“I have been in love fifty times,” Loretta admitted to an interviewer in 1933. “If I didn’t fall a little bit in love with the men I play opposite, I could not do love scenes with them. “ This was not the boast of a starlet, eager to graduate to siren, or at least love goddess, status. Loretta was a star; she was also speaking truthfully. Her adolescence was spent in the movie business. While other girls her age went off with their boy friends to the local soda fountain and sipped ice cream sodas through two straws—the era’s idea of safe sex—Loretta was constantly in transit, spinning through Warner’s revolving door, with an occasional break. Few other actresses could claim to have appeared in fifty-five films by the time they were twenty.
Not every actor made the cut. Walter Huston, who played Loretta’s racketeer father in The Ruling Voice (1931), giving the only memorable performance in a less-than-classic crime film, was too avuncular for fantasy. Besides, Huston was twenty-nine years her senior, and Loretta had been cast as his daughter. When Loretta spoke of falling in love, she was talking about a transferable infatuation generated by her imagination that enabled her to perform credibly on the screen. Whether she knew it or not, she was talking about the art of acting, an art so elusive that, once experienced, it can only be described, not defined. Even in her early thirties, Loretta sounded like a child of fancy. Quoting a limerick that ends, “I like men,” she cited some of her favorite screen lovers: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Don Ameche, Richard Barthelmess, Ronald Colman, Charles Boyer, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, and Alan Ladd. When she mentioned Clark Gable, it was only to record, like a school teacher, that knowing how she felt about swearing, he observed decorum on the set, even when something went wrong and justified a bit of profanity. Anyone who knew what had happened when they were making The Call of the Wild would have been amused that while Gable curbed his language, he did not do the same to his libido.
When Loretta was sixteen, and making The Second Floor Mystery (1930), she fell in love with her leading man, Grant Withers. This time, it was not love filtered through the lens of the imagination, but an emotional attachment that may have been love. But how would Loretta know? She was so used to fantasy that, if she ever experienced the real thing, she might not have known the difference. Loretta was always attracted to older men. Withers, born in 1904, was nine years her senior. They seemed to have much in common: both were born in January, Withers on the sixteenth in Colorado, the state in which Loretta’s sister, Sally Blane, was born; Loretta on the sixth in Utah. Before becoming an actor, he loaded freight at the Santa Fe railroad yards, reported on the crime scene for a Los Angeles newspaper, and drove a riot squad car for the LAPD. Loretta responded immediately to his rough-edged masculinity. She had no idea that he had been married before, but soon learned when his ex-wife, Inez, filed for alimony the first week of February 1930, shortly after Loretta and Withers were married. That January, Loretta thought she had found her future husband and was even willing to ignore the mandates of the Church and elope with him. “When love comes so strong, / There is no right or wrong. / Your love is your life,” Anita sings to Maria in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Loretta felt similarly. However, when she experienced that love, short-lived as it was, she was sixteen, which was not a marriageable age in California. Once Withers learned that a woman could be married in Arizona at seventeen, they waited until Loretta had reached her seventeenth birthday.
On Sunday, 26 January, Loretta and Withers boarded an early morning flight to Yuma, Arizona, where they were married. When the couple returned, a furious Gladys Belzer met them at the airport, threatening to have the marriage annulled, until she learned it was legal. Gladys was savvy enough to know that the press would make fodder of the three of them. She withdrew the annulment suit, and Loretta informed the press that she would remain married to Withers and that her mother had accepted her decision. The situation changed on 8 February, when Loretta received a subpoena to testify in an alimony suit brought by the first Mrs. Withers against her ex-husband, whom she had married in 1925, and with whom she had a child. If Loretta was devastated by the news, she did not show it. There was a front to maintain and a press to contend with. Still, at the end of June, Loretta, who knew how to make her life into a movie, informed reporters that she and Withers were taking a delayed honeymoon in Denver, as if, “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” But it wasn’t. God ruled otherwise, and in early July, Loretta initiated divorce proceedings.
But she still carried a torch. As she confessed to Gladys Hall in 1933, in an interview that never saw print, “I never, I know, felt that way about any man again. I was in love with him. I shall always be in love with him.” The torch burned out the following year when she made Man’s Castle with Spencer Tracy. Modern Screen (December 1933) reported that Tracy and Loretta were often seen lunching together and going out dancing in the evening. Ironically, both were Catholics, and Tracy was married but estranged from his wife. The Tracys never divorced; as Catholics, they remained faithful to their marriage vows, even though their marriage was foundering. Loretta was also a Catholic, yet she thought nothing about clubbing with a married man. Perhaps it was her youth or just the desire to enjoy the nonthreatening company of a man who respected her. There was no “affair.” At the time, Loretta had a rainbow-colored notion of love: it was passion viewed through a kaleidoscope, a swirl of colors, with kissing and petting in place of sex. Loretta’s idea of love was a precoital paradise. Still, she should have realized that, as a single Catholic, she was consorting with a married man whose marriage, the press implied, was imperiled because of her. But from her standpoint, it was not adultery; she was merely enjoying the companionship of a man who was secure in his masculinity and could be her “cleft in the rock of the world.” Tracy was the male companion and surrogate father that she desperately sought, and Loretta was the soul mate that Tracy’s wife could never be. “Soul mate” is apt. If Tracy harbored any physical desire for Loretta, her virtue-emblazoned face would have inhibited him—although it did not stop Clark Gable two years later.
In early 1934, Loretta and Tracy knew they had to address the subject of their “romance” and put their fans at ease. Loretta stated unequivocally that marriage was out of the question: “I would never marry outside my church. Nor will I. Consequently, Spencer and I might as well part company now as later.” Yet she did acknowledge her debt to him: “He has given me gentleness, thoughtfulness, and consideration such as I have never known in any other man,” adding, “[H]e has a rare masculine quality—a refined mind.” In November 1934, the Tracys separated but never divorced. Tracy told Gladys Hall that, although he was in love with Loretta, she “had nothing whatever to do with our separating, Mrs. Tracy’s and mine. Nothing whatever to do with it.”
Loretta found other male admirers, and Tracy found Katharine Hepburn, who implied that they were lovers, although Tracy was too guilt-ridden for adultery. “I tried to save him from drink,” Loretta told celebrity biographer Donald Spoto when he visited her Sunset Boulevard mansion to do a piece for Architectural Digest. Hepburn couldn’t save him, either. Tracy had his own desert places that others could not visit. Apart from chronic alcoholism and a marriage gone sour, there were unconfirmed tales about male prostitutes who allegedly serviced him in a bungalow on George Cukor’s estate, where he spent his final years.
There was no happy ending for Grant Withers, either. He married three more times, and his career, which was never meteoric, spiraled downward. In 1959, his landlord discovered Withers’s body in his apartment, a suicide note in one hand and a telephone receiver in the other. It’s tempting to think that he might have been trying to call Loretta.
If Loretta pined over Tracy, no one would know it. There were other men—several, in fact. When David Niven arrived in Los Angeles in 1933, he stayed at the home where Loretta, her mother, and sisters lived until he found a place of his own. An unreconstructed (and unapologetic) ladies’ man, Niven was immediately attracted to Loretta and escorted her to nightclubs. According to his biographer, he and Loretta were “never lovers, certainly not at first.” On the other hand, it was “common knowledge that he had practically every star in Hollywood.” If that’s the case, perhaps Niven could not distinguish between his successful conquests and his failures.
In 1939, Loretta set her sights on James Stewart. Supposedly, she was too forward for Stewart, whose shyness challenged her femininity and put it in overdrive. At that stage in his life, Stewart was “fearful of, a bit confused by, and more than a little tinged with guilt about her strong sexual advances.” What Stewart misinterpreted as sexual advances, strong or weak, was flirtatiousness. If Loretta was more aggressive than usual, it was because she had encountered a man who resisted her platonic notion of eros, preferring the reality to the dream. Stewart did not marry until 1949, when he was forty-one. In 1949, Loretta was thirty-six and had been married twice.
It would have been impossible for Loretta not to have been smitten by Tyrone Power, who, as Jeanine Basinger phrased it, was not handsome, but “beautiful.” As a Fox contract player, Power was a natural partner for the studio’s resident beauty queen, with whom he made six films. The press declared them an “item.” To Zanuck, Loretta and Power were an investment, which he had no intention of losing to marriage. Zanuck discouraged any further relationship with Loretta by setting up a romance between Power and his latest discovery, Olympic medalist Sonja Henie, whose talent lay in her spectacular skating, not her acting. With Henie, there was no hope of real romance, nor would anyone think of her and Power as an “item.” With this arrangement, Zanuck could keep his beauties at his studio. Power and Henie made one movie together, Thin Ice (1937), after which, one would like to think, Zanuck decreed that Power deserved better scripts and better costars. One movie with Henie was punishment enough.
Henie was no beauty, and Loretta was off limits, both by fiat and by choice. Loretta had no problem with Zanuck’s ultimatum. But she was always salary conscious. When she discovered that Zanuck found Power a greater asset to the studio than herself, she confronted him, complaining that in all the years she had been at Fox, she had never received a raise, unlike Power, who had received two. Worse, Zanuck committed the unpardonable sin of never sending her flowers. Power was the bigger star, and Zanuck knew his name meant more at the box office than Loretta’s. Besides, she received $4,000 a week for Suet (1938), her last picture with Power—not bad for a film in which she was eclipsed by Power and the newest addition to Fox’s talent roster, Annabella, who got the best notices of any of them. Annabella was Power’s kind of woman—temporarily, at least—and they soon married. He and Loretta remained friends. With Loretta, it was simple: One romance ends, another begins. When Power died in 1958, Loretta, now a television star, made a dramatic entrance at his funeral at Hollywood Memorial Park, coming straight from the set of her series, The Loretta Young Show. The episode being filmed that day required her to play an Asian. Since Loretta did not change her costume, she created a photo op, even upstaging the deceased.
One would think that she would have had a crush on Cary Grant, with whom she made two films: Born to Be Bad, which she “thought … was perfectly terrible,” and The Bishop’s Wife, which really belonged to Grant and the great character actors Monty Woolley, Elsa Lanchester, James Gleason, and Gladys Cooper. Grant paid little attention to Loretta, spending what she considered an inordinate amount of time “dissecting” his scenes with the director, Henry Koster. Finally, she confronted him: “I don’t mind your doing this because I know you’re trying to get a better film, but please don’t do it around me.” A true gentleman, he never did it again.
Loretta’s oddest relationship was with director Edward Sutherland, the oldest man (eighteen years her senior) she ever dated. He was not only a father figure; he was old enough to be her father. Since she never appeared in any of his films, the most famous of which were W. C. Fields vehicles (International House, Poppy, Mississippi), they must have met on some social occasion. For a staunch Catholic like Loretta, going out with Sutherland was even more problematic than it was with Tracy. Sutherland was now on his fourth marriage; his second wife had been the enigmatic Louise Brooks. Like Tracy, Sutherland was what Loretta was seeking: He was paternal, erudite, sophisticated (London-born, he still had an accent), and good for a night on the town. Although Sutherland imbibed, Loretta never felt that she had to save him from drink. What Loretta sought in Sutherland was a combination father-friend. What Sutherland sought was a woman who could give him what none of his wives could: fulfillment, sexual and otherwise—a love that heats the blood and cools the mind.
Sutherland’s understanding of Loretta was so accurate that he seemed to have had access to her unconscious: “Loretta idealizes, and she is rebuffed by the slightest intimacy. A platonic love would suit her, I think. I hope she marries again. When real love comes along, perhaps she won’t be so finicky.” To which Loretta replied: “I don’t blame him. He was and is a perfectly darling man, but I just didn’t want to get married. I wasn’t especially in love with him. I was in love with love.”
“I was in love with love.” She was in love with a word and all it conjured up. And the word became flesh in the person of Clark Gable.