Myrna Loy (43 page)

Myrna had consulted Arthur, as she tended to do before making a big career decision, about the wisdom of playing Lady Esketh. He initially advised her against taking on the role but changed his mind. He came to see her point, that she needed to stretch. As the world plunged into war, Arthur was coming to a decision about his own need for expanded horizons on the home front.

CHAPTER 13

Things Fall Apart

Myrna never stopped thinking of Arthur as the love of her life. “Of all the men I’ve known, he was the one,” she confessed in the autobiography she published in her eighty-second year (
BB
, 165). During her later years in New York, decades removed from the break with him, her eyes would fill with tears if she heard a song she associated with Arthur. But Arthur’s feelings for her were another story. His emotional skittishness, need to control every detail, and tendency to hold back had dogged their relationship. Getting married had been Myrna’s dream, not his. As the 1930s drew to a tumultuous close, after three years as man and wife and several more of unwed coupledom before that, Arthur’s conjugal devotion faltered. Even splitting up proved tortuous; that took three years.

People around them began noticing signs of discord in the spring of 1939, when Myrna took off for six weeks in the desert to recuperate from a strep throat before reporting to the set of
The Rains Came
. She seemed emotionally spent, as well as physically ill. The usually sure-footed Myrna was losing her bearings.

Eager to squelch rumors of a pending split and to advertise his role as a still loving and dutiful husband, Arthur showed up at the Los Angeles Union Pacific station to be photographed kissing Myrna good-bye when she and her mother embarked in February 1940 on a nostalgic trip back to Montana, Myrna’s first since she left Helena at age fourteen. There was significance in the fact, reported in the press, that Myrna had taken over the red barn behind the Hornblow manse in Beverly Hills and would furnish it with items her Scots grandmother had brought with her to Montana when she’d traveled west by ox cart in the 1860s. At the dawn of the new decade Myrna cast a backward glance, reclaiming her forebears’ pioneer past. The family heirlooms, including cut-glass stemware and fine china that she held on to through numerous changes of address, belonged to
her
.

Larry Barbier, an MGM publicist who accompanied Myrna and Della to Montana, made sure that the press covered every step of the actress’s sojourn in Big Sky country. Newspapers nationwide featured photos of Myrna Loy visiting a deserted gold mine, Myrna Loy at a country school-house, and Myrna Loy posed in front of a split-rail fence near the broken-down barn at the Williams ranch, the onetime family homestead north of Helena. The press also reported her triumphant return to Helena’s vintage Marlow Theater, where she’d once danced. At a reception in her honor the mayor presented Helena’s favorite daughter a bouquet of wildflowers.
¹

While on Montana turf, Myrna helped her mother purchase part of the defunct Williams ranch. Now that she didn’t have to live there all the time, and could skip the frigid winters, Della doted on the ranch’s craggy old trees, its tumble-down wooden structures, the expansive fields, and the surrounding snowcapped mountains she knew so well from her Radersburg girlhood and the years she spent at the ranch as a young wife and mother. Estate documents refer to it as the Home Place, and that name says it all. Herds of grazing horses and lowing cattle no longer populated the fields, and the staff of ranch hands had long since departed, but the landscape, at once dramatic and serene, exerted a powerful pull.
²

By turning over a portion of the ranch to Della, Myrna helped to right a wrong. Myrna’s father, David, had neglected to will his share of the property to Della, preferring to leave it instead to his two children. Still partly owned by Myrna’s surviving Williams aunt and uncle, the ranch land had been leased to tenants in recent years and had fallen into disrepair. It was a simple matter for Myrna and David Jr. to deed their share of the property to Della and for Myrna to pay the small amount of cash needed to buy additional acreage near the neglected ranch and begin restoring it. Della, who still had Johnson family in the Helena area, would henceforth, so long as her health permitted, spend summers at the ranch. Although Myrna didn’t often see her relatives back in Montana, she stayed in touch with some of them over the years. In reconnecting with Williams, Qualls, and Johnson kin and the land itself, Myrna further defined an identity completely independent of Arthur.

In Los Angeles concerned friends and professional gossips alike speculated about the future of the Perfect Wife’s marriage. When that tired epithet was hurled Myrna’s way by an insistent Hearst newspaper reporter, she grew snappish:

“I’m not the perfect wife. I don’t even like to discuss it. Let’s just forget it, shall we?”

“Certainly [the questioner promises], we’ll forget it. You mean that you’re not a perfect wife on screen, don’t you?”

“No, not necessarily. I’m not one in real life. Or in pictures, for that matter. [Nora Charles is] jealous. And now [with the release of

Another Thin Man

] she wakes Nick up in the middle of the night to play with the baby. And she always insists on tagging along. She’s too dumb at times, too smart at times. It bewilders Nick. Perfect wives shouldn’t bewilder their husbands.”

³

Arthur had grown restless. As his producing career gathered steam (recent or in-the-works Hornblow productions included the Mitchell Leisen screwball comedy
Midnight
, with Claudette Colbert, and
I Wanted Wings
, an air force picture featuring the newcomer Veronica Lake), rumors of his attentions to “still another actress” crept into the pages of
Photoplay
.
⁴

The plain truth is that Myrna no longer fascinated Arthur. He would tell his third wife, the former Leonora Schinasi Morris, with whom he eventually settled into an enduring and loving marriage, that without screenwriters to supply her witty lines, Myrna’s conversation fell short. Twenty-two years younger than Arthur, Leonora, a glamorous, highly verbal, socially prominent New York heiress once known as “Bubbles,” at age eighteen came to Hollywood to marry the Warner Bros. actor Wayne Morris. She soon divorced Morris and after an interval of several years married Arthur in 1945, at the home of her dear friends Bennett and Phyllis Cerf. (Phyllis, a cousin of Ginger Rogers, had been an actress [billed as Phyllis Fraser] in Hollywood.) Leonora later became a writer who collaborated with Arthur on several books for young people that were edited by the publisher and Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf. She also published a book on Cleopatra for young people and two adult novels about Hollywood, but at the time of her marriage to Arthur she had penned only a few fashion columns and book reviews and could not be called a career woman. She had been, however, a stylish, popular, and vivacious beauty who traveled in elite circles. Gloria Vanderbilt was a good friend, and later Babe Paley and Pamela Harriman would be as well. Much later, she’d make a splash at Truman Capote’s trend-setting Black and White ball. During her three decades with Arthur, Leonora’s life revolved around him, their homes, and their glittering social circle. That suited Arthur.
⁵

“
I
was the love of his life, not Myrna,” the still elegant octogenarian widow of Arthur Hornblow Jr. proclaimed in an interview. She fondled, and then held up for display, a heavy, jangling gold-link bracelet that Arthur had presented to her as a special gift. From a gold disk, one of three that dangled from the precious bauble, she brandished Arthur’s engraved inscription: “The beloved bearer is the true and only Mrs. Arthur Hornblow Jr.”
⁶

Arthur’s constant faultfinding and apparent rejection caused Myrna untold anguish. When he criticized Terry, something he did readily, Myrna sided with her stepson. Arthur could be patronizing. He looked down on Myrna’s Montana-bred mother, beloved Aunt Lu, and brother, David, who all remained financially dependent on Myrna until the mid-1940s, when David finally settled into a job as a mechanical designer at Hughes Aircraft and became self-supporting. To a lesser extent Arthur looked down on Myrna, too. He used to joke that when he met her, she was just a barefoot country girl. She continued to feel that she didn’t and couldn’t measure up. It was hard not to internalize his disdain.

While the Hornblows’ marital boat rocked, Myrna remained reticent, as usual. Even in her autobiography, out of consideration for Arthur’s family, friends they shared, and Myrna’s own preference for privacy, she didn’t discuss Arthur’s infidelity. He had affairs, including a brief fling with Kay Francis. She chose to keep mum even to close friends, but as she retained her dignity and integrity, Myrna’s health and self-confidence took a dive. She would tell the judge who granted her 1942 Reno divorce that her husband’s conduct “caused her great unhappiness and injured her general health.”
⁷

At home in the big, custom-built Hornblow home on Hidden Valley Road, her shortcomings and foibles seemed to grate on Arthur. He’d become impossible to please and fussed about minute details. He put sticky stuff on the bottoms of mantelpiece objects to make sure the housekeeping staff wouldn’t move them from an exact spot. When Terry visited during summer vacations, Arthur frightened the boy with his austere bearing, his list of Thou Shalt Nots and his harsh punishments. When they entertained guests, he obsessed about the wine he served. The MGM writer Bob Hopkins, who got to know Arthur when he jumped from Paramount to MGM in the early 1940s, joked that Arthur “can’t read a script unless it’s room temperature.”
⁸

Arthur had invested quantities of money, care, and thought on their Coldwater Canyon home’s design and décor, which Myrna enjoyed and helped plan and finance but didn’t care as much about. When the marriage finally ended, she relinquished her claim on the lavish wedding gifts and other furnishings of their home; Arthur took everything, including heaps of fine silver, and that was okay with Myrna. She liked the feeling of walking away unimpeded by truckloads of possessions and would repeat the pattern. Even before her first trip to the altar, Myrna made it clear that with the exception of some family heirlooms and a few pieces of jewelry, she wasn’t attached much to material things. She once left behind a valuable painting and some Wedgwood china in a Westwood house she rented from Dorothy Manners.
⁹

The traveling-light, I’ll-go-my-way-and-you-go-yours policy applied to income, too. Myrna paid her own way and was probably far too casual (for her own future security) about money. She did have a few small investments, and she owned the mountain retreat at Lake Arrowhead, but for her, estate planning didn’t rank high on the list of priorities. At the opposite extreme from Hollywood penny-pinchers such as Cary Grant and Clark Gable, she enjoyed spending her large income freely. Like her less-affluent father she splurged on gifts, bought what she wanted for herself, and squirreled away little. Unlike her father she always looked after her family.

One month after moving into their just-completed dream house in 1937, she and Arthur had signed a postnuptial agreement stating that they would share equally in household expenses and that each of them would keep earnings separate. Before the divorce Arthur handed her a bill for close to $6,000, claiming that Myrna owed it for shared expenses that he had fronted. Arthur never behaved irresponsibly when it came to money, but he kept close tabs.
¹⁰

The Hornblows’ unforgiving work schedules got in the way of wedded bliss, too. After a day of shooting on a set, Myrna might come home “too tired to know if I’m Myrna Loy, Mrs. Arthur Hornblow or Kitty O’Shea. I just stumble into bed, if I don’t have to memorize lines.” If Arthur found himself free for a few days, and wanted to take off somewhere, Myrna would sometimes be able to join him, but she often couldn’t, because of her obligations at the studio. Being married to a movie actress, especially a star, required a maturity, forbearance, and unselfishness that few husbands can muster. Arthur Hornblow Jr. didn’t make the cut.
¹¹

Even though Myrna’s commitment to the marriage remained huge, she had few hours to devote to being a caregiver. She needed care herself. “The men who
work
with us see us at our best, exciting, glamorous, meticulous,” Carole Lombard once tellingly observed. “The men we
marry
see us at our worst, dead tired, at the day’s end, with makeup off and the curlers on.” Still, Myrna had participated in planning the house and running it. She had become close to her young stepson, Terry, taking him fishing and on boat trips, providing him with pets and other kids to play with when he came to stay. She had hosted Arthur’s aging father when he visited from London, as she had his former nanny. She planned many a menu with Sergei the Russian chef, tried to wear clothes that Arthur liked, and cohosted innumerable parties on Hidden Valley Road. She’d joined Arthur doing the things they both relished: traveling, attending plays and movie premiers, dining at French restaurants. She’d involved herself with Arthur’s productions, offering her suggestions on casting decisions, and relied, in turn, on his astute counsel about her career. “Her friends knew how her interest in Arthur’s productions quite outweighed her interest in her own,” wrote Elizabeth Owens. “They knew how she carelessly let herself be maneuvered out of the leading feminine role in
Boom Town
[a 1940 MGM film, the top moneymaker of its year, in which Claudette Colbert ended up playing the role originally intended for Myrna Loy] and into the very much less important
Third Finger, Left Hand
.”
¹²