Hollywood Madonna

HOLLYWOOD MADONNA

HOLLYWOOD LEGENDS SERIES
CARL ROLLYSON, GENERAL EDITOR

HOLLYWOOD MADONNA

Loretta Young

Bernard F. Dick

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.

Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2011
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dick, Bernard F.
Hollywood Madonna : Loretta Young / Bernard F. Dick.
p. cm. — (Hollywood legends series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-079-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-61703-080-2 (ebook)
1. Young, Loretta, 1913–2000. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—
United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.Y6D53 2011
791.4302’8092—dc22

[B]                                                     2010053734

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Ned Comstock

CONTENTS

Preface

1.   Life without Father

2.   The Creation of Loretta Young

3.   LORETTA TALKS!

4.   Sacrificial Wives, Shop Girls, and Proud Proletarians

5.   Loaned Out

6.   Last Days at Warner’s

7.   Darryl Zanuck’s Costume Queen

8.   The Men in Her Life

9.   Heeding the Call of the Wild

10. The Great Lie

11. Return from the Ashes

12. Addio, Darryl

13. The Price of Freedom

14. Loretta Goes to War

15. “Age cannot wither” (but Hollywood Can)

16. Thrice Blessed: A Reunion, a Replacement, and an Oscar

17. The Return to Fox—and Zanuck

18. Slow Fade to Small Screen

19. Radio Days

20. Another Medium, Another Conquest

21. The Road to Retirement

22. A New Life

23. The Last Reel

Notes

Filmography

Major Radio Appearances

Major Television Appearances

Index

PREFACE

My family entered the television age in February 1954, when
The Loretta Young Show
was in its first season. Then, my only interest was live television. I delighted in
Studio One
and
Robert Montgomery Presents
, which brought theatre into our parlor, along with missed cues, flubbed lines, and camera gaffes that actually enhanced the immediacy of the experience. Filmed television was movies; live television, even variety shows, like
The Ed Sullivan Show
and
The Perry Como Show
, were theatre. My mother watched
I Love Lucy
and
The Loretta Young Show
. I did not—then.

I knew who Loretta Young was. I probably saw her before 1944, but my earliest memory of Loretta Young is a scene from
And Now Tomorrow
(1944) that lodged itself in my memory. (Little did I know at the time that I would be writing her biography.) It is the scene when Loretta, now hearing-impaired, awakens to the sight of a rain-streaked window. But there is no sound. She knows she should hear the impact of the rain against the glass, but cannot. I had no idea what a subjective camera or a POV shot were, but I shared Loretta’s fear, reflected in a face that, still beautiful, had taken on a kind of delicately expressed alarm, devoid of histrionics and panic—the sort of expression one would expect from a well-bred woman facing the first crisis in her life. I also had fond memories of
The Farmer’s Daughter
, and, as the product of a Catholic grade school education, of
Come to the
Stable, in which Loretta’s Sister Margaret corresponded to the kind of nun with whom I was familiar: the nun who uses her gentle, and often wily, powers of persuasion to accomplish her end—always, of course, for the greater glory of God.

Because my mother rhapsodized about
The Loretta Young Show
, I decided to watch it with her, but just once—or so I thought. I was mesmerized by Loretta’s much touted entrance, in which she executed a 180-degree turn while closing the door—her dress seeming to rotate with her—and then breezed into the living room where she purred her welcome. My first thought was, “How phony!” But after I saw a few more episodes,
I knew that what might have seemed like artifice was Loretta’s special form of theatre. It wasn’t live, but she made it seem as if it were, particularly with that iconic entrance so reminiscent of the way a star makes her first appearance in a Broadway play. But that was Loretta—a star doing a star turn.

In 1954, I did not appreciate the historic significance of
The Loretta Young Show
, unaware that it was the first truly successful (it ran eight seasons) attempt at anthology television—not a show that used the sitcom format, in which the stars play the same characters in each episode—but one following the repertory model, in which the star appears in a different vehicle each week. If asked how to define
The Loretta Young Show
in 1954, I would have said: “Thirty-minute movies.” That’s how they struck me. And, in a sense, I think my original definition holds true: They were truncated movies.

I had not thought much about Loretta over the years until the mid-1990s when Judy Lewis, her daughter by Clark Gable, published
Uncommon Knowledge
, in which Lewis divulged the details of her birth, the result of a liaison between the unmarried Loretta and the married Gable while they were filming
The Call of the Wild
(1935). I thought I was reading a treatment for a woman’s picture, with a cover-up that seemed like something out of an unwed mother movie of the 1930s—Loretta as Stella Dallas. Judy’s Loretta Young was not the plucky Katie of
The Farmer’s Daughter
or the saintly Sister Margaret. There was a real person, in some ways a tragic one, behind the Loretta Young who glided through the door, ready to offer another character from a repertory that seemed to defy categorization.

I knew then that I wanted to tell Loretta’s story, but from a different perspective, focusing on the woman and her films. It is impossible to separate the artist from the art when it is the art that reveals the artist. The films, beginning with
Laugh, Clown, Laugh
(1928), which made a star out of a fifteen-year-old newcomer, present a gradual efflorescence of a talent that was too often mistaken for Hollywood glamour or heavenly beauty. I have chosen to interweave Loretta’s films with her life in, I think, the right proportion. Since so many of her 1930s films are inaccessible except to fans of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), I have synopsized the plots for readers unfamiliar with these movies, but interested in seeing their place in her career.

I have chosen a form of documentation familiar to readers of trade books, one that uses neither parenthetical documentation nor the raised
footnote/endnotes format
of The Chicago Manual of Style.
Readers interested in the source of a particular statement need only consult this book’s notes section, in which the documentation appears page by page. A few words taken from a statement or quotation are followed by notation of their source.

I was privileged to meet Judy Lewis, and I hope I have done her mother justice. And for the movie lover, I trust I have done the same.

I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to the following: Grover Crisp, vice president, Asset Management and Film Restoration, Sony Pictures; actor Douglas Dick, who appeared with Loretta in
The Accused
(1948); Craig Fuller, associate editor, Utah Historical Society; Barbara Hall, Special Collections, the Margaret Herrick Library; Mother Dolores Hart, mother abbess, Abbey of Regina Laudis; Kristine Krueger of The National Film Information Service (NFIS); the staff of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Metro Campus library, especially reference librarian Kathleen Stein-Smith, MaryAnn Sena, and Deborah Daniele; Terry Salomonson, Audio Classics Archive; veteran publicist Walter Seltzer; and biographer Donald Spoto.

I have made use of the following special collections:

The Margaret Herrick Library, Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study

Loretta Young Clippings File

Paramount Collection

Jane Ardmore Papers

Gladys Hall Collection

Lux Radio Theatre Collection

Hollywood Women’s Press Club Records

Hal Wallis Collection

University of Southern California (USC), Cinema-Television Library

Hedda Hopper Collection

Warner Bros. Archives

MGM Collection

Constance McCormick Collection

Louella Parsons Collection

Twentieth Century-Fox Collection

Universal Collection

International Pictures Collection

The George Burns and Gracie Allen Collection

Hal Humphrey Collection

I owe a special debt to my wife, Katherine Restaino, for her assistance and encouragement; to Judy Lewis, for providing so much relevant information in
Uncommon Knowledge
about her mother’s family background; and to Anthony Greco, for locating many of Loretta’s difficult-to-find films of the 1930s.

Finally, I want to thank Ned Comstock, the ultimate archivist at the University of Southern California’s Cinema and Television Library, who always succeeds in turning the burden of research into the joy of discovery.

Teaneck, New Jersey
August 2010

HOLLYWOOD MADONNA

CHAPTER 1
Life without Father

Loretta Young and director Frank Borzage had something in common besides
Man’s Castle
(1933), the only film (and one of Loretta’s best) that they made together: Both hailed from Salt Lake City, Utah. Loretta could have been born
in any number of places
. Her parents, Gladys Royal and John Earle Young, met in Denver, where they were married in 1907. Her sister, Polly Ann, was born there on 25 October 1908. In 1910, John Earle Young, who worked as an auditor for the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, was transferred to Salt Lake City, and Gladys was required to relocate. It was not the ideal time to do so; she was pregnant again and scheduled to deliver in July. En route, Gladys went into labor in Salida, Colorado, in the heart of the Rockies; fortunately, Salida was a stop on the Denver and Rio Grande, and it was there that Elizabeth Jane Young (later known professionally as Sally Blane) was born on 11 July. Elizabeth Jane was not even in Salida long enough to have any memories of the town; once Gladys was able to travel, she and her children, now numbering two, continued on to Salt Lake City. Still, Salidans regard “Sally Blane” as one of their own.

Catholicism played a major role in Gladys’s life. In 1908, a year after her marriage, Gladys, then twenty, converted to Roman Catholicism, unaware that she had married a man whose wooden leg proved no deterrent to women. Young exuded a potent masculinity that mocked the essence of seduction, which is usually slow and subtle until the moment of total surrender. In Young’s case, the ritual was unimportant. Gazes locked, loins throbbed, and bodies conjoined. Gladys knew the scenario, having seen her husband in action, but she believed—at least for a time—in remaining faithful to her marriage vows, which pledged couples to remain together “for better or worse.” But the worse was yet to come.

Gladys was the force that kept the family from splintering when her husband’s promiscuity resulted in a cycle of separations followed by promises that were never kept. Gladys’s father, Robert Royal, differed from her husband only in degree. Gladys’s father was born in Tennessee; her mother, Fanny, in Missouri; and Gladys herself in Los Angeles. Even so, Gladys acquired the airs of a genteel Southern lady, even as her graciousness belied her resilience and adaptability. Robert Royal was not meant to be a father, much less a father of three daughters. After Fanny died of appendicitis, Royal abandoned his family. Gladys was then five. Loretta was four when Gladys initiated the first of several separations from John Earle Young that culminated in desertion and divorce. Loretta came from a family where husbands failed their wives and children, abandoning them when supporting them became too onerous or when other women proved more desirable than their own wives.