Myrna Loy (57 page)

Myrna had aged out of romantic roles, although in her last film from the 1960s,
The April Fools
, she got to play the privileged, appealing, and mystical American wife of an aristocratic and affectionate former Parisian, Charles Boyer. She made no complaint. The Production Code had finally given way to the Motion Picture Association of America’s film rating system, and after 1968 it became possible to show (in an R- or PG-rated film) a couple falling in love while married to others, as Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve do in
The April Fools
. But Myrna didn’t really benefit from the increased permissiveness; for her it came too late. Nor was she a particular fan of the new fashion for film nudity or of dialogue that incorporated four-letter words. She lamented the fact that a double standard for men and women still prevailed.

While male actors of her generation—Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, or Clark Gable—still could play romantic leads opposite much younger actresses, women over fifty, when they worked at all, were cast as sexless mothers or grotesque monsters. Only Katharine Hepburn, who triumphed as the addicted mother in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
in 1962 and, with fierce command, portrayed Eleanor of Aquitaine opposite Peter O’Toole’s King Henry in
A Lion in Winter
six years later, seemed to defy time.

The movie roles Myrna was offered made her angry. “Hollywood seems to have unearthed this cannibal mother, and that’s the kind of part available to someone my age,” Myrna told a reporter. To such indignities she said no thanks. She’d already served her term playing dragon ladies during her earliest years on the screen. Not for her the ghoulish makeup worn by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in 1962’s
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Those two wanted their names above the title no matter what. Remaining a star mattered less to Myrna than maintaining her dignity. She pointed to England and France as countries that allowed aging actresses to keep working while maintaining both their standards for high quality and their integrity. Not so in U.S. movies. “There are
no
sane older women in films these days,” she complained, “simply a lot of psychotic, disintegrated old bags.”
¹

She turned down many parts, including one offered by Hitchcock, probably in
Marnie
. A September 1963 entry in Leone Rosson’s diary says only that Myrna was sent a Hitchcock script but that she didn’t like the part—perhaps as Marnie’s mother—and rejected the offer. She also declined to play Lana Turner’s evil mother-in-law in a 1966 remake of
Madame X
, a Ross Hunter production. Following
Midnight Lace
, Myrna Loy would be absent from the screen for eight years.

She yearned for a witty role in a good comedy, but film comedy as she had known it had gone missing, along with the satiric sense that nurtured it. “One problem,” according to Myrna, was that “you can’t write comedy unless you want to poke fun at things and yourself. There has been a long period of outrageous conformity in this country.” Prewar comedy, she remarked to an interviewer, had style, but now “people don’t dress up any more, and writers are writing about the kitchen and the bedroom and not the parlor.” She apparently didn’t think much of films like the Doris Day–Rock Hudson romantic comedy
Pillow Talk
, which Ross Hunter acknowledged had been inspired by the Powell-Loy style in their 1930s and early 1940s comedies.
²

Claudette Colbert had turned down the part of Aunt Bea in
Midnight Lace
because she wanted to maintain the fiction that she was too young to be Doris Day’s aunt, but Myrna had no problem playing older women. She knew that her face proclaimed her age, but she never considered having a facelift. The only other kind of cosmetic surgery she’d contemplated was having her ears pinned, as David Selznick had requested, but she didn’t follow through even on that. In her view, pretending to be young when you weren’t amounted to folly. “I don’t know why anybody thinks it’s important to keep their youth,” she once said. “What’s much more important is learning not to depend on youth or beauty. The true secret of survival is to be curious about life, to be interested in lots of things.” When she saw her younger self in an old movie on television, she said, “I don’t feel any pangs. I feel surprise—was that me? But I can’t yearn for yesterday. There’s too much to do today.” Joan Crawford once confessed in an interview that she envied Myrna Loy “like mad because she latched on to the secret of growing old gracefully—and usefully.” Myrna Loy had a gift for living in the present.
³

Back in Manhattan, after completing
Midnight Lace
, Myrna threw herself into John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency against the Republican Richard Nixon. Many Democratic activists in the New York theater and film communities had a hard time letting go of their loyalty to Adlai Stevenson after he lost his bid to be nominated for a third time as the Democratic presidential candidate. Alice Lee “Boaty” Boatwright, a publicist for Universal (later an agent for ICM) who met Myrna while doing publicity for
Midnight Lace
and became a dear friend, had been active in a group called “Broadway for Stevenson.” The core members of that group, which included Lauren Bacall, Betty Comden, and Phyllis Newman, were reluctant to get behind JFK. Myrna, who sat on the New York State Democratic Committee, succeeded in persuading Boaty and other Stevenson loyalists that Nixon had to be defeated, that he was a menace and that they must rally behind Kennedy. At a special performance of Gore Vidal’s
The Best Man
, organized by and for the Stevenson faction, Adlai Stevenson himself urged his devotees to throw their support to Kennedy.

Myrna stumped for Kennedy all over New York State and New Jersey, making speeches and attending rallies, luncheons, and dinners. She’d proven her ability to draw crowds. She joined Eleanor Roosevelt at a spontaneous campaign rally in Spanish Harlem, her last public outing with Mrs. Roosevelt, who died in 1962. Although she spent a fair amount of time in his presence, sometimes even riding in his private helicopter, Jack Kennedy barely acknowledged her existence. There was no small talk exchanged, no expression of thanks from him, although Jackie Kennedy never failed to be gracious and friendly (
BB
, 298). Myrna felt invisible to JFK, which would surely not have been the case if she had been younger and a potential bedmate. She never allowed his personal coldness to stand in the way of her political commitment. She rejoiced in Kennedy’s victory.

Myrna attended the Kennedy inaugural ball, where Hubert Humphrey spilled champagne on her green taffeta gown. She was later invited to a White House reception commemorating the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and was then asked to serve in the Kennedy administration on the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing. After Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1968, he sent Myrna one of his signing pens.

The overlap between New York activist Democrats and the East Coast performing arts community eased Myrna into her next professional venture as a stage actress. She had been thinking about breaking into theater since her first days with Arthur Hornblow but had never managed to bring it off. By now, in her fifties, she had developed monumental insecurities about her ability to cross over to the stage.

Noel Coward reinforced those doubts when she auditioned in the late 1950s for one of his plays,
The South Sea Bubble
. Coward had always been friendly to Myrna and had often visited her movie sets in Hollywood. He’d tried to borrow her from MGM to play Elvira in the film version of
Blithe Spirit
. He’d incorporated her name into the lyrics of one of his songs, “Mad about the Boy”; rhyming
boy
with
Loy
had proven irresistible. They’d sat side by side at many a dinner and post–opening night celebration in New York. Coward once paid her a treasured compliment, telling her that onscreen she’d “never played a false note” (
BB
, 309). They had some good friends in common, including Cary Grant and Roddy McDowall. Roddy and Myrna had been wowed by a singer named Tammy Grimes when they heard her at a club called Upstairs at the Downstairs, and they were responsible for bringing Noel to hear her; that led to her being cast by Coward in
Look After Lulu (BB
, 291). Roddy, by now very close to Myrna, also had a part in the Broadway production of
Look After Lulu
. He accompanied Myrna to her 1959 tryout for the man she referred to as the Master. During her reading for
The South Sea Bubble
, however, Coward kept interrupting to remind Myrna that her voice could not be clearly heard and that this was “theatah” and she must learn to project (
BB
, 306). She became so humiliated that she crawled away, convinced she should give up all thoughts of ever performing on the stage.

But she needed to work, both to generate income and to preserve her sense of self. “Work is important to me to fill my life,” she told Dorothy Manners. “I must be occupied or I feel I’ll rust.” Movie roles no longer sufficed; they neither paid the bills nor fulfilled her. Television offered occasional jobs and opportunities to work with such talents as Helen Hayes, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, and Tony Randall, but she found it a frustrating medium because there was never enough time to polish a performance. After her appearance in an episode of
The Virginian
, she said, “I wish I’d had more time to do it better. I was raised . . . when they made movies fast. . . . I don’t need a dozen retakes, but TV is just too terribly fast for me. It’s frightening. I’m not sure I’ll watch the show. I know I won’t be satisfied with myself.” In television work, you might get hired on a Tuesday, receive the script on Wednesday, fly out to California on Thursday, report to the set on Friday. The whole hurried process seemed much more haphazard than shooting a film.
⁴

Her new but already devoted friend Boaty Boatwright urged her to find a summer stock role that could serve as her theatrical debut. Boaty took the proposition one step further by volunteering to produce this first venture on the strawhat circuit. The play they chose for the debut was
The Marriage Go Round
, an American comedy by Leslie Stevens that had been a hit on Broadway with a cast headed by Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer. It had quickly been turned into a movie featuring Susan Hayward and James Mason. The plot concerned a married couple, both professors at a university, and the mayhem created by the intrusion into their household of a seductive young guest from Sweden. Once again, Myrna Loy would be cast in the familiar role of wife, although this wife had a Ph.D. and a job.

Through Barbara Handman, a leader in liberal causes in New York who had been one of those convinced to switch her allegiance from Stevenson to Kennedy, Myrna met Bobbie Handman’s husband, Wynn Handman, a noted stage acting coach who had helped other performers, among them Red Buttons, Jan Murray, and Dan Dailey, prepare for speaking roles in the theater. Before body mikes became the norm, stage actors had to learn (as Noel Coward had hurtfully reminded Myrna) to project their voices so that they could be heard and understood in the back rows of a large house. Projecting felt artificial to Myrna. Once she graduated out of exotic vamp roles, she had always striven for a relaxed, natural acting style. “Myrna was an exceptionally honest person,” Wynn Handman recalled, “and that carried into her acting. There was much
reacting
in her acting.” Wynn Handman had to persuade her that on the stage, projecting is honest. He also had to teach her how it is accomplished.
⁵

Prior to the July 1961 opening of
The Marriage Go Round
in New Hampshire, Myrna Loy and Wynn Handman met several times a week at her East Side Royal York apartment for coaching sessions. To help open up Myrna’s voice, Handman rehearsed her in roles from classic Greek drama. He told her, “You have a big voice, but you don’t like noise. So you don’t like the sound of loud voices.”
⁶

When casting for
The Marriage Go Round
was completed, rehearsals with the other actors began in the barnlike Lakes Region Playhouse in Laconia, New Hampshire. Handman assumed directorial duties, Claude Dauphin was leading man, and a Swedish actress known as Siri took the bombshell part. Myrna had to figure out how to retain for ensuing performances the things she’d learned; in movies you shot a scene, sometimes multiple times, but then it was over, and you moved on. She wanted the security of knowing that the props would always be placed in the same place and that her movements would always follow an established pattern. She practiced how to hold for a laugh. Also new and welcome to her was the comparative fixity of the script. “In films, you don’t know what you’re doing from one day to the next.”
⁷

In box-office terms the summer stock production of
The Marriage Go Round
at various New England and upstate New York regional theaters was a smash hit. Every performance sold out, and extra shows were added to make a grueling total of nine each week. Producer Boaty Boatwright made more money than she’d ever made before. The
New York Times
reported that the show set a new house record at the Westport Country Playhouse. “Myrna Loy was everyone’s darling,” said Handman. “Audiences swarmed to see her.” In 1961 her fan base from the movies was still solid and seeing her “live” was a novelty.
⁸

The few critics who weighed in offered qualified praise.
Variety
opined, “Myrna Loy is a deft comedienne in this first attempt at legit.” The trade weekly applauded her “winning personality on stage” but also found fault, adding, “She’d be considerably better if she’d had adequate direction or if, like [Claude] Dauphin, she were experienced enough on stage to know how to . . . retain the serious undertone of a scene without abandoning the surface comedy.” In subsequent years the jury came in divided on the subject of the effectiveness of Loy’s theatrical voice. Some judged it an expressive instrument. Others found it wanting. “Her voice is too weak, and her stage manner is at times both lackluster and nervous,” a Newark critic carped. Responding to her turn as Dona Ana opposite Ricardo Montalban in Shaw’s
Don Juan in Hell
, the
Los Angeles Times
judged her reading “perfectly lucid” but “lacking in volume and self-assurance.”
⁹