Hollywood Madonna (30 page)

Like other Oscar winners, Loretta found that the statuette was a blessing and a curse. Judy Holliday was also a dark horse in 1951, when most insiders expected the 1950 Best Actress Oscar to go to either Gloria Swanson for her spectacular comeback in
Sunset Boulevard
or to Bette Davis for
All About
Eve, which resurrected her career—but not to Judy Holliday for reprising the role that made her a Broadway star, Billie Dawn in
Born Yesterday
. Yet Holliday won, and probably for the same reason that Loretta did:
Born Yesterday
was accessible. Holliday’s Billie was a refreshing alternative to the gothic bravura of Swanson’s Norma Desmond and the epigrammatic egomania of Davis’s Margo Channing. Billie Dawn was a recognizable human being, the mistress of a loutish junk dealer, resorting to self-deprecating humor to hide her vulnerability. Billie needs—and gets—a deliverer (William Holden), who convinces her of her potential, equipping her with enough of an education so that she can leave her overbearing lover. More Academy members could identify with Billie than with Norma or Margo; like Katie, Billie was palpably real.

But the public wanted Holliday, the dizzy dame, not the educated woman; sadly, her subsequent films were a footnote to
Born Yesterday
, and her great potential was never realized once she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which brought her life to an end at the age of forty-two. Swanson’s movie career dead-ended after
Sunset Boulevard
, and Davis did not have another film that clicked with the public until the ghoulish
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962), which at least brought her a Best Actress nomination.

Loretta was also not inundated with quality scripts after her Oscar; few winners are. But those that she chose to do were respectable, even when the material was tissue-thin. At least her next and last RKO film,
Rachel and the Stranger
(1948), was anything but flimsy.

When Loretta’s sister, Sally Blane, married Norman Foster in 1935 after his divorce from Claudette Colbert, Loretta never thought that, a decade later, her brother-in-law would direct her in a film. Loretta first met Foster when he was an actor, costarring with him in
Play-Girl
and
Weekend Marriage
(both 1932). In the mid 1930s, Foster discovered his true calling: directing. He revealed a knack for avoiding racial stereotypes
in the Mr. Motto series about a Japanese amateur sleuth played by Peter Lorre. Foster directed and coauthored six of the eight Mr. Moto films. Before Orson Welles began
Citizen Kane
(1941),
he screened a number of films
, including the Mr. Motos. Welles was particularly taken with Foster’s ability to evoke a menacing environment through the manipulation of light and shade. His subtle use of chiaroscuro was exactly what Welles wanted for
Citizen Kane.
When Welles realized he could not edit
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942) and direct
Journey into Fear
(1942) at the same time, he entrusted the latter to Foster. Sadly, RKO had its own ideas about
Ambersons
, and Welles’s masterpiece underwent radical surgery. But even in its truncated form, it remains a testimony to Welles’s genius.

Nineteen forty-eight saw dramatic changes in the film industry. The boom year of 1946, Hollywood’s
annus mirabilis
, when paid attendance was at an all-time high, was followed by a period of budget cutting and the curtailment of unnecessarily lavish productions. As RKO’s new production head, Schary sought a mix of the prestigious but financially unsuccessful (
Mourning Becomes Electra
[1947],
Joan of Arc
[1948]), and the popular (John Ford’s
Fort Apache
and
Rachel and the Stranger
,
which reaped profits
of $445,000 and $395,000, respectively). Schary expected
Rachel and the Stranger
to have great popular appeal, which it did. Since Norman Foster was a known quantity at RKO, Schary entrusted him with the film, which was based on Howard Fast’s short story, “Rachel,” with a screenplay by Waldo Salt. Knowing that Loretta was not bound to any studio and had time before starting
The Accused
, Foster cast his sister-in-law in the lead. Her costars were William Holden, on loan from Paramount, and RKO contract player Robert Mitchum.

Anyone who expected a movie with an anti-capitalist subtext was disappointed, even though Fast and Salt had both been members of the Communist party.
Fast served three months
in prison in 1950 for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). In 1956 he severed his connections with the Party after learning that Josef Stalin, the avuncular “Uncle Joe, “ was nothing more than a genocidal dictator. Salt had been subpoenaed by HUAC in fall 1947 to testify to the preposterous charge of Communist subversion of the movie industry. Eleven were called, the last being German playwright Berthold Brecht, then residing in Los Angeles, who denied being a Communist and immediately returned to East Berlin.
If the hearings had not been
temporarily suspended, Salt would have been next. But, as an unfriendly witness, Salt was soon blacklisted, working only intermittently and
under pseudonyms. He was finally vindicated when his adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s
Midnight Cowboy
(1969) was awarded an Oscar, followed by a second one for 1978’s best original screenplay,
Coming Home
.

Rachel and the Stranger
, however, is apolitical. Loretta was cast as a bondswoman in the 1820s, bought by widower David Harvey (Holden) to run his household and educate his young son. Until the end of the film, Rachel is a wife in name only, a combination servant-housekeeper. Loretta was the perfect frontierswoman, in her high-necked dress that made her look austere but could not conceal her body’s natural curves—actually, the dress emphasized them. The high neck worked to the character’s advantage, forcing her to hold her head high, despite the treatment she received from her husband. A specially created makeup gave Loretta’s face an earthen glow, the opposite of the lustrous look she had in romantic comedies.

Of all her mother’s films,
Rachel and the Stranger
is Judy Lewis’s favorite. It is certainly one of Loretta’s best. To see her churning butter is to watch an actress inhabit a character that was completely at odds with her persona. Yet when Loretta had to play women from society’s lower echelon (e.g.,
Life Begins
,
Man’s Castle
,
Taxi!
,
Midnight Ma
ry), she gave them a sense of dignity that steeled those women against life’s injustices and men’s callousness. Loretta played Rachel as a woman so inured to a hard-knock life that she would never break down. Like Cherry in
Along Came Jones
, Rachel can handle a rifle. During a Shawnee attack, Rachel kills one of the Indians, her face registering the pain she feels about taking a life as she presses herself against a wall.

Robert Mitchum gave an unusually sympathetic performance as Harvey’s itinerant friend, Jim Fairways, who falls under Rachel’s spell. Knowing that Harvey regards Rachel as little more than a hired hand, Fairways makes a bid for her, as if she were up for auction. Here, perhaps, is a vestige of Salt’s leftism: two men vying for a woman as if she were chattel—at least from the woman’s point of view. After the Indian attack interrupts what would have been a violent confrontation between the men, Fairways realizes that, from the way Rachel rallied to protect a family that was not even hers, she is meant for Harvey. And the film ends with a close up of Harvey kissing Rachel, who emerges as morally superior to both her husband and her suitor.

Expecting a stream of obscenities from Mitchum, whose maverick ways and public brawls always made the papers (he was jailed for marijuana possession in 1948, the same year
Rachel
came out), Loretta arrived on the set with her swear box. When Mitchum learned what each
bit of profanity or blasphemy cost, he asked within Loretta’s hearing distance, “
How much does Miss Young charge
for a ‘fuck’?” He then stuffed a $5.00 bill into the box and indulged himself with his favorite expletive. Loretta’s response is unknown. In her profession she must have heard the national obscenity before, but she probably referred to it as the “f word.”

CHAPTER 17
The Return to Fox—and Zanuck

In 1939 Loretta told Zanuck she would never work for him again (which, in effect, meant never working at Fox), but the passage of time, an Oscar, and a three–picture contract—including one in which she would play a nun—prompted Loretta to think differently about the studio where she had spent five years, making twenty-two films. However, only one of three that Zanuck offered her,
Come to the Stable
(1949), was significant. If the other two,
Mother Is a Freshman
(1949) and
Half Angel
(1951), had never reached the screen, audiences would have been spared two more mediocre movies.

A college administrator should have been hired as technical advisor for
Mother Is a Freshman
, which gleefully flaunted academic protocol. It was filmed in Technicolor, never the ideal medium for Loretta, whose sculpted cheekbones were suffused with red, making her face look flushed. Anyone planning to send a child, particularly a female, to college might have thought twice after seeing the movie
.
Loretta played Abigail Fortitude Abbott, a widow with a spendthrift daughter, who finds herself in financial straits—although one would never know it from Abigail’s elaborate wardrobe and Park Avenue apartment. When Abigail remembers that her grandmother had established a scholarship at her daughter’s college for anyone with the name of Abigail Fortitude (Abigail’s unmarried name), she decides to apply, even though she and her daughter Susan (Betty Lynn) would be attending the same school and perhaps taking some of the same classes.

Loretta’s costar was Van Johnson, five years younger than the thirty-six-year-old Loretta, and still looking like the boy next door. We must take it on faith that he is not only an English professor, but has also become so attracted to Abigail that he pressures her into coming for tutoring to his house, where he has prepared a candlelit dinner. Although he
has also invited his parents, he makes sure that Abigail arrives early. We are also asked to believe that the professor and Abigail’s lawyer (Rudy Vallee) were contemporaries at Yale, even though Vallee was seventeen years older than Johnson—and looked it. “That’s Hollywood for you,” as columnist Sidney Skolsky used to say.

Complications arise when Susan develops a crush on the professor. Once she learns that he is her mother’s prom date, she invites the lawyer to attend as Abigail’s escort, pitting the two men against each other. Any veteran moviegoer could predict the ending: Abigail will continue working toward her degree—but in the dual role of student and professor’s wife—and Susan will discover someone her own age. Although Loretta did not disappoint her fans, who wanted their fashion plate in Christian Dior’s “new look,”
Mother Is a Freshman
is more of an ellipsis than a footnote in her career.

Loretta was in her element in her next Fox film,
Come to the Stable
(1949), as Sister Margaret of the Holy Endeavor, humble but wily enough to use her charm and powers of persuasion to achieve her goal. She was a Catholic child’s ideal grade school nun: not the knuckle-rapper, but the kind who would enter a classroom with a gentle rustle of her habit as it trailed along the floor and the jingle of the fifteen-decade rosary suspended from her belt, heralding her arrival as she approached the desk. The habit was only the exterior; beneath it lay a determined educator and, in Sister Margaret’s case, an entrepreneur. Loretta would play nuns again, but not on the big screen. Loretta looked as if she were to the habit born. There have been other authentic movie nuns (Ingrid Bergman in
The Bells of St. Mary’s
, Gladys Cooper and Jennifer Jones in
The Song of Bernadette
, Audrey Hepburn in
The Nun’s Story
, Rosalind Russell in
The Trouble with Angels
, Claudette Colbert in
Thunder on the Hill
, Donna Reed in
Green Dolphin Stree
t), and actress-nuns for whom the habit was just a costume (Greer Garson in
The Singing Nun
, Maggie Smith in
Class Act
). Loretta was the genuine article.

Come to the Stable
was one of Fox’s top-grossing films of 1949, nominated for seven Oscars: Best Actress (Loretta), Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester), original story (Claire Boothe Luce), original song (“Through a Long and Sleepless Night”), set direction, and black-and-white photography (Joseph LaShelle). It did not matter to Zanuck that
Come to the Stabl
e failed to win a single award. He was happy with the gross and thrilled that Dean Jagger was voted Best Supporting Actor for Fox’s
Twelve O’Clock High
, Zanuck’s personal favorite that year. If some of the others made money, all the better.

Although
Come to the Stable
was not Zanuck’s kind of film, he took it more seriously than one might expect. Loretta was his only choice to star as Sister Margaret, even though Luce envisioned Irene Dunne in the role. Zanuck wanted “
a great Catholic
,” which to him meant Loretta, and a “great Catholic” required a “great script.” Zanuck made sure the great Catholic got it. Dorothy Parker and John B. Mahin collaborated on one, but it was not great enough. By mid November 1948, Sally Benson came on board and managed to write, with some assistance, a script that conformed to Zanuck’s requirements: “
a comedy about faith
that is not preachy or religious.”
Come to the Stable
is a comedy in the classical sense: a work with a happy ending, despite what transpires earlier.