Myrna Loy (14 page)

Most of the injuries occurred during filming of the tumultuous flood sequence, in which spill tanks dumped thousands of tons of water to destroy a temple with columns a hundred feet high. The photographer Hal Mohr tried to talk Curtiz and producer-writer Zanuck into using process photography, shooting in a way that would wreck the set but spare the people. “My contention was we could get better results without endangering anyone.” Zanuck and Curtiz overruled him, both men bent on doing it their way—“for real.” They made a bad situation worse by using extras, not stuntmen, to navigate the cascading floodwaters. An outraged Mohr quit in protest, and shooting stopped for several weeks while a substitute cameraman, Barney McGill, was found and brought in. Meanwhile, according to Mohr, “a couple of people were injured to the point that they never did recover.” No one ever made the injuries or casualties public, and the Warner Bros. Archive file on
Noah’s Ark
contains no report or legal brief on accidents.
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Three years in the making,
Noah’s Ark
imitated earlier film epics such as Griffith’s
Intolerance
and DeMille’s
Ten Commandments
by telling parallel stories, one biblical and the other set in modern times. Every credited cast member played dual roles, one a contemporary of Noah, the other from the era of the Great War. Myrna Loy is both a slave and a Broadway dancer. Dolores Costello, the female lead, portrays both a German chorus girl and a handmaid in the household of Noah. Costello’s modern and biblical-era characters are both in love with male counterparts played by George O’Brien, the male lead. With two major stars, sensational train wrecks and floods, a Vitaphone score, and a cast that included hundreds of animals, among them rare single-striped zebras and sacred oxen from India, the film made money despite mediocre reviews.

Michael Curtiz, who became the hyperactive contract director responsible for more than 150 films, including
Casablanca
, wanted to star Myrna in a film version of
Madame Bovary
, but Warners blocked the project, fearing that a movie about adultery would never get past the censors (
BB
, 49). Instead, Curtiz used her in an inane Technicolor western musical,
Under a Texas Moon
(1930), starring charmless Frank Fay as a singing Mexican lothario pursuing cattle rustlers in Texas and featuring Myrna, in one of several Hispanic roles she played, as flirty Mexican spitfire Lolita Romero. It didn’t help that Curtiz and Frank Fay were not on speaking terms during shooting. The picture’s sole distinction was its outdoor color photography, made possible when the sound engineer used a new Western Electric sound truck equipped for recording discs on location.

When she played a character who spoke English with a foreign accent, Myrna had to fend for herself; dialect coaches had yet to be called onto the back lot. For the role of Azuri, the treacherous half-caste native girl in 1929’s
The Desert Song
, she improvised, taking a cue from the actress she’d seen in a stage version of the Sigmund Romberg operetta. “It was a kind of French Moroccan patois, some awful thing. I made it up, really. I used to make up all kinds of foreign accents.” She speaks such lines as, “Azuri, she don’t forget,” and “Vere ees Pierre?” For the latter line Myrna received much ribbing from friends “who would come to me, give me a strange look and say, ‘Vere ees Pierre?’ ”
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Thanks to Darryl Zanuck, she had to fight to play Azuri in
The Desert Song
, a prominent role in the first-ever sound operetta on film, and Loy’s first all-talking picture. The operetta had enjoyed a long run on Broadway, and for the screen version theater veterans John Boles and Carlotta King were cast in the major singing roles. Although Loy had already spoken lines in several talkies, had appeared in more than thirty films, and had been at Warners for close to four years, Zanuck, now head of production, insisted on testing her before allowing her to play Azuri. “I’m not sure you can handle this,” he told her, threatening to remove her before the picture was completed if she didn’t measure up. “I’ll take the chance” (
BB
, 57), she insisted, refusing to be cowed, and when the cameras rolled, she proved herself, excelling in a wild nautch dance where the crowd throws coins at her as she tosses her hips, eyes flashing, her feet and midriff bare.

Loy’s seductive Azuri resembles her gypsy hellion Nubi in
The Squall
. Directed by Alexander Korda, who was making his first talkie, the film was set in Korda’s native Hungary but shot at night in Burbank. This is the story of an intruder, a tempestuous dark-skinned beauty with tousled black hair, dangling earrings, and an off-the-shoulder blouse, who disrupts the serenity of a farm family that had been living harmoniously before she arrives, pounding on the door seeking shelter during a storm. They allow her to join the household as a servant, and before long she has seduced every single male within reach, from the hired man to the son to the father, robbing, conniving, and deceiving each between tumbles in the hay. Her foil is the sixteen-year-old Loretta Young, who plays Irma, the pure, naive fiancée forsaken by Paul (Carroll Nye), the son of the house. He was a dutiful student devoted to Irma before falling under the spell of the spitfire Nubi and stealing money to buy a pearl necklace to win her favor. “Nubi, she give you kiss for every pearl,” but Nubi, “she not love anyone.”

Loretta Young would play an innocent good girl to Loy’s experienced femme fatale in two more films,
The Devil to Pay
and
The Truth about Youth
, both from 1930. Offscreen she considered Myrna mysterious and gorgeous, and looked up to her, but found her aloof. She got a kind of “stay away” feeling from her. They later got to know each other socially but never became close friends.
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Although
The Squall
has laughable lines (“How long have you been tangled up with that strumpet?”) and a murky soundtrack, Myrna Loy’s work in it carries an electrical charge, a vibrancy that attests to a new self-confidence and an ability to both enjoy and kid the excesses of her role. Nubi, the quintessential home wrecker, typifies the sort of character associated with the name Myrna Loy in her prestardom days. The screen’s future “Perfect Wife” started out as the perfect Other Woman whose bewitching allure drove decent men to stray.

The more third world temptresses Loy played, the less likely it became for her to get a chance to try anything else. Azuri and Nubi paved the way to a loan-out to Fox for
The Black Watch
. For this film, based on the Talbot Mundy novel
King of the Khyber Rifles
, the director, John Ford, requested Myrna Loy to play Yasmini, the Joan of Arc of India. He admired her performance as Azuri in
The Desert Song
and thought she would bring exotic beauty to the costarring role. Yasmini leads a Khyber Pass rebellion against British rule at the time of the Great War in Europe. A woman warrior who sees herself as a new Cleopatra, she conducts herself with far more dignity than either the half-caste Azuri or the gypsy Nubi. She sometimes wears a veil and never appears partially clothed—although her nipples are clearly visible in one of her sheer costumes. Usually she is draped in billowing yards of white fabric from head to toe. In our first glimpse of her she is asleep behind a net curtain. A servant pulls the curtain back to reveal Loy’s face in close-up. A movie camera has never before lavished so much doting attention on her arresting visage, which both Ford and the cinematographer, Joseph August, clearly appreciated. As Yasmini, who is worshipped as a goddess, she moves and speaks slowly, with stately majesty, addressing even the man she loves as “thou” in an oracular tone. Loy’s performance feels stilted. It’s as if she’s been shot with a tranquilizer dart.

One of the reasons for this lack of animation and integration with the rest of the spirited film is that after John Ford had completed shooting
The Black Watch
, dialogue scenes scripted by James K. McGuinness were added. These extra dialogue sequences, coached and supervised by a British actor and stage director named Lumsden Hare, have a wooden, tacked-on quality. Ford found them “really horrible—long talky things” that had nothing to do with the story. No wonder a critic for the
Los Angeles Times
complained that Ford failed to knit together the film’s disparate elements, calling
The Black Watch
“an unwieldy combination of
The Green Goddess, The Big Parade
, and a generous helping of Dante’s
Inferno
.” The same critic sang the praises of Myrna Loy’s melodious speaking voice and predicted, “The role should establish her as a favorite of the talking screen.”
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The British-born Victor McLaglen gives the film whatever coherence it has. A former boxer and Irish fusilier who appeared in many John Ford films and would win a 1935 Academy Award for his work in
The Informer
, he plays Captain Donald King, who is torn from his bagpipe-playing Scottish regiment, the Black Watch, as it embarks for Europe after the outbreak of the Great War. He wants to join his fellow Scots in battle, but because he was raised in India and speaks Indian dialects, he’s chosen by his commander to be posted to India on a secret mission: he must prevent holy war by deposing Yasmini, the worshipped rebel leader. The moment Yasmini sets eyes on Captain King her fate is sealed. Passion overtakes her, womanly love for a man displacing her supposedly mannish love of power. She receives King in her chamber, declaring from a reclining position, “It is sweeter to be a woman to one man than goddess to thousands.” Because the Hays Office had proscribed miscegenation, she must assure King that she is really a white woman, a descendant of Alexander the Great, no less.

McLaglen has a gruff, commanding presence, and when he removes his shirt to fight a Pashtu in the seething Cave of Echoes, we can understand why Yasmini’s eyes widen with admiration. But in the love scenes with Yasmini he is hopelessly inhibited. Even when Ford had the couple try embracing in McLaglen’s dressing room, the actor balked, complaining, “Myrna, she’s just a child” (
BB
, 56).

Ford thought he’d directed high drama, but in movie theaters, McLaglen’s Captain King elicited unintended laughter when his pronunciation of the name “Yasmini” sounded like “Yes, Minnie,” and the audience howled. Myrna’s friends took to calling her Minnie, a nickname that stuck.

Attracted to Myrna, Ford enjoyed teasing her. When
The Black Watch
was completed, he invited her to a party at his home, which turned out to be a stag party. Myrna was the only female present, although Ford’s wife, Mary, was somewhere in the house and had opened the door for her. After recovering from her initial shock, Myrna stayed and enjoyed herself. A young, shy John Wayne (still known as Marion Morrison), who’d served as prop man on
The Black Watch
set, stayed in the background (
BB
, 58).

During Myrna Loy’s later years at Warner Bros., reviewers and fan magazine reporters protested that she was not getting a fair shake. Under a full-page portrait of her in a cloche hat,
Photoplay
commented, “Hollywood is wasteful of beauty. Myrna Loy, for instance, has something to contribute to Art. But, for the most part, she is relegated to the ungrateful task of vamping in modern operas.” A critic for New York’s
Outlook and Independent
wrote that Myrna Loy “has never had a chance to do anything but run around in Oriental costumes and talk Pidgin English. . . . Myrna Loy has intelligence and it’s high time someone gave her a decent part.”
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By 1929, though, she was at least drawing some serious attention.
Screenland
magazine in August singled out her work in
The Squall
and
The Black Watch
as the best performances of the month.
Photoplay
profiled her in September as “The Siren from Montana,” characterizing her as a quiet home girl offscreen who had never been further east than Montana. “Myrna doesn’t make whoopee in the Hollywood meaning of the term. She smiles when she says perhaps she makes whoopee in her own way. She doesn’t like to go to parties because bad gin has its after effects. She rides and swims and goes often to the theater. When she isn’t working she models statues, but she is working most of the time. . . . She lives with her mother and younger brother, who graduated high school this year.”
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Myrna recognized that she could appear haughty. When Joan Crawford offered to teach her how to dance the Black Bottom, she told Joan no thanks, partly because Myrna feared she wouldn’t dance it well but also because “I had airs and thought of myself rather above a dance called the Black Bottom.”
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An earlier
Photoplay
article reported that she was “going with” the young actor Barry Norton, a native of Buenos Aires who appeared in
What Price Glory?
and many Spanish versions of Hollywood films, and whose real name was Alfredo Carlos Biraben. The article hints that marriage might be in the offing. In her autobiography Myrna calls Barry Norton a “perpetual male ingénue” who was “one of my more serious flings” (
BB
, 54). She was a bit more revealing in an interview with Gladys Hall, where without naming him she referred to Norton as her “first adult love,” someone she was drawn to because, like her, he disdained small talk and partying. She added that as a man he fell short of her heroic ideal. “Not a man yet, still a boy.” Was he a failure as a lover? Apparently Norton was in the process of defining his sexuality. According to Ramon Novarro’s biographer, André Soares, Norton later came out as gay.
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The failure of her relationship with Barry Norton may have contributed to a bout of the blues that Myrna suffered as the 1920s drew to a close. Working at Warners no longer gave her much gratification, for as the studio soared on the wings of sound to its economic zenith, she felt left behind and professionally stymied. Her fame was growing, yes, but her range as an actress was not. She couldn’t break out of the exotic vamp straitjacket. She felt touched, but also depressed, when a Chinese man in San Francisco wrote to propose marriage to her, sweetening the offer with a promise to take her back to China, “their” shared native land. Even in a light, though interminable, 1929 musical revue,
Show of Shows
, there she is in the “Chinese Fantasy” number, made up as a Chinese doll, dancing a pseudo-Chinese number before a pagoda, surrounded by chorus girls in coolie hats who twirl parasols while Nick Lucas croons a song named for her character, “Li-Po-Li.” The repetitiveness of her roles, combined with their lack of subtlety, began to feel stifling. “What depressed me was the sense of a barrier between the audience and myself, which I tried to penetrate, but couldn’t. . . . When you were a heavy, by George, you were a heavy. Not a saving grace; no chance of adding a little white to the black.”
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