (William A. Poulsen), doesn’t add much. Nora rushes around, checking to be sure that the baby’s bottle has been warmed and interviewing nannies while trying to talk on the phone. The tyke serves as an excuse for a birthday party staged by thugs and as a reason for Nick to find himself seated on a couch while holding an incongruously huge stuffed panda. The shifty-eyed baby nurse looks like a suspect, but there’s not much else to justify this cute baby’s existence. The plot is a labyrinth of dead bodies, lively nightclub scenes, and sleazy criminals with names like “Creeps” and “Dum-Dum”—so many that they’re hard to sort out. The flaws didn’t matter that much. What counted was that the Nick and Nora team was back. Fans turned out to see them onscreen, and the film made more than $2 million in worldwide rentals.

On the first day of shooting Myrna honored Bill Powell’s wish to play it light, bypassing a big emotional “welcome back” scene. She made every effort to treat his return to work matter-of-factly. All that she and Woody Van Dyke did was to kid him about showing up a bit late. But the crew greeted his MGM homecoming with a standing ovation.

During Powell’s recuperation Myrna worked with Robert Taylor on
Lucky Night
(she found him stuffy) and shared the screen with Rosalind Russell, Walter Pidgeon, and Franchot Tone in the forgettable love quadrille
Man-Proof
, whose principal claim to fame is Myrna Loy’s extremely funny drunk scene. MGM seems to have forgotten its vow to improve the quality of her pictures after she returned from being on strike. She next made two popular but formulaic films with Clark Gable, both about pilots, their planes, and their romances.

The airborne heroics of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, the endeavors of aviator-filmmaker Howard Hughes, the growth of commercial aviation, the popularity of stunt pilots, and advances in aerial photography all fueled what seemed an insatiable appetite for movies about flying. Beginning well before
Wings
, the 1927 Best Picture choice, filmmakers and moviegoers carried on a love affair with aeronautic feats and the skilled and daring pilots accomplishing them. Several directors, William Wellman, Victor Fleming, and Howard Hawks among them, had piloting skills and loved to make movies about flying. Myrna’s embarrassing
Wings in the Dark
made its own “contribution” to the genre, and
Night Flight
drew on the piloting expertise of director Clarence Brown, a onetime World War I flying instructor.

Test Pilot
, Loy’s first of two 1938 aviation films, boasted three popular stars: Loy and Gable, cashing in as Hollywood’s newly anointed king and queen, joined by the recent Academy Award winner Spencer Tracy. As daredevil test pilot Jim Lane, Gable restored his he-man image after the
Parnell
debacle. In our first glimpse of him he’s joshing with two floozies after a tipsy night on the town. Carousing is obviously his way of decompressing from a job that demands that he risk his life racing and testing planes. Loy plays his appealing wife, Ann, the woman who tries to tame him, and Tracy is cast as Gunner Morris, Gable’s mechanic, best friend, and sidekick at Drake Aviation. Box-office-savvy Metro guessed rightly that pairing Gable and Tracy again after their huge success in
San Francisco
, in which bad-boy Tracy scored by playing against type as a priest, would pay off. Once he attained the status of a top star with acting talent to match, Tracy sustained his reputation as the actor’s actor.

Tracy and Loy both tended to underplay. He kept seeking reassurance, as they worked out a scene, that he hadn’t hammed it up too much. Perfectionists, each abhorred the scenery-chewing school of acting and strove above all for an ease that seemed spontaneous but was anything but. The scene in which Tracy loudly cracks and eats walnuts while Gable, looking abashed, faces Loy after coming home from a weeklong bender had been prepared in detail the previous night, according to Joseph Mankiewicz. At the time of
Test Pilot’s
shooting, Tracy was staying at Mankiewicz’s Santa Monica house. “Christ, he used up five pounds of nuts, and then he pretended on the set it had just occurred to him. It was perfectly timed so he would never crack a nut on Clark’s line. But you would always have to cut to him.” Myrna must have worked out her casual knitting in one scene, or her boisterous shouts at baseball players during a Kansas game, in a similar way.
¹¹

In
Test Pilot
all three top-billed stars, along with such supporting players as Lionel Barrymore and Marjorie Main, lined up under Gable’s favorite director and chum, Victor Fleming, who cultivated a reputation as a ladies’ man, race car driver, aviator, and tough guy. Fleming had guided Tracy’s winning turn in
Captains Courageous
, in which the actor’s Kipling-derived character, a curly haired Portuguese fisherman, dies at sea. As
Motion Picture Herald
commented, Metro’s big men “might have figured out that killing [Tracy] in
Captains Courageous
had something to do with making the public love him in that picture and, therefore, that to kill him again in this one
[Test Pilot]
might be equally effective.” His
Test Pilot
character, Gunner, a laconic, gum-chewing charmer who tails Gable’s Jim like a loyal puppy, dies heroically trying to protect his friend when Gable’s plane crashes and burns.
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Fleming, who had previously directed Loy in
Renegades
and
The Wet Parade
, did well by her in this film. She got a chance to shine in a sympathetic dramatic role that called for shows of deep emotion—quite a change from nonchalant Nora Charles. She’d played ruthless schemers, the first one European, the second a spoiled-brat American, in her two earlier Fleming-directed films.

Myrna’s personal favorite among all her films,
Test Pilot
is action-packed, brisk, and entertaining, though sometimes sappy. Gable’s flowery outbursts about the “girl in the blue dress” in the sky, and Loy’s about him being in love with her truest rival, “a lady with wings,” are cringe-worthy.
Test Pilot
nonetheless won a Best Picture nomination, and its worldwide grosses of close to $4 million made it one of the big box-office winners of the year, but it is no masterpiece. “Judicious cutting and less banal dialogue would have lent it the distinction it lacks,” wrote the spot-on critic for the
New York Daily Mirror
.
¹³

The film garnered enough notice on its first run to inspire an E. B. White poem that was published in the
New Yorker
, called “An Earthbound Boy” (with the subtitle “After seeing the movie ‘Test Pilot’ ”), all about the landlocked poet’s secret yearning for honeysuckle-sweet Myrna Loy, who’s smitten by enviable sky prince Gable.
¹⁴

One reason Myrna so enjoyed making
Test Pilot
was that she simply found it a kick to be offset by two dynamite, top-tier leading men, one on each arm. Another cause for celebration was that she got to portray a character with a background very like her own. Myrna had always yearned to play a woman with western ranching roots. MGM bought the rights to
Sea of Grass
, Conrad Richter’s 1936 novel of love, desertion, and illegitimacy in pioneer days, planning it as a vehicle for her and Spencer Tracy, but kept postponing production (
BB
, 192). It would eventually appear in 1947, after Myrna had left Metro; it costarred Tracy and Hepburn and was directed by Elia Kazan.