The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  † Ross was a graduate of Princeton who soon gave up acting to become a producer. Not all sources indicate the couple met on Young Eagles, because Ross was also in Saturday Night Kid in 1929. However, both Arthur and Ross indicated that it was on the set of Eagles that they began spending time together and became close. They would divorce in 1949.

  * In early October 1932, after she appeared in a play called The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (twenty-eight performances), Arthur had also made a brief trip back to California. No one is clear what prompted her decision. Some sources say she was approached by RKO and returned to resume her film career. The facts are that, while there, she made a lackluster film, The Past of Mary Holmes, for RKO, and it was released in April 1933. After shooting it, she went back to New York. This period of her life is further clouded because Arthur shot a film for the low-budget Regent Pictures before she “quit” in January 1931, and that film, entitled Get That Venus, was not released until mid-1933. (To add to the chaos, some sources say Get That Venus received no theatrical release of any kind.)

  * If You Could Only Cook, seen today, comes the closest. Arthur plays a homeless blonde who teams up with an automobile tycoon to become a gangster’s cook and butler. She’s delightful in just the type of comedy that’s right for her, but The New York Times review said she couldn’t “lend the sparkle” that the role required and that her voice carried “an irritating shrillness.” (Variety, however, called her a “standout.”)

  † Capra often talked to me about how he and Ford discussed Arthur’s talent, her special qualities, and her charm. Both men felt she could become a great movie star, but agreed she wasn’t there yet with The Whole Town’s Talking.

  ‡ Arthur’s hair had been many colors, from red to white blond to ash blond to dark brown and black. Capra found the right shade.

  * Prior to The Impatient Years, she starred for her husband’s production company in a 1943 RKO release, The Lady Takes a Chance, co-starring John Wayne.

  † Arthur’s replacement was, of course, the delightful Judy Holliday, who made the role of Billie Dawn her own, ultimately winning an Oscar for the film version.

  * Her co-star in First Monday was Melvyn Douglas. Later, the play would be done successfully with Henry Fonda and Jane Alexander in the Douglas and Arthur roles.

  DISENTANGLEMENT:

  LORETTA YOUNG, IRENE DUNNE,

  NORMA SHEARER

  It was tough for a woman to last. Those who ran the studios and operated the star machine knew only too well that the beautiful female stars they were manufacturing were going to lose popularity sooner than the males. Glamorous women were a fragile product. It is startling to realize how few actresses could achieve career longevity considering that there were so many big-name female stars in the old days. Stories about women needed them, and female fans hungered for them. But longevity for women was tricky. The camera was a cruel observer, and it saw age: wrinkles, thickness, the loss of that glistening shine of the first blush of ripe sexuality. The standards of beauty were stricter for women, and society’s attitude toward romantic pairings of older women and younger men was less accepting. If a female star could last for a decade, she really paid off. If she could last for two decades, she was a phenomenal success. If she lasted longer than that, she was a miracle, and today we can call her a legend: Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford. These women were tough, smart, determined, and they each had some special quality, some touch of rare good luck, and a set of indestructible bones. Each in her own way was a product of the machine. Davis fought it, Loy ignored it, Crawford embraced it, Hepburn was too well off personally to need it, Stanwyck grew past it, but three women who are not as well known today went through it and escaped out the other side, each one achieving a remarkable career success. Each one refused to be labeled “product,” and they all had survival instincts that helped them find a solution to dealing with the machine. One outsmarted it. One rose above it. And one married it.

  LORETTA YOUNG

  Loretta Young

  In McMillan & Wife, a successful 1970s TV series starring Rock Hudson, an episode entitled “Love, Honor and Swindle” contains a wedding scene. As McMillan’s “sister” is speaking her vows, his “mother” (played by the unparalleled Mildred Natwick) weeps copiously, blurting out, “It’s just like a Loretta Young movie!” Therein lies the glory of Loretta Young, as well as her ignominy. She’s a big name, recognizable to a 1970s TV audience, and she’s associated with her own specific kind of movie, but, alas, it’s the kind that weepy old ladies love and a subject for ridicule.

  This is sad for the exquisitely beautiful Loretta Young, and very unfair. She was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, but today, more than thirty years after McMillan, her name is barely known to young people, who, if they are aware of her at all, know her only for her annual Christmas appearance in the whimsical The Bishop’s Wife, which they’re willing to watch because Cary Grant is in it. Young was never given the tributes that many of her contemporaries earned. She had no Kennedy Center Honors, no honorary Oscars, no Lincoln Center tributes, no American Film Institute Life Achievement awards. There were no Loretta Young festivals being mounted internationally, with the star in fur-clad attendance, sweeping in for extensive ovations and chic career “persona” evaluations in the New York Times. Young’s name is never included when the list of female Hollywood icons is trotted out: Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, Garbo, Garland, Dietrich. Nor is she even placed among the second tier, along with Ginger Rogers or Olivia de Havilland or their younger equivalents, Doris Day and Elizabeth Taylor.

  Why was Young overlooked in the great stampede to honor former Hollywood greats? Her varied career deserves respect for her incredible longevity and for her shrewd ability to get her way within the system. She began working in movies as a child, when she was barely four years old. Born as Gretchen Young on January 6, 1913,* she is said to have debuted (uncredited) in the 1917 film Primrose King. Her first lead came in 1928, when she was fifteen, and Lon Chaney personally chose her to play opposite him in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. (When asked in later years why she thought Chaney chose her, Young remembered, “He said it was my sad smile.”) Possessing a melodious speaking voice as well as ethereal beauty, Young easily made the transition to sound.† She worked steadily throughout the 1930s, the 1940s, and the early 1950s, winning an Oscar in 1947, and making her last feature film, It Happens Every Thursday, in 1953. In that year, on September 30, she debuted on NBC in the weekly TV series she and her then husband (Tom Lewis) co-created, Letter to Loretta, which became The Loretta Young Show in 1954, The Loretta Young Theatre in reruns in 1960, and The New Loretta Young Show in 1962. She became a top-rated star on TV for eleven years, from 1953 to 1964, winning three Emmys as Best Actress (in 1954, 1956, and 1959), and remarkably coming out of retirement in 1987 to win another for her leading performance in a made-for-television movie, Christmas Eve. And then she played another lead in a TV movie, Lady in the Corner, in 1989. She narrated documentaries made by her son, Christopher Lewis, and in 1994, when she was a youthful eighty-one years old, she narrated TV’s Life in the Mississippi. Thus, if Young is given her due, she was a working professional actress from 1917 to 1994—an astonishing and record-breaking seventy-seven years! And her career never dwindled into supporting roles. Loretta Young was not a minor star. She was one of Hollywood’s most famous names from 1928 to 1953 and a top-ranked television star for another ten. This is amazing longevity, and for forty years she called her own shots.

  How did she do it? Loretta Young was a pioneer career woman who took charge of her own image. Backed up by her equally intelligent and business-savvy mother, she fought hard for better roles even in the earliest years of her career. She studied every aspect of filmmaking, asking serious questions about lighting and camera angles, making herself the master of her own makeup and costuming. She was stubborn—never agreeing to any hat, outfit, or hairstyle she felt did not show her to her best advanta
ge. When one of her sisters appeared on-screen wearing an unflattering hairdo that had been highly recommended by the hairdresser, Young told her never to let that happen again. “If you don’t know more than your hairstylist,” she snapped, “you don’t deserve to have one.”

  Originally under contract to Warner Bros./First National, Young was taken along to 20th Century Pictures by Darryl Zanuck in 1933, when he left Warners. After 20th Century merged with Fox to become 20th Century–Fox (in 1935) and Zanuck was put in charge, Young once again accompanied him. She was famous for pressuring him constantly not to cast her only as a beauty or a clotheshorse, and was known to make Zanuck pay for any slight she imagined came her way, exacting her small, but meaningful to her, revenges. Assigned to a minor role (although technically the female lead) in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Young tried to get out of it. Failing, she played Bell’s deaf wife with everything she had and stole every scene she was in, mutely gazing out of the frame adoringly or pityingly or angrily or in whatever way she could think of, using her large and expressive eyes. No one in the audience noticed anything but her, and inventing the telephone seemed the least Bell could do to make himself worthy. As further payback, Young also forced Zanuck to cast her three real-life sisters in the roles of her on-screen siblings.* When she was given another small role as the Countess Eugenie opposite Tyrone Power in Suez, she was not fooled by its being listed as the “technical” female lead. By her own admission, she cajoled the costume designer to create spectacular period dresses for her Suez wardrobe, saying, “I had the hoop skirts made twice as wide as they should be … it was the only way to get noticed, you see.” (Her skirts are wider than the canal, rivaled only by those created for Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette.) Always angry at what she felt was unfair treatment, she startled everyone by refusing to renew her Fox contract when it expired in 1939. She took the daring step—rare for anyone, especially a woman—of going independent. She also spoke out about why, saying that Zanuck was more interested in male stars than female, that he gave preferential treatment to other women he had under contract (with all the implications that could be attached), and that he simply didn’t treat her like a star. (It was reported that she said, “he never once sent me a bouquet of flowers,” a diva’s complaint if there ever was one.)

  Young’s fighting the system to gain control of her own working life continued in the 1950s when she entered television at a time when the studios were warning stars that the small screen would ruin their careers. (Some of these “warnings” were out-and-out threats.) About her bold and defiant move, Young said, “I wanted to be in on this great new invention. I’d seen how mesmerized by it small children were. The powers of having your own show were enormous. Coming right into people’s homes! … I was considered a traitor in Beverly Hills … Louis B. Mayer took it upon himself to phone me and he said, ‘Loretta, television is considered the enemy. You’ll never make another picture, dear.’” However, Young not only saved her career through TV, she extended it and increased her visibility. Feminist film scholars have praised Ida Lupino for her relatively minor directorial career, celebrated Hepburn’s independence (which doesn’t amount to much in career terms), and given cult status to Dietrich’s androgyny, but no one has inspected Loretta Young’s nerve in fighting her bosses, going independent when she could have remained at the very top, safely under studio protection, and pioneering in television where she cast her shows, produced them, and even carried edited films to the airport to be flown to New York if she had to. You never hear about that Loretta Young.

  In fact, what you do hear is what keeps everyone uninterested. She’s said to have been a perfectionist and a demanding artist—two attributes that, had she been a man, might have earned her respect, but for a woman are often the kiss of death. These qualities brought on her dread nickname, “the steel butterfly.” (She wasn’t the only one to get such a moniker; Jeanette MacDonald was “the iron butterfly.”) But Young wasn’t the only demanding perfectionist. After all, her Hollywood peers included Bette Davis, who fought everyone; Dietrich, who could keep a seamstress busy for three hours just perfecting a hemline; and Joan Bennett, who once mailed Hedda Hopper a dead skunk. Women who became movie stars were often people who couldn’t be pushed around, and all the big successes were demanding about their images, their work, and their wardrobes. No, it’s not the steel butterfly label. And it’s not the lifelong rumors about her unwed motherhood, either. (Young concealed for years the fact that her adopted daughter, Judy, was actually her own child by Clark Gable, a union that took place in 1935 when she was only twenty-one, Gable was a married man, and they were co-starred in The Call of the Wild.) No, Young’s career has gone into eclipse because she’s simply not fashionable today, and for several reasons. First, she never made any secret of being a devout Catholic, ultimately bringing it directly into her work on TV.* She also believed in good manners, a strong work ethic, and always being a lady. (The lady thing is a real killer.) Finally, Young appeared in more than ninety movies throughout her lifetime, but she carved her long career out of almost no truly superior ones. Her filmography is highly respect- able, but she has only a few that are revived today for mass audiences: the aforementioned The Bishop’s Wife (1947), of course; her Oscar-winning role in The Farmer’s Daughter (1947); her film both directed by and co-starring Orson Welles, The Stranger (1946); and another frequent Christmas revival, which she often said was her own personal favorite, Come to the Stable (1949). But these are not the movies that end up on “The 100 Best Films” lists, nor are they used regularly in classrooms. She does have a group of extremely distinguished works that are revered by scholars, in particular, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933), which co-stars her with Spencer Tracy, as well as DeMille’s The Crusades (1935), John Ford’s Four Men and a Prayer (1938), Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931), and Roland V. Lee’s Zoo in Budapest (1933). The truth is that Loretta Young, a very glamorous movie star, had to carry the majority of her films single-handedly. (It’s ironic that she could end up being mocked for her work ethic, because without it she probably would have been nowhere.) Loretta Young toiled.† Furthermore, although her magical beauty initially ensured her career, it also held her back. She was serious and wanted challenging roles, but with a face like hers, studio bosses just wanted to hang some furs on her, highlight her cheekbones, backlight her hair, and put her up on the screen in radiant close-up. She hated this, saying, “To be reviewed for your cheekbones in every picture becomes deadly. I wanted to be known for my acting.”

  Loretta Young didn’t need to be “discovered.” She was just there—her mom ran a boardinghouse for actors, her older sisters preceded her into films, and Lon Chaney had found her and endorsed her when she was just fifteen. By the end of the silent era, when the studios began to formalize the star machine process, she was already established and working in leading roles. She didn’t need a screen test or a set of tryout roles. She did have to undergo the usual posing for stills, fashion layouts, and publicity plants, but unlike the majority of the great female movie stars in the sound era, Young began her real climb to stardom somewhat outside the system. She wasn’t voluptuous. She didn’t have an individual voice that could be easily imitated (although her voice was lovely). She was not a movie fashion plate (although she always looked good in clothes and in real life, she was one).* In the beginning, she was an unpolished actress, without any particular technique. Two of her early sound movies (in 1931) show what she did have: I Like Your Nerve, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Frank Capra’s underrated Platinum Blonde. She became a star because of her extraordinary beauty, particularly her large, extremely beautiful eyes. She knew how to use them expressively, but often enough all she had to do was open them wide and smile.

  In I Like Your Nerve, when she is not yet a star, Young is billed under the title, although in larger type and above the names of the other supporting players. I Like Your Nerve is Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s film. He’s the star, stunning
in well-cut clothes and possessing a dazzling smile. Young is just around to play the girl he falls for when he sees her ride by in an open car, a lacy parasol partly hiding her face. Her looks are amazing, well worthy of his. Young is stuck in a role any beautiful girl could be plugged into, a role requiring nothing but her good looks, yet she tries to make the hollow leading lady a person. It’s obvious that she wants to be more than just a pretty face, that she’s not going to settle for that. (Young, of course, lasted as a star much longer than Fairbanks.)

  Seeing Platinum Blonde for the first time, many people today are surprised to find Young playing a rival to Jean Harlow for the little-known Robert Williams. But the surprise doesn’t come from Young and Harlow being in competition but because Harlow plays a high-society lady of the type associated today with Young, and Young plays what now seems to be the Harlow role, a down-to-earth working gal, a reporter who hangs out with the boys down at the old speakeasy. (Movie typing wasn’t just about how stars looked, but also about the roles they were assigned and which way the audience liked them best.) Over the years, Young’s manner became more delicate and feminine, and Harlow became flashier and sexier. They each changed “type” after Platinum Blonde, but Young hits her “press gal” role right. Again, she’s trying to stretch.

  There was another quality to Young that separated her from the pack. She’s hot. And she can be low-down. Taxi! (1932), Midnight Mary (1933), Employees’ Entrance (1933) at Warner Bros., Zoo in Budapest, and Man’s Castle at Fox—all show the passion and not just the beauty that made her a star. In Taxi! she’s a waitress at Goldfarb’s Fish Grotto—and you can believe it. In Employees’ Entrance, she secures a job as a department store model by sleeping with the boss. And in Midnight Mary, she’s an out-and-out moll, a gangster’s mistress and an ex-con to boot. She’s no lady. She’s also lyrically beautiful, with a sensuality that’s palpable. She seems to have a flame burning low inside her … and it’s always lit. (After all, the real-life seventeen-year-old Young ran off with her older co-star, Grant Withers, and got married. Her mama, however, was waiting in the doorway when she got home and demanded an immediate annulment. Young showed her mettle, standing up to her mother and refusing to obey. Within a year, however, she and Withers were divorced.)