Hollywood Madonna (36 page)

Mutual’s fear of another Catholic program was allayed when Fr. Peyton presented the network with a slate of the stars and stories, many of which were adaptations of classics such as “The Necklace” (Jeanne Crain),
The Song of Roland
(Terry Moore and Jeff Chandler),
Evangeline
(Mona Freeman),
The Gold Bug
(Maureen O’Hara),
A Tale of Two Cities
(Robert Ryan),
Cyrano de Bergerac
(Robert Young),
Moby-Dick
(Dane Clark),
Work of a Lifetime
(Edward G. Robinson),
The Windbag
(Bing Crosby),
Ivanhoe
(Macdonald Carey), and
A Daddy for Christmas
(Shirley Temple). But Fr. Peyton often inserted a pitch for his Rosary Crusade, as if it were an encoded message that audiences had to decode. Apparently they did, since the crusade, to paraphrase one of the chapter titles of
All for Her
, girdled the earth. Like a film,
Family Theatre
was a cooperative venture, in which Loretta, along with others, played a role.

The inaugural program
on 13 February 1947 costarred Loretta and Don Ameche in
Flight from Heaven
, hosted by James Stewart and written by True Boardman, whose specialty was Abbott and Costello comedies (
Keep ’Em Flying
[1941],
Pardon My Sarong
[1942],
Hit the Ice
[1943]). But there was no time for comedy on this occasion. Stewart’s dedication of
the program to families, reminding them that “all things are wrought by prayer,” set the tone for both the play and the series. Ameche and Loretta played a married couple subjected to the ultimate test of faith: personal tragedy. When the husband is bypassed for the academic position he expected, he becomes an alcoholic, deserting his wife after she miscarries. Just as
Flight from Heaven
was turning into a sudsy melodrama, the plot veered off in a literary direction. The husband’s favorite poem was Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” once part of the English curriculum in Catholic high schools. In this “dark night of the soul” poem, the speaker is fleeing a “Him” (capitalization is the key) “down the nights and down the days.” When he finally confronts his pursuer, he discovers it is God: “I am the He whom thou seekest.”

Loretta’s best-remembered performance took place two years later on 21 December 1949, when she narrated
The Littlest Angel
, which proved so popular that it was repeated the following year, on 27 December 1950. It is the story of an angel eager to upgrade his status. Currently a cherub, he is also a klutz who sings off key, sniffles, arrives late for prayer, loses his halo, and bites his wing tips. Once the other angels hear about Christ’s birth in a Bethlehem stable, they resolve to honor him. Having nothing to give the child, the littlest angel can only offer the box that he prized as a boy, to which he was adding at the time of his death. (How the angel still has his boyhood box in his noncorporeal state is not a question one should ask of a parable.) The box contains a butterfly, a blue egg, white stones, and a dog collar. The gifts find favor with God, who accepts them in honor of Christ. The littlest angel is promoted to the next category, whatever it is (perhaps “angel first class”), for those who have proved themselves worthy of advancement.

As narrator, Loretta turned her voice into an instrument, with the text as a score and the tempos marked. Her delivery was exquisitely cadenced, the voice rising and falling, as accented and unaccented syllables alternated. Her voice was not the creation of a coach or a speech therapist. Obviously, she had some professional training, but no instructor could have transformed the teenager’s voice that she had at the beginning of her career into one the American Institute of Voice Teachers called “
the finest feminine speaking voice
.” As she grew in her craft, so did her voice. Her true voice teacher was her profession, which required her to speak like her characters—whether she was playing molls, waitresses, actresses, clerks, authors, western heroines, farm workers, debutantes, queens, home makers, or nuns. When Loretta describes heaven in “The Littlest Angel,” she colors the voice to convey the rapture that
the narrator, and perhaps she herself, felt. For Loretta, painting a picture of heaven through voice alone was second nature.

As the 1940s were drawing to a close, so was Loretta’s radio career—except for
Family Theatre
, which extended it into the 1950s. When the short-lived
Four-Star Playhouse
(3 July–11 September 1949) went on the air, Loretta, Fred MacMurray, Rosalind Russell, and Robert Cummings rotated in leading roles in adaptations of stories from
Cosmopolitan
. But audiences were indifferent, and Loretta returned to
Lux Radio Theatre
(24 March 1952) for the last time to reprise one of her favorite roles, Sister Margaret in C
ome to the Stable
, opposite Hugh Marlowe, again as the composer.
Come to the Stable
was broadcast a year and a half before Loretta made her TV debut on 20 September 1953. As early as 1950, she sensed that television would be the new mass medium. “
By 1949
, a million [television sets] had been sold, and by 1951, ten million.” Loretta had more portraits to hang in her gallery. The new ones would be displayed in an annex, called television.

CHAPTER 20
Another Medium, Another Conquest

Loretta never worked with Lucille Ball, although she knew who Ball was, and closely followed her growing fame in the medium that Loretta was planning to enter. Lucille Ball was star writ small. She appeared in some films—Dorothy Arzner’s
Dance, Girl, Dance
(1940), Jules Dassin’s
Two Smart People
(1946), Henry Hathaway’s
The Dark Corner
(1946), Douglas Sirk’s
Lured
(1947)—that have attracted film scholars, not because of her, but because of the directors. Ball’s MGM career was erratic; she could have brought her own brand of zaniness to the MGM musical, except that the studio had its resident zany, Red Skeleton, with whom she costarred in
DuBarry Was a Lady
(1943). “Costarred” is not entirely correct—the only star was Skelton. Otherwise, she was upstaged by a musical comedy trouper (Nancy Walker in
Best Foot Forward
[1943]), or the MGM family (
Thousands Cheer
[1944]), or relegated to sidekick status (
Without Love
[1945],
Easy to Wed
[1946]). When Ball had a chance to release the scatterbrain within, using her body as a comic conduit, it was in a string of Columbia B movies—
Her Husband’s Affairs
(1947),
Miss Grant Takes Richmond
(1949), and especially
The Fuller Brush Girl
(1950)—released the same year that she and her husband, Desi Arnaz, hit the road, offering audiences a prevue of the sitcom that made television history when it premiered in October 1951:
I Love Lucy.

Although stars who defected to television were threatened with blacklisting, those whose movie careers had run their course were not alarmed. Television was small-screen film. Don Ameche, who made four movies with Loretta, entered television in 1950 as the Manager of
Holiday Hotel
, an ABC variety show. The same year, he emceed a quiz show,
Take a Chance
. Since Ameche was never a major movie star, threats—if he even heard them—did not matter. He had the next best thing in television, and Broadway as well. In April 1951, Claudette Colbert, who
also knew her glory days were over, shocked Hollywood by appearing in a comedy sketch on
The Jack Benny Show
with one of film’s masters of gravitas, Basil Rathbone (whose movie career petered out with the end of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series). Others had nothing to lose. Live television was another form of live theater for those who were as comfortable on the stage as they were on the screen (e.g., Madeleine Carroll, Melvyn Douglas, Zachary Scott, Jane Wyatt, William Lundigan, Diana Lynn, Lloyd Nolan, Margaret Wycherly, Claudette Colbert, Ethel Barrymore, and the venerable Lillian Gish, who knew that if she could make the transition from the silents to the talkies to the theatre, she could move on to television and work the tripartite circuit for the rest of her career). If live TV proved daunting, there was always filmed television, particularly sitcoms, such as
I Married Joan
with Joan Davis,
My Little Margie
with Gale Storm and Charles Farrell, and
The Donna Reed Show.

Loretta had no fear of blacklisting. When Louis Mayer bluntly told her that if she defected to television, she would “
never get another script
—ever,” Loretta replied that television was “the next, natural step” in entertainment. Mayer was wrong, but his death in 1957 precluded his realizing it. Loretta received movie offers over the years: for example, the part of the unmarried secretary vacationing in Venice in
Summertime
, which Katharine Hepburn inherited, along with an Oscar nomination.
Producer Jerry Wald
felt confident enough to inform the press that Loretta would costar with James Stewart in
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation
(1962). She probably took one look at the script and realized that, despite costar billing, she would be in the supporting cast; the title made it clear who the main character was, and it wasn’t Mrs. Hobbs. For an actress who was a natural nun, it was surprising that Loretta even passed on the role of the mother superior in
Lilies of the Field
(1963), in which an itinerant handy man (Sidney Poitier) helps a community of German nuns build a chapel. Just as Loretta would have been miscast in
Summertime
, she would have been eclipsed by Sidney Poitier in
Lilies of the Field
. Poitier deservedly won an Oscar for his performance, becoming the first African American actor to be so honored. The role of the mother superior, with whom Poitier spars, went to the Austrian actress Lilia Skala, who did not have to affect an accent and who was also rewarded with an Oscar nomination.

From the early fifties on, television was Loretta’s only medium. She had Helen Ferguson present her to the public as an ex-movie star eager to embrace the new medium, not as a Hollywood diva slumming on the tube. Ferguson did not have to be told; she knew her job, even
boasting, “
I can give a better
Loretta Young interview than Loretta herself. “ Helen Ferguson Public Relations at 151 El Camino Drive in Beverly Hills was the address of Loretta’s authorized image-maker, who wove together fact, conjecture, and myth so seamlessly that truth and fiction were indistinguishable. Ferguson represented other stars, such as Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Maureen O’Hara, and Robert Taylor, but Loretta was special. For the others, Ferguson went the distance; for Loretta, she went beyond it, perhaps sensing that, despite her propulsive drive, Loretta could not banish the specter of failure that broods over any new venture. Not only was Loretta anxious about the show, she was also concerned about the way audiences would react to
her
. Being a star was no guarantee of success. Frank Sinatra disappointed his fans when
The Frank Sinatra Show
premiered in 1950, lasting for only two seasons. When the show was revived in 1957, it barely lasted the season, even though Sinatra was now an Oscar-winner for
From Here to Eternity
(1953). Television represented the greatest challenge Loretta had ever faced. She needed an image for the tube, a scaled-down version of her Hollywood persona. She had to be friendly and inviting, as if the audience were her guests and she their hostess. And that is exactly the image that she projected during all the years
The Loretta Young Show
was on the air.

Ferguson handled the packaging of Loretta carefully, portraying her as a convert to television, which was true. Equally true was Loretta’s determination to perpetuate her image on the small screen. Since she had done film and radio, and had earlier ruled out the stage, television was the logical next move. Loretta may not have been a narcissist, but she refused to join the ranks of the forgotten when she had a public that remembered her. The Lewis household, as Ferguson described it, entered the television age in the early 1950s with the purchase of their first TV set. It was literally love at first sight. Loretta was delighted with such shows as
Hopalong Cassidy
,
The Kate Smith Evening Hour
,
The Ted Mack Family Hour
, and
Arthur Godfrey and Friends
, all good, wholesome entertainment—as if there was anything else at the time. “
Loretta felt they were friends
…. She loved everything about T.V.” And soon TV would love her.

Loretta may actually have gotten the TV bug in 1950, when she was scheduled to speak at a Variety Club convention in Philadelphia hosted by Ken Murray, an ex-vaudevillian with a popular variety show,
The Ken Murray Show
(1950–53). When Murray heard that a baby girl had been abandoned in a local theater, he sensed a coup. Since his show that evening was a tribute to the Variety Club, he wanted to announce that the
club would adopt the child. But Loretta upstaged him: She headed over to the hospital in street clothes and street makeup, and returned to the studio with the baby, knowing that there would be no studio lighting. At that moment, she was both a star and a mortal—a 75 percent star/25 percent mortal combination that would transfer to the small screen, when the time came. And two years later, the time came.

When Loretta informed the William Morris Agency that she was no longer available for movies, she was telling only a partial truth. Actually, Loretta was not being besieged with film offers. Although occasionally a few came her way, none of them would have been a comeback on the order of Gloria Swanson’s in
Sunset Boulevard
. The same year that Loretta made her television debut, her last film, the enjoyable but inconsequential
It Happens Every Thursday
, was in release. And that was her Hollywood swan song. In 1952, even before
It Happens Every Thursday
began shooting, Loretta made up her mind: She was going to enter television. That year, the
Los Angeles Times
reported: “
[Loretta Young] has succumbed
to television [and] starts shooting in January on a series entitled ‘Loretta Young and Your Life Story.’” The series would be produced for NBC by the Ruslew Corporation, the company’s name a combination of the last names of its founders, Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter (
King of Jazz
,
Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble
,
Between Two Women
,
Julia Misbehaves
, etc
.
) and Tom Lewis. Ruskin and Lewis acted as vice president and president, respectively.