Authors: Emily W. Leider
In a later interview she acknowledged how much her experiences visiting wounded or disabled sailors, marines, and soldiers had moved her and helped prepare her for her postwar role in
The Best Years of Our Lives
. “Those incredible youngsters,” she said, referring to the convalescents she visited. “It’s when they joke about their crippling injuries that you want to cry. But you mustn’t pity them. Nor must you pretend to ignore their injuries. You are supposed to be natural with them—and sometimes I don’t quite know how.” Myrna at times privately succumbed to tears. “The blind soldiers would run their hands over my face and say, ‘Yes, that’s Myrna Loy.’ I’d go into the ladies room and cry.”
15
On her hospital visits she sometimes signed a soldier’s plaster cast or bestowed a kiss on request. A 1945 Hearst newsreel showed her in a hospital ward autographing a soldier’s leg cast as Gene Kelly, outfitted as the real-life sailor he was, dances in front of men in wheelchairs.
16
During the war years Myrna fielded numerous marriage proposals. “I received more than fifty thousand letters from lonely soldiers overseas asking me to marry them. Each one declared he knew I’d make him a perfect wife. It nearly drove me crazy.”
17
Frank Sinatra, with a draft classification of 4-F, agreed to make some hospital visits. He was welcomed, along with Bob Hope and Jack Benny, with wild enthusiasm, but the star who scored highest with the male patients was Betty Grable, the singing, dancing blonde with the upswept hair, the dazzling smile, and the legs that had been insured for $1 million. Myrna went with her to visit Halloran Hospital, on Staten Island, and the wounded men went bananas. Grable, the top box-office attraction of 1943 and
the
pinup girl of the World War II era, gamely handed out autographs and planted her lipstick imprint on plaster casts as she made her way among the injured, some in wheelchairs, bandaged, on crutches, or with only a single arm (
BB
, 183).
The gratification Myrna found in her Red Cross work helped her cope with an increasingly miserable, indeed terrifying, domestic life with John Hertz. Erratic, often drunk and prone to violence—he once hurled a Rodin sculpture at Myrna and tried to shoot his nurse through a door—he drove Myrna to consult a psychiatrist. Once again, John’s sister, Helen, played a key role; she introduced Myrna to her own therapist, Ruth Mack Brunswick. Dr. Brunswick, an American-born analyst with an office on Washington Square, had gone to Vienna after completing medical school to study with and be analyzed by Freud. She remained in Vienna for many years—until the Anschluss of 1938—and became one of Freud’s close associates. She taught at the Psychoanalytic Institutes in Vienna and, after her flight from Vienna, in New York. Dr. Brunswick was well known for her writings about the Wolf Man and later as the analyst of Karl Menninger. After she died at age forty-seven in 1946, it became known that she had become addicted to pain killers. Myrna probably never learned this.
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Dr. Brunswick had the good sense to advise against psychoanalysis for John, who obviously needed intervention, on the grounds that his mental illness was of a type and severity that made him unlikely to benefit from such talk-based treatment. From what she’d heard from both Helen and Myrna, the doctor judged him to be insane (
BB
, 184). Leonora Hornblow, who in her youth knew John socially, reported that he ended his days in a mental institution.
Myrna valued her psychiatrist and believed that her ten-month analysis (surely a record for brevity), during which she trekked twice a week to Dr. Brunswick’s office on Washington Square, helped her to understand herself and restored a sense of wholeness. Dr. Brunswick told her within a year that, in effect, she was cured; she need not prolong the therapy (
BB
, 191). The details of Myrna’s analysis remain unknown, but apparently Myrna’s anger became the focus of the psychiatric sessions. Dr. Brunswick unlocked vaults of what had been mostly repressed rage directed against several important men in her life: her father, for burdening her with more family responsibility than a child should be asked to shoulder; L. B. Mayer, for boxing her in and undervaluing her as an actress; and Arthur, for being hypercritical and failing to love her enough. Myrna believed that she worked through a portion of this rage, but her anger at John also bubbled over, and during the course of the analysis she left him.
After she determined to end her second marriage, Myrna simply packed her luggage and exited the household that she and her husband had shared, taking nothing with her but her elegant clothes and jewelry. Feeling lucky simply to be escaping alive, considering John’s vengeful nature, access to weapons, and total lack of self-control, she hurriedly moved into an apartment in the Waldorf Towers in March of 1944, a few months shy of what would have been her second wedding anniversary.
19
When she knew she would soon be single again, Myrna eagerly agreed to return to California and report for duty as Nora Charles in
The Thin Man Goes Home
. Her salary for the $1.4 million picture would be $100,000. Her joint agents, Myron Selznick in Hollywood and Leland Hayward in New York, would share ten percent of her earnings.
20
After announcing her impending second divorce, Myrna agreed to an interview with Louella Parsons, who reported, “Myrna Loy has never seemed so carefree. Living in New York has given her a chic she didn’t have when she spent all her time in Hollywood.” Asked why her marriage to Hertz had failed, Myrna diplomatically explained, “There is no happiness possible when two people have divergent interests. You do not think alike and you cannot find real congeniality or mutual enjoyment.” Myrna faulted herself for marrying Hertz before she had a chance to get to know him. Parsons advised, “Next time be sure. Don’t marry in a hurry.” “There will be no next time,” Myrna assured her. “Twice is enough.”
21
Myrna’s return to California happened to coincide with the death of Myron Selznick, her high-powered agent, whose wealth and star-studded list of clients couldn’t prevent him from drinking himself to death at age forty-five. At his funeral William Powell read a eulogy written by Gene Fowler. Just about every luminary in Hollywood came to pay last respects: Hal Wallis, L. B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Eddie Mannix, Hunt Stromberg, Walter Wanger, Ingrid Bergman, Loretta Young—they were all there, though Selznick’s ex-wife Marjorie Daw and their fourteen-year-old daughter, who lived on the East Coast, were not. The writer of his
Los Angeles Times
obituary didn’t try to mask the combination of awe and ire Myron Selznick had aroused. “He was constantly at loggerheads with producers and was credited with raising to their present level the high salaries of screen artists.” L. B. Mayer had banished him from meeting his clients on the MGM lot.
22
For about a year after the death of Myron Selznick, Leland Hayward alone represented Myrna Loy as her MGM contract termed out. MCA would absorb Hayward’s clients in 1945, and Lew Wasserman became Myrna Loy’s agent from then until the early 1960s, to be replaced by the independent agent Robert Lantz.
When she returned to MGM to make
The Thin Man Goes Home
after an absence from the screen of nearly three years, the studio made Myrna feel cherished. Bill Powell, accompanied by the latest incarnation of Asta, had greeted her train in Pasadena, and the press covered the homecoming. On the first day of shooting
The Thin Man Goes Home
, everyone on the set, from the prop man to the makeup crew, wanted to give her a hug, and some members of the crew carried signs reading, “Don’t Leave Us Again, Myrna” (
BB
, 185). A genuine red carpet strewn with crepe-paper roses had been laid out to welcome her, and she found that MGM had readied a new dressing room, decorated in “her favorite shades of periwinkle blue, violet and rose, with fresh flowers to match.”
23
But Myrna couldn’t deny her awareness that things had changed. This was a different MGM, where Joan Crawford no longer worked, having bought out her contract to sign with Warner Bros. Elizabeth Taylor, twelve years old, was filming
National Velvet
. Seven-year-old Margaret O’Brien was also a rising star, and Norma Shearer had retired. Van Johnson, typed as a boy next door, was the leading man of the moment. MGM was making fewer pictures than in the past but spending more money on those it did make. Woody Van Dyke had died, and Richard Thorpe, who possessed Van Dyke’s knack for speed without sharing any special rapport with Myrna, was replacing him at the helm. Myrna had worked with Thorpe on the sets of
Double Wedding
and
Man-Proof
, and he’d demonstrated his professionalism. But she keenly felt Van Dyke’s absence. Hunt Stromberg, producer of all previous
Thin Man
pictures, and one of the mainstays of Loy’s career, had also left MGM, released from his contract after eighteen years there. F. Scott Fitzgerald once referred to Stromberg as “a sort of one-finger Thalberg, without Thalberg’s scope, but with his intense power of work and his absorption in his job.”
24
This time Everett Riskin served as producer, in collaboration with his writer brother, Robert, coauthor with Dwight Taylor of the screenplay for
The Thin Man Goes Home
. Between them, the Riskin brothers had assembled a formidable list of comedy credits: Everett produced
The Awful Truth
and the 1938
Holiday
, while Robert had written scripts for several Frank Capra pictures. But neither Riskin was at the top of his game for this production. Robert was employed as chief of the Overseas Motion Picture Bureau of the Office of War Information, producing documentaries, when he took time out to work on
The Thin Man Goes Home
screenplay. He considered this Culver City job, taken on to please his brother, a distraction from weightier pursuits. He wrote to his wife, Fay Wray, that he found his
Thin Man
assignment “dreadfully dull,” and his lack of enthusiasm is evident in the script.
25
Everett Riskin decreed that because of wartime liquor rationing, Nick and Nora’s constant tippling, one of the givens of the
Thin Man
franchise, would be banished in
The Thin Man Goes Home
. Drinking on the screen, he feared, would have a negative effect on a “thirsty audience.” So, in the opening scenes on the crowded train, where Nick and Nora are passengers traveling with Asta (but without Nick Jr.) to visit Nick’s parents in small-town Sycamore Springs, we find Nick sipping from a flask of apple cider. Nora explains that Nick has gone on the wagon to please his disapproving father (Harry Davenport), a conservative and respected physician, who dismisses his son as a no-account. By the last frame in the picture, Nick has won the admiration of his father, who pops a button with pride, but he has also, by giving up booze and trying so hard to please his parents, gelded the character Dashiell Hammett created. “In real life,” writes the film historian Ed Sikov, “the transformation of a drunken malcontent to a self-possessed man of the world is cause for celebration; in a series of dark detective comedies, it’s deadening.”
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Nora, too, has been altered almost beyond recognition. The script turns her into an airhead who can jitterbug but who natters on to her father-in-law about his son Nick’s accomplishments and can’t figure out how to assemble a deck chair. After she jabbers to a reporter about Nick’s detective work when she should have remained mum, Nick turns her on his knee and delivers a spanking (an act Powell was prohibited from performing in
Libeled Lady
), as his dad approvingly clucks, “You know, I’ve always wanted to do that to your mother.” She’s been demoted from competitive partner to pesky brat in need of punishment.
Situating Nick and Nora in a small town filled with eccentric characters like Anne Revere’s Crazy Mary and Gloria DeHaven’s self-dramatizing Laura provided novelty, but that novelty came at a dear price. Every one of the three writers for
The Thin Man Goes Home
—Riskin, Dwight Taylor, and Harry Kurnitz, who cowrote the story—was a native New Yorker who might have provided sassier and more authentic dialogue in an urban setting. As
Variety
put it, the “production as a whole lacks much of the sophistication and smartness which characterized the early Thin Man films.” Even Myrna’s outfits, designed by Irene, tip towards the dowdy.
27
Myrna sensed that by now the cynicism that powered the earlier
Thin Man
movies no longer fit the national mood, that during the war marriage and murder didn’t seem like laughing matters, and that “the noble, self-sacrificing Minivers and Curies” had replaced the flippant Charleses, who epitomized the spirit of the 1930s (
BB
, 192). Still, she found that
The Thin Man Goes Home
came through with some hilarious scenes. She recalled one particular line with fondness, the one, possibly ad-libbed, where she tells Nick not to move out of his hammock: “You might get all sweaty and die.” The throngs of moviegoers who bought enough tickets to make it a minor hit concurred. The film made just over $500,000 in profits.
Myrna returned to New York to resume her Red Cross work as the Allies invaded Normandy. In early August 1944, just as she turned thirty-nine, she flew to Mexico to divorce Hertz in Cuernavaca on grounds of “Incompatibility of Character.” Footloose for a spell, she zoomed from one perch to the next, settling for a few months in Bel Air in a rented house that MGM found for her, facing a golf course. Feeling spunky, she hosted many weekend parties at which Bing Crosby might drop by after a round of golf and sing a tune, accompanied by Hoagy Carmichael at the piano.
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