I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood's Legendary Actresses Page 6

  Loretta Young

  I’ve written before about the way the studios controlled the information that reached the public. When they wanted to, they could enforce a lockdown the Central Intelligence Agency would envy. But within the industry, secrets were impossible to keep. People heard stories, people gossiped. Often, the information came directly from the parties involved.

  Everybody knew who was gay, and with very few exceptions, everybody knew who was having an affair, and with whom. An actress who was stepping out with her leading man would mention something to her hairdresser, who would mention it to his boyfriend, who would promptly call Hedda or Louella, who would run a blind item that nobody outside the business could decipher but that served as a sharp jab in the ribs to everyone in the business.

  For years my publicist was a woman named Helen Ferguson, who had been an actress in the silent days and then segued into publicity when the parts got scarce. Helen was also the publicist and close friend of Barbara Stanwyck’s, who suggested I hire her—one of my smarter moves. Besides impeccably managing things for me, Helen would often treat me to some of the inside dope she was privy to.

  So, one way or the other, we all heard the story about Loretta’s illegitimate child from her brief affair with Clark Gable. They had met on the location of the aptly named Call of the Wild in 1935, which was made at Fox by William Wellman.

  It was not Loretta’s first fling with a married man. There had been an affair with Spencer Tracy a few years earlier, but pregnancy involved an entirely different level of complication. Because she was a strict Catholic, Loretta wouldn’t get an abortion. In those days, actresses who became pregnant went to the hospital for what would be announced as “an appendectomy” or “exhaustion.” Some must have had serious stamina issues, because they were hospitalized for exhaustion every couple of years.

  For her part, Loretta went away on a lengthy vacation, had the child, stashed her in an orphanage, and then doubled back and adopted her, naming her Judy. It was a neat end around, and it wasn’t the first time that gambit was pulled. Years earlier, William de Mille, the brother of Cecil B. and a good director in his own right, as well as a very married man, got his girlfriend pregnant. She went away and had the baby, a boy, whereupon Cecil adopted the child. He simply couldn’t stomach the idea of a DeMille being cast out into the world, illegitimate or not. Besides, Cecil’s children were girls, and he liked the idea of having a boy around the house. William’s wife didn’t know the truth, nor did his daughter Agnes, who later became a famous choreographer, nor did Cecil’s own children.

  Cecil and William struck a bargain that the boy—Cecil named him Richard—would only be told the true story of his parentage when one of the brothers died. Richard went through the first thirty-odd years of his life thinking he was an anonymous foundling who got lucky. It wasn’t until William de Mille died in 1955 that he learned the truth, rocking him to his core.

  The true story of Judy Lewis’s birth never leaked out until years later, after Clark had died, and Judy wrote a book about her exceedingly strange upbringing. How did she find out the truth? Her fiancé told her two weeks before they got married. The publication of the book resulted in Loretta’s not speaking to her daughter for more than ten years.

  Even before that, though, the real account was widely accepted in Hollywood, mostly because anyone who met Judy couldn’t help but be struck by her strong resemblance to her father—she had his broad face, his warm eyes, and early in her life, his jug ears. The ears were a real problem, so Loretta had Judy undergo plastic surgery on them when she was only seven years old.

  I spent some time with Judy when she was an adult, and she was a lovely person. She couldn’t have had an easy childhood. For Loretta, Judy was a reminder of her having strayed from the straight and narrow path, so she was less than affectionate with the child. “Remember, you’re a reflection of me,” she would tell her. Although Judy carried the surname of Lewis—Loretta’s husband, whom she married years after she had Judy, was named Tom Lewis—her stepfather never actually adopted her.

  Judy met her real father precisely once, when she was about fifteen, and her mother and Clark were making another movie together, called Key to the City. Judy came home one day to find Clark sitting in the living room of her home. They had the usual chitchat—he asked her about school, boys she was seeing—and after a while, he said he had to go. She walked him to the door, he kissed her on the forehead, and he left. She never saw him again.

  The interesting thing was that whenever the subject of Clark would come up, Loretta didn’t have all that much good to say about him. “Clark Gable . . . to me, was not so much an actor as he was a star,” she once remarked, years after Clark’s death. “Spencer Tracy . . . was such a magnificent actor that he was also a star, but he was never the star that Clark Gable was, because he didn’t have, I guess, the magnitude or the sex appeal or whatever you want to call it that Clark Gable had.”

  I believe that is referred to as passive aggression.

  Judy worked on Loretta’s TV show for a few years, then became an actress herself. In her forties, she went back to college and became a clinical psychologist with a specialty in marriage and family therapy, helping to untie the emotional knots that her own family had never been able to articulate, let alone deal with.

  Recently Loretta’s daughter-in-law gave an interview in which she announced that Loretta had told her that Judy Lewis was the result of rape; that a drunk Clark Gable had come into Loretta’s train compartment on the way back to Hollywood and forced himself on her.

  Well.

  In response to that retroactive piece of character assassination, I can say that I knew Bill Wellman quite well, and he was firmly convinced that Clark and Loretta were having an affair during the making of the film, to the extent that it became a detriment to the movie.

  Besides that, I knew Clark Gable, and he simply wasn’t the kind of man to force himself on a woman. At least one woman who knew whereof she spoke told me that he was very courtly, a complete gentleman of a type that was rarely found in Hollywood, or, for that matter, anywhere else. Clark and Loretta didn’t have any choice about how they dealt with the matter of their out-of-wedlock child. Today, unmarried people can have children and nobody thinks anything of it, but in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, an illegitimate birth would have destroyed a star’s career, as Ingrid Bergman discovered when she became pregnant by Roberto Rossellini. She was denounced in Congress—as if it were anybody’s business but Ingrid’s—and was ostracized by Hollywood for years until things cooled down.

  Loretta had to be petrified during her entire pregnancy; not only her career, but the well-being of her entire family, whom she supported to a great degree, hung in the balance. Given what she had gone through, and that she had made the same decision as Ingrid—to proceed with the pregnancy—Loretta might have considered standing up for Bergman, but she kept silent.

  Neither her pregnancy nor anything else ever seemed to faze Loretta.

  She had epic battles with Darryl Zanuck when she was under contract at Fox. Darryl used to grouse that she continually rejected the costumes he chose for her by saying, “I’m a fashion plate. I don’t care whether you like it or not. I am known as one of the best-dressed women in motion pictures.”

  “My wife wouldn’t wear a dress like that,” Darryl retorted, which she followed with a withering, impolitic put-down: “Your wife isn’t a movie star. I am.” As the argument escalated, she torched the bridge: “You ruin every woman you touch.” It wasn’t long before Loretta left Fox, to the great relief of both her and Zanuck.

  Loretta was one tough lady. Her sister Sally said, “She didn’t seem to mind rejection like I did. She didn’t take it personally. . . . Any rejection she got just made Loretta more determined. ‘What do they know?’ she would say.”

  Loretta was well positioned in the business socially as well as psychologically, and she managed her career with great canniness. She was a movie star
for thirty-five years, and when movie roles began to dry up in the early 1950s, she simply segued to television.

  She explained what made her switch mediums: She and the family were watching TV, a suspense program. A woman walked into a dark room and started to get undressed. The camera moved in on her until she was in close-up, whereupon two hands came into the shot and strangled her. Loretta’s children started to cry, because they’d never seen a murder in their living room before.

  With that, Loretta decided to do a show that wouldn’t scare viewers, but would inspire and elevate them instead, and had great success for nearly ten years. As always, she was smart about how she approached the matter. At that time, a network program involved making more than thirty episodes a year. Loretta realized that they all couldn’t be good, and set her criteria at ten good shows annually.

  The Loretta Young Show, which began airing in 1953, rehearsed for two days and was shot in three. Loretta found that she liked the pace, that doing that much production, that much work, sped up her metabolism and was perfectly capable of making her a better actress than she had been.

  At the time she went into television, it was regarded as a huge step down from the movies, so a lot of tongue clucking went on. Dore Schary, who was running MGM at the time, told her she was making a big mistake and would never get a job in the movies again.

  But Loretta went ahead anyway. Her reasoning was simple: “I couldn’t pick my own roles in the movies. When I had my TV show, that’s when I had a good time.” I think that finally attaining absolute control was a factor in her happiness. She also felt that after winning an Oscar for The Farmer’s Daughter, there was nowhere to go but down in the movie business.

  On her show, an anthology series, Loretta played everything from nuns to hookers to Chinese wives. Each story had a moral, which she reemphasized in her farewell at its end. Another trademark of the show was her entrance at the beginning of every episode, in which she sashayed through a doorway in a gorgeous gown. It was very glamorous, but it made Loretta ripe for parody. Imogene Coca did a hilarious bit playing her, trying to waft through the doorway, only to get her dress wedged. Watching Coca try to get her dress unstuck while maintaining her gracious smile and serene composure was priceless.

  How smart was Loretta? She got to keep all the dresses.

  The emphasis on clothes and moral uplift implied that the audience for the show was predominantly female, and her audience was extremely loyal. The show ran into the early 1960s, although it doesn’t get revived today—the only black-and-white half-hour TV shows that really survive are The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and The Twilight Zone. For modern audiences, Loretta’s career basically ends in 1953, even though she continued to make very occasional TV appearance into the 1980s.

  It was a very long run for an actress who was more highly regarded for her luminous beauty than as an acting talent, her Oscar notwithstanding. But she maintained her looks as assiduously as she maintained her career, and a fifty-year stand at or near the top of show business is not to be underestimated.

  The amazing thing about Loretta is that she walked away with nary a tremor. She had done it all and decided to get out while the getting was good. I think her religion insulated her from the normal insecurity that afflicts people in the acting profession.

  After you retire, there is really only one question: How do you fill the days? But Loretta had always regulated her life—movies were a component, and in time movies were replaced by TV, and after that she turned to religious activism and to being the perfect hostess. She always insisted that she had lived her personal life concurrently with her professional life, and that’s certainly possible—Loretta and Irene Dunne were cut from the same bolt of cloth, except I think Irene actually practiced her religion to a deeper extent.

  If Loretta had a weakness, it was her conventional taste in scripts as well as performance. Opposite Orson Welles in his film The Stranger, she plays a woman who unknowingly marries an escaped Nazi war criminal. After she stumbles upon the truth, she has one great line: “When you kill me, don’t touch me!”

  The line needs to be read with defiance, with theatrical bravura—imagine what Stanwyck or Davis would have done with it—but Loretta didn’t have the temperament for the big moment. She had great strength in her own life, but not when it came to the work—she always wanted to be, had to be, a lady. She plays the moment down, and the scene doesn’t have the kick it should have.

  There might have been a gap between what Loretta actually was and how she wished to be perceived, but that’s not unusual in the general population, let alone the movie business.

  How she managed to reconcile her piety with the fact of her illegitimate daughter is a question nobody has ever answered. But she kept her chin high and sailed through life with the appearance of complete self-assurance.

  THE FORTIES

  While many of the actresses of the 1930s were virtual goddesses, World War II started a vogue for more approachable women, who might be categorized as girls next door.

  These could range from June Allyson to Betty Hutton, Teresa Wright to Donna Reed. I’ve always suspected that MGM’s Andy Hardy films played a big role in developing this public taste. Even though they were modestly budgeted B movies, the Hardy films were hugely popular, and the studio had a policy of dropping newly signed ingénues into them. The acting bar was set low enough that none of them would be embarrassed by her performance; all any of them had to do was be charming and hold the camera.

  The other studios saw how young actresses like Judy Garland, Donna Reed, and Lana Turner were embraced by audiences and began developing their own rosters of wholesome starlets. Personally, if I ever saw Donna Reed walking her dog anywhere near my house, I would have immediately moved next door.

  To an extent, I’ve been writing about success stories, but the truth of the movie business is that it often attracts people who have innate instabilities, and the experience of the industry only widens the fault lines in their personalities. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t discuss some of the sadder lives that I came across.

  Betty Hutton always acted as if she’d been shot out of a cannon—she was the female version of wild men like Mickey Rooney or Harry Ritz or, if you prefer, a WASP version of Carmen Miranda. This was fine when there was a war on and there was a great deal of anxiety to be displaced. But after the war, she seemed out of tempo with the times and her career ended quickly. From a rapid rise to an even more rapid fall, Hutton’s career ran for just about ten years.

  But she will remain important in film history if only because in 1944 she made The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek for Preston Sturges, a film that inspires one single question: How did they get away with it?

  Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl who really likes soldiers. So much so that she goes on a date, gets drunk, and gets pregnant by a GI whose name she can only remember as something like “Ratzkywatzky.” (Sturges does throw in a quick line about a hurry-up wedding, but if you blink you’ll miss it.)

  Trudy needs a husband, and fast, so her mortified father enlists Eddie Bracken, who was the 1940s version of Harold Lloyd—shy, sweet, meaning well at all times, and a bit nervous.

  It’s an amazing film—amazingly accomplished, amazingly audacious—and Hutton is remarkable in it. Trudy is far from self-aware, but she’s sincere. In spite of the fact that the movie is a raucous farce, you’re pulling for her if for no other reason than she’d be a great mother. Scattered, but great.

  Nobody realized it at the time, but Betty Hutton was doing something extraordinary: embodying female energy unleashed. After the Sturges film, she starred in some successful musicals, stepped in when Judy Garland couldn’t make it through Annie Get Your Gun at MGM, and was one of the stars of DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.

  It was right around the time of the DeMille film that I went over to Paramount to see some friends. When the conversation turned to Betty, I was shown a large sandbag up in the flies of the
soundstage that had her name painted on it, with an arrow pointing downward. The stagehands had amused themselves by fantasizing an arcane way of killing Hutton. My friends proceeded to tell me how heartily Hutton was disliked by the studio rank and file, not to mention the front office.

  Betty Hutton

  It seemed that she was a prima donna, nasty to underlings, and generally a deeply unpleasant person. I was a young actor at the time, and I went away determined to be the kind of actor who the crew liked and respected. Besides that, I was not eager to have a sandbag drop anywhere in my vicinity.

  It would take thirty years for the rest of the world, and for women in general, to even begin to catch up to what Betty Hutton was representing in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and by that time she was out of show business and living as a housekeeper in the rectory of a Catholic church in Rhode Island.

  It was the culmination of a long slide down that neither she nor anybody else seemed able to stop. She walked out of her Paramount contract when they wouldn’t let her choreographer husband direct one of her pictures, and if that sandbag was any indication, the studio was glad to see her go. A number of TV specials failed, so did a series, and so did her marriages—all four of them—until finally, there was a complete breakdown.

  Hutton made only one more public appearance, with my friend Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies. She was so fragile, so tremulous—she looked as though she might collapse at any moment. When she died in Palm Springs in 2007, she was living on Social Security in a very modest apartment and estranged from her three children.

  There wasn’t enough money to bury Betty Hutton, so the undertaker called Watson Webb, another friend of mine who had been a premiere film editor at 20th Century Fox. Watson was one of the few editors to have a gold membership card in his union, and was independently wealthy.

  The undertaker knew Watson had been in the movie business and thought he might have some idea whom to call. Watson didn’t bother calling anybody; he wrote a check to cover the cost of Betty’s burial. He had never even met her, but he did it because somebody had to take care of a poor woman who had once been a great star. That’s the sort of man he was.