Myrna Loy (40 page)

As
Test Pilot’s
Ann Barton, Loy is a warmhearted, initially cheerful, college grad from a Kansas farm who’s smart and romantic, as well as pretty. She falls hard for reckless Jim Lane when he drops out of the sky during a cross-country race and lands his damaged plane with its broken oil pump in her parents’ wheat field. She promptly dumps her decent but humdrum farmer fiancé and takes to the skies with handsome bruiser Lane, the “prince” she says she’s always been waiting for, and she hurriedly weds him before they land at Drake Aviation’s flight field in New York. Jim proves fearless when racing a plane, or diving and looping a B-17 bomber, but he’s problematic as a husband. He’s hooked on booze and can suddenly disappear on a bender, with the money he’s recently won sure to disappear along with him. Ann spends her married life biting her nails when her husband’s aloft and crying her eyes out after he lands. She threatens to leave Jim but can’t bring herself to do it. Instead of rapping her errant husband on the head with a frying pan, as columnist Ed Sullivan suggested a real wife would have done under these circumstances, she forgives all and quietly goes into the kitchen to make sandwiches. “Miss Loy as the perfect wife,” Sullivan concluded, “is a species of wish fulfillment.” Myrna agreed. “Even in
Test Pilot
,” she told Gladys Hall, “I was the brave, good-sport Little Woman who stands by, a gallant grin on her face, her heart in irons.”
¹⁵

As it does in so many other films of the day, booze looms large in the script credited to Vincent Lawrence and Waldemar Young, which is based on a story by a former pilot, Frank Wead. Whether it was also based, without credit, on a book called
Test Pilot
by the martyred test pilot Jimmy Collins is a matter for debate. Collins’s widow sued MGM, charging her late husband’s opus had been plagiarized, but she didn’t prevail in court.
¹⁶

Jim Lane’s irresponsible binges exact a toll on his marriage and on his friendship with Gunner, who keeps trying to bail out his buddy. Joseph Breen’s notes from the Production Code office harped on the film’s “unnecessary drinking and drunkenness” and insisted on cutting a montage showing champagne bottles and spilling glasses.
¹⁷

Gunner initially resents Ann; she’s horning in on his turf. He makes no secret of his profound attachment to Jim, blowing him a kiss and affixing a wad of gum to his plane every time Jim takes off on a flight. He accepts a room in the newlyweds’ apartment and at one point tells Jim, “I love you.” He develops feelings for Ann, too, especially after they go through a shared hell watching Jim almost crash when he loses control of a spinning, fully loaded bomber as he attempts to reach an altitude of thirty thousand feet; Jim will spin out of control again later, in the bars. Ann and Gunner become allies, two planets circling Jim’s sun. When Jim takes off on a drinking spree, Gunner acts as a kind of babysitter to his pal, following him from bar to bar to make sure he gets home, eventually, in one piece. Gunner displays much more awareness of Ann’s suffering than does Jim, whose devil-may-care bravado is a cover for caddish selfishness. Until the formulaic happy ending, Jim remains blithely unconcerned about the impact his behavior has on others. But neither Ann nor Gunner can bear to break with him. This is a love triangle plot, but here the third wheel just might be the wife, not the best friend.

Since Tracy was an alcoholic, booze figures in the offscreen story of
Test Pilot
’s filming too. When Fleming and Gable took off in a B-17 from March Field for an alcohol-fueled lark on Catalina Island, Tracy faced a lot of ribbing because he refused to join the party. He was convinced it would only lead to one of his notorious benders, and he wanted to stay sober—at least for a while. Myrna defended his decision, angrily taking on Fleming and Gable for their poor judgment in trying to get Tracy to join them. Didn’t they know about Tracy’s drinking problem? (
BB
, 152). Yes, Myrna could lose her cool, on occasion. And Spencer Tracy seems to have had a genius not just for screen acting but also for finding women to mother him.

From all reports, Tracy and Gable grudgingly admired one another, and they kidded a lot. Gable would call Tracy a Wisconsin ham, and Tracy would ride his costar about his box-office bomb in
Parnell
. The columnist Sidney Skolsky reported that on the first day of shooting
Test Pilot
Tracy gathered up the electricians and other crewmembers, organizing a chorus to greet Gable by half shouting, half jeering, “Comes now the bee-youtiful King. All hail, all hail!” Their bonhomie concealed more than a little mutual envy. As Howard Strickling saw it, “Spencer Tracy would have given his right arm to have been the guy Clark Gable was—to be worshipped. Clark would have given his right arm to have been recognized as the actor’s actor.”
¹⁸

Test Pilot
was Myrna Loy’s first picture under her new $4,000-a-week contract. In addition to the raise MGM presented her with a spiffier dressing room on the second floor of a new building, next to Garbo’s and Joan Crawford’s dressing rooms, and allowed her to work at a less punishing pace than before. In 1938 and 1939 she’d make only three films yearly, compared to the six she’d made in the single year 1936. Back in her Warner Bros. days she’d sometimes appeared in as many as ten films a year. She’d fought for and won better working conditions at MGM, but she failed to fight for (and wouldn’t necessarily have won, even if she had) the superior scripts and first-rate directors that she needed to keep her name and career on the A list.

MGM didn’t cut its directors much creative slack; producers ran the show in Culver City. Joan Crawford sniped that an MGM director, caught in the system’s wheels, “had all the authority of a hamster.” She maintained that a Metro cameraman carried more weight than a director. Myrna didn’t have great luck with her MGM directors. She worked with Capra, as Powell worked with Gregory La Cava, while on loan to another studio, and although Cukor, brought to MGM by David Selznick, directed Jean Harlow, Jeanette MacDonald, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Katharine Hepburn, and Garbo—all the other top-ranked actresses at MGM during Myrna’s heyday—he missed out on directing her. The Sam Woods, the Richard Thorpes, the Robert Z. Leonards who presided over so many Loy films at MGM were competent journeymen, contract pros, nothing more. Jack Conroy, director of
Libeled Lady
and
Too Hot to Handle
, had brio, but his forte was ensemble work. He wasn’t
her
director, nor was Victor Fleming or Clarence Brown, each capable of distinguished work. Brown, who was Garbo’s favorite director, helmed mediocre Loy films at MGM,
Emma
and
Wife vs. Secretary
, in addition to
Night Flight
. Her best work for him came when both were loaned to 20th Century–Fox for
The Rains Came
, where Brown exulted in an A-film assignment and a chance to do things his way. Only Woody Van Dyke, among all of Loy’s MGM directors, took up cudgels for her cause. Van Dyke, however, spread thin, overworked, and never associated with any single star, was no
auteur
.
¹⁹

Ray June, behind the camera along with eighteen assistant cameramen employed for
Test Pilot
, lingers on Myrna’s sometimes smiling, sometimes tear-stained face for close-ups that manage to be both crisp and romantic. But June had been a cameraman in the Signal Corps in World War I; this was an aviation film, and the aerial shots of military aircraft diving, looping, ascending, and sometimes crashing to earth were what pushed moviegoers to the edges of their seats. The
Hollywood Reporter
claimed that 838 planes were used and half a million miles flown in the course of filming at such locations as Lindbergh Field in San Diego, March Field in Riverside, and the Cleveland Air Races. Paul Mantz, once Amelia Earhart’s navigator, provided technical advice, and Slavko Vorkapich, renowned for his montage sequences, worked on special effects. Myrna marveled at the technological mastery that made this film fly.
²⁰

Since
Test Pilot
made money during an otherwise drab season for MGM, Metro immediately got busy with another Gable-Loy aviation picture,
Too Hot to Handle
, this one with Gable playing a waggish and thoroughly unscrupulous newsreel photographer. Walter Pidgeon portrayed a rival cameraman, and Jack Conway directed most but not all of the shoot. He caught the flu and had to step down during the last weeks of filming, when Victor Fleming replaced him.
²¹

Because of Conway’s zany sense of humor, there are some absurdist moments in
Too Hot to Handle
, notably when Gable dons what is supposed to be a native chief’s feathered mask for a voodoo sequence meant to invoke the Amazon jungle. Mainly this movie serves as just another excuse for more spine-tingling aviation thrills and more sigh-worthy shots of swaggering Gable in goggles and leather, his (false) white teeth gleaming, his dimple dimpling.

Instead of another weepy wife, in
Too Hot to Handle
Myrna Loy plays an intrepid aviatrix, as she had in
Wings in the Dark
, out to demonstrate that “a woman’s place is in the cockpit.” This time
Variety
saw the casting as part of a Hollywood trend toward movies about women with professions: “Studios Turn to Femmes in Profesh, after Overboard on He-Man Fare,” proclaimed one headline. The claim was that “femmes” in the audience were clamoring for movies about career women because they were fed up with male-oriented thrillers and that “because women seem to have turned thumbs down on both drawing-room dramas and comedies, it was necessary to dig for a new brand of bait.” Other roles cited as part of the new trend were Kay Francis as a doctor in
Unlawful
, Gloria Stuart in
Lady Lawyer
, and Barbara Stanwyck playing a lady sleuth in
The Mad Miss Manton
. The trade press was declaring screwball comedy a thing of the past, but as we will see, the burial turned out to be premature.
²²

In
Too Hot to Handle
the battle of the sexes spurs verbal skirmishes between Gable’s Chris Hunter and Loy’s Alma Harding. Soon after they meet, Hunter tells Harding exactly what he thinks of her in particular and of women pilots in general: not much. “[You’re a] comic little dame who thinks she’s a man, flying around the world with grease on her face and her hands in her pockets.” Alma Harding doesn’t cower when baited, however; instead, she puts up her dukes, showing her mettle as a pilot by flying Hunter through night fog to film a burning munitions ship and accusing him, before falling in love with him, of having a camera where he ought to have a heart. Alma, headed for the altar by the end, gets to have the last word. Spoofing Chris Hunter’s past suggestion that she needs lessons in how to be a woman, she delivers the parting shot in the last frame: “Maybe I can show him how it feels to be a man.”

Chris Hunter redeems himself in the hokey denouement by rescuing Alma’s brother, a pilot lost after a plane crash in Brazil and held captive by hostile natives. Earlier, Chris showed he could be heroic when he pulled Alma from a burning plane. That stunt may or may not have inspired a for-real rescue of Myrna by Gable; Myrna wasn’t sure years later whether she’d actually been in peril because the “controlled” fire flamed out of control or whether the reported and photographed brush with life-threatening danger was just another MGM bid for publicity (
BB
, 155).

Myrna believed she did best in feisty parts opposite Gable. She’d played his “little woman” in
Night Flight
and
Test Pilot
, but Alma Harding fit the two-fisted mold. At times Myrna behaved like assertive Alma off camera and had to stand her ground, when, for instance, she chewed out Gable and Fleming for trying to get Tracy to drink with them. During the
Too Hot to Handle
shoot, Myrna recalled, “Clark was always trying to put me on the spot between scenes, there was constant one-upmanship. He liked tough women,” and he would soon be marrying one, ex-tomboy Carole Lombard. Myrna saw a lot of Carole, who, when not working, hung around Clark’s MGM sets to keep an eye on her relentless Romeo, who didn’t try too hard to be a one-woman man. Myrna remembered Carole as “very beautiful and very feminine, but she could swear like a stevedore, and she could really take off! And he [Gable] loved it; he would just sit back and grin.” At a barbecue for the
Too Hot to Handle
cast at the actor Leo Carillo’s San Diego ranch, Carole, dressed in jeans, a cowboy shirt, and western riding boots, practiced her lasso skills. Very different from Gable’s considerably older, somewhat matronly previous wives, she knew how to box and learned to shoot a shotgun so that she could join Clark on hunting trips.
²³

After the picture wrapped, Gable and Myrna celebrated by sharing a bottle of champagne, a rite that had become a tradition whenever they made a picture together. By now they fit like a well-worn pair of shoes and were looking forward to teaming up again, after he completed his loan-out to Selznick for
Gone with the Wind
. The movie they expected to make together would be a Joseph Mankiewicz production based on a Robert Sherwood play about Hannibal called
The Road to Rome
. Sherwood wrote the screen adaptation. As it turned out, because of its pacifist theme,
The Road to Rome
, a brilliantly written comedy that had played on Broadway in the late 1920s and had starred Jane Cowl, was never made into a movie, to Myrna’s enduring regret. As late as 1974 she still fretted about the zinger lines from
The Road to Rome
that she never got the chance to deliver on camera. Because the Sherwood script was shelved,
Too Hot to Handle
turned out to be the last of seven Loy-Gable collaborations.
²⁴