Myrna Loy (9 page)

By the time the original statue was put on display, in May of 1923, Myrna had dropped out of high school to go to work and help her family. Her father had counted on her, and that was fine with Della. Leaving school was difficult but didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice, because Myrna knew she wanted to perform and was eager to get started on her career. When she heard that dancers were being hired, she auditioned, along with hundreds of other girls, and was selected to join a chorus to dance in prologues to movies at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. The pay was thirty-five dollars a week—nothing to sniff at. Her reason for taking the job might have surprised Sid Grauman: “I never wavered,” Myrna explained, “in my conviction that I was the man in the family.”
²³

CHAPTER 4

Enter Myrna Loy

You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but at eighteen Myrna Williams was a walking battlefield. Opposing impulses tugged at her. The wistful-eyed dreamer contended with the practical, levelheaded miss who learned to drive during her teens and could change a flat tire with dispatch. The withdrawn poetry lover did battle with the striking beauty with fierce ambition to succeed, a need to express herself artistically, and an urge to show off onstage. Her friend Betty Berger, two years younger and still in high school when Myrna began her first professional dancing job, found it remarkable that Myrna felt comfortable wearing a skimpy, revealing costume onstage if her role demanded it. Still not sexually active herself, Myrna had a sophisticated air and seemed free of prudish concerns about what was proper or modest. Her exposure to the world of professional dancing, her reading, and her independent travel around Los Angeles had all contributed to her apparent worldliness. She matter-of-factly informed Betty, who came from an overprotective Orthodox Jewish household and had been approached by a woman on a streetcar who tried to pick her up, that not all women desired men; some desired other women. Betty had never heard of lesbians before. Myrna also advised Betty, who looked up to Myrna as a fount of wisdom on intimate matters, that conventional views about sex and morality should not be held sacrosanct.

Betty had a cherished steady boyfriend who was not Jewish—Bob Black, the man she would marry. Her parents disapproved, urging Betty to find a Jewish beau, but Myrna encouraged Betty to stand her ground and stay with Bob, if she truly loved him. Why care about obeying outdated and constricting rules set by others? What mattered was being true to one’s own heart (
BB
, 36).

Daring with her advice to Betty, Myrna was often tongue-tied among those she didn’t know well. Many of the colleagues she worked with over the years sensed her reserve, which could work either for or against her. There would be directors, producers, screenwriters, and probably fellow actors, who pushed for her to release those emotional brakes, to let herself go. More often her tendency to underplay, her way of subtly evoking feelings without clobbering the point, won favor. But there was another Myrna altogether—the tangle-haired free spirit. Anyone who has seen her cut loose on the screen as a gyrating, bare-midriffed native girl or as the gypsy vixen who drives men mad knows her shadow side, the wild-eyed, barefooted siren who can seduce a man with a slink, an exposed shoulder, and a come-hither glance. It was this confounding mixture—Myrna’s mysterious face, her lithe figure, and sensual movements, joined to a deep strain of palpable repression—that riveted peoples’ attention and got her started as a dancer on one of Hollywood’s most visible stages.

Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre might have been built as a set for a D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza. Sid Grauman, an instinctive showman who owned a chain of movie palaces, built it in 1922 as a kind of dream structure. (His opulent Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a few blocks to the west on Hollywood Boulevard, would open in 1927 and allow stars to immortalize their footprints in cement.) Grauman hired the architects Mendel Meyer and Gabriel Holler to design a templelike Egyptian Revival sanctuary on Hollywood Boulevard, an $800,000 palace of movie worship that would ride the crest of Egypto-mania triggered by Howard Carter’s 1922 excavations at the tomb of Tutankhamen. The theater’s mammoth scale, its 1,760 seats, its sunburst ceiling, its long courtyard adorned with a striking sculpture of a man with a dog’s head and an ornamental carved elephant, the huge scarab above the proscenium, the wall adorned with hieroglyphics, the massive columns at the main entrance, and the monumental carved heads on pillars flanking the heavy wooden door were all designed to inspire awe.
¹

When Myrna joined the troupe dancing on the Egyptian’s stage in 1923, there were Middle Eastern shops along the forecourt, and each time a show was about to begin, an actor dressed as an Egyptian sentry trod the ramparts, calling out the title of the feature in stentorian “Hear Ye, Hear Ye” tones that could be heard from afar. Attending a movie at the Egyptian Theatre was no casual outing; it was something to plan and to remember with a souvenir program, a genuine, capital-E Event, especially for those lucky enough to get a seat at the October 18, 1922, premiere of Douglas Fairbanks’s
Robin Hood
. This was the first-ever Hollywood opening night gala and the film that opened the Egyptian Theatre. Tickets could be reserved two weeks in advance at a cost of five dollars each. “We approached amid the glare of a hundred spotlights,” an on-the-scene columnist told her readers, “worked our way across the street between a thrilling jam of Rolls Royces, Nationals, Pierce Arrows.” That was Ruth Roland she spotted, in person, resplendent in sable, and behind her Blanche Sweet in silver lace and sealskin. Megastars Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Pola Negri, all diminutive in stature, loomed large as they took turns smiling and waving to the crowd of gawkers gathered on Hollywood Boulevard.
Robin Hood
’s star and producer Douglas Fairbanks failed to make an appearance; he and his wife, Mary Pickford, were away.
²

The lavish, elaborately costumed twice-a-day dance prologues, some gathering as many as a hundred performers onstage at one time, lasted almost as long as the featured film. Accompanied by a live orchestra, each prologue focused on a theme related to the picture being shown, and some included in-the-flesh appearances by costumed members of the movie’s cast. The public came to see the live shows as much as the movies that followed.

To get herself hired, about eight months after the
Robin Hood
premiere, Myrna had to audition for a well-known brother-sister team known as Fanchon and Marco, in charge of prologue production at the Egyptian. Their real names were Fanny and Mike Wolff, and they were the musical offspring of a Los Angeles clothier. As children they used to entertain at lodge parties and picnics. When they got older, as skilled ballroom dance partners they began appearing in dinner shows at nightspots such as Tait’s, in San Francisco. Before long they switched hats. Assuming the functions of promoters and producers, they hired and trained other performers, finding a ready market for their brief live musical revues that were designed for movie theater stages. Their Los Angeles studio on Sunset Boulevard became “a factory for producing fifteen-minute shows.” Fanchon and Marco supplied costumes and set designs, as well as the choreography and the talent—dancers, announcers, and musicians—for the productions they rehearsed. Fanchon eventually led several companies of female dancers called the Fanchonettes and directed dances for movies. Janet Gaynor, Joan Crawford, and Bing Crosby are just three of the many celebrated artists who, like Myrna Loy, once trained and trod the boards for Fanchon and Marco. Myrna remembered the couple as “marvelous dancers and hard taskmasters” (
BB
, 33).
³

Myrna was paid thirty-five dollars a week to dance twice a day at Grauman’s Egyptian. In the prologue to DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments
, as one of the Dancing Favorites of the Pharaoh, she and the other dancers in the Egyptian Ballet wore halters and headdresses, made angular hand movements copied from Egyptian wall paintings, and took deep kneeling bows, their arms extended on the floor in front of them. “Fanchon had us doing so many salaams,” Myrna told David Chierichetti, “that I’ve had trouble with one of my knees ever since.” A few months later, the elaborate prologue to
The Thief of Bagdad
, another Fairbanks fantasy, found her among sixteen Dance Maidens executing a barefooted East Indian Nautch dance à la Ruth St. Denis. In the prologue to
The Gold Rush
, clad in wintery white and silver, she represented the Spirit of Ice. Myrna’s movements tended to be languid, and Fanchon sometimes had to prod her to “Snap it up!”
⁴

Between the matinee and the evening shows she and some new friends from the troupe would get together for dinner at one of the nearby restaurants, perhaps at the Musso & Frank Grill. Feeling adult and independent, Myrna moved with three of the other young dancers into a rented house in Hollywood but—not quite ready to make the break—soon returned to Della, David, Laura Belle, and Aunt Lu on Delmas Terrace. Della liked her daughter to be near, and Myrna found it convenient to return home. While renting, she’d been burdened by household chores, which her roommates were happy to leave to her, the mature, responsible one in the group.

The entire company of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre prologue dancers went over to Paramount to appear as bacchantes in an orgy scene in a film directed by Raoul Walsh called
The Wanderer
(1926). “I was acting my head off,” Myrna remembered, “drinking and hanging over the couch” holding a wine goblet (
BB
, 37). But since she was an anonymous member of a large group, she didn’t consider this her true debut in pictures, which would soon take place.

A photograph of her dancing with two others from the Egyptian Theatre troupe led to her first screen test. After a performance, a Hollywood portrait photographer named Henry Waxman went backstage at the Egyptian and approached Myrna, telling her that he wanted to take pictures of her. As Myrna told it, “I chanced, that night, to be the central figure in the dance numbers. [When Waxman] offered to photograph me I was flattered and accepted the very kind offer, which was to be without cost to me. No one had ever wanted to photograph me before.” Fanchon and Marco allowed Myrna to go to Waxman’s studio on Sunset Boulevard, an old, abandoned streetcar that he had fixed up as a workspace. Wearing a flowing dress, bare feet, and untamed tresses that photographed black, she went before the camera in several group poses from a Prologue, staying on for some solo shots. After the long photo session Waxman told Myrna that he thought she had something special. He found her remarkably photogenic; maybe she’d be movie material. Waxman then mounted several of the developed and enlarged pictures of the dancing girls, displaying them both in the courtyard of the Egyptian Theatre and on his studio walls.
⁵

During a visit for his own portrait sitting, Rudolph Valentino took notice. Focusing on Myrna’s dramatic and kinetic image, he asked, “Who’s the girl?” Waxman told him that her name was Myrna Williams and that she danced in prologues at the Egyptian. Valentino prided himself on his ability to spot talent. Like Waxman he sensed that the striking young woman might have a future on the screen. After watching Myrna dance and visiting her backstage at the Egyptian, he immediately wanted her to be seen by his designer wife, Natacha Rambova, because he knew that Natacha, too, would be taken with the young dancer.

It may be that Valentino and Natacha Rambova (née Winifred Shaughnessy of Salt Lake City) became socially acquainted with Myrna, who liked Waxman and was spending some off hours at his studio, helping him with developing negatives and printing. Valentino and Rambova, who these days were not getting along very well, were on friendly terms with Waxman, too. According to Myrna, Rambova was far more exotic looking than her sweet, boyish, celebrity husband. Tall, with a fine complexion and a habit of walking like the ballerina she had once been, with her spine straight, head held high, and toes pointing out, Rambova was the most beautiful woman Myrna had ever seen. She usually covered her dark coiled braids with a turban and often wore dangling earrings, clunky necklaces, and calf-length velvet or brocade skirts (
BB
, 37). Her eyes were heavily outlined in kohl, and she favored dark red lipstick.

Sometime in the spring of 1925, the year of his separation from Rambova, Valentino offered Myrna a screen test for a role in his upcoming film
Cobra
, for Ritz-Carlton Pictures. He was looking for an actress to play the role of a demure secretary named Mary, the love interest in that movie for both Valentino’s character, the Italian Count Rodrigo Torriani, and the count’s American boss and best friend, Jack, who by the end of the movie has married Mary. In the screen test Myrna was to enter a drawing room, lift a book from a table, first registering interest, then surprise, then amusement. Myrna’s lack of acting experience told on her during the test, which was conducted in a portable dressing room at Paramount. She tested poorly, appearing “stiff, absurd, ugly,” and it didn’t help that the cameraman had shot the scene at the wrong speed, making her movements appear jerky. She looked gaunt onscreen even though Valentino himself had spent time expertly applying makeup to her face before the test was shot, and Natacha Rambova, who hadn’t yet stopped serving as her husband’s professional partner and adviser, lent her the clothes she wore for the test. “Rudy himself made me up,” Myrna recalled to Gladys Hall in 1935, “and to this day I think there has never been an hour so terrifying, so thrilling, as that hour when Rudy’s hands worked on me, when Natacha brought me her own clothes to wear. [They were] so friendly, so kind.”
⁶

The excitement and hope inspired by the planned screen test turned into a major trauma for Myrna once it was over. Knowing she had flubbed the biggest opportunity of her young lifetime, she came home and cried for hours, taking to her bed and staying there for two weeks. Valentino, she remembered years later, “was looking for a leading lady, and I was just a skinny kid.” When she got the news that another, more practiced, actress, Gertrude Olmstead, had been chosen to play the secretary in
Cobra
, Myrna was hardly surprised, since she had seen the test onscreen and found herself awful in it. But anticipating the bad news didn’t protect her from it. The fact that the Valentinos had been so welcoming to her made the sting of their professional rejection all the more hurtful. Her withdrawal put her job at the Egyptian Theatre—which she’d held for two years—in jeopardy and alarmed Della.
⁷