Hollywood Madonna (44 page)

Like Grace Guthrie, Loretta had made peace with the present. She still had more to do as she approached the last decade of her life.

CHAPTER 23
The Last Reel

Early in her career, Loretta was romantically linked with several men, including director Edward Sutherland; actors Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power; a British polo player; and a shady lawyer. All were attracted to her beauty, just as she was to their varying degrees of masculinity: paternal, carnal, androgynous, and protective. Most were older than she; some, significantly so (Gable, twelve years; Tracy, thirteen; Sutherland, eighteen). She and Power were the same age; they would have made a smashing couple, except that during the
Suez
shoot (1938), Power discovered the gamine-like Anabella in the supporting cast and married her the following year.

Tom Lewis was another “older” man—eleven years Loretta’s senior, to be exact. It would be simplistic to reduce their courtship to Loretta’s quest for a father figure to compensate for the desertion of John Earle Young. Ironically, his desertion brought Loretta to Los Angeles, where she became a bona fide movie star at fifteen. For someone attuned to the divine will, as Loretta was, Young’s abandoning his family was providential. Eventually, everyone prospered, which would probably not have been the case if he stayed. Conversely, was Lewis contemplating a brilliant marriage to a Hollywood star? Or was he really in love with Gretchen, saving Loretta for his radio, and later television, productions? Loretta and Lewis were in their late twenties and late thirties, respectively, when they married in 1940. Riotous youth had passed, along with the heyday of the blood. Loretta was no longer a teenage fantasist or a moonstruck ingénue, flaunting convention even by Hollywood’s liberal standards and socializing with a married man—much less a married Catholic, like Spencer Tracy. Neither was she reacting to Gable’s erotic instant messaging with her easily decodable body language, which William Wellman
and some of the C
all of the Wild
cast, particularly Jack Oakie, had no trouble deciphering.

Loretta was a poor judge of men. None of her great loves ever lived up to her expectations. What she experienced with Grant Withers was first love, which when it was over left a void in her life that could never be completely filled. Even at seventeen, Loretta seemed to know that once she really fell in love, as she did with Withers, she might be able to love again, but never in the same way. Loretta was sincere when she admitted that she would always love Withers. First love may be evanescent, but it is not forgotten. The passing years and Withers’s suicide may have lessened the intensity of her emotions, but it was still her first encounter with, as Cole Porter put it, “this funny thing called love.” She was seventeen when she eloped with Withers, twenty-seven when she married Tom Lewis. “Love is too young to know what conscience is,” Shakespeare observes in Sonnet 151. At seventeen, Loretta certainly did not know; at twenty-seven, she did. She knew the distinction between first love, infatuation, and conjugal love. She wanted a stable marriage to make up for her own short-lived one and her mother’s two failures.

When Loretta married Lewis, the scenario changed: It was no longer the princess and her betrothed; it was the movie star wife and her radio producer husband, followed by the TV celebrity and her TV producer husband, and ending with the former star and her ex-husband. Undoubtedly, Loretta and Lewis loved each other, but it was not a case of love given unconditionally and selflessly. In 1939, Loretta left Fox despite Zanuck’s threat of blacklisting. She had, she believed, survived worse:
l’affaire Gable
, the unplanned pregnancy, the subterfuge. But now it was time for a real marriage, a church wedding even though Loretta would not be wearing white. There should be life after Fox, Loretta reasoned, but where? Harry Cohn, who had no love for Zanuck, offered her a haven at Columbia, but after she fulfilled her five-picture commitment there, then what? A couple of movies at one studio, a couple at another? A stable marriage? That she found, temporarily, in Lewis.

Lewis’s pursuit of Loretta was partly motivated by desire but also by his need for her talent—not to mention her contacts—for Screen Guild Theatre, the radio program that he was creating for Young & Rubicam. It was no different when he signed on to Father Peyton’s
Family Theatre
, or later, when Loretta ventured into television. The network needed an anthology series, the series needed a star, the star needed a producer. Marriage served a dual purpose. Lewis wanted a family and got one; he wanted producer status, and he received it. Loretta’s needs were more
complex. If she were to be known as a butterfly, better a rare one with translucent wings, not metallic ones. For a time Loretta was airborne, but as the 1950s approached, the wings began to harden. The star-producer-network relationship began to unravel. Soon it was just the star with a new series, production company, and network.

After her divorce from Lewis, Loretta was rarely seen in the company of eligible men. She was too busy enshrining her image, accepting awards, lecturing, and supporting charities. It was odd, then, to pick up the
National Enquirer
(24 July 1979) and read the headline: “Loretta Young, 66, and Producer—It Looks Like Love.” The producer was William Frye (then in his early fifties), who had produced, among other films, the two Rosalind Russell vehicles
The Trouble with Angels
and
Where Angels Go … Trouble Follows
, both of which were written by Blanche Hanalis. It may well have been Frye who brought Hanalis’s
Christmas Eve
script to Loretta and encouraged her to star in it. The
National Enquirer
was known for sensationalizing even the trivial, which seems to have been the case when the couple was spotted on their way to a dinner party. Frye and Loretta may have been holding hands and smiling at each other, but Loretta insisted they were only “very, very good friends.” The friendship continued, but speculation about an upcoming marriage did not. A serious relationship with a younger man would not have been typical of Loretta, who was usually attracted to older ones. In 1979, Frye’s being a Presbyterian would not have been an impediment; if their relationship really became serious, Loretta would have done some serious proselytizing to bring him into the fold—her fold. The age disparity was the real obstacle. “[V]ery, very good friends” was all they could be.

However, a sensational bit of news occurred some fourteen years later when the eighty-year old Loretta married one of her favorite designers, Jean-Louis, five years her senior and far from a father figure. The wedding took place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, the preferred parish of the Hollywood Catholics. The couple had known each other even before
The Loretta Young Show
, for which Jean Louis designed the gowns for fifty-two of Loretta’s entrances. Loretta insisted that his creations were seductive, but never obscene. That was indeed true; the
strapless black satin gown
that he designed for Rita Hayworth when she sang “Put the Blame on Mame” in
Gilda
(1946) was tastefully sexy—although at the time the question was not how tasteful it was but how Hayworth managed to avoid a wardrobe malfunction while she went through her gyrations. The shimmering gown in which he dressed Marilyn Monroe when she appeared at Madison Square Garden in 1962
to purr “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy was intended to be so form-fitting she had to be sewn into it. Like Loretta, who could reconcile her faith with her profession, Jean Louis saw no disparity between his deep-rooted Catholicism and his creations, even when they raised eyebrows by their suggestiveness (e.g., Marlene Dietrich’s beaded nudecolored gown, which she wore for her Las Vegas debut in 1953). Jean Louis could also design less sensational costumes, as he proved with the stylish ones he created for Judy Holliday in
The Solid Gold Cadillac
(1956), for which he won his only Oscar.

Loretta and Jean Louis’s was not a late autumn-early winter romance, but more of an early winter-late winter one. Two octogenarians, Loretta and Jean Louis were both in the winter of their lives; the golden years had turned to silver, and sunset was darkening into evening. Loretta’s decision to marry was primarily an act of charity, really a form of love, the greatest of the three virtues, even surpassing faith and hope. It was love that Loretta felt, but of a certain kind: love mingled with compassion. Loretta knew what a staggering loss Jean Louis experienced in 1997 when his beloved wife, Maggy, died. In Jean Louis, Loretta found a man who was content with his own achievements, as she was with hers. Withers fulfilled her romantic longings, however briefly. Tracy could only provide Loretta with fatherly affection that was misinterpreted by a prying press and discouraged by the faith they both practiced. Lewis offered a dual arrangement: a husband-producer who did not feel threatened by her fame until she became a television celebrity with a larger public than she had ever known—and one that she had every intention of retaining regardless of what kind of a turn her health would take. In Jean Louis, she found the companionship she once had with Tracy, except that now she played the dual role of nurturing mother and ministering wife. She was no longer searching for a surrogate father, but rather a lost soul in need of rehabilitation. Although they only enjoyed four years of marriage, Loretta gave Jean Louis as close a reincarnation of Maggie as he would ever find—in addition to being a wife as fashion-conscious as he was. Visitors marveled at Jean Louis’s attire. He usually looked as if he were wearing one of his creations, which he probably was. With Loretta and Jean Louis, it was both mutual affection and shared taste.

A new marriage, a new address. Loretta was no stranger to relocation; from her childhood on, she was used to a peripatetic existence. Gladys moved the family from one home to another. Loretta was no different; she lived in a variety of homes in Los Angeles, including a ranch in Beverly Hills, a Santa Monica beach house, and a maisonette that Gladys
had designed for her in the North Flores apartment complex. However, her most famous residence was the one in Bel-Air
designed by Garrett Van Pelt
and decorated by Gladys, where Loretta lived in the 1930s and which was showcased in
Architectural Digest
. It was a ten-room white colonial that featured a dining room with hand-painted wallpaper and some of her mother’s collectibles, such as a lacquered screen from Korea and artifacts from the American Southwest and Mexico. In the living room, ivory settees faced each other on either side of a fireplace. Loretta’s room was a vision in blue and rose: rose chair and rug, wallpaper in rose and ivory. Hers was not an ordinary bed; it was double-canopied with a ruffled bedspread. Dresden figurines imparted a Victorian femininity to the room, which looked as if Christina Rossetti slept there. If any room could define Loretta, it was the Bel-Air bedroom. It was as much of a paradox as she: innocent yet sensuous, childlike yet sophisticated, luxurious yet simple.

Loretta decided that the ideal place for her and Jean Louis was Palm Springs. She put her last home, a Beverly Hills French Regency model, up for sale. The asking price was $895,000; it sold for slightly less in August 1996. The gated home in Palm Springs, complete with swimming pool, was discreetly opulent. There was no doubt that it was a movie star’s home, with Loretta’s portrait spotlighted by
Tiffany lamps
. But it was also the home of a devout Christian, as the four-foot silver crucifix dominating the living room indicated. The cross was both a memorial to her mother, who found it in Mexico, and a reflection of the faith they shared. This was Loretta’s last home. In a few years, when she became terminally ill, she would make one last trip to Beverly Hills.

In 1997, death became Loretta’s companion, the equivalent of a
memento mori
. Early that year, on 14 January, her sister Polly Ann died of cancer. Next was Jean Louis. On 20 April, the couple was on the way to Mass, when he collapsed and died. No stranger to death, Loretta knew the protocols: First a funeral mass, which took place at St. Louis Catholic Church in Cathedral City, midway between Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, the latter a resort community and home to the affluent. Loretta’s sons delivered the eulogy; after the ceremony, the family returned to Palm Springs for a gathering at the Givenchy Hotel. On 27 August 1997, it was Elizabeth Jane’s (Sally Blane) time to die, also from cancer. Loretta had already lost her mother, Gladys, in October 1984 when she suffered a massive stroke. All that remained of her family were her half sister and brother-in-law, Georgiana and Ricardo Montalban.

But to the image-obsessed Loretta, the death that meant as much to her as that of a family member was the death of a myth. In 1994, Judy published
Uncommon Knowledge
, touted as “The heartrending true story of the daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young.” At eighty-one, Loretta’s determination to conceal the truth of Judy’s parentage had nothing to do with her professional image. She knew she would never act again, not even on television, where all she would be offered were either cameo spots or character parts. Loretta was STAR in all caps; she had no intention of going lower case. In the last decade of her life, Loretta only cared about her image. A devout Catholic, despite a few early indiscretions, she was in every respect a daughter of the Church—even if maintaining that status meant having Judy’s birth and baptismal certificates falsified, and passing Judy off as her adopted daughter, whose father had died. A Jesuit would have understood: Loretta was resorting to the Jesuitical art of equivocation, reasoning that after Judy’s birth, her father, Clark Gable, had “died,” as someone who enters the religious life “dies” to the world, or, in this case, as someone who
was
but no longer
is
. Loretta had created the myth—with help, of course. It had become a sacred text that had always been suspect but never repudiated. She had no intention of having anyone, much less her daughter, expose her as the mythographer that she was. And yet, as an observant Catholic, what else could Loretta have done, short of holding a news conference, admitting the truth, embarrassing Gable, and endowing Judy with her own epithet: “Loretta Young’s illegitimate daughter”? An abortion was out of the question. Loretta was pro-life even in 1935, before the phrase became part of the national vocabulary. It was bad enough that she had committed one mortal sin by engaging in sex outside of marriage; she could not afford another.