Myrna Loy (24 page)

She continued her long-term friendships with Betty Black and Lou MacFarlane, which dated from school days; both were now married. At MGM she was surrounded by a staff of female helpers to whom she was most loyal, generous, grateful, and affectionate; she paid for their hospital stays if they got sick and bought their babies layettes. Her stand-in, Shirley Hughes, went to Hawaii with her and was for a time dating Myrna’s brother, David. And she got along well with Maureen O’Sullivan, who played Dorothy Wynant in
The Thin Man
and also had appeared with Myrna in
Skyline
and
A Connecticut Yankee
. But these days Myrna wasn’t investing her deepest emotions in friendships with other women. She even made the astonishing statement, in a newspaper interview, that only men had helped advance her career. She was clearly thinking of directors who gave her breaks, like Van Dyke, Ned Griffith, and Mamoulian, or even of her fellow actor Lowell Sherman, who allowed her to sneak into that first Warner Bros. frame on the set of
Satan in Sables
. Women in the movie industry, she implied, were rivals competing for the best roles rather than helpmates. She made an exception for Natacha Rambova, who provided her first movie part. But that was it, by her reckoning. “If women had banded together to help each other, the story of Hollywood might have been different,” she concluded sadly. But what about her early palship with Joan Crawford when they were thrown together as nearly anonymous chorines in
Pretty Ladies?
What about Minna Wallis, who got Myrna that all-important first contract at Warners?
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Loy and Powell hit their stride playing smart New Yorkers, but in 1934 Myrna Loy had yet to set foot in Manhattan. Powell as a young man had lived there for several years as a drama student and stage actor, but he spent his teens in the Midwest and had to be tutored in elocution at drama school in order to shed his Kansas City pronunciation.

Thirteen years older than Loy, Powell began his life in the 1890s and never lost his hybrid air of an aesthete who grew up on alternating doses of Shakespeare and Mack Sennett. Self-mocking, courtly, and a touch fey, he was at the same time an inspired physical comedian in the slapstick tradition. An adroit tennis player, he learned fencing in high school and could negotiate a mean pratfall. During comic high jinks in which Loy sometimes played the straight man, he often ended up on his rear. Those tumbles he took in movies never dented his reputation as a worldly gentleman. He conveyed upper-class, British-inflected gentility, even if Powell’s background was solidly middle class and American. His careful attention to the niceties of grooming; his perfectly tailored suits, spotless cuffs, and collars; his orotund voice curled around well-turned phrases; the deferential way he bowed his head slightly when being introduced—all would have helped him gain entry at any elite, leather-chair-and-brandy-snifter men’s club.

Born in Pittsburgh, he moved with his family to Kansas City and attended high school there, playing Malvolio in the drama club’s
Twelfth Night
. Powell’s accountant father and musical Irish American mother wanted their only child to attend law school, but acting Shakespeare and the experience of working as an usher at the Kansas City opera house had infected him with theatrical fever. His parents, however, refused to back his ambition to become an actor. A great aunt came to his rescue after he dropped out of college, agreeing to provide a loan to help finance his attendance at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. After that, Powell launched his stage career in touring stock companies and on Broadway, where, now a married man with a young son, he came to the attention of the film director Albert Parker.
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When he began appearing in movies in 1922, Powell was considered not handsome enough to qualify as a romantic leading man. Instead, he played heavies: a henchman of Professor Moriarty in
Sherlock Holmes
or the evil Tito in
Romola
, a 1924 Lillian Gish film for which nineteen-year-old Myrna Williams, just before she entered movies and changed her last name, danced in a prologue at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. Powell’s flexible and cultivated baritone became his calling card in talkies and helped him move out of bad-guy roles and start playing heroes. He came to be associated with sophistication.
Suave
was an adjective so often applied to him that he got tired of hearing it. Several years before he scored as Nick Charles he had become renowned for portraying another debonair detective, Philo Vance, first at Paramount and then Warner Bros.

Two Selznicks, sons of the movie man Lewis Selznick and both movers and shakers in 1930s Hollywood, helped Powell become a star: the agent Myron and his younger producer brother, David O. The brothers’ pooled intelligence, drive, and savvy expedited Powell’s climb to the top rung, a stratospheric ascent Myrna Loy had yet to achieve. Even after costarring with Clark Gable and being cast as Nora Charles, Myrna was still officially listed as a featured MGM actress rather than a star and was being paid accordingly.

Myron Selznick, a driven, two-fisted, usually inebriated character who after a spell as a producer became Hollywood’s first “power agent,” negotiated the $6,000 salary for Powell at Warner Bros. When slumping ticket sales forced Warners to cut that figure down to a mere $4,000 a week, Powell said no dice. Warners freed him from his contract, and Myron wheeled and dealed on Powell’s behalf, signing him to work for David O. Selznick’s unit at MGM.
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David Selznick brought Powell to MGM at a time when the studio badly needed to enlarge its pool of leading men. Loew’s executives had to be persuaded about the wisdom of hiring him, since the brass in New York, in particular the head honcho, Nick Schenck, considered him a has-been. But both Selznick brothers believed in Powell’s potential value to the Culver City giant, and they prevailed. Powell’s deal with MGM came through in time for the opening days of shooting
Manhattan Melodrama
in March of that all-important year, 1934.

Powell had to take a further cut in pay, to a mere $3,000 a week, when he moved to MGM, but what he temporarily lost in salary, he would gain in prestige, since MGM, with its stable of top stars, its twenty-two soundstages, and its reputation for gleaming, gorgeously mounted productions, ranked highest among all the studios. Powell quickly redeemed himself, winning a ten-film, $500,000 contract. He would remain a star at MGM for the next twenty-five years, retiring from that studio at the top of his game in 1953, with a fat pension.

Less lucky in career matters, undervalued, and not as much of a fighter for contract perks as Powell, though she was every bit as winningly expressive, just as hard working, and more beautiful to boot, Myrna Loy would leave MGM and begin freelancing in 1945. Only
after
playing Nora Charles did she part company with Minna Wallis, the beloved but less powerful agent who got her started in pictures, and move up to become the client of Myron Selznick, the actors’ representative whom the big boys recognized as one of their own. Arthur had introduced Myrna to Myron Selznick, and Minna, gracefully bowing out, had agreed that Selznick would best serve her. Loy’s salary, for which Minna Wallis had fought hard, was $1,500 a week, half of Powell’s $3,000. A year after
The Thin Man
, her annual salary was still only $34,208 (about $530,000 in 2009), compared to Powell’s $66,666. Mae West at Paramount took in a whopping $480,833, making her not only the highest paid star in Hollywood but the highest paid woman in America. When it came to salaries, Myrna Loy in 1934 wasn’t even a contender.
²⁵

The producer Hunt Stromberg joined Van Dyke in Myrna’s corner. Producers held the power cards at MGM in the 1930s, and Stromberg, a Kentucky-born former sports writer and publicist, headed the unit that produced most of Myrna Loy’s MGM pictures, including
Penthouse
, four
Thin Man
pictures,
The Prizefighter and the Lady
, and
Wife vs. Secretary
. Tall and tousled, with thick hair, “restless blue eyes,” and glasses with round, black-rimmed lenses, Stromberg didn’t waste time fussing with his appearance. “One could tell his luncheon menu by looking at his tie,” Sam Marx cracked. But fussing over casting choices—that he did. He also enjoyed an excellent rapport with his writers, a group that at various times included the Hacketts, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, and Dorothy Parker. The Hacketts reported that “with Stromberg, you had a real participation in casting,” and you also enjoyed a respect rarely accorded screenwriters in Hollywood. Stromberg honored the words writers had put on the pages and would go to the mat to resist the attempts of others to revise them.
²⁶

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, like Nick and Nora, had a low tolerance for boredom. After writing three
Thin Man
scripts, they felt they’d milked the characters to the max and wanted out. “We were getting morning sickness then, and crying in the typewriter, so we just left and went back to New York.” In order to keep from being tempted to create yet more sequels, they even proposed killing off Nick and Nora at the end of the first sequel,
After the Thin Man
, but Hunt Stromberg wouldn’t hear of that. The producer knew a cash cow when he saw one.
²⁷

Powell and Loy had created icons. On Nick and Nora’s enduring appeal their own futures—their salaries, opportunities, and fame—would partly rely. But they, too, felt that without the Hacketts and Van Dyke, the series headed downhill. Once Nick and Nora became parents, Nick started calling her “Mommy,” and she ceased to be the carefree Nora of
The Thin Man
. The fifth in the series,
The Thin Man Goes Home
, endowed Nick with conventional and proper small-town American parents whose disapproval of his drinking temporarily converts him into an imbiber of apple cider. By 1947, when the last of their Thin Man films,
Song of the Thin Man
, was shot, they knew that the series had lost its fizz. The original spontaneity had long since evaporated. Tired jokes about martinis and an obnoxiously cute Asta in the last of the series made a flat substitute for the original effervescence, although the film does have some passable 1940s jazz and a steamy performance by Gloria Grahame. MGM was slow to realize, but finally did, that the war had changed everything, including tastes and modes in comedy.

Woody Van Dyke, whose directorial chops had made all the difference on the first runaway hit, and who helmed the next three, died in 1943, at the age of fifty-three. “Van Dyke certainly didn’t take care of himself,” writes Rudy Behlmer, who edited Van Dyke’s journal. “He was a chain smoker, a consumer of endless cups of coffee during the day and of many glasses of gin during the evenings.” Commissioned as a captain and later a major in the marines, Van Dyke was crushed when told in the early 1940s that he no longer qualified for active duty. Myrna felt that MGM worked Van Dyke to death (
BB
, 115). He’d directed thirty-two films between 1930 and 1940, and his whirlwind shooting style had become obsessive.
²⁸

Hunt Stromberg, the distinguished, high-salaried, workaholic producer of the first four
Thin Man
films, and of more than a hundred additional MGM films, had begun taking morphine because of chronic back pain, but the drug was prescribed by an unscrupulous doctor. Stromberg became addicted, quarreled with Mayer about his contract, and left MGM in February of 1942. “We couldn’t work with him when he was on drugs,” the Hacketts privately revealed. He continued producing independently, with United Artists distribution, for another decade, raking in the bucks. He lived until 1968.
²⁹

Dashiell Hammett, who started it all, burned out early. His drinking, gambling, and carousing took their toll. He had trouble writing fiction—
The Thin Man
was his fifth and final published novel—and by May of 1938, when he was trying to complete the outline of the story for
Another Thin Man
, suffered a breakdown in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He had lost a great deal of weight and grown ill and weak. Frances Goodrich, by then a close friend, helped him pay his hotel bill and, with her husband, put him on a plane to New York. Lillian Hellman met it with an ambulance, which took him to Lenox Hill hospital.
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The Hacketts had been stalled in their efforts to complete the screenplay for
Another Thin Man
because Hammett was in no condition to provide the plot situations and motives they needed to move forward on their screenplay. They ultimately had to finish without him. Although Hammett had made a lot of money in Hollywood, he’d gone through most of it and was in debt. At the end of 1938 MGM suspended Hammett’s contract.
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A few years earlier, Myrna had spent an evening with Hammett and others after he, she, and Powell all took part in a broadcast of excerpts from
The Thin Man
on a radio program hosted by Louella Parsons. After the show, Powell, Jean Harlow, Hammett, and Myrna gathered at Arthur’s place, where Hammett quickly got drunk and, while speaking constantly of Lillian Hellman, made a pass at Myrna, “lunging and pawing” at her until Arthur informed him that he was looking ill and might want to go home (
BB
, 123).

MGM subsequently rejected Hammett’s proposal for a
Thin Man
sequel based on the character Herbert Macaulay, the murderer in the novel. Hammett was proposing that in this sequel Macaulay would get out of prison and return to San Francisco—in drag—in pursuit of Mimi and her strange son Gilbert. MGM wouldn’t touch it.
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