Myrna Loy (10 page)

When Myrna emerged from this period of sustained and uncharacteristic despondency, she found her resolve strengthened. Instead of giving up on herself, she now had a renewed determination to succeed. She thought she might try to earn enough money to go to New York and attempt to get work on the stage there. Though her plans could change from one day to the next, she had revised her wish to be a dancer, adding a new ambition: she might become an actress, too. Her recent exposure to a stage performance by the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse had reminded her that acting could be high art, worthy of her aspirations.

Back in the world after her retreat, Myrna quit her dancing job at the Egyptian Theatre, which she believed had taken her as far as it could. Gaining stage experience in New York might have served her career well, but she simply didn’t have the money for the cross-country trip. Instead, she decided to pursue opportunities in her own backyard. She began haunting the casting office at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the powerful, recently formed studio that was an amalgam of Metro Pictures Corporation, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. MGM’s huge lot, behind high white walls on Culver City’s Washington Boulevard, was within walking distance from her home, part of a very familiar local landscape. In her first years in California she and her friends had climbed the fence at what was then Goldwyn Studios and posed for snapshots near the sets. The Ritter School of Expression, where Myrna had taught children’s dance classes during high school, was right across the street. Myrna knew a few people who worked for MGM. She had a musician friend, Hazel Schertzinger, whose brother, the composer Victor Schertzinger, had directed several Metro-Goldwyn (pre-MGM) films. He promised to help Myrna get bit parts at the studio from which so many cinematic blessings seemed to flow. It wasn’t her connections, however, but her looks and persistence that got Myrna through the door.
⁸

The spring and early summer of 1925 brought several movie career breaks, all in a cluster. Myrna went before the motion picture cameras in three different productions, two of them at MGM. The first of these was
Ben-Hur
, the elaborate biblical spectacle, based on a novel by Lew Wallace, that cost close to $4 million to produce—the most expensive Hollywood film up to that time.
Ben-Hur
shooting dragged on and on, bleeding money. Production in Rome had begun in 1923 as a Goldwyn picture, under Charles Brabin’s direction. With the merger of Goldwyn, Metro, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, it had become an MGM project, and the original director, screenwriter (June Mathis), and leading man (George Walsh) all had been replaced. Ramon Novarro now starred, under the direction of the veteran Fred Niblo, and early in 1925 the entire company had been summoned back to the States from Rome, to complete shooting in Culver City.

Myrna briefly thought she might land the part of the Virgin Mary, but that didn’t happen. In these earliest days of her film career she became all too familiar with setbacks and disappointments.
Ben-Hur
’s casting director, Bob McIntyre, “the god in the grille,” had spotted her, looking forlorn and possibly undernourished, outside the MGM casting office, and her hopes soared when he opened the grille and told her to put on a costume Kathleen Key was supposed to wear in one scene. It turned out to be the costume they were initially interested in shooting for a color test, not Myrna, and the costume in question was decidedly unglamorous, the garb of a leper. “They did not want
me
,” said Myrna. “They wanted a body. Any body weighing less than 120 pounds on which to drape the leper costume Kathleen Key was to wear” as Ben-Hur’s sister, Tirzah. “That was my grand entrance into motion pictures!”
⁹

After the makeup artist Lillian Rosine removed the garish makeup Myrna had applied to her own face and replaced it with a professional makeup job, Christy Cabanne, who was working as a second-unit director, took another look at her and did a double take. What a remarkable and photogenic face and form! He told her she had a crack at playing the Madonna, nothing less than the mother of Jesus. Again Myrna’s hopes soared as she put on a blonde wig and white robes. She tested well this time, but the powers at MGM—either the chief of production Irving Thalberg or the director, Niblo—decided instead to go with a “name” actress for the part of the Virgin. Lillian Gish was mentioned as a possibility, but in the end the role went to the actress who had played Peter Pan to great acclaim, Betty Bronson, who looked suitably virginal, as Myrna believed she herself did not. Bronson was a safe choice for the studio, but Myrna was crestfallen.

She did get a bit part in
Ben-Hur
but one that was quite a comedown from the role she’d hoped to get. Wearing a black Medusa wig, she played a hedonist in a box at the chariot race, one of the mistresses of a wicked senator portrayed by Hank Mann. The shot was subsequently cut from the film and survives only in a still. Despite the disappointments, Myrna did find it exciting to be standing around the
Ben-Hur
sets during shooting of big scenes. Of the star Ramon Novarro, later her friend and costar in
The Barbarian
, she said, “He was poetry, walking.”
¹⁰

As a consolation prize Metro offered Myrna a dancing role in
Pretty Ladies
, a backstage drama described as a jazz picture (although silent) that had been modeled on the lives of dancers and comics in
The Ziegfeld Follies
. Actors played thinly disguised versions of Will Rogers, the dancer Frisco, and the singing comic Eddie Cantor. Norma Shearer, not yet married to “boy wonder” Irving Thalberg, had a small part in it, wearing a dazzling costume designed by Erté. Leading lady ZaSu Pitts was cast as a plain-looking, brokenhearted comedienne. Monta Bell, soon to direct Greta Garbo in her first American film, sat at the helm. Set in New York City,
Pretty Ladies
was shot on the cheap in Culver City. The New York City shots looked fake. A rooftop view of New York’s lit-up theater district was simulated by what was “obviously a curtain” and didn’t fool anyone familiar with the real thing. There were plenty of elaborately staged dance numbers for the chorus line. Scenes displaying “living chandeliers and undressed ladies, usual revue adjuncts, are to be seen,” reported
Variety
.
¹¹

Two of the scantily clad chorines who made up the living chandelier were Myrna Williams (uncredited) and a new girl in town, listed in the credits as Lucille Le Sueur, who would soon be publicly rechristened “Joan Crawford” in a
Movie Weekly
“name the starlet” contest. In one
Pretty Ladies
scene, Myrna remembered, she and Lucille/Joan “were supposed to look serene while sitting on blocks of ice” wearing “little balls of marabou.” Far more aggressive, sexually available, and publicity-hungry than Myrna, the magnetic Lucille/Joan poured her heart out to her new friend. “I remember how she would lie on the floor, her head in my lap, in her dressing room, and worry and cry,” Myrna told Gladys Hall. Joan, who had a beautiful figure, a determined jaw, and a dramatic slash of a mouth, “always worried terribly.” The MGM producer Harry Rapf had been chasing Joan, apparently with some success, and she worried about the consequences if she brushed him off. “I [worried] too,” admitted Myrna, “but I never showed it.” The two screen novices formed a friendship that stuck, although they didn’t see much of each other socially after Crawford’s career took off in a rapid ascent to stardom. She had an overwhelming will to succeed, “more willpower,” Myrna said, “than anyone I ever knew.” Following
Pretty Ladies
, Myrna and Joan, the “hey-hey” girl, posed as pinups together, wearing shorts and vamping, for
Art and Beauty
magazine. Although Joan Crawford remained the subject of tattletale gossip for most of her long career, Myrna’s loyalty to and affection for her never wavered.
¹²

Heavily made-up, intense, and a terrific dancer, Crawford, aided by her handlers at MGM, worked at being spotted and photographed around town at hot spots like the Vernon Country Club, the Ship Café in Venice, or Hollywood Boulevard’s Club Montmartre. She won trophies at Cocoanut Grove Charleston contests and posed at a sales conference as Miss MGM. Pictures of her with a variety of male escorts, most of them handpicked by publicists, turned up regularly in fan magazines and the press. Crawford also frequented popular restaurants with girlfriends, one of whom might have been Myrna if Myrna had been willing. “Joan Crawford used to ask me to go to the Ambassador for tea with her or to the Biltmore for dinner,” but aloof Myrna had no taste for such outings. “Things like that bored me,” she explained in an interview. “I never had much small talk. Now and again I went out dancing with Don Alvarado [an actor, also known as Don Page] and one or two other boys. I went, really, because my mother worried about me.” Della did voice concern that Myrna’s all-work-and-little-play pattern wasn’t healthy, though when the time came for Myrna to pull away and declare her sexual independence, Della would object, tugging hard on the maternal cord.
¹³

Joan Crawford had long since broken free of the supervision of her own mother, a hardworking, much-married, less conventionally respectable and less educated woman than Della. With two broken marriages behind her and two kids to support, she once ran a laundry in Kansas City and trained her daughter to be an expert at ironing shirts. Myrna and Joan both
had
to work. Each had a mother and brother who depended on their incomes. Crawford showed none of the indulgent affection for her brother, Hal, that Myrna felt for David; she actively resented Hal, calling him “a parasite and a drunk.” Both Joan and Myrna became the family breadwinner by age twenty. Joan, whose father abandoned them early in the game, learned to dance by dancing, not by taking ballet lessons or studying with Ruth St. Denis. Joan’s stepfather ran an Oklahoma vaudeville house, and Joan, then called Billie Cassin, caught the show-business bug there. She never attended a ritzy high school like Westlake School for Girls. She did enroll in one school where she was supposed to be a helper in the dorm but was actually corralled into cooking and cleaning for thirty, and she was brutally beaten by the headmaster’s wife when she failed to measure up. She briefly attended Stephens College, leaving school for a chorus line job in a Chicago show. That led her to a Broadway chorus line, where MGM’s Harry Rapf spotted her and gave her a screen test. Myrna’s opposite number when it came to feverish hoofing in nightclubs, bed-hopping, and seeking the spotlight, Crawford readily accepted the crown as one of Hollywood’s reigning hard-living, fun-loving flappers and would soon sign a contract with MGM.
¹⁴

Content to maintain a low social profile, Myrna pursued her professional goals with single-minded determination. Wounded by the way
Ben-Hur
had turned out for her, and frustrated by the whimsical habits of casting directors, she picked up the phone and called Natacha Rambova. Considered a cold fish by many in Hollywood, Natacha genuinely liked Myrna, and Myrna could sense their rapport. Although very different in personality and background (Natacha’s mother had married money and sent her daughter to be educated in Europe), Myrna and Natacha were both dancers; both were arty, ambitious, and cultured; and both were considered exotic looking and standoffish. Rambova’s private life had ruptured since the time of Myrna’s
Cobra
screen test. Her term as the wife of Rudolph Valentino was about to come to a painful end, with bitter consequence for Rambova’s career as a designer of movie sets and costumes.
The Hooded Falcon
, an ambitious film about Moorish Spain that she and Valentino had hoped to make together, never got off the ground because of budget problems. Now, under financial pressure, Valentino had signed a new contract with United Artists and had verbally agreed to exclude Natacha Rambova from working with him or even putting in an appearance on the set. Rambova had played a prominent behind-the-scenes role in several past Valentino films, and she was habitually baited in the press for “wearing the pants” and being a haughty dominatrix. The marital split left her professionally high and dry. Feeling betrayed by Hollywood, and angry, she would soon leave for Paris and file for divorce. But before she left California, Rambova had decided to produce, with financial help from Valentino to the tune of about $50,000, a film of her own, which would show what she could do and at the same time serve as her Hollywood swan song.
¹⁵

When Myrna telephoned her, Natacha told her at once that the
Cobra
test was not the total disaster Myrna believed it to be. “She told me it wasn’t bad—that it must have been the projection machine that made it seem so jumpy.” Rambova then offered Myrna a role in the picture she was producing, to be titled
What Price Beauty?
The title echoes the name of a tremendously popular Broadway play from 1924,
What Price Glory?
Written by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings for a Broadway production produced by Arthur Hopkins, the World War I drama had been a success in New York before being adapted for the screen and turned into a major 1926 Fox film.
¹⁶

After a single screening,
What Price Beauty?
was pulled and would not be officially released and distributed by Pathé until 1928. Though the reasons for the delay can only be guessed at, Valentino’s sudden death in 1926 surely had something to do with it, since his estate was being contested. He had financed the film via his manager and estate executor, George Ullman, and the production ran way over budget. Just who owned the rights may have been unclear. Rambova’s unpopularity in the Hollywood movie world must also have played a part. She had trouble finding a distributor while she was still in Hollywood. After their very public divorce, and Valentino’s sensational demise, no major studio wanted to get near the work of his former wife, a reputed harridan. Following Valentino’s death, the press mocked Rambova’s film, in most cases before even seeing it.