During the filming of The Only Way, Ward sensed that there was something exceptional about Loretta, who did not strike her as a mere extra. But Ward was too busy promoting her own career to advance Loretta’s. Now forty-seven, Ward knew her Hollywood days were drawing to a close, and she did not have any intention of living vicariously through a protégé. Besides, Ward still had her fans, who could see her on the stage, if no longer on the screen.
It was quite the opposite with Mae Murray, who was immediately attracted to the “anonymous child” in The Primrose Ring. Loretta personified the kind of daughter Murray envisioned for herself but could never have. Murray was now on her third husband, director Robert Z. Leonard, whom she married in 1918 and divorced seven years later. Like her previous two marriages, the one with Leonard was also childless. Murray would eventually have a son by her fourth and last husband. Meanwhile, to fill the void in her life, Murray implored Gladys to allow Loretta to live with her and Leonard and enjoy the privileges that affluence could bring. Gladys, knowing it would be “one less mouth to feed,” agreed, and Loretta, with the Traxler’s youngest child, Charlene, as her companion, become part of the Leonards’ household.
Five-year-old Loretta had never seen such elegance: a beautifully furnished home, servants, a new wardrobe for herself, and, to cap it off, ballet lessons. But Cinderella’s golden coach reverted to a pumpkin, when, according to Loretta’s daughter, Judy Lewis, Murray wanted Loretta to move to the East Coast with her and her husband. Gladys refused, either because her maternal instincts prevailed or possibly because she sensed that Murray’s obsession with Loretta was a sign of mental instability, as later proved to be the case. If Murray and Leonard had any real notion of leaving Los Angeles, they soon abandoned it. Murray worked steadily in Hollywood, racking up a total of thirty-one films between 1918 and her swan song in 1931. Loretta resumed her mundane life. But achieving Murray’s lifestyle became Loretta’s goal. Eventually, her prosperity would surpass Murray’s.
Loretta’s brother John had even better luck when Ida and Angus Lindley offered to take him into their home. Again, Gladys agreed, but not to a permanent arrangement. John, who was never close to his mother, resented the matriarchal household in which he lived. Once Gladys realized the extent of John’s disaffection, she untied the apron strings and gave him his freedom. John was then eight. The break was permanent, and eventually John Royal Young changed his name to John Lindley.
Gladys’s son was the youngest male to exit her life. She may not have realized how easy it is for a child to transfer affection from a parent to a patron who can offer a substitute for parental love along with a charmed life. But what else could Gladys do? She knew that the family’s survival depended on her. In imitation of her sister, she borrowed money from a local priest and opened a boarding house of her own. Many of Gladys’s boarders were actors, and their presence made Loretta increasingly aware of a world that she knew she would enter. The boarding house also served another purpose: The income it generated enabled Gladys to send her children to Catholic schools, the only kind that she would consider.
Since Gladys was particularly concerned about Loretta’s education—perhaps because she sensed her daughter’s star quality—Loretta was taken out of one school and enrolled in another. She stayed only for very brief periods at St. Brendan’s and Sacred Heart Convent School (now Sacred Heart Academy) before Gladys discovered Ramona, in Alhambra, California, eight miles from downtown Los Angeles and founded in 1899 by the Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary. At Ramona, Loretta endeared herself to the nuns, who found her candor refreshing. When one of them gently admonished her for her mediocre grades, Loretta replied—with an innocence reinforced by self-confidence—that she did not need good grades because she was going to be a movie star. Once Loretta did achieve star status, the studios made much of her being “convent educated.”
School required Loretta to take a brief hiatus from the movies. Unlike Polly Ann, who attended high school, Loretta’s formal education ended with her graduation from Ramona. There is a gap in her filmography from 1921 to 1927. Loretta must have started grade school around 1918, and even though she had bit parts in three movies (one in 1919, two in 1921), she only had to work for an hour or two. But once she left Ramona, she averaged three and four movies a year, maintaining the same revolving door schedule throughout the 1930s, as she exited one film and entered another. The pace began to decelerate in the 1940s and wound down in 1953, after which a new vista opened up for her: television.
In 1920, Gladys knew she had to do something about her marriage, now one in name only. A chastened and repentant John Earle Young briefly rejoined his family in Los Angeles. But his reformation was short-lived. He continued to cheat on Gladys, who finally realized he was incorrigible. There would be no more separations and tearful returns. Like Robert Royal, once he realized there was no hope of reconciliation John Earle Young abandoned his family,.
Gladys felt she had no other choice but to file for divorce. It was a wrenching decision for a devout Catholic. However, priests were frequent dinner guests at the Young home. Loretta’s sisters recalled one such priest, Father John Ward, who advised Loretta to “acknowledge what you have and use it.” Perhaps it was he or another priest—for example, the one who loaned Gladys money for the boarding house—who told Gladys that, under the circumstances (desertion, ignorance of her husband’s whereabouts), a civil divorce is permissible only if followed by a Church annulment after establishing that there is no possibility of reconciliation. In Gladys’s case, there was none; thus, she could remain a Catholic and even remarry. And in 1923, Gladys married one of her boarders, George Belzer.
Remarriage resulted in both a new home and another child, Georgiana, born in 1924. By 1936, Belzer realized he was not the head of his family. His entrepreneurial wife had taken up interior decorating; his stepdaughter Elizabeth Jane, now known as Sally Blane, while not a star, was a recognizable name; and Loretta was a major star at Twentieth Century-Fox. Raised to think of the husband as provider and the wife as “help mate,” Belzer knew that, as a lowly accountant, he could not compete with women whose jobs were more lucrative than his own. By 1936, his marriage was over. And Gladys, now pushing fifty, knew her marrying days were over. She had her career, and Loretta and Sally had theirs. More importantly, Gladys had her faith.
Gladys was never meant to be a wife, only a mother. She may not have known what a feminist was, but in her own way she was one. She transformed herself from a lothario’s wife into an interior decorator with an eye for color and detail that won her clients. Even Loretta profited from her mother’s expertise when she wanted the right set for her iconic entrance on her television show. Gladys would have been an ideal wife for a man who could bask in the reflected glory of his wife’s success without feeling any diminution of his manhood. But in the early years of the twentieth century, such males were rare. And, as far as Gladys was concerned, they were not missed. Loretta, too, was meant for motherhood, not marriage. If her first husband, Grant Withers, dubbed her “the steel butterfly,” he did so because she was not destined for anyone’s net. Steel is an alloy, hard and durable. And so was Loretta Young.
CHAPTER 2
The Creation of Loretta Young
In Hollywood, both past and present (but more commonly past), myth and fact have mingled indiscriminately. Myth is elevated to the level of truth, while facts are given a mythic makeover, so that what was drab and ordinary acquires a glossy overlay, like lacquered wood.
But there are facts that are verifiable. Norma Jean Baker did not become Marilyn Monroe in the same way Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) become Vicki Lester in A Star is Born (1937) by picking up her paycheck and discovering that she had been renamed. Although Marilyn has inspired an ever-burgeoning mythology, there was nothing mythic about her name change. Ben Lyons, Fox’s casting director, was obsessed with the Broadway star, Marilyn Miller. He believed Norma Jean was a “Marilyn.” But what about the last name? Allit
erative names, or names with liquid consonants (l, m, n, r), always had cachet. When Norma Jean mentioned that Monroe was her grandfather’s surname, Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe. How Gretchen Young became Loretta Young is another matter: There is the received version, which seems plausible, and the alternative one, which is less so.
The received version: In her autobiography, Colleen Moore recalled the time she was making Her Wild Oat (1927) at First National. Among the extras, was “the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen.” “Little” was not the right word: Loretta was then fourteen. Like Mae Murray, Moore was enchanted by Loretta who, even as a teenager, had the look of a fairy child. Moore arranged for a screen test and was elated with the results. So was First National, but the studio was not happy with Loretta’s teeth, which were too obtrusive. Braces were recommended, to be followed by dental work. But Loretta remained a bit toothy until the early thirties, when her perfectionism—perhaps enhanced by creative dentistry—completed what nature had left unfinished.
Moore, not incidentally, also took credit for the name change: “I named her after the most beautiful doll I had ever had: Loretta.” Loretta, who appeared in two films that starred Moore, was unbilled in both. The second was Naughty but Nice, released in June 1927, six months before Her Wild Oat, which premiered at the end of the year. In all likelihood, the former film made Moore aware of Loretta.
Moore may not have known that shortly after Loretta’s one-day stint in Naughty but Nice, she was at Paramount playing a supporting role in The Magnificent Flirt, filmed between March 6 and March 27, 1928, but released in June of that year. Loretta’s days as an extra had ended, as her Paramount salary showed: She received $633 for three weeks of work. Now billed under the name that Moore had given her, Loretta played Denise Laverne, the daughter of the glamorous Florence Laverne (Florence Vidor), a widow whose flirtatiousness sets the plot in motion: the mother is wooed by a bachelor, the daughter by his nephew. As in a typical boudoir comedy, true love travels a rocky road: The bachelor jumps to the conclusion that Florence is a cocotte when he sees her embracing his nephew, little knowing that she is expressing her happiness about the younger man’s engagement to her daughter. But soon the ground levels off, and the two couples embark on a smooth journey into a world where marriages are made not in heaven, but on Mount Olympus.
Moore may have renamed her, but after The Magnificent Flirt, Loretta was no longer anyone’s protégée. Indeed, she even surpassed her patron. Although Moore proved she was a serious actress in such films as So Big (1925), Lilac Time (1928) and finally The Power and the Glory (1933), the public and critics preferred Colleen Moore, the embodiment of the 1920s flapper, who was wholesomely sexy, but neither as voluptuous nor as brash as Clara Bow. Loretta even became more versatile than Moore, taking on roles seemingly unrelated to her persona and proving that a star’s screen image is a composite of many faces, each of which can be superimposed on a character. The script determined the face, and Loretta’s portrait gallery continued to grow.
The alternative version of Gretchen Young’s metamorphosis is suspect, even though it comes from one of Hollywood’s premier directors. In his autobiography, Mervyn LeRoy (Little Caesar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Waterloo Bridge, etc.), recalled the time he phoned the Young home, inquiring about the availability of Sally Blane for his film, Too Young to Marry (1931). Sally, Gladys informed him, was working in another film; however, Gladys had a daughter who was available and more attractive than Sally. Even then Gladys knew which of her daughters would achieve stardom. LeRoy was an outstanding director, who launched the Warner Bros. gangster cycle with Little Caesar (1930). His memory is another matter. LeRoy wrote that when he took one look at the teenager in his office, he knew automatically that she was no Gretchen: “And so Loretta Young was born that day in my office. She was my first discovery.”
Here the story bifurcates. According to Loretta’s daughter, LeRoy did call the Young residence, asking to speak not to Sally Blane, but to Polly Ann Young. However, Loretta was the one who answered the phone, claiming that her sister was on location, and then asking demurely, “Will I do?” “He must have been very surprised when a fourteen-year-old arrived in his office, but he hired her anyway, as an extra in a movie starring Colleen Moore.” The phone call is not the issue; one could easily imagine Gladys promoting Loretta or Loretta promoting herself. But which sister did LeRoy want, and for what film? Polly Ann had a paucity of credits; she was unbilled in all but two of the seven films she made between 1929 and 1931. By contrast, Sally had appeared in 63 films between 1917 and 1930. LeRoy must have phoned about Sally, who would have been unavailable, going from picture to picture and ending up with sixteen credits in 1931 alone. But Loretta as an extra in a Colleen Moore film directed by Mervyn LeRoy? Loretta appeared in two 1927 Colleen Moore movies, neither of which was directed by LeRoy. The only film LeRoy made with Moore was Oh, Kay! (1927), in which none of the Young sisters appeared. LeRoy wrote that the film he phoned about was Too Young to Marry (1931), based on Broken Dishes, the play that brought Bette Davis to Hollywood. The movie version starred Loretta and Grant Withers. In 1931, neither Loretta nor Sally was working as an extra; for Marry, Loretta received $2,750; Withers, $1,650. When it was released in May 1931, Loretta had been going by her new name for three years. Furthermore, Loretta and Withers met when they were cast in Second Floor Mystery, released in April 1930 and directed by Roy Del Ruth. (Loretta fell madly in love with Withers, and the couple eloped in January 1930, divorcing the following year.)
Who called whom, when, and about what film? If it was Too Young to Marry, the phone call would have been made in fall 1930, with LeRoy inquiring about Sally Blane, not Polly Ann Young. If it was Naughty but Nice, the call would have been made in early 1927, and the caller was most likely the director, Millard Webb, or his designee. Assuming there was such a call (and it’s hard to imagine anyone calling about an extra), Loretta, then fourteen, would have answered the phone in the same way, purring, “Will I do?” in a voice bound to get her an interview. And if the call were intended for Sally, the film would not have mattered. Loretta came first.
The sisters were fiercely competitive. Loretta had just started at First National when she discovered that Sally was making $65 a week at Paramount. Loretta immediately demanded the same—and got it. Of the two, Loretta was Gladys’s favorite. When Loretta received her weekly check, she immediately handed it over to her mother; Sally, on the other hand, only gave Gladys two-thirds of hers. When Sally’s son was mauled by a dog, the damage to one of his eyes was so severe that doctors thought he might lose it. Instead of comforting her distraught sister, Loretta shrugged: “If he loses it, he loses it. That’s up to God.” Loretta and Sally appeared together in The Show of Shows (1929), a tedious musical revue designed to showcase First National’s talent roster, which included Louise Fazenda, Bea Lillie, Lupe Velez, John Barrymore, and Myrna Loy. Chester Morris introduced a number called “Sister Acts” that featured, among others, Loretta and Sally in a Parisian setting, cavorting as mademoiselles and performing as if they were seasoned professionals. Each sister vied for the spotlight, which played no favorites; theirs was, after all, a “sister act.”
Even as a teenager, Loretta understood the importance of self-promotion. She was not so much interested in being an actress as being a star, yet she became both. Stars have their own code of ethics: survival at any cost, even at the expense of a sibling. “It’s not personal, just business,” Loretta might have reasoned. Besides, it was God’s will. Blane did not fare badly. She worked steadily throughout the 1930s. With the advent of television, she easily adjusted to her sister’s new medium, appearing in a few episodes of The Loretta Young Show, in addition to other series that gave her a new life, even if it was on the tube.
Exactly when audiences became aware of a newcomer named Loretta Young depends on when they saw First National’s The Whip Woman, The Head Man, and Scarlet Seas; or MGM’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh; or Paramo
unt’s The Magnificent Flirt. All of the films were released within a few months of each other in 1928: Woman in January, Clown in April, Flirt in June, and Head Man in July. Scarlet Seas opened in New York on 31 December and went into wide release the following year. “Loretta Young” was becoming increasingly familiar. In The Whip Woman, she was merely billed as “the Girl”—but at least she had a credit. In the others, she played a character: Denise Laverne in Flirt, Carol Watts in Head Man, and Simonetta in Clown.
Of the five, Clown was the most important, if for no other reason than its star, Lon Chaney. Although First National’s The Whip Woman was directed by the indefatigable Allan Dwan, it was virtually ignored. Loretta was cast in it because First National was also Colleen Moore’s home studio and the logical one for Loretta. In Head Man, Loretta appeared as the daughter of a senator (comic actor Charles Murray) whose bid for the mayoralty is almost sabotaged by the local political machine. The New York Times (28 May 1928) reported that in The Magnificent Flirt, Loretta responded “nicely” to the “imaginative direction” of H. d’Abbadie d’Arrast. The Times (31 December) also observed that as the sea captain’s daughter in Scarlet Seas, Loretta “spreads pathos,” an emotion that came naturally to her.
Although Simonetta in MGM’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh was Loretta’s biggest role to date, the New York Times’s formidable film critic, Mordaunt Hall, wrote that “her talent as an actress is not called for to any great extent in this picture.” That Loretta even made a film at MGM, the “Tiffany of Studios,” with “More Stars Than There Are In the Heavens” emblazoned on the stationery, had to do with the script. Laugh, Clown, Laugh required a teenager (Loretta was going on fifteen) to play opposite Chaney. The director, Irish-born Herbert Brenon, may have seen Loretta in The Whip Woman and believed she could handle the role; perhaps Moore even used her connections to get Loretta the part. What mattered was credibility. Since Clown was one of MGM’s last silent films, it required the kind of expressive acting that exponents of the art such as Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Chaplin, and, of course, Lon Chaney, had perfected.
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