Myrna Loy (59 page)

Myrna continued to find men attractive and had a few beaus—in her autobiography she mentions George Kozel, a builder who escorted her to the Kennedy inaugural ball—but felt certain that another marriage didn’t make sense. Estelle Linzer claimed that Clark Eichelberger, a diplomat who had helped in the formation of the United Nations and became the executive director of the AAUN, was in love with Myrna, but he had a wife. The marital phase of Myrna’s life was over. “I’ll go to bed alone with my hair in curlers and plugs in my ears.” According to the writer Pope Brock, whose informant was an actor, she once at lunch advised much-married Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner to consider the merits of the single life.
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Myrna fulfilled her dream of appearing on Broadway by playing Kim Hunter’s mother in the 1973 revival of Clare Boothe Luce’s
The Women
, which originally ran on Broadway nearly forty years prior, became a popular George Cukor–directed movie in 1939, and this time around showed its age. “Now it is not so new and not so naughty,” Clive Barnes wrote in the
New York Times
. All about the catfights and backstabbings of a passel of upper-crust women defined by their men,
The Women
had little to say to New York audiences in the era of Gloria Steinem and closed after sixty-three performances. The all-star cast, which included Alexis Smith, Dorothy Loudon, and Rhonda Fleming, as well as Kim Hunter, received an award for ensemble acting and functioned as a working cooperative. All of the name players received the same salary and equal billing. Myrna took on the offstage role of company mother hen, clucking over the well-being of her brood. Safety was a worry, since the cast had to negotiate a production mounted on moving platforms.
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Backstage drama brewed during tryouts in Philadelphia. Lainie Kazan, a voluptuous brunette whose career as a singer and actress was just getting started, had been cast in a nonsinging role as the husband-stealing shopgirl Crystal, the role played by Joan Crawford in the Cukor movie. As written and conceived by Clare Boothe Luce, Crystal is a blonde. Lainie Kazan had agreed to wear a blonde wig but found that the masquerade made her feel ridiculous. With her olive complexion, “I looked like a Puerto Rican hooker.” Convinced that the wig was sabotaging the authenticity of her performance, she begged for permission to remove it. Luce said no, refusing to revise her vision of Crystal. Lainie Kazan was abruptly fired and replaced. Myrna did everything in her power to support the devastated, cast-off actress. “She took me aside and told me I was talented and beautiful and that my being fired had nothing to do with me.” In the eyes of Lainie Kazan, Myrna Loy remains “one of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever known.”
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Shortly before she appeared in
The Women
, Myrna agreed to submit to a public interview conducted by her friend and publicist John Springer in Manhattan’s Town Hall as part of his Legendary Ladies of the Movies series. Myrna had attended Springer’s interview with Bette Davis, who took questions called out spontaneously from members of the audience. She wanted none of that, insisting that she would only answer questions that had been submitted in writing and screened in advance. She needed to feel in control, so that was the protocol Springer followed, although he couldn’t keep Lillian Gish from calling out, “Myrna Loy, what a joy!” Inevitably, during the question-and-answer period someone in the audience asked about her relationship with William Powell. Myrna told the crowd that she had visited him in Palm Springs the previous summer (their last encounter, as it turned out) and that they had reminisced together and “cried a lot.” Springer, who qualified as a film historian and writer, preceded his interview with clips from fifteen Loy films, ranging from
The Squall
to
From the Terrace
. He knew Myrna well and would later write insightfully about her in his book about actresses of the 1930s,
They Had Faces Then
. In it he hailed Myrna Loy as the only actress who played leading roles in movies in every decade from the 1920s through the 1970s. She proved, he wrote, that it is possible to be “warm and cool all at once.”
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Although she never established herself as a major Broadway player, Myrna became part of the vibrant New York theater scene through her involvement with the American Place Theatre, which she helped Wynn Handman to found and for which she served as board member and trustee. At board meetings Handman relied on Myrna’s sound judgment and total commitment. Handman’s mission was to create a nonprofit theater devoted to producing plays by living American playwrights who worked outside the commercial mainstream. The American Place Theatre’s original home was a Gothic church, St. Clement’s, in Hell’s Kitchen, which one of the founders, Sidney Lanier, an Episcopalian minister, helped to secure.

At the Founder’s Reception in 1963 at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Tree, Robert Lowell, whose play
The Old Glory
would be the debut production for the new venture, read three of his poems. Robert Penn Warren also read some of his poetry, and Myrna read an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s piece about Alfred Stieglitz, “If Anything Is Done,” which included the words “an American place.”
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Kennedy’s assassination occurred the day after the Founder’s Reception. It shocked and horrified everyone. The very first event staged by the American Place Theatre turned out to be a memorial service at which Robert Lowell and a shivering Tennessee Williams, who belonged to the American Place board, read poetry. Myrna recited Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain a formal feeling comes” (
BB
, 316).

Over the years the American Place helped launch some distinguished actors, including Dustin Hoffman, Frank Langella, and Faye Dunaway. It introduced plays written by Sam Shepard, Ed Bullins, Anne Sexton, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others. Its most celebrated production was probably William Alfred’s
Hogan’s Goat
, which resulted in awards for William Alfred and featured Faye Dunaway. It led to Dunaway’s first Hollywood contract. Eventually the American Place moved to its own theater in an upscale building, which proved costly and unsustainable. It found more humble quarters and as of this writing remains a going concern, now mainly devoted to performances in schools.

Myrna Loy took on her last screen roles because they promised her a chance to perform surrounded by talent she admired. She accepted the part of another tippling old lady in
Airport 1975
, for instance, because Bill Frye, a friend who had produced her TV movie
The Elevator
, promised she would have a scene with the brilliantly manic Sid Caesar. Caesar’s shyness in her presence surprised her; improvising with him proved to be hard work (
BB
, 346). In some ways
Airport 1975
is a descendant of Myrna’s earlier aviation films like
Night Flight
and
Too Hot to Handle
. Stunt flying and near-disaster still promised excellent box office.
Airport
1975, which today plays like an inadvertent comedy, grossed more than $47 million. It was the inspiration for the 1980 spoof
Airplane
.

Although Myrna Loy appeared in only one scene of the 1978 black comedy
The End
, she performed it opposite Pat O’Brien, with whom she’d last worked in 1931 in
Consolation Marriage
. They played the dotty, aged parents of the star and director, Burt Reynolds, who took the role of Sonny, a handsome loser who’s been told by doctors that he has a rare blood disease and has only a few months left to live. In their absurdist scene the geriatric parents remain cheerfully indifferent to their distraught son, who plans to rob their medicine cabinet of sleeping pills to help him commit suicide. The mother (Loy) would rather watch television, the father (O’Brien) paint by numbers, than respond to Sonny or, indeed, show any sign of life at all other than as human robots. When Reynolds plants an affectionate kiss on his mother’s cheek, she looks genuinely startled. Myrna couldn’t get enough of Burt Reynolds’s affection and teasing banter. The attention of a young hunk with a good sense of humor delighted her. He would take her out for dinner when he came to New York and call her Mom.

Seventy-five-year-old Myrna jumped at a substantial role in
Just Tell Me What You Want
, a comedy directed by the respected New York–based Sidney Lumet, who started out as a child actor in the Yiddish theater and went on to distinguish himself at the helm of such films as
12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon
, and
Network
. Myrna found him an interesting and accomplished workaholic who meticulously planned every camera angle and never stopped going. As William Wyler had done prior to shooting
The Best Years of Our Lives
, Lumet rehearsed the actors as if they were preparing a play. Lumet considered Myrna Loy one of the greats, an actress whose power derived from what she held back. In her performances, he said, “you can feel ten things she’s not showing for the one detail you can see” (
BB
, ix).

Just Tell Me What You Want
tells the story of a brash, hard-charging New York tycoon, Max Herschel (Alan King), who doesn’t care how he gets what he wants so long as he gets it. His young, glamorous mistress and colleague, TV producer Bones Burton (Ali MacGraw), matches him in nervy ambition. She turns him into a blubbering crybaby when she marries a playwright (Peter Weller) who is younger and prettier than Max. Myrna Loy as Max’s tart-tongued, all-knowing, ever-reliable executive secretary, Stella Liberti, sees through her boss and sasses him but panders to him nevertheless. She has all the phone numbers and addresses at her command, and Max can’t make a move without her.

Alan King, funny and totally convincing as in-your-face Max, endeared himself to Myrna by telling her his dream as a kid had been to play Nick to her Nora. He took to calling her “Nora.” According to Myrna, Ali MacGraw needed a lot of reassurance about her acting, which Myrna willingly provided. Warner Bros. disappointed one and all by pulling the movie from distribution after just two weeks.

Myrna’s last major role was in a made-for-television film in which she starred opposite Henry Fonda.
Summer Solstice
was TV’s answer to the successful feature film
On Golden Pond
, which Fonda had just completed opposite Katharine Hepburn. Myrna liked, admired, and politically saw eye to eye with Fonda, but they had never worked together. In
Summer Solstice
they are poignant and tender as a timeworn couple looking back on fifty years of a marriage that has been anything but tranquil. Husband and wife each took lovers, and their son drowned in childhood. Now they are wistfully gentle as they recall scenes from the past. Stephen Collins and Lindsay Crouse portrayed their younger selves. “You’re more beautiful than ever,” Fonda tells white-wigged Loy as he caresses her lined face. “Wrinkles,” she answers, truthfully. “I worked hard to put those there,” he says.

“Mr. Fonda and Miss Loy turn the older couple into a truly memorable portrait,” wrote the TV critic John O’Connor in the
New York Times
. “He is craggy, seemingly distant, but clearly passionate. She is serene, seemingly passive, but totally devoted. Acting together for the first time in their careers, Mr. Fonda and Miss Loy demonstrate splendidly why they remain stars.”
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On her eightieth birthday Myrna learned that after twenty-eight years of marriage Terry Hornblow was divorcing his wife, Doris, who with their children had provided Myrna with a loving extended family and a feeling of bedrock stability. Leone Rosson wrote in her diary, “Myrna was upset about Terry and Doris divorcing and about being eighty. She had an awful day” (Aug. 2, 1985).

One of the activities that helped sustain Myrna through the difficult 1980s was working on her autobiography with friend and writer James Kotsilibas-Davis, a former New Englander whom she first met when he interviewed her for an article in
Life
magazine in 1968. The original book contract was signed with Coward McCann in 1980, but Myrna didn’t want to collaborate on the kind of kiss-and-tell memoir her first editor and publisher had in mind. She and Kotsilibas-Davis moved to Knopf, which supported the substantial book she did want to create. Jim Kotsilibas-Davis did all the writing. What Myrna did was talk and talk, allowing her memory to be prodded by the many interviews Kotsilibas-Davis conducted with Myrna’s friends and colleagues. Kotsilibas-Davis also incorporated quotes from interviews Myrna had given to previous interviewers, culled from clippings. He traveled with Myrna to Los Angeles in May of 1981, revisiting her remaining friends there and past haunts. They had lunch together at the MGM commissary, along with Myrna’s manager, Mimi Weber (who now lived in Los Angeles), George Cukor, David Chasman (MGM’s vice president in charge of production), and Sam Marx, the man who had purchased screen rights for
The Thin Man
. This was a nostalgic, emotion-drenched visit. Myrna had not set foot on the MGM lot since 1947’s
Song of the Thin Man
. William Powell, who rarely left Palm Springs these days, was much in Myrna’s thoughts. He would die at age ninety-one in 1984, beloved by Myrna till the last.

At MGM Cary Grant emerged from a board meeting to greet them. Her next and final encounter with Grant would come the following year when she attended a Friars Club roast of him, hosted by Frank Sinatra at the Waldorf-Astoria. She sent him one of her rare surviving letters, addressing him as “Dear, dear Cary.” She wrote, “I enjoyed every accolade for you and didn’t blame you for weeping a bit. I was trying to get word to you to say blow your nose, and your voice will clear a bit. Of course you would have been
horrified
at the idea. I was proudest of all. Thank you dear—you look divine and I wish your mother could have been there.”
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