Myrna Loy (51 page)

Myrna arrived twenty minutes late to her own wedding. Her car, driven by Lieutenant Commander Collier Young, had encountered a roadblock in Long Beach. Young, whose then-wife Valerie served as matron of honor, was close to Gene, and the two couples had made a frequent foursome in Washington. The Youngs would soon divorce, and in 1948 Collier would marry Ida Lupino.

With twenty guests on hand, including former navy men Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Robert Montgomery, a navy chaplain performed the brief ceremony, after which the newlyweds, each marrying for the third time, promised, “This time it will stick.”
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Gene had arranged a celebratory lunch at Mike Romanoff’s, in Beverly Hills. When the last toast had been toasted, he delivered Admiral Halsey to his next appointment, while Collie Young took Myrna home. That night friends joined the newlyweds for a big party at Mocambo, which Myrna called “a typical Markey extravaganza, but hardly a wedding celebration” (
BB
, 196). What she meant was that it was a party for Gene Markey and his navy buddies more than for the bride and groom.

Gene had been ill and was winding down his duties as a producer at 20th Century–Fox, so Myrna, newly signed for her role in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, was going to be paying most of the bills. Gene had a pattern of marrying beautiful women who made more money than he did and who maintained him royally. As a wedding gift Myrna bought him a fine wine cellar. She also kept him outfitted in tailor-made British clothes. According to Betty Black, he traveled to Europe with twenty steamer trunks packed with suits, coats, sports jackets, evening wear, shoes, shirts, and ties. Betty viewed the balance of power in the new marriage as a replay of the situation with Arthur, in that Myrna indulged and deferred to her husband. Everything was for Gene. He contributed his Irish charm, elegance, and immense social grace, and he certainly knew how to flatter a woman. Although ten years older than Myrna, he remained boyish in her eyes. She said many times that she could never resist him.
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Gene had a twelve-year-old daughter by Joan Bennett, Melinda, whom Myrna considered a decided plus. The feeling was mutual; Melinda much preferred Myrna to her previous stepmother, Hedy Lamarr. Melinda, who aspired to become an actress, lived with her mother but would come regularly to visit her father and stepmother, sometimes accompanied by her older half-sister, Diana. Melinda found Myrna welcoming and genuine, “a delightful lady, smart and kind.” She and Myrna grew very fond of one another.
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The Markeys made their home in a clapboard house off Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades that Myrna had bought, a replica of a Connecticut saltbox that was painted dark red. Overlooking Rivas Canyon, it included a lime-tree orchard, a perfect lawn, and an English garden that reminded Myrna of the one her Johnson grandmother used to keep in Helena. The house had belonged to a skilled craftsman named Avery Rennick, who hand-built the furnishings and copied the paneled walls in the sitting room from a display in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As she did during her first years with Arthur, Myrna became quite social. Gene seemed to know everybody. As a couple they attended dances hosted by the Darryl Zanucks and small dinners at the home of Cole Porter in Brentwood. Since a devastating riding accident, Porter relied on the world to come to him. He pumped Myrna for gossip but found her a reluctant and disappointing source. What she adored was to listen to him play the piano and sing his songs. He would send Myrna yellow roses following a visit (
BB
, 210).

At the nearby home of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and his wife, Mary, she would exchange blank stares with Garbo, who never once acknowledged Myrna; or she’d converse with Evelyn Waugh, who these days was spending his time at Forest Lawn, doing field work for
The Loved One
. She was introduced to Somerset Maugham, but he had little use for her because she refused to play cards. Members of the British aristocracy would often be included on the Fairbanks guest list, to Gene Markey’s delight. Titles impressed him, and Myrna called him a Bourbon by temperament. He and Myrna had very different ideas about who and what mattered. He once chastised her for chatting at a party with the African American actress Louise Beavers, who’d played the maid in two of Loy’s films. Markey told Myrna, “You don’t care who you talk to,” and Beavers privately referred to him as a skunk. But for the present, at least, harmony prevailed in the Markey-Loy household.
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Myrna got help in practical and money matters from her new secretary, Leone Rosson, an attractive, single (divorced) Texas native with a good grasp of finance, on whom Myrna would come to depend. Five years older than Myrna, Leone became her business manager, bookkeeper, and functional right hand, through many decades. She often accompanied Myrna on trips, and when Myrna lived in New York, she used Leone’s Los Angeles address on South Orange Drive as her own official address. Myrna’s bills would be sent directly to Leone, who wrote the checks, managed bank accounts, and filled out the Screen Actors Guild health insurance forms.

Gene shied from politics, but Myrna took sides in a Hollywood increasingly polarized by the cold war. “You could feel this cold wind blowing into Hollywood from the East, chopping the city into factions,” she recalled (
BB
, 205). As the new Red Scare took hold, conservatives demonized liberals, left-wingers called conservatives fascists, and schisms displaced the solidarity of the war years.

From the moment of its founding, in the spring of 1945, Myrna took up the mission of the United Nations as her own crusade. In the nuclear age, she believed, world war would mean human annihilation; nations must find a way to negotiate their differences. She had visited Lake Success, attended a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, and been moved by the sights of the circle of flags in front of the building and the delegates inside sitting around a circular table. “The symbol of the U.N. seems to be the circle: no beginning, no end, and no one nation below or behind another,” she said. But there were many Americans who regarded internationalism as a threat to U.S. patriotism and branded it and its advocates un-American.
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Myrna’s political troubles began when she read the preamble of the U.N. charter at a Carnegie Hall meeting of the American Slav Congress, unaware that the Department of Justice had listed the organization as subversive and communist. This single action was enough to get her smeared as a fellow traveler, six weeks before the premiere of
The Best Years of Our Lives
.

The smear ran obscurely at first, as an editorial in
American Photo-Engraver
, a small-circulation trade union publication of the American Federation of Labor. Its author was Matthew Woll, a vice president of the American Federation of Labor. Myrna became a far more visible target after Woll’s attack ran for a second time in
The Hollywood Reporter
, and it became the talk of the movie community. Woll’s reprinted editorial called for the creation of a league for political decency that would spur movie boycotts just as the Legion of Decency had when it declared war on screen immorality back in 1934. This time the protests would be directed against “many high-salaried stars and script writers who are part of the Communist fifth column in America.” Arguing that “glamour must not be allowed to serve a possible treasonable purpose,” Woll named Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Burgess Meredith, Myrna Loy, James Cagney, and Lionel Stander, along with other high-profile film colony offenders he alleged had “sponsored Communist or Communist-dominated organizations.”
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Woll’s blast continued:

It is difficult to understand how American movie stars, whose wealth and fame is made possible by money paid into box offices by millions of hard-working and patriotic Americans, can lend their names to support regimes which are killing and maiming members of our country’s armed forces, yet that is precisely what Myrna Loy did recently when she announced herself a sponsor of the American Slav Congress, a Communist front organization designed to beat the propaganda drums for Tito in the U.S. Somehow we do not recall hearing of a protest from Miss Loy when Tito’s fliers shot down an unarmed American plane which resulted in the deaths of five U.S. airmen.

He ended his broadside with a call to movie industry leaders to “root out the fifth columnists and fellow travelers from the movie capital of America.”

Myrna was in the middle of filming
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
when Woll’s attack appeared in the press. Although her costars, Cary Grant and Shirley Temple, kept their thoughts to themselves, RKO’s production chief, Dore Schary, jumped to Myrna’s defense, promising to back her up with all the support she needed. Schary was a bookish writer of plays and screenplays who became a producer and in the early 1940s had headed the B-picture unit at MGM. After clashing with Mayer about an anti-Hitler movie Schary wanted to make, he left MGM and partnered with David O. Selznick at Vanguard Pictures. Still allied with Selznick, he came to RKO in 1945 and stayed until Howard Hughes bought the company three years later. A liberal Democrat who believed movies should comment on world issues, he left a complicated professional legacy. Joan Crawford hated his message pictures and labeled him a “cornball.” Esther Williams, who worked under him in the late 1940s and early 1950s at MGM, found him condescending and treacherous. But in Myrna’s eyes he could do no wrong. She claimed him as a cherished friend and political ally from that point on.
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Surprisingly, the conservative Louella Parsons also spoke out in her Hearst-papers column on Myrna’s behalf. “I happen to know that Myrna worked herself to skin and bones during the war, going to hospitals every day and in Red Cross work,” she wrote. “How [Woll] could accuse Myrna of being un-American is something those of us who know her well aren’t able to understand. I do believe there are Communists in our town who should be exposed, but you can never make me believe that Myrna is one of them.”
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Myrna dispatched an angry letter of protest to the
Hollywood Reporter
, which published it along with one from Orson Welles. She demanded a retraction, itemizing and denying Woll’s charges, one by one. “I am not part of a Communist fifth column. I am not serving a possible treasonable purpose. I have not sponsored Communist or Communist-dominated organizations. I am not a person guilty of treason. I have not lent my name to support regimes which are killing and maiming members of our armed forces. I did not announce myself a sponsor of the American Slav Congress. . . . I am not engaged in misguided and dangerous activities. I am not a Communist. I do not belong to the Communist party. I do not flout American patriotism. I am not disloyal.”
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Myrna’s lawyer, Martin Gang, filed a $1 million libel suit against the
Hollywood Reporter
and its editor, W. R. (Billy) Wilkerson, claiming that the
Reporter
had reprinted a “false and malicious” story designed to “discredit and defame Loy and to expose her to hatred, contempt and the ridicule of the public.” Wilkerson soon caved in and published a frontpage retraction. He knew he could not substantiate any of Woll’s allegations and that he would lose in court. Matthew Woll also backed off, admitting he had misjudged Miss Loy. He conceded that, since publishing his initial attack, he’d studied the record and found “that she has not supported any activity harmful or inconsistent with the American way of life.” Citing her war work, he now pronounced her “a patriotic American citizen.” Satisfied that a wrong had been righted, Myrna withdrew her lawsuit.
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But cold winds continued to blow. In Hollywood “it suddenly became risky, even dangerous, to be a Democrat,” Lauren Bacall remembers. “Fear was rampant—the ruling emotion.” An inquisition was under way.
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Stalwarts of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, among them the director Sam Wood and actors Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, and Gary Cooper, convinced that communists enjoyed undue influence in the film industry and were disseminating anti-American beliefs, cozied up to cold warriors in Washington, inviting them to expose and root out the lurking Hollywood reds and pinks. A group of congressmen eagerly joined the battle.

Bacall and Humphrey Bogart were among the civil libertarians from the movie world who flew to Washington to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings devoted to investigating communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. The HUAC sessions began in October 1947, chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican who would later go to jail for accepting kickbacks. The actors, writers, and directors on the flight would, they hoped, counterbalance the “friendly” witnesses, such as Menjou and Sam Wood, slated to testify. Myrna did not join the Bogarts, Danny Kaye, Marsha Hunt, June Havoc, Larry Adler, Sterling Hayden, Shepperd Strudwick, Evelyn Keyes, Joseph Cotten, John Huston, Philip Dunne, and Ira Gershwin on the chartered flight to Washington because she was in the middle of filming
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
, another Dore Schary film. But she became a charter member of the Committee for the First Amendment, the group that sponsored the flight, and she contributed $1,000 to it. She was one of 140 in the film industry who signed a petition published in the trade papers expressing outrage at HUAC’s attack on freedom of expression. Other signers included Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Ava Gardner, and Gregory Peck. The FBI tagged Myrna Loy “one of the most vociferous” protesters of the HUAC hearings.
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