Hollywood Madonna (18 page)

Love Is News
is purportedly about the newspaper world. The staccato dialogue and newsroom ambience invite comparisons with the prototype,
The Front Page
(1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, who put his stars (Adolphe Menjou as the editor, and Pat O’Brien as his star reporter) through their paces, so that the scenes had the rhythm of a professional typist, hitting the keys at 120 words per minute.
Love Is News
is not in the same league as
The Front Page
—either the play by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht or Milestone’s film. Three years later, it was eclipsed by the definitive newspaper film, Howard Hawks’s radical makeover of
The Front Page
,
His Girl Friday
(1940).
His Girl Friday
featured Cary Grant as the editor, playing the role with the kind of serpentine charm that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Rosalind Russell as the reporter, who did not mind taking a bite of the apple and typed away as if she had printers’ ink in her veins.

Tay Garnett was a perfectly competent director, best remembered for
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946).
Love Is News
is lesser Garnett. His problem was not with Power and Loretta, who knew that the more improbable the plot, the more convincing they had to be. And they were convincing, in addition to looking as if they were made for each other. But the early scenes in the newsroom, the fiefdom of the managing editor (Don Ameche), could have taken place in some corporation. There is
no ebb and flow of language, no dialogue delivered with the propulsive rhythm of a drill.

What made
It Happened One Night
a classic and
Love is News
just another flick is not just running time: seventy-two minutes (
Love
) versus 106 (
Night
). Even if
Love Is News
ran close to two hours, monotony would have set in; the plot would have either stalled or chugged along until the writers recharged the narrative. The beauty of
It Happened One Night
is that, in addition to being screwball (and romantic) comedy, it is also a road movie, with the characters learning enough about each other to constitute a courtship, even though they assume they are just traveling east. In
Love Is News
, one must assume that the couple will find whatever they have in common off screen; all Loretta and Power had to do was convince the audience that they would. If Loretta, then twenty-three, was having more mature crushes on her leading men, she could not have done better than Power. Zanuck had declared them a team. The press and the public concurred. And if Power was unavailable, there was Ameche.

Because she wore clothes so elegantly, Loretta was cast as an heiress again in
Café Metropole
(1937), a frothy romance that appeared two months after
Love Is News
and that might have had more buoyancy if it had been directed by Ernst Lubitsch instead of Edward H. Griffith. Screenwriter Jacques Deval devised a pretzel-like plot with enough twists to hold an audience’s attention and a denouement involving a phony check. The café owner (Adolphe Menjou) is amoral, but as played by Menjou, who gives the most satisfying performance in the film, he deceives with such silken charm that any attempt to expose him would be a violation of good taste. When a Princeton-educated playboy (Tyrone Power) cannot pay his gambling debts, Menjou has him impersonate a Russian prince and woo a millionaire’s daughter (Loretta). Despite his inconsistent accent, Loretta is so taken with Power (as she was in real life) that she goes along with the deception. Who could resist Power, who never looked so good as he did in the 1930s?

But if Cinderellas have their midnight, so do bogus princes. Loretta even resorts to having her father falsely arrested to keep Power out of prison for passing a bad check. And since the two of them complement each other—looking as if they had been sprinkled with Peter Pan’s fairy dust—neither prison nor parental opposition will stand in their way. Power’s accent is supposed to be “on and off,” and with just a quizzical look, Loretta lets the audience know that she is not deceived. She had
also fallen in love with the imposter, gazing at him as if she were moonstruck and flirting her way into his affections. Loretta was now more adept at comedy of manners; at least she had dialogue that was sufficiently literate to pass for wit, delivering the lines as if they were lyrics set to the music of her voice. Loretta would appear in other romantic comedies, but few that allowed her to treat the dialogue like bonbons—delicious but unsubstantial.

Zanuck did not want to spend much money on
Café Metropole
. He only cared about 1937 releases that would yield a profit: the Shirley Temple movies
Heidi
and
Wee Willie Winkie
; the
Seventh Heaven
remake with James Stewart and Simone Simon; and the Dick Powell–Alice Faye musical,
On the Avenue
, with a score by Irving Berlin.
He pared down the budget
; insisted that
Café Metropole
be made in thirty days; demanded that at least twelve pages (he preferred fifteen) be cut from the script; and vetoed the tracking shot that would open the film, showing patrons entering the café. Just use a dissolve to move from the exterior to the interior; it’s cheaper.

Loretta’s weakest film with Don Ameche was
Love Under Fire
(1937), supposedly set during the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that Hollywood avoided until World War II erupted in 1939, the same year the Spanish Civil War ended; or, as some would say, the year the dress rehearsal in Spain for World War II did. By 1939, it was clear that the Spanish Civil War was the prologue to a global tragedy. But as far as Hollywood was concerned, World War II provided such a wealth of screen material that the prologue could be detached from the tragedy and, if not performed separately—as it was in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1943)—become part of a character’s past (e.g., Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
, Orson Welles in
The Lady from Shanghai
, John Garfield in
The Fallen Sparrow
, Ray Milland
in Arise, My Love
). But even
For Whom the Bell Tolls
seemed like a World War II movie, in which the Spanish partisans, mostly Communists, were part of an anti-fascist resistance—which they were, in a sense.

Hollywood was uneasy about the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) not because the United States was neutral during the conflict, but because of the identities of the two battling factions and their allies. There were the Loyalists, who were fighting to maintain Spain as the duly elected republic the popular vote mandated, and there were Franco’s Nationalists, who wanted a Catholic Spain under the control of the Church and the military, as it had been in the past. The Catholic Church naturally supported the Nationalists, and radicals (socialists, communists, and anomalous left-wingers) passed the plate for the Loyalists, staging fund-raisers
and benefits for the cause. The war produced its own idealists. Unlike the First World War, it was not a war to end wars, but one to prevent the one that a prescient minority sensed would occur within a few years and might be averted by the extirpation of fascism. The American Left’s finest hour came when 3,100 Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington battalions of the Fourteenth International Brigade. At long last the Left had a cause—to many, a noble cause. But the cause was perverted once outside forces intervened. Fascist Italy, sensing an ally in Franco, supported the Nationalist cause even if it meant bombing Spanish cities like Madrid and Guernica. Since the battalions were dominated by socialists and communists, the Soviet Union posed as their ally, while secretly subverting the noble gesture with the goal of turning what would have been a socialist utopia into communism’s newest convert—with Spain as the first communist country in Western Europe.

Zanuck hoped to release the first movie that dealt, at least peripherally, with the war. Walter Hackett had written an unproduced play,
The Fugitives
, in which the Nationalists were portrayed trying to keep valuable jewelry from falling into the hands of the Loyalists. It was a boilerplate plot, with enough intrigue, romance, and politics to sustain audience interest. In October 1936, three months after the war began, Kathryn Scola and Darrell Ware had an adaptation ready for Zanuck’s scrutiny. The script was a skein of contradictions; the characters were so chameleon-like with their shifting allegiances that if the Scola-Ware script were ever filmed, it would have only reflected many moviegoers’ own ambivalence about the war. Defenders of a democratic form of government might have been thrilled that the Spanish people voted to make Spain a republic, but they might have balked when they realized it would be a socialist one. Those with fascist sympathies might have hoped for a Nationalist victory, but they were uneasy about Franco’s contempt for the democratic process. And when it was known that both sides were guilty of atrocities, some might have wondered if either side was worth supporting.

Zanuck finally realized that he could never make the kind of film he envisioned and issued an ultimatum: “
Eliminate all references
to ‘loyalists’ and ‘traitors’, etc. Refer to all other sides as General so-and-so and his forces.” The title went from
The Fugitives
to
Fandango
and ended up as
Love under Fire
, with new screenwriters: no longer Scola and Ware, but Gene Fowler, Allen Rivkin, and Ernest Pascal. All that remained of Hackett’s original plot were the jewels, reduced to a pearl necklace that Loretta’s character supposedly stole. Once a Scotland Yard inspector (Ameche)
learns she is not a thief, they can fall in love and leave Madrid, which is under bombardment for reasons that would not have interested most of isolationist America. And those who decided to see
Love under Fire
were more interested in “love” than in “fire,” knowing that with Loretta and Ameche in the leads, the lovers could enter the fiery furnace and not get singed.

Power and Loretta were teamed for the penultimate time in
Second Honeymoon
(1937), which had potential. But the paradigmatic comedy of remarriage, Leo McCarey’s
The Awful Truth
, was released the same year, relegating
Second Honeymoon
to the oubliette for runners up. The writers, Kathryn Scola and Darrel Ware, imagined a retread of Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
, filmed in 1931, in which a couple divorce, remarry, and discover that all the parties involved are spending their honeymoons at the same hotel. Eventually the original couple shed the new spouses and reunite. In
Second Honeymoon
, Loretta and Power do not meet cute; they run into each other in Palm Beach, impeccably dressed—Loretta in chiffon that streams down her frame, and Power with glistening hair and a figure-flattering tuxedo, usurping the moonlight for no other reason than to make love to his ex-wife.

In
The Awful Truth
, the divorced couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) has not remarried, giving each partner the opportunity to undermine the other’s marital prospects. In
Second Honeymoon
, Power has to woo Loretta away from her stolid husband (Lyle Talbot), which is not that difficult. With Power’s piercingly compassionate eyes, promising dream fulfillment, and Loretta’s knowing smile and coy body language, how else could the film end?
Second Honeymoon’s
main problem is its uneasy juxtaposition of high and low comedy. The latter involves carry-overs from
Three Blind Mice
: Stuart Erwin as Power’s valet and the lively Marjorie Weaver as his fiancée. Although intended as comic relief, they emerge as the only real characters in a world where the problems of the idle rich alone matter. Neither Loretta nor Power was at his and her best. When they quarrel, Loretta is gratingly shrill; by way of comparison, in
Private Lives
, the couple literally comes to blows, but the dialogue remains on the same urbane plane. Loretta and Power engage in a shouting match that is totally out of character. Although
Second Honeymoon
aspired to be an amalgamation of screwball and comedy of remarriage, it was so only in theory.

For the third time in one year, Loretta was cast as a woman of privilege. In
Wife, Doctor, and Nurse
(1937), she was a socialite, married to a doctor (Warner Baxter) who suspects that her husband’s nurse (Virginia
Bruce, in the film’s best performance) is her rival. Properly handled, the film could have qualified as respectable screwball comedy, but the plot turned out to be just another triangular template without the wit of
My Favorite Wife
and
Too Many Husbands.
The nurse is an atypical “other woman”: She is neither a gold digger nor a home wrecker, but merely a victim of unrequited love. Her refusal to join the ranks of rebuffed women by seducing the husband or feeding the wife’s suspicions gives her a stature that Loretta’s character lacks. Because she is one of the upper East Side ladies who lunch, Loretta invites the nurse to a classy restaurant where she plans to confront her, discovering instead that the nurse does not even realize that she is in love with the doctor until Loretta brings it up. Privilege allows the privileged to play psychiatrist, getting the unsuspecting “patient” to reveal unconscious motives and desires. Satisfied, the wife returns to her Park Avenue apartment, unappreciative of the nurse’s integrity. The nurse is a professional, not a rival. The wife does not even have to reclaim her husband, who never cheated on her. If there was ever a film to dispel the myth of woman’s intuition, this was it.

The role made no demands on Loretta, whose name preceded Baxter’s in the credits only because she was a bigger star than he. Baxter was never A list; it was only when he starred in the “Crime Doctor” series at Columbia in the 1940s that he found a new audience, less discriminating than those he once knew, who could accept his workmanlike performance. To his credit, Baxter could register intensity and menace, but when it came to romance, it was hard to envision him as a lover. Loretta had to work doubly hard to convince the audience that she was attracted to him. Bette Davis had a similar problem with George Brent in
Dark Victory
. Actress that she was, Davis convinced audiences that Brent was her great love, even though he, too, was not the most charismatic of actors.