It would have been impossible for Loretta not to have been smitten by Tyrone Power, who, as Jeanine Basinger phrased it, was not handsome, but “beautiful.” As a Fox contract player, Power was a natural partner for the studio’s resident beauty queen, with whom he made six films. The press declared them an “item.” To Zanuck, Loretta and Power were an investment, which he had no intention of losing to marriage. Zanuck discouraged any further relationship with Loretta by setting up a romance between Power and his latest discovery, Olympic medalist Sonja Henie, whose talent lay in her spectacular skating, not her acting. With Henie, there was no hope of real romance, nor would anyone think of her and Power as an “item.” With this arrangement, Zanuck could keep his beauties at his studio. Power and Henie made one movie together, Thin Ice (1937), after which, one would like to think, Zanuck decreed that Power deserved better scripts and better costars. One movie with Henie was punishment enough.
Henie was no beauty, and Loretta was off limits, both by fiat and by choice. Loretta had no problem with Zanuck’s ultimatum. But she was always salary conscious. When she discovered that Zanuck found Power a greater asset to the studio than herself, she confronted him, complaining that in all the years she had been at Fox, she had never received a raise, unlike Power, who had received two. Worse, Zanuck committed the unpardonable sin of never sending her flowers. Power was the bigger star, and Zanuck knew his name meant more at the box office than Loretta’s. Besides, she received $4,000 a week for Suet (1938), her last picture with Power—not bad for a film in which she was eclipsed by Power and the newest addition to Fox’s talent roster, Annabella, who got the best notices of any of them. Annabella was Power’s kind of woman—temporarily, at least—and they soon married. He and Loretta remained friends. With Loretta, it was simple: One romance ends, another begins. When Power died in 1958, Loretta, now a television star, made a dramatic entrance at his funeral at Hollywood Memorial Park, coming straight from the set of her series, The Loretta Young Show. The episode being filmed that day required her to play an Asian. Since Loretta did not change her costume, she created a photo op, even upstaging the deceased.
One would think that she would have had a crush on Cary Grant, with whom she made two films: Born to Be Bad, which she “thought … was perfectly terrible,” and The Bishop’s Wife, which really belonged to Grant and the great character actors Monty Woolley, Elsa Lanchester, James Gleason, and Gladys Cooper. Grant paid little attention to Loretta, spending what she considered an inordinate amount of time “dissecting” his scenes with the director, Henry Koster. Finally, she confronted him: “I don’t mind your doing this because I know you’re trying to get a better film, but please don’t do it around me.” A true gentleman, he never did it again.
Loretta’s oddest relationship was with director Edward Sutherland, the oldest man (eighteen years her senior) she ever dated. He was not only a father figure; he was old enough to be her father. Since she never appeared in any of his films, the most famous of which were W. C. Fields vehicles (International House, Poppy, Mississippi), they must have met on some social occasion. For a staunch Catholic like Loretta, going out with Sutherland was even more problematic than it was with Tracy. Sutherland was now on his fourth marriage; his second wife had been the enigmatic Louise Brooks. Like Tracy, Sutherland was what Loretta was seeking: He was paternal, erudite, sophisticated (London-born, he still had an accent), and good for a night on the town. Although Sutherland imbibed, Loretta never felt that she had to save him from drink. What Loretta sought in Sutherland was a combination father-friend. What Sutherland sought was a woman who could give him what none of his wives could: fulfillment, sexual and otherwise—a love that heats the blood and cools the mind.
Sutherland’s understanding of Loretta was so accurate that he seemed to have had access to her unconscious: “Loretta idealizes, and she is rebuffed by the slightest intimacy. A platonic love would suit her, I think. I hope she marries again. When real love comes along, perhaps she won’t be so finicky.” To which Loretta replied: “I don’t blame him. He was and is a perfectly darling man, but I just didn’t want to get married. I wasn’t especially in love with him. I was in love with love.”
“I was in love with love.” She was in love with a word and all it conjured up. And the word became flesh in the person of Clark Gable.
CHAPTER 9
Heeding the Call of the Wild
When Loretta learned she would be costarring with Clark Cable in The Call of the Wild (1935) and working for the fourth time with William Wellman, she was elated. She was prepared to have a crush on her leading man, salving her Catholic conscience by limiting her crushes to fantasies more romantic than erotic. But that was before she went on location at Lake Chelan in Washington—although it would have been the same if she and Gable were in Nevada as originally scheduled. But a change of climate required a change of plan, and the state of Washington was a logical stand in for the Yukon at the turn of the twentieth century. Wellman was in his element with The Call of the Wild. The more masculine the milieu, the more legible the Wellman signature. From the opening scene—with men slugging it out in the mud, bars thronged with hard-drinking prospectors, and poker players at their tables too absorbed in their game to ogle the chorines who languidly went through their routines—there was no doubt that The Call of the Wild was a William Wellman film, the only one in which a dog upstaged the stars.
Anyone who read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild never forgot Buck, the combination Saint Bernard and Scotch shepherd, as London describes him, from whose point of view the story is told. Buck is indisputably the main character. London’s empathetic prose makes the reader wince every time Buck is mistreated by his sadistic owner or forced to contend with emaciated sled dogs so crazed by the smell of food that they attack each other. His point of view informs the novella, making it impossible to think of any of the other characters as real people, but only as obstacles that Buck must overcome in his Darwinian struggle for survival. To the fiercely socialist London, Buck was “the dominant primordial beast,” relegated to the underclass in a world that exploits laborers, even depriving them of their identity. Buck does not even qualify as a wage slave, since he is not paid for his services. He is simply a beast of burden, serving the dominant class but giving it a run for its money. Docile, Buck is not.
The film is so radically different that it is practically an original screenplay inspired by the novella. Virtually all of London’s characters have been eliminated except Buck. In the novella, he heeds the call of the wild and joins a wolf pack, becoming the head and protector of his brood, staking out his domain, which mortals enter at their peril. The only other character that made the transition from novella to film was John Thornton (Gable, called Jack in the film), who is killed in the original, a fate that would not be visited upon the star. A host of other characters were added, including a female costar (Loretta) and a male sidekick (Jack Oakie). If the film were made a decade later during the Lassie craze, a more faithful re-creation of the novella might have been possible. But screenwriter Gene Fowler heeded his own call of the wild (as did Gable and Loretta) and concentrated on the Gold Rush, and the extremes of rugged individualism and murderous greed that it generated.
When “Shorty” Houlihan (Jack Oakie), one of many invented characters, learns about an unclaimed gold mine, he enlists the support of another adventurer, Jack Thornton. Guided only by a map that Shorty has sketched from memory, the two make their way into a world as awesomely beautiful as it is dangerous, not knowing that the real heirs to the mine, John Blake and his wife Claire (Loretta)—created as a plot complication, with Claire as the love interest—have also set out to claim it. A storm sends Blake in search of help, leaving his wife to contend with the elements, especially the wolves. When Thornton and Shorty find her, she insists on joining them, unaware of their own plans. Claire—and, for that matter, Loretta—was indifferent to Thornton/Gable at first, but few women could resist Gable’s penetrating eyes. Wh
en he looked at Loretta bundled in fur, it was as if he could see through all the insulation. Four years later, his eyes still had their disrobing power. The first time we see Rhett Butler (Gable) in Gone with the Wind, he is standing at the foot of the staircase, looking up at Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) so knowingly that Scarlett remarks, “He knows what I look like without my shimmy.”
During the making of the film, Loretta was having her first real affair, the others being romantic interludes re-enacted in dreams and reveries. But Gable was no fantasy. Neither of them suspected that the fate of their characters would, in part, be theirs. When John Blake, who was presumed dead, turns up, Claire’s relationship with Thornton comes to an end. This was the age of the new morality, spearheaded by the reinforced production code and the increasingly powerful National Legion of Decency. The writers (chiefly Gene Fowler) could have had someone discover Blake’s body, so that true love could triumph. But who would object to a romance that could not continue once the missing spouse reappears? The costars paid no heed to that aspect of their characters’ fate and continued their affair during a projected six-week shoot that dragged on for three months because of the weather. Gable and Loretta were two professionals who knew there is a time to work and a time to make love, the latter in private. Perhaps the weather contributed.
Claire challenged Loretta only in the sense that she was on location and had to rough it, wading through water, catching duffle bags as they were thrown to her, and going down the river in a makeshift raft. As far as characterization went, there was hardly any—only the transition from indifference to devotion, with a bit of ocular foreplay. That Loretta could easily manage. Wellman had no interest in her character; his was a world of men, fearless and resilient (e.g., Wings, The Ox-Bow Incident, Yellow Sky, The Story of G.I. Joe) and occasionally tough dames (Midnight Mary, Roxy Hart). As a “What price, Hollywood?” film, A Star Is Born (1937) may seem atypical of Wellman, but the main characters are a fading star who commits suicide, and his widow who displays incredible strength when she makes her first public appearance after his death.
The star of Wild was Gable, and his costar was Buck, who, in a more faithful adaptation, might have been billed above the title. Buck’s emotional range (menacing, dangerous, affectionate, and, at one point, poignantly selfless) makes it possible for Thornton to win a $1,000 bet if Buck pulls a staggering load a hundred yards. Buck was a real actor; Lassie (or rather, the myriad of Lassies) was only a personality.
Although by contemporary standards it is hard to believe that The Call of the Wild incurred censorship problems, it did. After a hue and cry over films with women who were braless, promiscuous, or both; couples cohabiting outside of wedlock; unmarried mothers; hard drinkers of both sexes; charismatic gangsters; and Mae West, whose films were seasoned with double entendres, the National Legion of Decency was formed in April 1934. Two months later, the Production Code Administration came into existence, with Joseph Ignatius Breen as production code administrator. After a decade of salutary neglect, which Breen considered far too salutary, the production code would be rigorously enforced. Breen took a dim view of sex, marital or otherwise, animal or human. The film posed two problems: Claire and Thornton must not engage in a “sex affair,” and scenes with Buck and his “lady friend” (Breen’s euphemism for a female wolf) should not carry any “unpleasant connotations”—meaning that there must be no indication that they copulate. Breen was truly catholic when it came to sex: He regarded human and animal intercourse with similar contempt, believing only that the sacrament of matrimony justified the former, but never on screen; the same was true of animals who could not even sniff each other, even though they may be on the verge of a “sex affair.”
Once they became lovers, Loretta and Gable knew they had to be discreet, even though their off screen behavior during the shoot reflected more than two actors rehearsing their scenes or discussing their roles. Studio contracts contained a morals clause, typified by the one MGM’s Irving Thalberg drew up for Clark Gable in 1931:
The artist agrees to conduct himself with due regard to public conventions and morals, and agrees that he will not do or commit any act that will degrade him in society, or bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn, ridicule—or [any act] that will shock, insult, offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the Motion Picture industry in general.
Golden Age Hollywood was a closed community, where powerful studio heads and their publicists operated under the radar to keep indiscretions from exploding into national headlines. George Cukor’s homosexuality was common knowledge—but not to the general public. MGM’s Howard Strickling kept Cukor’s indiscretions out of the press, which considered him to be a “woman’s director” and nothing more. When producer Anderson Lawler mistook an undercover cop for a male prostitute to whom he offered cocaine, Zanuck intervened, and the charges were dropped. Sometimes, when either a murder or a bizarre death was involved, even Zanuck was powerless. Nineteen twenty-two was not Hollywood’s glorious year. The still unsolved William Desmond Taylor murder case adversely affected the career of Mabel Normand, supposedly the last to see him alive. Fatty Arbuckle’s wild San Francisco weekend that resulted in the gruesome death of starlet Virginia Rappe turned the beloved comic into a pariah. Hollywood would behave similarly if the unmarried Loretta gave birth to Gable’s child. No one in Wilkes-Barre or Oshkosh cared about Cukor’s gay escapades. Only movie buffs would even know who he was. But Loretta was a household name. As Hollywood’s preeminent Catholic, she would have been excoriated by the religious right and the National Legion of Decency. Her mortal sin would have occasioned “wages of sin” sermons. She would have become as unemployable as the blacklistees of the late 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps she could have found work at a Poverty Row studio like Monogram, Republic, or later, PRC. She could have worked in theatre, except that she knew she could never excel on the stage. Her media were film, radio, and finally, television.
In the Gospel according to John, Jesus saved an adulteress from death by stoning when he revealed the sins of her persecutors through symbols that he sketched on the ground which, in some way, they understood. He then challenged them: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). To rid herself of guilt, Loretta might have recalled Jesus’s final words to the woman: “Has no one condemned you?” he asked. “No one, sir,” she replied. “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” But Loretta’s guilt had become so all-consuming that even Jesus’s words, cited chapter and verse, would have had no effect. First century Jerusalem was another time, another place. In 1935, it was not a question of absolution, but of survival. No one could rescue her except her mother, her doctor, and particularly Zanuck—but only if they worked out a credible scenario. Abortion was anathema, leaving her no choice but to bear the child others would have called a mistake, but which she termed a mortal sin. As a Catholic, she knew about the sacrament of penance and no doubt confessed what she had done. But whatever penance she was given was not enough. Loretta imposed her own penance, which lasted until the end of her life.
Loretta was an actress in an industry where image was all, and hers could be irreparably sullied. Since neither murder nor drugs—unpardonable sins in neo-right wing Hollywood (even though the latter never vanished from the movie scene)—were involved, all Loretta needed was the celluloid wall of silence, buttressed by the Church. Rumors and conjectures were inevitable, but the public had to remain ignorant of the facts, notably that the child had been placed in an orphanage and later adopted by Loretta, portrayed in the press as a woman eager to embrace motherhood, however vicariously. Would it work? Loretta was an excellent actress. She would make it work.
In March 1935, Loretta’s immediate problem was fulfilling her next assignment. She had been loaned out to Paramount to star in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades (1936). Such was the price of being the costume queen. She was scheduled to report to the studio on 30 January. By 8 February, she still had not arriv
ed. DeMille grew impatient; to him, she was replaceable. He considered Sylvia Sidney, whose screen test convinced him she was not medieval enough. Next, he turned to Elissa Landi, one of the stars of his hugely successful Sign of the Cross (1932). Landi was unavailable. DeMille had no choice but to go with Loretta, shooting around her until she was able to join the production. Doing so was not that difficult, since Henry Wilcoxon as Richard I (Richard the Lionheart) had the bigger part, but not the billing. Loretta suspected she was pregnant in late January 1935; by February, she knew she was. When Gable was informed, he was sympathetic but bewildered: “I thought she knew how to take care of herself. After all, she had been a married woman,” he confided to Gladys. Married, yes. A consummated marriage? Loretta was probably not ready for sex when she eloped with Grant Withers. Once she learned a week after their wedding that Withers’s ex-wife was suing him for alimony, she must have been even more inhibited, frightened at the idea of any intimacy that could result in conception. Elopement was bad enough, but with a divorced man? Loretta’s first sexual encounter must have been with Gable. Everything else was amateur night.
Sometime in March, Loretta made her first appearance on the set of The Crusades. Supposedly, she was the main character. She was billed first, but under the title—she had been upstaged by the producer-director, who was giving moviegoers another Cecil B. DeMille production. By the mid 1930s, DeMille was known for his ability to integrate sex, religion, and history into a pseudo-spectacle that looked like Joseph’s multicolored coat. Occasionally (e.g., Cleopatra, The Sign of the Cross), he at least worked within a historical canvas on which he lavished his own color. “Directed by Cecil B. DeMille” was his calling card, inviting audiences, particularly those with a limited knowledge of history, to learn a paucity of facts and experience a wealth of invention.
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