HOLLYWOOD MADONNA
HOLLYWOOD LEGENDS SERIES
CARL ROLLYSON, GENERAL EDITOR
HOLLYWOOD MADONNA
Loretta Young
Bernard F. Dick
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.
Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2011
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dick, Bernard F.
Hollywood Madonna : Loretta Young / Bernard F. Dick.
p. cm. — (Hollywood legends series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-079-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-61703-080-2 (ebook)
1. Young, Loretta, 1913–2000. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—
United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.Y6D53 2011
791.4302’8092—dc22
[B] 2010053734
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
For Ned Comstock
CONTENTS
Preface
1. Life without Father
2. The Creation of Loretta Young
3. LORETTA TALKS!
4. Sacrificial Wives, Shop Girls, and Proud Proletarians
5. Loaned Out
6. Last Days at Warner’s
7. Darryl Zanuck’s Costume Queen
8. The Men in Her Life
9. Heeding the Call of the Wild
10. The Great Lie
11. Return from the Ashes
12. Addio, Darryl
13. The Price of Freedom
14. Loretta Goes to War
15. “Age cannot wither” (but Hollywood Can)
16. Thrice Blessed: A Reunion, a Replacement, and an Oscar
17. The Return to Fox—and Zanuck
18. Slow Fade to Small Screen
19. Radio Days
20. Another Medium, Another Conquest
21. The Road to Retirement
22. A New Life
23. The Last Reel
Notes
Filmography
Major Radio Appearances
Major Television Appearances
Index
PREFACE
My family entered the television age in February 1954, when The Loretta Young Show was in its first season. Then, my only interest was live television. I delighted in Studio One and Robert Montgomery Presents, which brought theatre into our parlor, along with missed cues, flubbed lines, and camera gaffes that actually enhanced the immediacy of the experience. Filmed television was movies; live television, even variety shows, like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Perry Como Show, were theatre. My mother watched I Love Lucy and The Loretta Young Show. I did not—then.
I knew who Loretta Young was. I probably saw her before 1944, but my earliest memory of Loretta Young is a scene from And Now Tomorrow (1944) that lodged itself in my memory. (Little did I know at the time that I would be writing her biography.) It is the scene when Loretta, now hearing-impaired, awakens to the sight of a rain-streaked window. But there is no sound. She knows she should hear the impact of the rain against the glass, but cannot. I had no idea what a subjective camera or a POV shot were, but I shared Loretta’s fear, reflected in a face that, still beautiful, had taken on a kind of delicately expressed alarm, devoid of histrionics and panic—the sort of expression one would expect from a well-bred woman facing the first crisis in her life. I also had fond memories of The Farmer’s Daughter, and, as the product of a Catholic grade school education, of Come to the Stable, in which Loretta’s Sister Margaret corresponded to the kind of nun with whom I was familiar: the nun who uses her gentle, and often wily, powers of persuasion to accomplish her end—always, of course, for the greater glory of God.
Because my mother rhapsodized about The Loretta Young Show, I decided to watch it with her, but just once—or so I thought. I was mesmerized by Loretta’s much touted entrance, in which she executed a 180-degree turn while closing the door—her dress seeming to rotate with her—and then breezed into the living room where she purred her welcome. My first thought was, “How phony!” But after I saw a few more episodes, I knew that what might have seemed like artifice was Loretta’s special form of theatre. It wasn’t live, but she made it seem as if it were, particularly with that iconic entrance so reminiscent of the way a star makes her first appearance in a Broadway play. But that was Loretta—a star doing a star turn.
In 1954, I did not appreciate the historic significance of The Loretta Young Show, unaware that it was the first truly successful (it ran eight seasons) attempt at anthology television—not a show that used the sitcom format, in which the stars play the same characters in each episode—but one following the repertory model, in which the star appears in a different vehicle each week. If asked how to define The Loretta Young Show in 1954, I would have said: “Thirty-minute movies.” That’s how they struck me. And, in a sense, I think my original definition holds true: They were truncated movies.
I had not thought much about Loretta over the years until the mid-1990s when Judy Lewis, her daughter by Clark Gable, published Uncommon Knowledge, in which Lewis divulged the details of her birth, the result of a liaison between the unmarried Loretta and the married Gable while they were filming The Call of the Wild (1935). I thought I was reading a treatment for a woman’s picture, with a cover-up that seemed like something out of an unwed mother movie of the 1930s—Loretta as Stella Dallas. Judy’s Loretta Young was not the plucky Katie of The Farmer’s Daughter or the saintly Sister Margaret. There was a real person, in some ways a tragic one, behind the Loretta Young who glided through the door, ready to offer another character from a repertory that seemed to defy categorization.
I knew then that I wanted to tell Loretta’s story, but from a different perspective, focusing on the woman and her films. It is impossible to separate the artist from the art when it is the art that reveals the artist. The films, beginning with Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), which made a star out of a fifteen-year-old newcomer, present a gradual efflorescence of a talent that was too often mistaken for Hollywood glamour or heavenly beauty. I have chosen to interweave Loretta’s films with her life in, I think, the right proportion. Since so many of her 1930s films are inaccessible except to fans of Turner Classic Movies (TCM), I have synopsized the plots for readers unfamiliar with these movies, but interested in seeing their place in her career.
I have chosen a form of documentation familiar to readers of trade books, one that uses neither parenthetical documentation nor the raised footnote/endnotes format of The Chicago Manual of Style. Readers interested in the source of a particular statement need only consult this book’s notes section, in which the documentation appears page by page. A few words taken from a statement or quotation are followed by notation of their source.
I was privileged to meet Judy Lewis, and I hope I have done her mother justice. And for the movie lover, I trust I have done the same.
I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to the following: Grover Crisp, vice president, Asset Management and Film Restoration, Sony Pictures; actor Douglas Dick, who appeared with Loretta in The Accused (1948); Craig Fuller, associate editor, Utah Historical Society; Barbara Hall, Special Collections, the Margaret Herrick Library; Mother Dolores Hart, mother abbess, Abbey of Regina Laudis; Kristine Krueger of The National Film Information Service (NFIS); the staff of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Metro Campus library, especially reference librarian Kathleen Stei
n-Smith, MaryAnn Sena, and Deborah Daniele; Terry Salomonson, Audio Classics Archive; veteran publicist Walter Seltzer; and biographer Donald Spoto.
I have made use of the following special collections:
The Margaret Herrick Library, Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study
Loretta Young Clippings File
Paramount Collection
Jane Ardmore Papers
Gladys Hall Collection
Lux Radio Theatre Collection
Hollywood Women’s Press Club Records
Hal Wallis Collection
University of Southern California (USC), Cinema-Television Library
Hedda Hopper Collection
Warner Bros. Archives
MGM Collection
Constance McCormick Collection
Louella Parsons Collection
Twentieth Century-Fox Collection
Universal Collection
International Pictures Collection
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Collection
Hal Humphrey Collection
I owe a special debt to my wife, Katherine Restaino, for her assistance and encouragement; to Judy Lewis, for providing so much relevant information in Uncommon Knowledge about her mother’s family background; and to Anthony Greco, for locating many of Loretta’s difficult-to-find films of the 1930s.
Finally, I want to thank Ned Comstock, the ultimate archivist at the University of Southern California’s Cinema and Television Library, who always succeeds in turning the burden of research into the joy of discovery.
Teaneck, New Jersey
August 2010
HOLLYWOOD MADONNA
CHAPTER 1
Life without Father
Loretta Young and director Frank Borzage had something in common besides Man’s Castle (1933), the only film (and one of Loretta’s best) that they made together: Both hailed from Salt Lake City, Utah. Loretta could have been born in any number of places. Her parents, Gladys Royal and John Earle Young, met in Denver, where they were married in 1907. Her sister, Polly Ann, was born there on 25 October 1908. In 1910, John Earle Young, who worked as an auditor for the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, was transferred to Salt Lake City, and Gladys was required to relocate. It was not the ideal time to do so; she was pregnant again and scheduled to deliver in July. En route, Gladys went into labor in Salida, Colorado, in the heart of the Rockies; fortunately, Salida was a stop on the Denver and Rio Grande, and it was there that Elizabeth Jane Young (later known professionally as Sally Blane) was born on 11 July. Elizabeth Jane was not even in Salida long enough to have any memories of the town; once Gladys was able to travel, she and her children, now numbering two, continued on to Salt Lake City. Still, Salidans regard “Sally Blane” as one of their own.
Catholicism played a major role in Gladys’s life. In 1908, a year after her marriage, Gladys, then twenty, converted to Roman Catholicism, unaware that she had married a man whose wooden leg proved no deterrent to women. Young exuded a potent masculinity that mocked the essence of seduction, which is usually slow and subtle until the moment of total surrender. In Young’s case, the ritual was unimportant. Gazes locked, loins throbbed, and bodies conjoined. Gladys knew the scenario, having seen her husband in action, but she believed—at least for a time—in remaining faithful to her marriage vows, which pledged couples to remain together “for better or worse.” But the worse was yet to come.
Gladys was the force that kept the family from splintering when her husband’s promiscuity resulted in a cycle of separations followed by promises that were never kept. Gladys’s father, Robert Royal, differed from her husband only in degree. Gladys’s father was born in Tennessee; her mother, Fanny, in Missouri; and Gladys herself in Los Angeles. Even so, Gladys acquired the airs of a genteel Southern lady, even as her graciousness belied her resilience and adaptability. Robert Royal was not meant to be a father, much less a father of three daughters. After Fanny died of appendicitis, Royal abandoned his family. Gladys was then five. Loretta was four when Gladys initiated the first of several separations from John Earle Young that culminated in desertion and divorce. Loretta came from a family where husbands failed their wives and children, abandoning them when supporting them became too onerous or when other women proved more desirable than their own wives.
By the time Gladys was twenty-six, she was the mother of four. When the third child arrived, the Youngs had their own home where, on 6 January 1913, Gretchen Young was born, followed by her brother John a year later on 7 October 1914. “Gretchen” did not become “Loretta “ until she was fifteen and on the brink of stardom. But to her family she was always Gretchen, whom her sisters dubbed “Gretch the Wretch” owing to her aggressiveness.
According to the studio biographies, which are often more like hagiographies, Loretta was born on Hollywood Avenue, the address an implicit harbinger of things to come. In this case, the biographies were partially correct. The Youngs did live on Hollywood Avenue, but not in 1913. According to the 1914 Salt Lake City Directory, they lived at 288 J. Street, within walking distance of what was then the city’s commercial and business center. The houses on J Street ranged from baronial to cottage-size, the latter most likely the kind in which the Youngs lived. Theirs was a respectable neighborhood, where residents included a large number of businesspersons.
In 1915, the Youngs were at a different address: 1422 Hollywood Avenue. John was now working as a clerk for the Oregon Shortline Railroad Company. Hollywood Avenue was about four miles from the center of the city in what would now be considered the suburbs. Exactly why the Youngs moved is difficult to say, yet the move was part of a sequence of relocations: sometimes within a city, at other times to another state. Possibly the Youngs—or at least Gladys—thought Hollywood Avenue would provide a better environment for the children, since the area was still somewhat rural. The family was not at that address very long, yet it was the only one that Loretta remembered, having no recollection of J. Street. She obviously gave the Hollywood Avenue address to studio publicists, who invested it with a significance that it never really had.
Loretta rarely spoke about Salt Lake City. By the time she was four, she was living in Los Angeles with her mother and siblings. When Gladys could no longer endure her husband’s infidelities, which made a mockery of their marriage vows, it was relocation time again. She and the children moved to Los Angeles, which became their permanent home.
Gladys had a reason for bringing her children to Los Angeles in 1917. Her sister, Charlene, lived there with her husband, Ernest Traxler, a production manager and minor director (e.g., Caleb Piper’s Girl and Go Get Em, Gerrity, both 1919) at Famous Players-Lasky, the precursor of Paramount. To supplement their income, Charlene took in boarders, and Traxler found extra work for their three-year-old daughter. Since his sister-in-law’s children were attractive, Traxler found them work, too. John, for example, was often cast as Wallace Reid’s son. No sooner had Gladys and her family arrived in Los Angeles than Traxler, who had connections at other studios, managed to get the children cast as extras in Universal’s Sirens of the Sea (1917), a retelling of the Lorelei legend with the four-year-old Loretta as a nymph. Loretta knew nothing about nymphs or the Lorelei, nor did it matter. She was exposed to the excitement of on-location shooting; besides, she was paid the munificent sum of $3.50 for doing relatively little.
In 1917, Universal released films in three, then four, categories in order of prestige: Jewels (later Super Jewels), Bluebirds, and Red Feathers. Sirens was a Jewel, requiring location filming, which took place on Catalina Island and the Channel Islands (now part of Channel Islands National Park) off the coast of Southern California. The Young children were only used in the Catalina exteriors. Still, it must have been thrilling for them to board the ferry to Catalina (probably from Long Beach), even if they did not understand the reason for the excursion. To them, it was a holiday; they donned funny clothes and stood in front of an odd piece of equipment that bore no resemblance to anything they
had ever seen. Yet the experience left an impression on both Loretta and Elizabeth Jane, who had been exposed, however briefly, to the magic of movies.
The atmosphere, hectic but exciting, was a welcome diversion from their uneventful lives. The children would not have phrased it that way; they would have just called it “fun.” But it was also fun that in a few years, show business would bring both sisters much more than $3.50. Meanwhile, Loretta was at her uncle’s studio, Famous Players-Lasky, where she played the “anonymous child” in The Primrose Ring (1917), starring Mae Murray, who became a short-lived fairy godmother. Roles in The Only Way (1919), White and Unmarried (1921), and The Sheik (1921) followed.
When Loretta was seven, her aunt, also an extra at Famous Players-Lasky, rushed home and told Loretta to head over to the studio, which happened to be just across the street. A child was needed for a scene in The Only Way. Loretta had been making mud pies and arrived with her face splattered with mud, only to be told to come back after she washed her face. When she did, she was placed on a strange looking table and told to cry. The scene worked. The Only Way is a lost film, but if it ever resurfaces, Loretta can be seen as the “child on operating table.”
At seven, she had no idea that the star of The Only Way, Fannie Ward, had been a popular actress on both the New York and London stages before making her film debut in 1915. Cecil B. DeMille, who followed the theatre scene, cast Ward against type in The Cheat (1915), in which she was obviously too old (forty-three) to play the young wife who loses money in the market and is forced to negotiate a loan from an ivory dealer (Sessue Hayakawa), whose terms are quite simple: She must pay with sex. When she is able to repay the loan, he retaliates by ripping her dress and branding her. The film was a hit, with Ward and Hayakawa receiving high praise for their performances. His film career lasted longer than hers, which petered out in the early 1920s, after which Ward played vaudeville.
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