Hollywood Madonna (8 page)

CHAPTER 5
Loaned Out

At eighteen, Loretta must have had some idea about Columbia Pictures’ reputation and its president-production head, Harry Cohn. The studio originated as the CBC Sales Co., the Cs standing for the Cohns, Harry and his brother, Jack, the B, for Joseph Brandt, a lawyer who never practiced law. But Harry had no intention of being part of a triumvirate. By 1924,
CBC had become Columbia
; by 1932, Brandt, whose health was deteriorating, bowed out. Jack returned to New York, which he preferred to Los Angeles, as vice president for distribution. Harry was the one Cohn associated with the new studio, consolidating his old title, head of production, with his new one, president.

Columbia was located on Gower Street, synonymous with “Poverty Row,” where fly-by-night film companies cropped up and disappeared, not far from “Gower Gulch,” where actors in cowboy outfits waited for extra work in westerns. Loretta knew little about the film for which she had been loaned out, or its director. The director was Frank Capra, who soon found his place in the pantheon. The film was
Platinum Blonde
(1931). In his autobiography, Capra includes Loretta among the “
great cast
” that he had assembled, implying that she would have been the star until a decision was made to add some sex in the person of Jean Harlow, whose “breastworks burst their silken confines.”

Although Harlow’s addition to the cast required some rewriting and a change of title, it did not derail the film.
Platinum Blonde
boosted Loretta’s career. For film historians, it is more significant as the first of screenwriter Robert Riskin’s collaborations with Capra than for a Harlow sobriquet (derived from a title that was never the writer’s first choice). The
original title
was “Gallagher,” the surname of Loretta’s character (whose first name is never mentioned). Although Harry Cohn took credit as producer, this was, in every way, a “Frank Capra Production,” as was every
one of the director’s films. By the time “Gallagher” was ready for release in November 1931, it had been retitled
Platinum Blonde
, with the hope of attracting audiences, whose curiosity was piqued by the title character rather than the presence of Loretta, who had yet to acquire a following. Harlow became a sensation after the opening of
Hell’s Angels
(1930), in which even the impressive aerial photography could not dim her sheen. Hollywood had discovered a force of nature who needed the right combination of script and director to channel her erotic energy.

Capra might have originally been taken with Harlow’s breastworks, but her most distinctive feature was her hair, which looked like spun silver. She was a metallic earth mother with an undulating walk and ungirdled waist, elusive and otherworldly, pursuable but unobtainable. Robert Williams, a promising stage actor whose tragic death a few days after the film’s premiere precludes a true assessment of his talent, played Stew Smith, an endearingly cocky reporter assigned to cover a breach of promise suit involving celebrity Ann Schuyler (Harlow). Unaware that his colleague Gallagher is secretly in love with him, Stew becomes so infatuated with Ann that they elope, leaving Gallagher to pine in silence.

Once Stew realizes he is the “Cinderella Man,” as the tabloids have christened him—and “a bird in a gilded cage,” like the canary in his bedroom—it is only a matter of time before he asserts his independence, prompting Ann to seek a divorce and Stew to admit that he ignored his growing attraction to Gallagher because of his infatuation with Ann. Riskin was too talented a writer to have Stew undergo an epiphany and confess his love for Gallagher. Stew is an aspiring a playwright without a plot, alternating between one exotic setting and another until Gallagher suggests that he write from experience, specifically his most recent one: a rich girl-poor boy whirlwind romance that culminated in a failed marriage. When Stew asks Gallagher how the play should end, she casually, but unconvincingly, explains that the wife should repent, return to her husband, adopt his name, and live in his shabby apartment. From her voice, Stew is now aware of the sadness she has suppressed; he offers his own resolution, in which the hero admits that there was another woman, whose worth he never realized while he was under the spell of the platinum blonde. When Gallagher weeps silently, Stew, compassionate for the only time in the film, takes her in his arms and consoles her. This was the ending audiences wanted—the kind that was unpredictable but indisputably right.

Both Capra and Riskin were committed to elevating the stature of the “little man,” the unsung ordinary citizen, insisting that he/she (usually
he) merits the same respect granted to royalty. In the opening scene, the vibrant rhythms of the newsroom, with the staccato dialogue, the clacking typewriter keys, and the good-natured banter among the reporters usher us into an egalitarian world, where people of the same class work and occasionally play. In contrast, there is so much empty space in the Schuyler mansion that any sound produces an echo.

As taken as Capra was with Riskin’s script, he was equally taken with Harlow; she was a synthesis of moon goddess and earth mother. In the party sequence, Stew and Ann slip away to the garden, retreating into a glass enclosure sprayed with water from a geyser. Their embrace behind water-drenched glass is shot in sensuous chiaroscuro with Harlow’s hair as a major source of light. Equally impressive is another scene in which Gallagher, sent to the Schuyler mansion to cover a party for the society page, retires with Stew to the same garden, unaware that Ann is on the terrace above them, looking like a silver-coated statue. Gallagher, in white chiffon, embodies a less ostentatious and more feminine brand of luminosity. The contrast in whiteness—artificial vs. natural—should have resolved Stew’s dilemma. Gallagher looked like a woman; Ann, like Pygmalion’s statue that has come to life and, at any moment, could revert to marble. Harlow’s name may have attracted more moviegoers than Loretta’s, yet Loretta, looking at least five years older, held her own. It was a faultless performance in what was essentially a supporting role.

By 1933, Loretta had adjusted to Warner’s exit-one-film-enter-another policy. However, her home studio often found her difficult to cast. At times, her beauty obscured her talent, and she found herself playing young women of privilege in picture hats and summery dresses. Significantly, when she was loaned to Columbia for
Platinum Blonde
and especially
Man’s Castle
, she could play characters with which she was familiar: members of the working class and the dispossessed. Loretta belonged to neither but encountered both types during the years when her mother ran a boarding house, and later, when Gladys kept moving the family from one neighborhood to another. Loretta’s compassion for those less fortunate than herself, intensified by her Catholicism, resulted in two extraordinary performances. It was not merely Loretta’s art that made them so memorable. She was fortunate in having two outstanding directors, Capra and Frank Borzage.
Borzage—with whom she only worked once—has been labeled
the champion of “sublime love,” “the poet of the couple,” an “uncompromising romantic,” and a “consummate dreamer.” He was all of these, investing his films with a deep spirituality and sanctifying human relationships as if he were a priest officiating at the union of
a man and a woman that is too pure to be validated by marriage (which might be necessary but not the perquisite for love). The faces of the lovers are transfigured, as if nature realized the limitations of studio lighting and decided to add some lumens of its own.

It was cinematographer Joseph August who realized Borzage’s vision, painting it in light. If Loretta lived in ancient Rome, she would have been the ideal vestal virgin. As Trina in Borzage’s
Man’s Castle
, she looked even purer after becoming pregnant by the abusive and irresponsible Bill (Spencer Tracy). But that purity was partly the result of August’s lighting, which washed over her face and complemented what lay within.

There was not one false note in Loretta’s performance. To watch her wash and iron like a seasoned homemaker, preside over a kitchen stove as if it were her domain, and hear her lyrically ungrammatical speech—reminiscent of Clifford Odets’s street poetry—is to see a twenty-year-old actress in total command of her character. That she had had some contact with working women does not entirely explain her performance. She understood the plight of a homeless woman as only an actress can; whether or not she imagined what could have happened to the woman and her family is irrelevant. Hers was that mysterious empathy that an actor feels for a character, resulting in a performance that cannot be explained rationally. Technique? Loretta had it, but she was not a drama school product. Emotional memory? It is difficult to imagine Loretta drawing on any comparable experience; desertion by a father is not the same as homelessness. If, as Hamlet tells Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” there is much in the art of acting that eludes our puny attempts to explain it.

Loretta wore stardom lightly. In 1934, she spoke candidly to a reporter: “
I don’t feel
that I have done anything particularly striking; but I hope to do something really good …. After seven years I’m rather well known, however, and I believe very early fame—if you can call it fame—is good for a girl, because she grows up with it and doesn’t value it too highly or think it means more than it does.” It was her realistic attitude toward success, combined with her faith, that prompted her final remarks in the interview: “Nearly 2000 years ago Christ showed people how to live so that all their problems would be solved.”

Cohn was pleased with Loretta’s performance in
Platinum Blonde
and wanted her back for
Man’s Castle;
however, he did not have the final say when it came to casting.
Man’s Castle
was as much a “Frank Borzage Production” as
Platinum Blonde
was a “Frank Capra” one. Borzage must
have seen Loretta in any number of films and concluded she was right for Trina. Since Borzage had directed Tracy in
Young America
(1932), he requested him. For Cohn, getting Borzage was a coup, the kind that could expunge the Poverty Row stigma that tainted the studio.
Man’s Castle
helped, but the stigma did not disappear until Academy Award night 1935, when Capra’s
It Happened One Night
(1934) was awarded five Oscars.

Loretta responded instinctively to Tracy’s burly masculinity. She had never costarred with a man like Tracy who, although short, a bit stocky, and not especially handsome, could attract women with his unpretentiousness and virile self-confidence. The same qualities drew Katharine Hepburn to him, even though he often treated her as ungallantly as Bill did Trina. But it was Bill’s proprietary attitude that made Trina love him, and it was Tracy’s way of expressing affection—sometimes tenderly, other times, chauvinistically—that attracted Trina to him. When Bill threatens to beat Trina, she laughs it off, quoting the opening verses of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from
Show Boat:
“Fish gotta swim, / Birds gotta fly.” She only quotes the beginning; those familiar with the lyrics know that “I gotta love one man / Til I die” comes next. Trina was a one-man woman, which is how Loretta played her. Both she and Bill are victims of the Great Depression, but the difference is that while Bill can con waiters into a meal, Trina is reduced to sitting on park benches, which is how they meet: she, wondering where she will sleep that evening; he, feeding pigeons the popcorn that she eyes hungrily. Bill is an alpha male to the
n
th degree, alternately tender and gruff. He brings Trina to his Hooverville shack, which she turns into a home. Their relationship is not at all sensual, even though when she admits discreetly that she is pregnant, it is obvious that Trina did not reject his advances. She found lovemaking the equivalent of love, not just sex, knowing all the time that Bill was born under a wandering star.

Eventually, he agrees to a marriage performed by an ex-minister, reduced to working as a guard in a toy factory. Desperate for money, Bill becomes involved in an abortive plan to rob the factory. Now a wanted man, he and Trina, in her Victorian wedding gown with its high neck and ruffles (a replica of the one the equally virginal Janet Gaynor wore in Borzage’s
Seventh Heaven
), hop a freight. The last scene is pure Borzage, who made a subtle connection between the Holy Family and Bill and Trina with her as yet unborn child, due in December. Trina is lying on a bed of straw, with Bill’s head resting on her breast. The camera tracks back, as if the sight is too sacred for profane eyes. The viewer is left with
the knowledge that within Trina there is life, and where there is life, there is hope. The final shot is a Nativity tableau: The straw bed, Trina’s gown spread out like a fan, and Bill asleep at her breast combine to form a freight car Bethlehem. And if the child is born during their journey, the delivery will take place in a makeshift manager.

Man’s Castle
was Loretta’s defining moment as an actress. “
I proved
I could really act with that one,” she claimed, while at the same time crediting Borzage: “He made you believe your part.” Tracy also contributed to Loretta’s intensely realistic performance. He was thirteen years older than Loretta, who responded to him as a father figure and potential lover, good for a night on the town. It might be too facile an explanation to say that he was a substitute for her absentee father, whom she barely remembered. Still, she was always attracted to older men, mainly because she thought they would offer her the security that she craved. For Loretta, a salary was no gauge of personal worth, only of personal income. She wanted warmth, affection and above all, a safe haven—“a cleft in the rock of the world,” as Blanche DuBois phrased it in
A Streetcar Named Desire
—where she could take refuge when life’s problems loomed large for her. As it happened, Loretta ended up solving them herself.