Myrna Loy (4 page)

Della and David attended Radersburg’s one-room grammar school on the hill, a wood-frame building that also housed the Methodist church. The town had only this one church—Della used to play the organ there—but supported three saloons (one run by a woman), a liquor shop, and a brewery. Although many prospectors of gold and silver had moved on to what they hoped would be richer claims in other parts of the country, mining of some sort (for silver, lead, zinc, and iron ore after the gold had played out) continued in Radersburg into the early twentieth century, and despite the civilizing presence of the church, the school, a general store, and three lodges, frontier unruliness—the whoops that go with whiskey, high-stakes poker games, fancy ladies, and bucking broncos—lingered. The tiny town, once the Jefferson County seat, had its own jail and sheriff by the 1880s. Before that, a murderer or some other unfortunate transgressor might be found dangling from a rope extended from a beef scaffold. During the gold rush, robbery and claim jumping were common crimes. Nearby mining camps had been named Hog-Em, Cheat-Em, and Rob-Em. Although crime diminished by the 1880s, drinking, gambling, and disputes over claims continued to disrupt everyday life. Ranchers still had reason to complain about horse thieves and cattle rustlers. Gun toting was the rule, not the exception. The itinerant Methodist preacher, known as Brother Van (William Wesley Van Orsdel), had his work cut out for him. He rode into town on a white horse, always boarding with a different local family, which received him warmly. Brother Van enjoyed celebrity status in Radersburg and its environs. “The women were crazy about him,” Della recalled.
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Social life in this rough but no longer booming gold-rush town revolved around dancing parties where a pistol-packing chaperone would expel anyone carrying liquor or a six-shooter. Group dances—square and circle—were favored, though couples might venture a Highland waltz or two-step. The women at the dances pinned up their long hair, donning floor-length skirts with pinched-in waists, bustles, and blouses with high collars and puffy sleeves. Their men put on freshly laundered blue jeans, pressed shirts, and polished boots. The dances could last all night, because the revelers feared that the roads were too dangerous to travel in the dark.
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During the school year Della participated in a literary society, led by the schoolteacher, which offered drama programs, too. On Saturday nights recitations of poetry took place, and pageants and tableaus were presented. Come spring there would be Sunday afternoon horseback riding parties after church. On the Fourth of July everyone flocked to a big picnic, where Old Glory would be unfurled and the Declaration of Independence declaimed. Della, who lived in town, participated enthusiastically in the community goings-on, but David, ensconced in the Valley on the Williams ranch, could join the fun less often. He liked parties, but he was needed for chores when he wasn’t at school.
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The outdoor events Della enjoyed had to take place in spring or summer because the long, frigid winters could be, and often were, deadly. Cowboys had to put on “two suits of heavy underwear, two pairs of wool socks, wool pants, two woolen shirts, overalls, leather chaps, wool gloves under leather mittens, blanket-lined overcoats and fur caps.” During the infamous winter of 1886–87, when the temperature plummeted to sixty-three degrees below zero, hundreds of thousands of Montana Territory cattle and sheep perished trying to find forage in the snow and ice. A similar freeze when Myrna was a year old made railroad tracks snap and sent starving cattle into the towns in search of grass. Humans died too. David’s older sister Hattie succumbed in the brutal winter of 1887. Of David’s ten siblings, only five—the five who would eventually inherit the ranch—survived into adulthood. According to Myrna (
BB
, 6) scarlet fever took several of them.
²²

Recollections of the severe Montana winters didn’t taint Myrna’s rosy picture of her early years at the Williams ranch. In her autobiography she speaks lovingly of the fragrant roses spilling over the split-log fence in front of the ranch house; her grandmother’s apple trees in the back, which yielded bushels of apples in summer; and her grandfather’s cotton-woods, whose leaves she tried to taste. She recalls playing with the baby lambs and the dobbin Dolly she was first taught to ride with no saddle, only a bridle (
BB
, 13). It’s always spring or summer in her recollections.

Myrna would always regret that she never got to portray a frontier woman onscreen in a Gary Cooper western. Cooper, whose British parents settled in Helena, grew up playing cowboys-and-Indians and collecting arrowheads—activities that apparently escaped young Myrna, though in her Hollywood days she could still throw a lasso. She did play a Salinas Valley ranch wife in the 1949 film based on Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony
. To most film lovers, though, news of Myrna Loy’s Montana ranch background comes as a shock. Who pictures Nora Charles wearing cowboy boots, denim, buckskin, or calico frocks? In her screen heyday Myrna Loy embodied city-bred, martini-quaffing, chiffon-gowned elegance and sophistication.
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Myrna’s earliest memory was of the endless acres of wheat fields where she wandered off on her own, losing her way, not to be found by anxious searchers until late at night. That trauma didn’t curb her fondness for plunking herself down in the midst of a field of swaying brown-gold grain, looking up at scudding clouds and the expansive, mountain-framed sky, which might shift its color from blue to darkest gray in a matter of seconds. “I used to be alone most of the time—that’s great for the imagination.” The only other child around was her cousin Laura Belle Wilder, daughter of Della’s sister Lu, but although Myrna loved her cousin, a five-year age gap separated them. From the start, Myrna tended to be a solitary dreamer, busy with her own thoughts and quite self-sufficient. Those traits would linger. Don Bachardy, who sketched her when she was close to seventy, refers to her “charming wistful vagueness” and “untragic aloneness.” Because there were no playmates of her own age around the ranch, she frolicked with the animals or invented human companions. “I liked having friends nobody else could see,” Myrna would say of herself. “Maybe that’s the Welsh in me. You know how they believe in . . . the little people.”
²⁴

If this young daydreamer prized stillness, she also loved to move. Physically adventurous, Myrna often scraped her knees while climbing trees, tumbling in the hay, or scurrying through a wheat field. In early spring she braved swimming in an icy stream. Surviving photographs of her in early childhood show her all dolled up in pretty dresses, with a locket around her neck and a ribbon in her hair. Della made sure Myrna looked her best for the camera. But on the ranch and later, in Helena, Myrna was known as a tomboy. She and her father were pals. He read her stories and would take her along for berry picking, horseback riding, or rabbit hunting. He never struck her. The only spanking she ever received was from the hired man, Ben Sitton, who had forbidden her to crawl through the wire around the ranch. “I did, so he spanked me.”
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Ranch hands ate at a long kitchen table. In the same room, behind the potbellied wood-burning stove that provided heat, Myrna stored her slate, picture books, and child-size red chair. There she cuddled two gray kittens named after local plants, Timothy and Alfalfa. At night, after the candles were blown out, she could hear the howls of wolves and coyotes from her bed. More soothing was the sound of her mother playing Brahms’s “Lullaby” on the piano, accompanied by Aunt Lu’s violin. Thus comforted, Myrna would drift off to sleep.
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CHAPTER 2

Not Your Typical Helena Girl

When Myrna was five, her parents decided they’d had enough of ranch life. They pulled up stakes and moved to Helena, a former mining camp that had burgeoned into a thriving commercial center and, as Montana’s capital, a political hub. Pitched against Mount Helena and Mount Ascension, with the Big Belt Mountains to the east and spurs of the Rockies poking the sky to the north and west, Helena offered sweeping mountain views and bracing air plus city amenities. Its clanging streetcars, bustling shops, imposing civic buildings, flourishing public library, and lively theater scene must have made it seem like a metropolis after the isolation of Radersburg and the Crow Creek Valley. Here the population exceeded twelve thousand! Even in Helena, though, horses remained essential to everyday life. Most homes of the day came with outdoor hitching posts, and the rich had carriage houses, soon to become shelters for newly available automobiles. On a pretty day the Williams family, which would soon acquire a Dodge touring car, might ride the streetcar to Central Park, where they’d find a beer garden, a dance pavilion, skating rinks, a zoo, and a merry-go-round.
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For Myrna, even going for a walk felt like an adventure, since the Helena streets zigged and zagged. Built at the bottom of a ravine, the city grew up along the course of a meandering stream. Miners had altered the terrain by digging tunnels under most neighborhoods, some of which were naturally hilly. The odd-shaped lots, furrows, and steep slopes, down which Myrna went bobsledding in winter, could turn the terrain into a child’s oversized playground.
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The Williams family settled into a modest but comfortable house on Fifth Avenue, in a middle-class enclave east of Last Chance Gulch with none of the showiness of the elite west side, where gold barons, copper kings, and bankers of the plush 1880s had built ostentatious mansions with carved mahogany mantels, Tiffany stained-glass windows, and little stands on which New Year’s Day visitors placed their printed calling cards.

Grandmother Johnson had cashed in her Radersburg mining claim, leaving behind the house John Johnson had built, and moved with her son Fred to Helena’s Breckenridge Avenue, a few blocks from the Williams’s new home. Myrna often spent weekends with her grandmother, whose front hall display of programs from touring plays starring the likes of Minnie Maddern Fiske or John Drew attested to her fondness for going to the theater (
BB
, 8). Also within walking distance was the grand Italian Renaissance state capitol, with its figure of the Goddess of Liberty astride the burnished copper dome and Charles Russell mural within, depicting Indians encountering Lewis and Clark. To this stately structure Myrna’s father had reported for duty in the legislature in 1903, when he helped plan Montana’s observance of the Lewis and Clark Centennial. Now, seven years later, David worked out of the less lofty Pittsburgh building, where the 1910 Polk’s Helena Directory announced his occupation with one word, “Lands.” His business card elaborated: “Specializing in small farms on easy payments.”
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Helena had survived several disastrous fires and many economic ups and downs. The economy slumped with the lowering of silver prices in 1893; banks failed. With the coming of the twentieth century, prosperity returned as gold mining geared up in nearby Marysville, and Helena residents could find work constructing Canyon Ferry or helping to build two Missouri River dams in the area. The Williams family arrived as an upswing in population began, statewide. Electrical power plants and telephone lines began to sprout. Land values rose. David F. Williams, who soon began selling insurance and brokering loans, as well as offering farmland and other real estate, had chosen a potentially lucrative line of work.
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Della became pregnant soon after the move to Helena, and a son, another David F. (which in his case stood for Frederick, as in uncle Fred Johnson), came into the world in May 1911. Little David, a towhead, at once became his mother’s darling, though he didn’t share his sister’s sunny disposition. Della spoiled him throughout his life, and Myrna did too, eventually. Initially, however, at least according to one account, she refused to even look at her newborn brother. A photograph of the boy with his six-year-old sister shows him with a dour expression and Myrna wearing a smile that appears less than spontaneous. But despite this she looks fetching. Even then, the camera loved Myrna. She could be shy around strangers but never around a camera. In every image of her with little David, both children are beautifully groomed and expensively dressed, like manikins in a store window. In one photo Myrna wears a sailor hat with a striped border and a pleated skirt over a long jacket that appears hand-sewn; David, who looks about a year old here, has on knit rompers, matching hat, and lace-up boots.
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When he was old enough to draw and mold figures, David displayed artistic talent and started his young adult life wanting to become a sculptor. As soon as he was old enough, Della set him up with lessons in art, which Myrna also studied. A nun at the local convent served as the teacher (
BB
, 16).

Myrna had an excellent eye, a good sense of form and design, and a talent for working with her hands. Guided by the art-teacher nun, she enjoyed both molding clay and drawing and would later excel both at homey crafts like knitting and at practical tasks like changing flat tires and fixing gadgets in need of repair. She studied piano, too, and learned two pieces for a student recital that she could still play in adulthood. She attended Central Elementary School, where English, history, and geography were her favorite subjects and arithmetic her bane. Gary Cooper, just a year older than she and then known as Frank, at times attended the same school, but Myrna didn’t recall knowing him there. He claimed he remembered her pigtails and freckles, as well as her mother once bestowing on him a jar of apple jelly when he came by the Fifth Avenue house. Myrna would go sledding past the substantial home of Judge and Mrs. Cooper, Frank’s English-born parents, who knew Myrna’s parents (
BB
, 14–15).