Authors: Emily W. Leider
In Helena the solitude she had known on the ranch gave way to a community-centered life filled with other children. Afternoons she made fudge with her girlfriends, went on excursions to the turreted brick library, and devoured books she had borrowed:
Little Women, Lorna Doone
, Tennyson poems. Well-liked and easy to get along with, Myrna nonetheless sensed that something set her apart. “I was not your typical Helena girl. For one thing, my parents were more liberal than most people from Montana.” When a black family moved in across the street, bigoted neighbors ostracized them, but Della welcomed them, encouraging the children to play together (
BB
, 18).
6
Myrna began to think about what she might want to be when she grew up. She knew she wanted to do something distinctive. Influenced by Presbyterian aunts and uncles, and by the convent art teacher, she went through a martyr period at around age eleven, when she hoped to become “a nun or nurse and spend my life doing good works.” She soon became guilt-ridden for harboring aspirations she considered less noble: she now wanted to be a performer, perhaps a dancer or actress. From the time she could walk, she had the habit of sometimes standing on tippy-toes.
7
As a budding actress she, along with her neighborhood friends, put on plays behind a makeshift curtain in the Williams cellar, near the neatly stored shelves of preserves in jars and as far as possible from the dank corner with the coal chute. For their production of “The Sleeping Beauty” Myrna was cast as the witch, doubling as the prince, and for the latter role wore a plumed hat and bloomers over black stockings. She stuffed the toes of a pair of oversized slippers with paper to make the toes curl up the way they did in picture-book illustrations of princes. She missed out on starring as the Sleeping Beauty because she didn’t look like a storybook princess, lacking the long, golden curls that crowned the head of her angelic looking next-door friend, Amy. “She was a lace paper valentine, I was the comic variety. The boys made a great fuss over her.
I
carried my own books.” Myrna saw herself as “a very plain little girl” with “carroty hair, freckles . . . and unpleasantly skinny. I was a tomboy, too. Grubby hands and knees, torn dresses.” Not realizing that teasing can signal affection, she smarted when boys would yell, “Redhead, gingerbread, five cents a loaf.” She’d run and cry, skinning her knees on the stairs. She claimed she never felt adored. “Never once did anyone ever hug me or pat my head and say, ‘What a lovely, luscious little girl.’ ”
8
Myrna and her mother played out a tug of war in which Myrna constantly turned up bruised, scraped, and torn, with smudges on her face, and the meticulous Della cleaned her up, vigorously applying washcloth, soap, and scrub brush. She braided Myrna’s unruly red hair into two tight pigtails. Eventually, Della won this battle. Myrna learned to groom herself immaculately.
Myrna was cast more than once as a male character in her childhood amateur theatricals. When she and her friends dressed up as dolls for a living doll show, Myrna, as the Papa doll, donned a top hat and a man’s suit jacket. She submitted to this casting decision but ardently wished that she looked more like a princess and got treated more like one. “I suffered agonies in silence,” she recalled years later. “I always have been inarticulate when it comes to personal pain. I wanted, passionately, to be beautiful.”
9
Della became seriously ill with pneumonia after young David’s birth and required home visits by nurses who supplied tanks of oxygen. With his wife still in fragile health some months postpartum, David senior encouraged Della to hasten her recovery by taking the baby and six-year-old Myrna with her to balmy Southern California rather than enduring another winter in frigid Helena. Della, Myrna, and babe-in-arms David Frederick took the train to San Diego, renting a house by the sea in La Jolla. There they remained through winter, spring, and then into summer. Della discovered that she loved both California’s sunny climate and its relaxed way of living. She felt no isolation because she had friends from Montana who visited and other friends who moved nearby. For the first time in her seven-year marriage she experienced the freedom of living away from her husband and found that she rather liked it. Myrna, too, found the seaside enchanting. In La Jolla she befriended a kindly old naturalist, Dr. Kline, who owned the local aquarium and taught her to catch eels and hunt for shells on the beach.
10
David senior came to visit in August, in time to join the celebration of Myrna’s seventh birthday. The long sojourn in California, coupled with all the train fares, must have cost plenty, but there is no evidence that money was a major concern. At this point the focus was on Della’s health and on getting to know an alluring part of the world. During his visit David senior resisted Della’s entreaties to buy land in California, proclaiming himself a Montanan, by God (
BB
, 17). He and Della evidently quarreled. She fervently wanted the entire family to relocate and tried to convince David that he could make a good living selling real estate in the Land of Sunshine, which was attracting hordes of newcomers. He wouldn’t hear of it, however, and dispatched his family to return home to Helena’s Fifth Avenue. They did so in time for Myrna to resume her schooling in Helena in the fall of 1912.
Four years later, Della needed a hysterectomy, and she and the children returned to Southern California, this time to a shingled house in the Los Angeles area with a honeysuckle-strewn porch on Hart Avenue in Ocean Park, near Santa Monica. Across the street lived a friend who put them up when they first arrived. Della had persuaded David to allow her to undergo both the surgery and the convalescence in a healing climate. He indulged her by giving his reluctant consent. They remained long enough for Myrna, now almost eleven, to be enrolled in school in Ocean Park for several months and for her to take her first dancing lessons, which she loved. She formed a tight bond with a girl named Louella Bamberger (later called Lou MacFarlane), who lived next door and would remain a lifelong friend. Myrna, tall for her age, was already aware of boys and seemed quite worldly to the younger Lou. The two enjoyed Saturday afternoon dances for children at Ocean Park Pier. Myrna had taught herself the steps to popular ballroom dances, which she in turn taught her friend. At the Saturday dances Myrna and Lou would dance together (
BB
, 19).
Della recovered quickly from her surgery. Myrna remembered her mother enjoying parties, champagne, and the jazz orchestra at the Nat C. Goodwin Pier. Della didn’t seem to be pining for home, Montana, or her absent husband. Whatever passion once existed between Della and David, both still in their thirties, had by now subsided.
Myrna did miss her father, and her beloved Johnson grandmother as well, but she flourished nonetheless beside the Pacific Ocean. While investigating barnacles beneath the pier, she got her first glimpse of movie stars cavorting at a private beach. The women wore bathing costumes with bloomers and tied their hair up in turbans. She viewed more actors at close range when Della took the children on a tour of Universal Studios, where they watched William Farnum (who would later appear with Myrna in
A Connecticut Yankee
) “shootin’ it up with wranglers” under blue lights (
BB
, 18). That same day they also watched Dorothy Davenport and Jack Pickford at work. But what most entranced Myrna on her first visit to a movie studio was the filming of a sequence “in which a small girl broke out of a fancy egg and danced exquisitely.” According to Della, “That inspired Myrna.”
11
All this California fun ended abruptly when David senior issued another edict for their return to Helena. Della complied, but once they were reinstalled in the family home, Myrna keenly sensed the friction in her parents’ marriage. Her mother was certain she no longer wished to live full time in Montana. She wasn’t saying she wanted to break up the family, only that she should cast the deciding vote on where they should pitch their tent. California, still smogless and without freeways, offered a healthier life for one and all, she insisted; the family should follow the sun. As he had before, David stood his ground. Now working for the Banking Corporation of Montana and serving as a member of the board, he was the breadwinner, the head of the household, and the son of pioneer Montana ranchers, whose tradition he honored. With the outbreak of war in Europe came a business boom that benefited the entire state. Prices were high for farmland; now was no time to leave. His roots were in Montana; his brothers and sisters all lived nearby, so in Helena they would remain.
By this time Myrna had developed a decided attachment to Southern California. But one of the compensations of being back in Helena was that now, at age twelve, she could begin taking Saturday morning ballet classes with Miss Alice Thompson. Grandmother Johnson further stimulated her love of dance by taking her to see a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck’s
The Blue Bird
. Myrna was moved to choreograph her own version of a “Blue Bird” dance and was invited to perform it in a talent show following the annual banquet of her father’s lodge, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. The talent show took place on the stage of Helena’s spanking new Marlow Theater. Looking every inch the princess she had long yearned to become, she leaped across the stage in a pale blue silk dress decked with blue ribbon bows. “Miss Williams, who is much admired for her grace and beauty, has received many compliments,” reported the
Helena Record-Herald
. Her tomboy days had ended.
12
Myrna’s triumphant dance, witnessed by many Helena friends and relations, marks a turning point, a decisive step toward a future of creativity and performing. But as she took her bows at the Elks show, two notable absences tempered Myrna’s joy. Her beloved maternal grandmother, Isabella Johnson, had recently died of cancer, at age seventy-four. And Myrna’s idolized father, David, chose to be out of town on a business trip on the night Myrna was to perform for his lodge. David had agreed to fund Myrna’s dancing lessons, Della recalled, because “he recognized that aesthetic dancing embodies the finest ideals of art and music.” But he could not comprehend how a daughter of his could possibly want to cavort in public. Della reminded him that Myrna had two parents and that she, Della, happened to be one of them. She tried to convince him that there was nothing shameful about being an “artistic” dancer, but he insisted, “No daughter of mine is going to be a chorus girl.” According to Della, “he fancied all professional dancers were . . . of questionable morals.” David’s disapproval stung all the more because, after Grandmother Isabella’s passing, Myrna and he had been spending more time together, becoming even closer than they’d been before.
13
Despite her father’s opposition, Myrna held fast to her ambition to become a dancer but tried not to provoke. She disliked talking about her feelings and concealed from both parents the news that she had experienced her first crush, on a boy in her neighborhood, Johnny Brown. Johnny barely knew that she was alive, however. It was the blonde neighbor Amy he wanted as his valentine. Myrna, when she was grown but had not yet married for the first time, would look back on these first unrequited love pangs and comment, “I’ve always fallen in love with the wrong man—or with a man who didn’t know the state of my feelings,” a truth that remained with her throughout her life.
14
Despite her silent pining, and the tensions in the household, there were still many joys to savor in Helena: dancing class, horseback riding with her father, frolicking in the snow with her brother, and holiday dinners with many guests and tables piled high with puddings and roasts. Her father’s largesse and hospitality made Christmas a bountiful time. Myrna called him “a Santa Claus type of man” (
BB
, 14).
Going to the movies on Saturday afternoons became an eagerly anticipated treat. The habit got started in Ocean Park, California, where she and Lou attended Saturday matinees and serials like
The Perils of Pauline
. But movies were available in Helena, too. When the Williams family first moved there from Crow Creek Valley, moving picture shows had been confined to rowdy theaters in the saloon district, and the proper Williams clan had kept its distance. Not any more, now that the respectable Helena Theatre on North Jackson, which seated eight hundred, was offering “photo spectacles” appropriate to young viewers. After 1918, films could also be watched at the gleaming new Marlow. Myrna had favorite actresses. A fan of Marie Doro in
Oliver Twist
, she was also completely smitten with the image of Annette Kellerman as a mermaid who detaches her body from a fish tail to marry the hero in
Neptune’s Daughter
.
15
Because of her parents’ interest in politics, Myrna from an early age developed an awareness of the wider world. The outbreak of the Great War heightened that interest. Her father, a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” had been inclined to vote for prointerventionist Charles Evans Hughes against Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election of 1916. Wilson’s reelection campaign slogan had been, “He kept us out of the war.” Myrna, precociously siding with her Democrat, proneutrality mother, helped talk him into voting for Wilson, who ended up winning Montana. She, Della, and David senior also backed Wilson’s campaign to establish the League of Nations.
16
By April of 1917, when the United States entered the war, breaking from its earlier neutral stance and joining the Allied effort to defeat Germany, fanatical patriotism took hold in Montana as it did elsewhere in the nation. Neighbor turned on neighbor in Helena as it became a crime to speak German or to say anything “disloyal, profane, violent, contemptuous or abusive” about government, soldiers, or the American flag. Of Montana’s adult male population, 10 percent, nearly forty thousand men, enlisted in the military, the highest percentage in the country. Flags waved and trumpets blared as the 2nd Montana 163rd Infantry paraded down Helena’s Main Street.
17