Myrna Loy (17 page)

MGM, the richest and most prestigious Hollywood studio, and the one that was best weathering the Depression, signed Myrna Loy to a five-year contract in the fall of 1931. It was Minna Wallis who accomplished this feat. She was friendly with Norma Shearer, Thalberg’s wife, and had attended their wedding. Minna was well aware that Shearer had become one of MGM’s A-list romantic leading ladies, going head to head with Joan Crawford and with Garbo, who occupied a tier of her own. Minna knew that the studio renowned for employing “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven” was a place where an actress could soar. She showed Irving Thalberg, the youthful and talented vice president in charge of MGM production, a clip from
Skyline
—a Fox film about builders of New York skyscrapers in which Myrna looks ravishing but has little to do in the way of acting—and Thalberg was sold. According to one Los Angeles daily, however, it was her performance in
Transatlantic
that had really impressed him.
²³

Myrna’s arrival at MGM felt like a homecoming of sorts. She had grown up in the shadow of the Culver City studio and had taken baby steps into the movies with an extra’s part in
Ben-Hur
and a bit as a dancer in
Pretty Ladies
. She felt certain that the strides she had made as an actress over seven years and sixty films were finally being acknowledged. But the elation she initially felt quickly dulled. “All the heartbreak I’d endured before was nothing compared to what I felt when I learned why they had signed me. I made a silent test for a picture and they liked it. Then they gave me the dialogue and asked me to make a vocal test. I said, ‘To whom am I supposed to be speaking?’ And then it came out. I was supposed to be speaking to a dwarf, and the picture was to be called
Freaks
. I said, ‘No, gentlemen, I’m sorry.’ ”
²⁴

Myrna had made it clear in interview after interview that she’d had her fill of playing venomous outsiders. She simply wanted the studio officials to regard her as a human being, she insisted. “I’m tired of being a freak.” Arthur, who advised her on career matters and whose opinion counted for much, was telling her that she must no longer allow herself to be typed as a one-note menace. She should try to play women more like her real self. “The screen was turning to naturalness and humor.”
²⁵

Directed by Tod Browning and featuring a cast of sideshow circus performers with various disabilities and deformities,
Freaks
, although opposed by the studio head, L. B. Mayer, went ahead as a Thalberg production intended to be MGM’s answer to Universal’s
Frankenstein
, a tremendous hit. It would have cast Myrna Loy as Cleopatra, a sinister trapeze artist who couples with a dwarf. Publicity posed the question, “Can a full grown woman love a midget?” When Myrna balked, the role of Cleopatra went to Olga Baclanova, “The Russian Tigress.”

Myrna accepted a role in the Marie Dressler vehicle
Emma
without protest, but playing a spoiled, grasping, and snobbish rich girl in her first MGM picture didn’t exactly make her jump for joy. Dressler, whose performance would win her a 1932 Academy Award nomination, portrays the title character, a greathearted nanny in a motherless household who eventually marries her widower boss (Jean Hersholt) and after he dies is accused by three of his four grown children—the very children she has lovingly raised—of being both a fortune hunter and a murderer. In her sixties now and a wildly popular, beloved star whose pictures made more money than Garbo’s, the homely, overweight Dressler inspired Myrna’s admiration and devotion. Myrna prized her warmth and generosity, as well as her acting skill. She listened when Marie, after hearing Myrna’s complaints about her unsympathetic role, cautioned her to be patient. Just wait, Dressler advised. “You’ve got the whole world ahead of you” (
BB
, 71).

CHAPTER 7

Cutting the Veil

Out of the blue one day Irving Thalberg summoned Myrna to his office. She’d been at MGM for about a year, and she knew that Thalberg, the most powerful and respected producer in Hollywood, didn’t give away his time lightly. She barely knew him, having met him only in group situations, but realized this private meeting had to be about something important. Her anxiety, mounting while Thalberg kept her waiting, escalated into anger when he finally showed up and from behind his massive desk, which was raised on a platform as a way of compensating for his slight stature, addressed her without looking at her. He instead focused his gaze out a window, his back turned. She chided him for his rudeness; where she came from, a gentleman did not turn his back when speaking to a lady. Registering surprise at her outspokenness, Thalberg swerved his chair so that he now looked her squarely in the eye. A sensitive-looking man who weighed only 122 pounds, he had an intelligent, fine-featured face that Myrna considered handsome, even beautiful. He had dark, comprehending eyes and spoke both softly and calmly, “as if his words were a sort of poetry.” Everyone in Hollywood knew that Thalberg suffered from a heart condition and was physically fragile. He concealed a row of prescription pills in bottles behind his office dictograph. Thalberg also had a reputation for astuteness, bringing together a rare combination of nice-Jewish-boy-from-Brooklyn bookishness and Hollywood whiz-kid ambition and practical savvy about making movies. Anybody with that much power had to have a ruthless side. Robert Montgomery considered him money-crazed and a tough, cold operator. “Thalberg was a sweet guy,” the studio manager Eddie Mannix once said of him, “but he could piss ice water.”
¹

Myrna was unprepared for the intimate tone Thalberg now took. “Myrna,” he told her, “you’re terribly shy,” and your shyness is hurting you, “putting a veil between you and the audience.” He urged her to cut through the veil and make a grab for something more. The public was already beginning to adore her. She was beautiful and was progressing at MGM, inching her way to star status. But she must no longer allow constraint to hold her back (
BB
, 79).

Myrna had yet to appear in a lead role in an important MGM film, though she never stopped working. In addition to her turn as the mean-spirited daughter in
Emma
, she’d portrayed a calculating cabaret hostess in the Prohibition melodrama
The Wet Parade
, based on an Upton Sinclair novel. She’d been Robert Young’s charming American neighbor in a Paris boardinghouse in
New Morals for Old
, a part much reduced from the one originally planned in the script. She’d worn Adrian-designed outfits once again and had relished the chance to work alongside talents like Walter Huston and Jean Hersholt, but still she had not been asked to show her stuff as an actress. MGM’s photographers, designers, and makeup crew made sure she always looked ravishing before the cameras, but—as at Warners—the producers imprisoned her in roles with little emotional range. She kept to the familiar punishing schedule, rising at 5:30 on weekdays to arrive at the studio for makeup by 7:00 and be camera-ready by 9:00. She’d study her lines under the hair dryer. MGM, rushing her from set to set, rarely allowed time for her to catch her breath, let alone for rehearsal or for learning a script in advance. Thalberg’s summons was confirmation that at least someone with clout had been paying attention.

Thalberg’s advice didn’t magically transform Myrna Loy into a brassy extrovert or an emotional volcano, but it did have an impact. It boosted her self-confidence and persuaded her that MGM had plans for her. It empowered her to fight harder for the roles she wanted. And it may have helped nudge her out of her mother’s household. Soon after the meeting with Thalberg she finally, at age twenty-seven, laid claim to the life of an independent, sexually active woman who happened to be in love with the producer Arthur Hornblow Jr.

Before their relationship caught fire, Myrna and Arthur hadn’t seen one another since
Arrowsmith
closed production. Some months later they met by accident in a drugstore, and the next day Arthur, now separated from his wife, Juliette, sent an array of gorgeous roses with a dinner invitation enclosed. After that they were rarely apart.

Arthur was eight years older than Myrna, worldlier, and far better read than she. The transplanted New Yorker was not just Myrna’s lover but also a kind of guru and teacher who was helping to mold her. Arthur had a musical Polish Jewish mother and a literary British father who had moved to New York and there become the founding editor of
Theatre
magazine. The younger Arthur, fluent in French after serving in counterintelligence in France during World War I, felt at home among Europeans, particularly those who worked in the theater. He advised Myrna on what to wear in front of the camera (Adrian’s creations were too fussy for her, he counseled) and on which roles to pursue or avoid. He gave her books to read, introduced her to his cultured, successful, and usually famous friends, and exposed her to the pleasures of the
New Yorker
. Arthur served both as Myrna’s sweetheart and the father she had done without since the age of thirteen.

Della put up a tremendous fight when Myrna at last declared independence. She didn’t want Myrna to leave, nor did she give her blessing to her daughter’s growing intimacy with Arthur. Fleeing with just a suitcase, Myrna rented an apartment in Beverly Hills and then sent her friend Lou MacFarlane to fetch the rest of her things from North Crescent Drive. In a fit of pique Della soon took off for a year in Europe, financed of course by Myrna. During the next several years Myrna would change addresses numerous times, renting digs now in Beverly Hills, now in Santa Monica, now in Hollywood. All the flitting around gave her a delicious footloose sensation and lent credence to the official line that she lived alone, but, in truth, most of the time she was bunking with Arthur. In addition to paying her own rent, she continued to support her mother, aunt, and brother, David, the latter now hoping to make headway as a commercial artist but not getting very far.

Mad about Arthur, Myrna wanted nothing more than to marry him. “I believe in LOVE,” she told Gladys Hall, “the love of the poets, the love of a lifetime. When that love comes to us, genuine and four-dimensional, infidelity is impossible. Love is one body indivisible and cannot be broken into fragments.” To Myrna, love on this scale entailed the merging of two bodies and souls, plus the security and commitment that a wedding ring promised. But Arthur kept stalling, telling her that Juliette refused to give him a divorce. That was a way for him to buy time. He wanted to be with Myrna, and assured her that he loved her alone, but was in no rush to acquire another wife. Arthur’s feelings toward Myrna seem to have been more ambivalent than hers for him, from the get-go. He ran hot and cold. And although a brilliant man who cultivated the art of living well, he lacked Myrna’s greatness of heart.
²

Myrna’s joy at being coupled with Arthur was enormous but less than total. It gnawed at her that her lover was still a married man. Readers of the February 1932 issue of
Vanity Fair
were treated to an Edward Steichen portrait of the sophisticated-looking Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hornblow Jr. Brunette Juliette Crosby, smiling and attractive in a print dress, sits beside smiling Arthur, shown in profile and looking quite French in a black beret. Arthur and Juliette no longer lived together by the time the photo was published.

The first Mrs. Hornblow, Juliette Crosby, briefly resumed her stage career by appearing opposite Walter Huston in a dramatization of
Dodsworth
. Arthur brought Myrna to see the play at the Biltmore Theater, then took her backstage to meet Juliette. Myrna would later see this introduction of the new love of Arthur’s life to his discarded wife as an unfeeling, even cruel, way for Arthur to treat Juliette, but at the time she withheld any harsh judgment (
BB
, 77).

In the spring of 1932 Myrna went on loan to Paramount, the studio to which Arthur Hornblow would soon be moving after years of close association with Samuel Goldwyn. Arthur appears to have played no part in arranging this particular loan-out, however; it was the work of Myrna’s friend and admirer, the innovative director Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian, who trained at the Moscow Art Theater, made his name directing theater in New York and caused Hollywood to sit up and take notice with his inventive use of the camera in
Applause
, his first venture as a film director. Mamoulian wanted Loy to appear as the man-hungry Countess Valentine in
Love Me Tonight
, a comic operetta in the Lubitsch mode, which Mamoulian was producing and directing. Based on a French play, with a glorious Richard Rodgers score and Lorenz Hart lyrics, it was a musical fairy tale set in France. It starred two big-ticket players, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and was photographed by Victor Milner. Mamoulian conceived the film as a stylized exercise in rhythm and rhyme. From the movie’s magnificent opening, where the city of Paris awakens to a basso continuo of chimes, hammer strikes, knife grindings, and the sweeping strokes of a broom caught in a tracking shot,
Love Me Tonight
sustains a beat.

Mamoulian had escorted Myrna to the opera and theater a few times; he obviously enjoyed her company. He saw a twinkle in her eye that other directors had managed to miss and that he wanted to capture on the screen. He told her that although her Countess Valentine part was not written into the script, and Paramount saw no need to include her, he knew she had a place in
Love Me Tonight
as a witty foil to Jeanette Mac-Donald’s dreamy, nose-in-the-air princess. Every few days he would hand her lines typed on blue interoffice memo paper. Countess Valentine, an aristocratic temptress who thinks of nothing but sex, suffers from ennui. She has no function at court other than to lounge around the chateau taking naps, waking just long enough to change her Edith Head–designed gown, flirt briefly with whatever attractive man she encounters, or deliver a naughty bantering line. When asked, after the princess faints, “Can you go for a doctor?” she responds, “Certainly, bring him right in!” When Jeanette chides, “Don’t you think of anything but men, dear?” Valentine ripostes, “Oh yes, schoolboys.” Preview audiences roared at these less than earth-shatteringly clever quips. Hearing their delighted response gave Myrna her first heady whiff of her own comedic powers.