Authors: Emily W. Leider
While superficially conforming to the Code,
Wife vs. Secretary
at the same time teases its audience with suggestive situations. Gable at one point climbs into a phone booth with Harlow, and at another goes off with her for a few days of after hours professional collaboration in Havana, while wifey Loy frets at home by the phone. One might argue that all the teasing is dirtier than actual sex would be, but Breen allowed the teasing, while nixing the real thing.
Although she’s clearly in anguish, Linda remains a sympathetic character. The
Hollywood Reporter
opined, “Myrna Loy performs the wife as only Myrna Loy can. The wife is obviously wrong in her suspicions, [but] is a grand person and made appealingly human by Miss Loy. Her graciousness, breeding and excellent sense of values are stressed to make impossible a hint of the shrew.” Over and over again her equanimity and willingness to shrug off a husband’s failings were the qualities that won praise for the wives Loy portrayed. She was Mrs. Congeniality, rarely complaining, attempting to reform her mate, or resorting to outbursts of anger or blame.
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The private Loy began to insist on drawing a distinction between her true self and the perfect wives everyone associated with her name. When Gladys Hall asked if she’d really like to join her husband in a drunken round of barhopping, the answer came back a resounding “No.” Hall pressed, “You wouldn’t be the Good Sport, the Gamest Girl in the world and stay with him?” Myrna instantly shot back, “I would NOT!”
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At least one moviegoing wife griped to a reporter that Loy’s Perfect Wife set a standard impossible to match. This fan surmised that a husband would compare his for-real wife with Nora Charles on the screen and find his spouse wanting. “Naturally, no husband who sits and watches Miss Loy being so sweet—no matter whether he comes home drunk or makes eyes at the blonde down the street—is going to be satisfied with his own wife,” this woman complained.
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During the 1930s, Loy-as-wife twice found herself struggling through hard times onscreen, first in
To Mary—with Love
and later in
Lucky Night
(1939), when the characters she played were married to men down on their luck. Both times, short on cash, her character has to scrimp, do her own housework, and take a low-paying job to help make ends meet. Although struggling economically in a way that Depression-era audiences recognized, Mary clearly was not from the working class, nor was the actress portraying her. Loy was no Barbara Stanwyck or Mae West. Her diction was so elegant that for a scene in
Third Finger, Left Hand
where she briefly turned herself into a hip-swinging Brooklyn tart who pronounced
worms
as “woims,” she had to work with a dialect coach. In both
To Mary—with Love
and
Lucky Night
Loy’s character starts life as a lady, suffers hardship, and ends with at least the promise of better days to come. Usually, though, she played not just a lady but a lady of wealth and privilege.
In
Wife vs. Secretary
she and husband Clark Gable share a posh house decorated by Cedric Gibbons in what he called “Neo Greek” style; the place comes equipped with a grand curved staircase, pseudo-Greek decorative art, and a British manservant in livery. The missus has her pick of furs to wear in town, but in the boudoir it’s all about floaty chiffon negligees trimmed in lace. Loy is wearing one of these confections when lovey-dovey husband Gable slips a diamond bracelet into her breakfast trout on her birthday as a surprise gift. No forgetting the wife’s birthday in this cozy picture-book ménage.
Wife vs. Secretary
, directed by the gifted but sometimes syrupy Clarence Brown, extols marriage, placating censors. Not so the irreverent
Libeled Lady
, where wedlock comes off as a jerry-built, totally arbitrary arrangement. Since the Code adopted the Roman Catholic view that the union of man and wife is a sacred, eternal bond, and since it decreed that Hollywood movies must always handle matrimony with respect, it’s a wonder that this comic gem ever managed to get produced and distributed, let alone gross $2.7 million to become one of the year’s biggest hits.
When he saw the first-draft script, Breen stormed: “Present treatment of material is, in our opinion,
in violation of the Production Code
. Unless changes are made, as suggested below, it will be our duty to reject a picture made from this script.” The head censor lambasted the screenplay’s “general tendency to treat the institution of marriage casually and with ridicule.”
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Breen won some major compromises and deletions. Specific lines of dialogue implying that Jean Harlow’s character, Gladys, had long been her boyfriend’s mistress were removed, and bits of business (Gladys stuffing a key into her bra) squelched. William Powell would not be permitted to spank Myrna Loy. Even after MGM made what it considered the necessary revisions, two months after he first listed his objections, Breen was still howling that parts of the script “reflect unfavorably upon marriage and the sanctity of the home.” But a few weeks later, after Metro made more relatively minor changes, the picture was cleared for release. Its impertinent take on wedded bliss remained intact.
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Lawrence Weingarten, the film’s producer, also doubted that his film would ever find its way into theaters. “When I sent the script to Myrna Loy, she disappeared, went to Europe,” he recalled. He claimed that Harlow, presumably because she now wanted to shake her bad-girl image and to play nicer girls, didn’t want the role, a statement disputed by Harlow’s biographer, David Stenn, who says she did want to join the four-star cast. Weingarten claimed that “Spencer Tracy had never played comedy before and he wanted to [instead] do
The Plough and the Stars
,” a John Ford movie based on a Sean O’Casey play that would have required MGM to allow Tracy to be loaned to RKO; Thalberg had agreed to the loan-out, but after Thalberg’s September 1936 death, L. B. Mayer vetoed it, probably because Tracy had suddenly become a hot property. Weingarten claimed further that “Bill Powell played [in
Libeled Lady
] because it was his last picture on the contract [he had] and he wanted to get a new contract.” As Weingarten remembered it, when he agreed to produce
Libeled Lady
, he was up against reluctance from three out of four stars.
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Somehow
Libeled Lady
got made, and the four lead players harmonized like a crackerjack barbershop quartet. Though Powell received more critical plaudits than the others, and Harlow won top billing, the movie showcases egalitarian ensemble acting at its best. The critic for
Time
magazine raved: “the balancing is done with as much precision as if the roles had been weighed in an apothecary’s scales.” Jack Conway, an underappreciated “action director” who had once been an actor and assistant director under D. W. Griffith, injected his sense of rapid-fire antic fun into the whole enterprise. All four lead players felt affection for the film and for each other. Harlow relished another chance to work with Powell for the first time since
Reckless
, a 1935 musical that had cynically exploited both Paul Bern’s violent death and her romance with Powell.
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Harlow was going through another rough patch in her tumultuous personal life. Forlorn after an imposed hospital abortion, when she had the chance, she would drink too much. She had also managed to get so badly sunburned that she became ill; shooting
Libeled Lady
had to be suspended for a few days. Powell, for his part, was flourishing, despite some recent eye trouble. His career kept flying high, and he felt totally at ease working with both Harlow and Loy.
Spencer Tracy, notorious for disappearing during shoots to go on benders, behaved himself while making
Libeled Lady
. His recent work playing a priest in the Jeanette MacDonald megamusical
San Francisco
(directed by Woody Van Dyke) contributed to a hit that was breaking box-office records and making L. B. Mayer glad that he’d managed to lure Tracy to MGM.
Libeled Lady’s
opening tracking shot, showing Harlow, Powell, Loy, and Tracy arm in arm, striding toward the camera and beaming as the credits roll, tells us that at least for the duration of the movie, happy days are here.
The completely improbable plot of
Libeled Lady
turns on a revenge theme. A newspaper, the
New York Evening Star
, has printed a bogus story about an American heiress trying to steal a British lady’s husband. The snooty, though in this case blameless, heiress is Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy), and neither she nor her short-tempered moneybags father (Walter Connolly) likes this scandal-mongering one bit. Before the
Evening Star
editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) can stop the presses, pull the first edition from the trucks setting out to distribute it, or apologize to the furious Allenburys, they’ve read the incendiary news story. The libeled Miss Allenbury sues the
Evening Star
to the tune of $5 million. Haggerty goes apoplectic. He does lots of screaming in this movie. If Connie Allenbury wins her suit, the paper goes under. So Haggerty concocts a scheme. He will engage former
Star
ace reporter Bill Chandler (William Powell) to return to the
Star
. Chandler will marry some woman, any woman willing to say yes, and then entice Connie Allenbury into a tryst. Connie will be discovered fooling around with a married man, and, fearing bad publicity, she’ll be forced to drop the suit.
Haggerty, it turns out, has his own problems. On the day the newspaper printed the bogus story, he’d agreed to finally marry his longtime sweetheart, Gladys. Haggerty cancels the wedding, as he’s evidently done several times before. Gladys, in her white satin wedding gown and carrying a bouquet of orange blossoms as Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” erupts in the background, storms into Haggerty’s pressroom, on a tear. “I won’t stand for it!” she screams. “You can’t do this to me!” Then comes the plaintive line, which she’ll repeat later: “If you don’t want to marry me, just say so.” For the private Jean Harlow, the words must have carried a sting, since Powell didn’t want to make her his offscreen wife.
Breen was entirely correct in his belief that
Libeled Lady
kids marriage. Gladys, stuck on Warren Haggerty even though he’s mean to her, goes through with a farcical wedding to Powell’s character, the conniving Bill Chandler. Once again Haggerty and his all-consuming newspaper job are jerking her around. But Gladys, though shrill, is a sucker for Haggerty and obliges him one more time by getting hitched to a guy she refers to as “that baboon.” Harlow, a terrific comedienne, hits the note just right: love tinged by hurt and outrage. Apparently Gladys isn’t legally divorced from her first husband, so the marriage to baboon Chandler won’t be binding; it’s just a put-up job that will help Haggerty out of a tight spot. But in this zany world all connections between lovers or spouses are tied with a slipknot. Every one of the four leading characters has to have a mate, but it doesn’t seem to matter who that mate is. This is a square dance in which you swing your partner and your corner lady too. “She may be his wife,” says sputtering Haggerty in one outburst, “but she’s engaged to me.”
Gladys begins to fall for her make-believe husband, Bill Chandler, while Haggerty sustains his not-so-slow burn, and Chandler gradually succumbs to the charms of the woman he was hired to entrap, haughty Connie Allenbury. As Myrna Loy plays her, Connie changes during the movie. She starts out as an icy snob, so full of herself she can’t be bothered to correctly pronounce Chandler’s name after he’s behaved chivalrously toward her on an ocean liner, but she gradually defrosts as she gets to know him. At her father’s suburban New York estate she’s even willing to turn temporarily into a homey type and fry up some pancakes for him. She ends up proposing to Chandler, and they immediately rush off to recite their vows, even though Chandler might still be married to pretend-bride Gladys.
If you think about it, which this fast-paced movie doesn’t give you one second to do, you wonder why anyone in
Libeled Lady
would
want
to marry. Marriage doesn’t come off as a particularly attractive bargain. “You mustn’t fight,” Haggerty advises Chandler and Gladys once they’ve gotten temporarily hitched. “Why not?” Bill shoots back. “We’re married.” Like Nora Charles, Connie Allenbury is wealthy, well spoken, urbane, and capable of great charm, but we’re far from the happy-couple territory of
The Thin Man
.
Libeled Lady
credits three screenwriters. “In those days we felt that multiple writers are better than one,” recalled Weingarten. “Maurine Watkins was the playwright, George Oppenheimer [handled the] comedy, and Howard Emmett Rogers was our plot man.” Before she arrived in Hollywood, Watkins, a former
Chicago Tribune
reporter, wrote the 1926 play
Chicago
, a lurid tale of murder laced with gin, jail, and jazz, which after its Broadway run would inspire three widely spaced, highly successful Hollywood movies. Instead of death row,
Libeled Lady
focuses on the smart-alecky world of the newsroom, a favorite of comedy writers since Hecht and MacArthur scored their stage, then screen, triumph with
The Front Page. Libeled Lady
involves conniving, fast-talking reporters and spoiled socialites. It doesn’t troll at the bottom of the social cesspool the way
Chicago
does, but it’s still an urban tale—tough, snide, and cynical. The scheming Bill Chandler bluffs his way to a big paycheck from the
Evening Star
by pretending he’s become a sought-after novelist who just got handed a big advance. The truth is, he’s about to be kicked out of his hotel because he’s overlooked the little matter of paying his bill. Even his riotous trout-fishing escapade, filmed on location in the Sierra Nevada foothills, is part of an intended scam. He’s trying to palm himself off to Connie and her father as a gentleman of means who’s an avid sportsman instead of the raffish, unscrupulous reporter/con man he really is.
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