Myrna Loy (37 page)

PLATE 41. Two radio broadcasts called
Hollywood Fights Back
protested the HUAC hearings. Myrna Loy, Fredric March, and Lucille Ball were among the participants.
San Francisco News-Call Bulletin
, Oct. 27, 1947. San Francisco Public Library.

PLATE 42. Myrna Loy and Cary Grant take a break from filming the high school relay race in
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
(RKO, 1947).
San Francisco News-Call Bulletin
, March 6, 1947. San Francisco Public Library.

PLATE 43. Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, as Jim and Muriel Blandings, contemplate a model of their future home. Promotion for
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
(RKO, 1948).
San Francisco News-Call Bulletin
, April 19, 1948. San Francisco Public Library.

PLATE 44. Myrna Loy campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.
San Francisco News-Call Bulletin
, Sept. 28, 1956. San Francisco Public Library.

PLATE 45. Montgomery Clift and Myrna Loy became close friends during the filming of
Lonelyhearts
(United Artists, 1958). Private collection.

PLATE 46. Myrna Loy and Paul Newman as mother and son in
From the Terrace
(20th Century–Fox, 1960). Private collection.

PLATE 47. Myrna Loy toured with the national company of Neil Simon’s
Barefoot in the Park
for more than two years.
Left to right:
Sandor Szabo, Richard Benjamin, Myrna Loy, Joan Van Ark. Photofest.

PLATE 48. Myrna Loy’s last film, made for the Boston affiliate of ABC television in 1981, was
Summer Solstice
, costarring Henry Fonda. Private collection.

When Joseph Breen first read the Elsie Schauffler play that inspired the film
Parnell
, he fretted about the impact Parnell’s story might have on movie audiences in both the United States and Great Britain. He thought that a film about Parnell’s struggle for home rule risked alienating both those who sympathized with the Irish Catholics in their struggle against Britain and those, primarily Protestant, who supported British rule over Ireland. (Parnell was actually Anglo-Irish, and Protestant, with an American mother. Katie was English and Protestant. Willie was Irish Catholic.) Breen warned, “No matter how you soft pedal that discussion, you are certain to come in for considerable opposition from
both
Irish and English.” And of course Breen, himself a puritanical Irish American Catholic, voiced deep misgivings about a movie focusing on an illicit love affair that prompted a divorce scandal and public charges of adultery and even harlotry. In Ireland Katie was denounced as a whore and called “Kitty,” a synonym for
prostitute
. Worries about offending people in the audience doomed
Parnell
from the get-go; it was bowdlerized to death even before the S. N. Behrman-John Van Druten screenplay existed.
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Myrna stuck up for
Parnell
, defending her own and Gable’s performances, and the romance at the heart of the story, but few who have seen the treacly movie agree with her. The essential dishonesty at the core of
Parnell
did it in. Put simply, nobody believed it. And in the United States in 1937 nobody cared a lot about Charles Stewart Parnell. If people were thinking about Britain and divorce, their attention was riveted on the recent abdication of King Edward VIII and his subsequent marriage to a divorcee. Neither as a political leader nor as a man who broke taboos did Parnell stir the passion in the United States that he still did, forty plus years after his demise, in the United Kingdom, especially in Ireland. To Americans his story seemed remote and dated. The British accents of players such as Alan Marshall didn’t help.

Myrna Loy fans responding to her in
Parnell
missed the wry, sophisticated, and modern woman they knew from other films. The historical Katie was known for her high-voltage emotions. In the movie, smothered in bonnets, bows, bustles, and floor-length taffeta gowns, she’s downright prim. Frank Nugent of the
New York Times
called Loy’s Katie O’Shea “about as fiery as a Wellesley daisy chain. Hers is a portrait in pastels, mostly in pink and blue and white. She is O so brave, O so sweet, O so true, but she is not O’Shea.”
²⁸

Myrna said she read “some twenty books on Parnell and his times” and endured 150 fittings for the 15 Adrian-designed period costumes. “There were sketches drawn for hundreds of hats. I dreamed of hats. I had to practice standing, walking,” because Katie O’Shea “didn’t stand nor walk as does the girl of today.” Her Katie is both overstudied and overdressed.
²⁹

Joan Crawford, originally slated to play Katie O’Shea, turned down the role at the last minute because she decided after misfiring in
The Gorgeous Hussy
in 1936 that she was done with costume pictures. She also, understandably, didn’t like the lifeless
Parnell
script once she had a chance to read it. She and Myrna swapped pictures, Crawford taking on what had been planned as Loy’s role opposite Powell, that of a jewel thief posing as a society woman in
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
. This kind of sudden switching around happened all the time at MGM, but Gable blamed Crawford for the box-office disaster that
Parnell
became, and he didn’t talk to her for years.
³⁰

The Gable fans who rejected his Parnell wanted to see the devil-may-care actor they knew and loved. They didn’t recognize this somber, earnest, at times maudlin figure, turned out in dark Victorian frock coats and mutton-chop sideburns but no beard, who asks Katie on the day they meet, “Have you never felt there might be someone, somewhere, who, if you could meet them, was the person that you’d been always meant to meet?”

The tepid adultery depicted in
Parnell
left audiences cold. Misplacing the blame, critics charged that the actors were at fault and that the lead roles had been miscast. “Myrna Loy behaves as though she missed
The Thin Man
, and not even mutton chop whiskers and a turret-top collar can make Clark Gable look, sound or act like the uncrowned King of Ireland,” sniffed
Time
magazine’s reviewer. Where was the heavy breathing promised in ads that claimed, “Their Romance Rocked the Foundation of an Empire! The Most Powerful Romance Ever Filmed!” It’s missing in both the script and in Stahl’s weeper-style direction. The actors could only do so much with a production predicated on evasion and fear of offending. For Breen to approve the picture, scenes “showing physical contact between Parnell and Katie” had to be “reduced to an absolute minimum.”
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Beautifully photographed by Karl Freund and sumptuously mounted on seventy-four Cedric Gibbons sets that take us to London’s House of Parliament and New York docks, as well as to Ireland’s fields of famine; and with a cast that included such stalwarts as Edna May Oliver, Montagu Love, and Edmund Gwenn,
Parnell
cost more than $1.5 million to make and lost $637,000—hard numbers to swallow for Gable, the much-indulged King of Hollywood. A fan attending a
Parnell
preview in Santa Ana wrote on a postcard in response to the screening, “I prefer Loy and Gable in light comedy.” Another commented tellingly that Gable’s face was too rakish for the role. “Clark’s mug does not fit the character. Not enough idealism manifested in his features.” Given the inhibitions dominating Hollywood at the time,
Parnell
should never have been attempted in the first place.
³²