Hollywood Madonna (17 page)

Two years later, Loretta found herself in the
Ladies in Love
remake,
Three Blind Mice
(1938), which resurrected—and not for the last time—the trio of husband hunters, who, like the women in Akins’s play, decide that to trap a millionaire, they must pretend to be millionaires so they can move in the right circles. Akins did not even receive a “Suggested by” credit; rather, the source listed was a play by Stephen Powys, the author of
Walk with Music
. But Powys’s play did not premiere until 1940; when it was written, when Fox bought it, and if it opened in its original form remains unknown.
Three Blind Mice
was so radically different from Akins’s play that Fox felt there was no reason to acknowledge the playwright, even though there would not have been a
Ladies in Love
or a
Three Blind Mice
without her.

The “three blind mice” were three sisters—played by Loretta, Pauline Moore, and Marjorie Weaver—who use their inheritance to leave Kansas and try their luck in Santa Barbara. Loretta is romanced by the two male leads, Joel McCrea and David Niven, while all Weaver can attract is the buffoonish Stuart Erwin, who turns out to be her ideal mate, without the baggage that weighs down the wealthy. Loretta has the more difficult choice. In an early scene, when McCrea and Loretta are lolling around in their bathing suits on a stretch of sand, a clueless Niven does everything but bless their union. The scene has an understated sexuality about it; neither McCrea nor Loretta seemed shy about lying together in such close proximity. In fact, they look as if they enjoyed it and probably did. They seem headed to the altar until McCrea confesses he has no money. Will Loretta choose love or money? McCrea never gave a sexually charged performance; his were always subtly calibrated. Sexuality was regulated, like a thermostat that was never raised beyond the comfort level. Loretta knew how to raise the temperature to cozy warm, and when she did, McCrea responded effortlessly. McCrea was exactly the
kind of actor to whom she could give herself—in fantasy terms only—because both understood the difference between propriety and passion: the former meant for the camera, the latter for later.

If all three sisters were to pair off with their respective husbands, Moore seemed to be the odd sister out. The only possible pairing was the provincial Moore and the worldly Niven. Strangely, this worked: Niven plays a rancher with cattle and chickens, and Moore plays a girl who grew up on a chicken farm, giving them at least poultry in common. Three sisters, three husbands, only one of whom, Niven, is a bona fide millionaire.

Three Blind Mice
did not mark the end of the gold diggers movie; two years later, the theme resurfaced in the Fox musical,
Moon over Miami
(1940), and again in 1946, in
Three Little Girls in Blue.
With the advent of CinemaScope, Fox remade it again, this time with Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe as the trio in
How to Marry a Millionaire
(1953). But the theme goes back even earlier, to Anita Loos’s novel
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1925), in which Lorelei Lee and her sidekick do not need a third party to achieve their goal.

Loretta gave a less satisfying performance in
Three Blind Mice
than she did in
Ladies in Love
, which at least proved that attempting to ensnare a rich husband (which may occasion temporary euphoria) usually ends in disillusionment.
Three Blind Mice
insisted that the three sisters, unlike Chekhov’s, found their mates, however circuitously. Loretta was more effective in a fairy tale that went sour than in one that was cloyingly sweet.

Less than a year after Judy’s birth, Loretta was a mother again—on screen. She looked unusually radiant, perhaps because the adoption scenario was finished, and in a few months Judy would be ensconced in a San Francisco orphanage. Loretta no longer had to visit the house in Venice on the sly. Gladys could return to decorating the homes of the famous, and Loretta to the only profession she knew. It was picture-hopping time, and Loretta made four in 1936, five in 1937, four in 1938, and three in 1939, her last year at Fox. For Loretta, a mother’s place was before the camera.

Private Number
was released in early June 1936, a month before Judy’s removal to St. Elizabeth’s. Insiders must have exchanged smiles, or smirks, when Patsy Kelly described Robert Taylor, Loretta’s leading man in the film, as being “as handsome as Gable.” Loretta laughed knowingly, but innocently, and replied: “I’ll say so.” It was not exactly an apt comparison. The young Taylor, like the young Power, had a masculine
beauty that complemented Loretta’s shimmering femininity. Gable was the opposite; he was all high testosterone and devilish eyes that could seduce without exerting the slightest effort.

By 1936, audiences had become accustomed to the class distinction film—either rich boy/poor girl, or vice versa—a plot template common to both serious drama and screwball comedy.
Private Number
was a woman’s film, with Loretta triumphing over falsehoods and perjured testimony that would have felled an ordinary mortal, which her character was not. She was Ellen, a maid in an affluent household, ruled by a demonically creepy butler (Basil Rathbone). When he sees Ellen, he is taken with her beauty, suggesting that he can help her “advance,” which she does without having to lose her virtue. The son (Taylor) is also smitten with her, so much so that class barriers dissolve and they secretly marry. But other barriers arise.
Private Number
would not be a woman’s film without Ellen undergoing a series of trials that would have broken the spirits of an ordinary mortal. The rebuffed butler dredges up her past, including a prison stint. When Ellen becomes pregnant, her in-laws threaten to have the marriage annulled. The courtroom sequence is a free-for-all, with false testimony, histrionics, and the climactic arrival of Taylor, who vindicates his wife and embraces fatherhood.

The one scene Loretta has with her newborn is done with uncommon tenderness. Judy was about three months old when
Private Number
started production. Loretta transferred the affection that she could not lavish on Judy to the infant in the film. In that one scene, Loretta displays the kind of maternalism that transcends mere acting. Or was the unfeigned love that she lavished on the infant in the basinet her last act of motherhood before she consigned Judy to St. Elizabeth’s?

Loretta’s return to Fox did not result in better roles. But there were no great roles for any actress at the studio. Zanuck was only interested in promoting the careers of those whose names would guarantee an audience: namely Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, and perhaps the up and coming Tyrone Power. Temple and Henie had gifts that had little to do with acting, at which neither excelled. Temple became an industry, with coloring books, cutouts, and even a non-alcoholic cocktail named after her. She was also an extraordinary child star, whose deficiencies as an actress became evident when she moved into her teens. There was a sad ordinariness about her work in her last films (e.g.,
Adventure in Baltimore
,
The Story of Seabiscuit
, and
A Kiss For Corliss
), which revealed a young woman no different from the generic brand that had been banished to B movie limbo. But there had never been a skater in film like Henie,
whose bubbly personality and spectacular feats on the ice (a sound stage at Fox was converted into a rink just for her) ensured her popularity for a decade, after which she began appearing in icecapades, lavishly staged with Broadway-worthy choreography. Temple and Henie were flavor-of-the month stars, with careers that lasted sixteen and twelve years, respectively. Temple’s could easily have ended in 1942, ten years after she made her screen debut, since her roles from 1944 to 1949 could have been played by others. Similarly, Henie could have left Hollywood after
Iceland
(1942), rather than following the now forgotten
Countess of Monte Cristo
(1948)
.
Loretta’s career, on the other hand, spanned more than three decades. She might have consoled herself with the realization that, for the time being, Zanuck was not turning out Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated films. Between 1936 and 1939, the studio could only boast of two Oscars, both in the supporting category: Alice Brady for
In Old Chicago
and Walter Brennan for
Kentucky
(both 1938). None of Loretta’s films were even Oscar material.

But Loretta was useful to Zanuck. When he decided to make
Ramona
(1936), Fox’s first full-length Technicolor feature, he knew he had no other actress for the title role. If anyone could photograph well in color, it was Loretta. The director was Fox’s specialist in Americana, Henry King, ideally suited to re-create 1870s Southern California. The studio publicists concocted a story that must have given every wannabe hope. On the basis of “
exhaustive tests
… made of practically every feminine star and some hundred-unknowns,” Loretta was chosen to play the convent-educated heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1886 novel, whose strongest appeal was to young women. The “exhaustive tests” bit was pure hype. Zanuck already had his Ramona.

Since Loretta was cast as the daughter of an interracial union (white mother, Indian father), she was given an exotic look, with burnished cheekbones tinged with red, and long black hair, parted in the middle and cascading down her shoulders in folds. The wig and makeup were in keeping with the character, who, once she learned about her origins, considered herself an Indian. Jackson never describes Ramona in detail, writing only that her protagonist had a “
sunny face” and a “joyous voice” and extended a friendly greeting to everyone. The nuns at her convent school referred to her as the “blessed child.”
Screenwriter Lamar Trotti did not have a problem with the racial aspects of the plot; he merely followed Jackson’s lead and had Ramona become romantically involved with another Indian, Alessandro (Don Ameche). Although by contemporary standards Ameche looked like a racial stereotype, with a feather
sticking out of his headband, he was the film’s sole revelation, creating a genuinely moving—and ultimately tragic—figure. Ameche divested himself of his sometimes-oily smugness and connected empathetically with his character, as did Loretta with hers.

King was in his element, reveling in slow tracking shots and the opportunity to embellish what he probably thought was a hokey melodrama by supplying local color and detail, including sheep-shearing and a fiesta, in which Loretta danced so authentically that some moviegoers might have wondered what she would have been like in a musical, a genre that she never attempted. Melodramatic as
Ramona
is, there are scenes that generate real tension, especially when the newly married Ramona and Alessandro discover that the whites whom they had befriended and fed have returned to practice their own version of manifest destiny by taking over their property, the property of mere Indians. Another near tragedy occurs when their newborn child becomes gravely ill. Alessandro locates a doctor, who is too busy to travel and can only give him the medicine. One of the whites, to whom the couple was so generous, shoots Alessandro for commandeering his horse after his own became lame.

These scenes elevate
Ramona
from the level of storybook romance to tragedy, in which Indians suffer at the hands of rapacious whites. The film ends with a shot of Ramona after Alessandro’s funeral, greeted by Felipe (Kent Taylor), who was always in love with her. Ramona sighs ecstatically, “Don Felipe.” Fade out, The End.
Ramona
discreetly skirted the implications of another interracial union—this time between a white man (Felipe) and a woman of mixed blood. The novel, however, does not end ambiguously. Ramona and Felipe relocate in Mexico, where she and her daughter, also named Ramona, can live without prejudice. We read that the couple had a large family, “
but the most beautiful
of them all and … the most beloved by both father and mother, was the eldest one, the one who bore the mother’s name … Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian.” If the film version had included Jackson’s epilogue, Zanuck would have been hailed (and in some circles, denounced) as a champion of civil rights. In the post World War II era, Zanuck would tackle such controversial themes as anti-Semitism and racism. But to quote Cole Porter, 1938 Hollywood was “the wrong time” and “the wrong place.”

One would think from the movies of the 1930s that heiresses merited front-page headlines, however frivolous their actions. In
It Happened One Night
, Claudette Colbert can dive off her father’s yacht and embark on a series of escapades that capture the attention of the nation during one of
the worst years of the Great Depression. It is as if
It Happened One Night,
classic that it is, were taking place in a world antipodal to the real one—a world where wealthy runaways and scoop-hungry reporters dispelled the grim present and offered the public a Neverland where all that matters is that boy gets girl, regardless of class distinctions and compatibility. If they embrace at the fadeout or, as in
It Happened One Night
, when the blanket barrier between their beds falls to the floor, the audience exits, believing that happiness is right around the corner.

When
Love Is News
was released in March 1937, the Spanish Civil War was in its second year, the Rhineland had been remilitarized, and the bloody Detroit steelworkers’ strike that left ten dead and more than ninety wounded was over. But what did it matter if a brash reporter (Tyrone Power) was writing unflattering pieces about a fabulously rich young woman (Loretta), who retaliates by informing the press that they are engaged? All audiences wanted to know is how two people who hate each other could possibly fall out of enmity and into love. With Loretta and Power in the leads, the film could hardly have ended with the two going their separate ways.