Myrna Loy (6 page)

David senior, at age thirty-nine, felt moved to enlist in the fall of 1918, not solely out of a sense of duty and genuine love of his country. Conflicts with Della fueled his desire to flee into the battlefield. Looking back, Myrna saw him at this juncture as agitated, unhappy, and close to a breakdown. She sensed her father’s precariousness, without knowing exactly what caused it. The truth is that, though she had no inkling of this, David senior had more than the war, more than marital disharmony on his mind. He had plunged himself into financial hot water. To fund land-buying deals in various locations, he had borrowed money from banks and from friends (including Della’s father’s former business partner from Sweden, A. W. Sederburg) and from relatives, including his sister Emma Stone-house and brother-in-law Fred Johnson. He had secured one promissory note “by chattel mortgage on 8 head horses, 4 sets harness, 2 drills, 2 red cows (1 dead), 1 drag harrow, 1 fourteen inch breaking plow.” In 1918 he had fallen behind on his monthly payments for the family home in Helena and was facing possible foreclosure. Della’s expenditures for travel to California in past years, and extravagantly long stays there, had surely contributed to the family’s insolvency.
¹⁸

In February 1918 David Franklin Williams, while in Los Angeles, wrote and filed a last will and testament that was witnessed by three Los Angeles residents. What was he doing in Los Angeles at this time? Was he looking around for real estate, reconsidering his stance on remaining in Helena? Did he decide to write a will in his thirty-ninth year because he recognized that he might die on the European war front after his contemplated enlistment in the military? If he survived that peril, did he foresee a separation from Della, or a divorce? Affirmatives to at least some of these questions seem likely.

Myrna recalled being at home in Helena, shortly after she turned thirteen, dressed up as a girl soldier with a cap and a khaki jacket, when, with a voice cracking with emotion, she tried to persuade her father to change his mind about enlisting. She wanted him home. He didn’t yield to her entreaties. Should anything happen to him, he told Myrna,
she
should take charge of the family. “You’re my little soldier. When I go, I’m leaving you to take care of things” (
BB
, 21). What an extraordinary thing to say to a schoolgirl who had just entered her teens, especially considering the financial hole he was in the process of digging. Myrna took her father’s words to heart. They would shape her future role in the family and ultimately define her sense of purpose. She would become a person with a fierce work ethic, a young woman with ambitious goals for herself who at the same time shouldered responsibility for others.

The Spanish influenza epidemic prevented David’s planned enlistment. Beginning in September of 1918, a virulent strain of the disease walloped the entire country. Almost a quarter of the national population contracted the infection, and out of every one thousand that fell ill, nineteen died. Army camps were decimated as more soldiers died from the flu than had fallen in the trenches. Calls for 142,000 draftees were canceled. In Montana entire homesteader families died in their beds, and children not yet stricken wore balls of asafetida tied around their necks.
¹⁹

When Myrna, her brother, and Della all came down with the flu, David senior nursed them, aided by a professional nurse who came to their house for just one hour a day to administer medicine and pack them in ice. Myrna remembered waking from sleep to find her father sitting beside her, holding her hand. She also recalled a sleepwalking episode. Feverish and not aware of her own movements, she wandered out of her bedroom. Her father gently led her back to bed.
²⁰

When David himself contracted the disease, Myrna, who had recovered, went to stay with a neighbor. She learned of her father’s death by overhearing a morning phone call and went to pieces. Recalling the moment to James Kotsilibas-Davis more than sixty years later, while working with him on her autobiography, Myrna again broke down.
²¹

David Franklin Williams, not yet forty years old, died November 7, 1918, two days before Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and four days before Germany signed the armistice and hostilities ceased. “Funeral services for David F. Williams, who died at 8:30 yesterday morning from effects of influenza, will take place at 11 Saturday morning from Flaherty and Kohler chapel under the auspices of the Helena lodge of Elks,” reported the
Helena Independent
. “The Rev. James F. McNamee of First Baptist Church will preach the sermon.” David Franklin Williams’s estate was billed $365 for funeral expenses, including “casket, box, services,” the hearse, and five taxis. He was buried on November 11, to background noises of jubilation—drumbeats, bells, sirens, and shouts—as the rest of Helena celebrated the armistice.
²²

“I worshipped him,” Myrna said of her father, whose death proved to be the determining event in her life. “I coped with his loss by accepting the responsibility for my mother and brother he had entrusted to me” (
BB
, 22).

CHAPTER 3

Life without Father

In asking Myrna to take responsibility for the family if he died, her father had cast a kind of spell, one that could not be broken. Myrna began to think like a parent instead of a child.

David’s will reveals that despite his plea to Myrna, he had made other, more hardheaded provisions for the future of his wife and children, plans he hadn’t shared with either Myrna or Della. The last will and testament that David Franklin Williams wrote, or at least put on public record, in Los Angeles in February of 1918 designated his married older sister, Nettie Williams Qualls of Helena, as executrix of his estate and guardian of the “persons and estates” of his two minor children, who were his named beneficiaries. David empowered Nettie, in the event of his death, to hold her deceased brother’s property in trust for minors Myrna Adele and David Frederick, “to handle said property as though it were her own” until the children reached adulthood. As for Della Williams, who was, after all, his wife when he wrote the will and the mother of his children, David’s will instructed Nettie to pay Della the sum of twenty-five dollars per month, so long as Della remained “single and chaste.”
¹

David’s estrangement from Della all but leaps from the pages of his final testament. His will indicates that when he wrote it, he felt some financial obligation to his wife but not much beyond that. It’s the tribe started by his parents, D. T. and Ann Williams, personified by his trusted older sister Nettie, and continued by his two Williams children, his blood kin, that he calls his own. Nettie and his children represent “us,” and Della, joined to him by law but not by blood, is “them.” Myrna and young David are the ones for whom he wants to provide an inheritance. As for Della, even though twenty-five dollars a month, the equivalent of about $353 in the year 2009, was a far less paltry sum in 1918 than it is now, his carefully monitored provision for her attests duty, not love. Further, it lays bare David’s wish to deprive his widow of true adult independence, since it binds her for subsequent years to the judgments, allotments, and ministrations of her sister-in-law Nettie Qualls. According to the will, if Nettie decides at some future point that Della has been “unchaste,” she has the right to withhold Della’s monthly stipend. She sits in judgment. Worse yet, from Della’s point of view, by appointing Nettie guardian of Myrna and young David’s “persons and estates,” David senior undercuts, or attempts to undercut, his wife’s authority over her own children.

The name Nettie Qualls doesn’t appear a single time in Myrna Loy’s autobiography,
Being and Becoming
, nor in any of the several interviews Myrna gave that touched on her early life. Nor is Aunt Nettie, a teacher, mentioned in the script of the May 1956 episode of the television biography program
This Is Your Life
that was devoted to the life story of Myrna Loy, though her father’s younger brother, Myrna’s uncle Elmer Williams, is. Uncle Elmer actually came to Los Angeles that May to tell the television audience about the Williams ranch and Myrna’s Montana girlhood. It seems safe to conclude that neither Myrna nor Della felt close to the upright, Presbyterian, Montanan aunt/sister-in-law to whom they would long remain tethered.
²

But Nettie Qualls deserves respect, and probably won at least a measure of it, for her steadfast and responsible attempt to honor her brother David’s last wishes and to untangle and restore some credit to the confusion and debt, along with a considerable amount of property that he left. At the time of his death, David Franklin Williams had all of $138.11 in his bank account, less than $2,000 in current worth. His property—the land and personal effects (including that Dodge touring car) that he owned or was in the process of acquiring when he died—had to be sold to generate cash. His debts amounted to almost $12,000, and his assets eventually were assessed at just over that same amount. Because the estate was so strapped for cash, Nettie and her lawyer arranged with the court for the estate to pay only 10 percent of what David owed to creditors, not the whole sum. This left a small pool of cash from which she could in time draw. When, after more than two months following her brother’s death, Nettie on behalf of the estate had not yet repaid a claim of more than $1,000 owed to the Bank of Boulder, that bank tried to have her removed as executrix. Nettie Qualls and her lawyer successfully defended her right to continue as executrix by arguing to the court that she was doing the best she could, considering her difficulties in sorting things out, and that she had been acting in the best interest of the estate’s beneficiaries. Nettie Qualls explained to the Lewis and Clark County First District Court that her brother’s estate provided little help in the way of official inventory, account books, or clear, readily accessible data about his business dealings and real estate holdings. She faced quite a daunting task trying to piece together the patchwork of estate obligations but did manage to eventually carry it off.
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Nettie also demonstrated an admirable sense of fair play, for she allowed Della to acquire for nominal sums property that David might have willed to her—the Fifth Avenue house they had occupied in Helena (the one burdened with several months of delinquent payments to the seller) and a portion of the Crow Creek Valley Williams ranch and land. The latter transfer of property didn’t happen until 1942, when the estate was close to being finally settled, and it required Myrna’s help, since she and her brother had inherited the rights to their father’s share of Williams ranch land. Della acquired the equity in their Fifth Avenue house in Helena for the sum of one dollar in 1919, soon after her husband’s death.

Della must have spent some sleepless nights worrying about her future ability to stay afloat financially even before David died, because in 1918 she briefly enrolled as a student at Helena Business College, a remarkable step for a woman who had never held a job for wages and whom everyone in the family considered impractical when it came to money. She clearly sensed the precariousness of her marriage and had to know that David, depressed and in an agitated state, had fallen behind in payments for their house and had accrued numerous other debts as well. She feared she might very well be faced with having to fend for herself and the children. Concerns about the Spanish influenza epidemic, and the war, surely alarmed her further. Death was in the air. As it turned out, in the tumult of 1918 she never finished business college. She would later earn some money by giving piano lessons, helping out in a dress shop, and for a brief period working as a clerk in a small company.
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Soon after burying her husband in Helena’s Forestvale Cemetery, where her own ashes would one day repose in a plot right next to David’s grave, Della decided to leave Montana and start a new life, relocating with the children to a place she’d long considered the land of milk and honey, Southern California. Although she would occasionally return for visits to her home turf, she wanted to leave behind those frigid Montana winters and put some distance between herself and her past life, with its entire cast of characters, including the now all-powerful Nettie. She made an exception of her sister Lulu Belle, Myrna’s favorite aunt, persuading Aunt Lu to come to California, bringing along her daughter, Laura Belle, Myrna’s older cousin, next to whom Myrna had sat at many a laden table at family Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Laura Belle’s health was fragile—she had an unnamed degenerative neurological condition, possibly multiple sclerosis—and found walking increasingly difficult. Everyone hoped that the California sunshine might do her some good. The sisters, Della and Lu, could pool resources to run a household, raise the three children, and pay the bills. A boarder from Radersburg, old man A. W. Sederburg, once a partner in the cabinet-making business with Della’s father, soon joined the household as its sole adult man, remaining for a year or so. According to Myrna, the lifelong bachelor, now in his sixties, had a lady friend and was not romantically involved with either Della or Lulu Belle. He functioned as a sort of adopted great uncle. Various Johnson women had been looking after him for years.

Della continued to own the family home in Helena, perhaps renting it out before deciding to sell it when it became clear after some months that they would not be returning to live there. The income generated from that house, together with a small insurance settlement, a few hundred dollars that Della inherited from her mother’s estate, and the monthly stipend from Nettie, allowed her to buy train tickets and move the household into a pretty California bungalow. It was located not in La Jolla or Ocean Park, where she’d stayed in the past, but in the Palms section of Los Angeles, “city of sunshine, fruit and flowers,” a block north of Venice Boulevard, the Culver City border.