By January 1936, it was time for Loretta to go back to work. Like the phoenix, she had risen from the ashes of unwed motherhood—the stigma expunged, the evidence temporarily concealed, and the future brighter than it had been the previous fall. Although Loretta had convinced herself that she had committed a mortal sin, she at least had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not as serious as abortion.
Loretta might have enjoyed some peace of mind if she sought out a liberal priest, accustomed to hearing actors’ confessions, who would have given her a penance of five Hail Marys and told her to get on with her life. Loretta did, in her own way. She returned to her Bel-Air home with Gladys, while a trustworthy nurse remained in Venice to take care of Judy, whom Loretta visited periodically. But the subterfuge could not continue indefinitely. Loretta and Dr. Holleran were fleshing out the plot points in the adoption scenario, which would be finished in six months, with Judy being placed at St. Elizabeth’s. Loretta was still a working actress, slated for four films in 1936, and four more in 1937. Professional obligations had to take precedence over the joys of motherhood.
The orphan adoption scenario was worthy of Dickens, who used a similar one in Bleak House, in which Lady Dedlock’s affair with an army captain involved a more elaborate subterfuge, as one would expect in an eight-hundred-page novel that allows for considerably more subplots than a ninety-minute film. Since the reconciliation between Loretta and her daughter had not yet occurred when Uncommon Knowledge was published, but instead happened a short time before Loretta’s death, only Judy Lewis can reconstruct that moment of truth. It was probably never as theatrical as Lady Dedlock’s disclosure to her daughter, Esther, when, dropping to her knees, Lady Dedlock implores, “Oh, my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! Oh, try to forgive me.” That would have been a great scene for any actress—including Loretta, if Hollywood had decided to film the novel. But Zanuck had other plans for his star.
When Loretta checked in at Fox that January, she discovered that Zanuck had loaned her out to MGM again. Because Midnight Mary proved so successful, MGM wanted to reunite Loretta and Franchot Tone in The Unguarded Hour (1936), an adaptation of a British melodrama with Tone as Lord Dearden, a leading barrister, and Loretta as his wife. Loretta’s voice was now sufficiently cultivated that she did not have to affect a British accent, as she was forced to do in The Devil to Pay. Instead, she injected a melodic lilt into her speech, as if she were playing drawing room comedy, which was enough to suggest the character belonged to a world of peerage. Tone’s, on the other hand, was faux British but adequate for a film where intricacy of plot was more important than authenticity of accent.
There is always a villain in melodrama, and in The Unguarded Hour it is Hugh Lewis (the lethally suave Henry Daniell, London-born and sounding it). Lewis informs Lady Dearden that his wife has incriminating letters from her husband, dating back to the time when they were lovers, which, if published, will derail Dearden’s political career. Rather than jeopardize her husband’s future, Lady Dearden offers to buy them, unaware of the consequences, which include a fall from a Dover cliff, a murder, a false confession from Lord Dearden, and his unmasking of the real killer, who, of course, is Lewis. Like Dial M for Murder, Sleuth, and Deathtrap, The Unguarded Hour is the kind of film with enough plot twists to hold the viewer’s attention until the narrative cord can bear no further knotting and slackens, buoyed up one last time for an unexpected but not implausible denouement.
The Unguarded Hour’s significance lies in its director, the estimable Sam Wood, who preferred directing films based on novels (e.g., Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Kitty Foyle, Kings Row, and For Whom the Bell Tolls) to those based on plays. Yet he did well with stage adaptations, which require careful pacing to hide their theatrical origins. Wood learned the importance of pacing and rhythm in the silent era; he had directed thirty-two silents before he made his first talkie, So This Is College (1929), with two actors from Broadway, Elliot Nugent and Robert Montgomery. By 1935, he displayed his ability to hold a fractious narrative together in the Marx Brothers classic A Night at the Opera, a magnificent example of controlled anarchy. By 1936, a creaky melodrama like The Unguarded Hour posed no problem; he knew how to keep the film from splitting into narrative fragments, preserving its theatricality by using a fade out to mark the end of a scene, like the lowering of a curtain. Wood’s best stage adaptations are Our Town (1940) and Command Decision (1949). Despite Wood’s sensitive direction and Aaron Copland’s evocative score, Our Town lacked the original’s uncompromisingly bleak ending. In the film, Emily’s death in childbirth and her return to earth to relive one day, moving among the living who cannot see her, turns out to be a dream—except to those who knew Thornton Wilder’s play.
Janet Gaynor headed the cast of Loretta’s next film, Ladies in Love (1936), but was not the star. No one was; it was not a question of stardom, but of empathy. Although the leading roles are evenly distributed, the script was structured in such a way that audiences could root for their favorite lady. But if their sympathies lay anywhere, it was with Loretta. Gaynor was costarred with Loretta and Constance Bennett, as three young women from the provinces who set out for Budapest in search of wealthy husbands—only to discover that a Cinderella can meet her Prince Charming, have a fling with him, and then stand by while he marries someone from his own class. Since Gaynor was an Oscar winner (few could forget her performance in Seventh Heaven [1929]), and highly respected by the industry and the public, she received top billing, followed by Loretta and Constance Bennett. When Tyrone Power (then Tyrone Power Jr.), looking preternaturally beautiful as a Hungarian count, spots Loretta working as a chorine in a nightclub, their interlocked gaze, etherealized by front lighting, suggests that the lady of the chorus has met her royal deliverer, and that a fairytale ending is in the offing. But it was not to be; theirs was the only kind of dalliance that royalty have with commoners. As a result, Ladies in Love became a sobering study in the disappointments of working class women who set their sights on upper class men.
Some moviegoers might have sensed a similarity between Ladies in Love and The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932), a Samuel Goldwyn production. And theatergoers would have known that Goldwyn’s film was based on a play by Zoë Akins (at the time America’s leading female dramatist) called The Greeks Had a Word for It, which opened on Broadway in September 1930 and enjoyed a run of 253 performances. Goldwyn, an avid follower of the New York theatre scene, bought the rights, expecting little, if any, opposition from the Hays office. Will Hays, Warren Harding’s postmaster general, had been relatively tolerant about film content during the early years of the sound era, but in this case he did not object to the subject matter (husband hunters) so much as to the title, which he suspected the self-righteous would consider prurient. “It” could be interpreted as a euphemism for what Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun calls “doin’ what comes naturally.” And so, The Greeks Had Word for It became The Greeks Had a Word for Them, as if “them” was less suggestive than “it.” Regardless, the film was not one of 1932’s major attractions. It might even have been a noble failure if Sidney Howard (a fine playwright, toiling in Hollywood) had retained Akins’s denouement, in which the trio continued to ply their trade. Instead, Howard has one of them succeed in finding a husband.
Two years later, Loretta found herself in the Ladies in Love remake, Three Blind Mice (1938), which resurrected—and not for the last time—the trio of husband hunters, who, like the women in Akins’s play, decide that to trap a millionaire, they must pretend to be millionaires so they can move in the right circles. Akins did not even receive a “Suggested by” credit; rather, the source listed was a play by Stephen Powys, the author of Walk with Music. But Powys’s play did not premiere until 1940; when it was written, when Fox bought it, and if it opened in its original form remains unknown. Three Blind Mice was so radically different from Akins’s play that Fox felt there was no reason to acknowledge the playwright, even though there would not have been a Ladies in Love or a Three Blind Mice without her.
The “three blind mice” were three sisters—played by Loretta, Pauline Moore, and Marjorie Weaver—who use their inheritance to leave Kansas and try their luck in Santa Barbara. Loretta is romanced by the two male leads, Joel McCrea and David Niven, while all Weaver can attract is the buffoonish Stuart Erwin, who turns out to be her ideal mate, without the baggage that weighs down the wealthy. Loretta has the more difficult choice. In an early scene, when McCrea and Loretta are lolling around in their bathing suits on a stretch of sand, a clueless Niven does everything but bless their union. The scene has an understated sexuality about it; neither McCrea nor Loretta seemed shy about lying together in such close proximity. In fact, they look as if they enjoyed it and probably did. They seem headed to the altar until McCrea confesses he has no money. Will Loretta choose love or money? McCrea never gave a sexually charged performance; his were always subtly calibrated. Sexuality was regulated, like a thermostat that was never raised beyond the comfort level. Loretta knew how to raise the temperature to cozy warm, and when she did, McCrea responded effortlessly. McCrea was exactly the kind of actor to whom she could give herself—in fantasy terms only—because both understood the difference between propriety and passion: the former meant for the camera, the latter for later.
If all three sisters were to pair off with their respective husbands, Moore seemed to be the odd sister out. The only possible pairing was the provincial Moore and the worldly Niven. Strangely, this worked: Niven plays a rancher with cattle and chickens, and Moore plays a girl who grew up on a chicken farm, giving them at least poultry in common. Three sisters, three husbands, only one of whom, Niven, is a bona fide millionaire.
Three Blind Mice did not mark the end of the gold diggers movie; two years later, the theme resurfaced in the Fox musical, Moon over Miami (1940), and again in 1946, in Three Little Girls in Blue. With the advent of CinemaScope, Fox remade it again, this time with Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe as the trio in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). But the theme goes back even earlier, to Anita Loos’s novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), in which Lorelei Lee and her sidekick do not need a third party to achieve their goal.
Loretta gave a less satisfying performance in Three Blind Mice than she did in Ladies in Love, which at least proved that attempting to ensnare a rich husband (which may occasion temporary euphoria) usually ends in disillusionment. Three Blind Mice insisted that the three sisters, unlike Chekhov’s, found their mates, however circuitously. Loretta was more effective in a fairy tale that went sour than in one that was cloyingly sweet.
Less than a year after Judy’s birth, Loretta was a mother again—on screen. She looked unusually radiant, perhaps because the adoption scenario was finished, and in a few months Judy would be ensconced in a San Francisco orphanage. Loretta no longer had to visit the house in Venice on the sly. Gladys could return to decorating the homes of the famous, and Loretta to the only profession she knew. It was picture-hopping time, and Loretta made four in 1936, five in 1937, four in 1938, and three in 1939, her last year at Fox. For Loretta, a mother’s place was before the camera.
Private Number was released in early June 1936, a month before Judy’s removal to St. Elizabeth’s. Insiders must have exchanged smiles, or smirks, when Patsy Kelly described Robert Taylor, Loretta’s leading man in the film, as being “as handsome as Gable.” Loretta laughed knowingly, but innocently, and replied: “I’ll say so.” It was not exactly an apt comparison. The young Taylor, like the young Power, had a masculine beauty that complemented Loretta’s shimmering femininity. Gable was the opposite; he was all high testosterone and devilish eyes that could seduce without exerting the slightest effort.
By 1936, audiences had become accustomed to the class distinction film—either rich boy/poor girl, or vice versa—a plot template common to both serious drama and screwball comedy. Private Number was a woman’s film, with Loretta triumphing over falsehoods and perjured testimony that would have felled an ordinary mortal, which her character was not. She was Ellen, a maid in an affluent household, ruled by a demonically creepy butler (Basil Rathbone). When he sees Ellen, he is taken with her beauty, suggesting that he can help her “advance,” which she does without having to lose her virtue. The son (Taylor) is also smitten with her, so much so that class barriers dissolve and they secretly marry. But other barriers arise. Private Number would not be a woman’s film without Ellen undergoing a series of trials that would have broken the spirits of an ordinary mortal. The rebuffed butler dredges up her past, including a prison stint. When Ellen becomes pregnant, her in-laws threaten to have the marriage annulled. The courtroom sequence is a free-for-all, with false testimony, histrionics, and the climactic arrival of Taylor, who vindicates his wife and embraces fatherhood.
The one scene Loretta has with her newborn is done with uncommon tenderness. Judy was about three months old when Private Number started production. Loretta transferred the affection that she could not lavish on Judy to the infant in the film. In that one scene, Loretta displays the kind of maternalism that transcends mere acting. Or was the unfeigned love that she lavished on the infant in the basinet her last act of motherhood before she consigned Judy to St. Elizabeth’s?
Loretta’s return to Fox did not result in better roles. But there were no great roles for any actress at the studio. Zanuck was only interested in promoting the careers of those whose names would guarantee an audience: namely Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, and perhaps the up and coming Tyrone Power. Temple and Henie had gifts that had little to do with acting, at which neither excelled. Temple became an industry, with coloring books, cutouts, and even a non-alcoholic cocktail named after her. She was also an extraordinary child star, whose deficiencies as an actress became evident when she moved into her teens. There was a sad ordinariness about her work in her last films (e.g., Adventure in Baltimore, The Story of Seabiscuit, and A Kiss For Corliss), which revealed a young woman no different from the generic brand that had been banished to B movie limbo. But there had never been a skater in film like Henie, whose bubbly personality and spectacular feats on the ice (a sound stage at Fox was converted into a rink just for her) ensured her popularity for a decade, after which she began appearing in icecapades, lavishly staged with Broadway-worthy choreography. Temple and Henie were flavor-of-the month stars, with careers that lasted sixteen and twelve years, respectively. Temple’s could easily have ended in 1942, ten years after she made her screen debut, since her roles from 1944 to 1949 could have been played by others. Similarly, Henie could have left Hollywood after Iceland (1942), rather than following the now forgotten Countess of Monte Cristo (1948). Loretta’s career, on the other hand, spanned more than three decades. She might have consoled herself with the realization that, for the time being, Zanuck was not turning out Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated films. Between 1936 and 1939, the studio could only boast of two Oscars, both in the supporting category: Alice Brady for In Old Chicago and Walter Brennan for Kentucky (both 1938). None of Loretta’s films were even Oscar material.
But Loretta was useful to Zanuck. When he decided to make Ramona (1936), Fox’s first full-length Technicolor feature, he knew he had no other actress for the title role. If anyone could photograph well in color, it was Loretta. The director was Fox’s specialist in Americana, Henry King, ideally suited to re-create 1870s Southern California. The studio publicists concocted a story that must have given every wannabe hope. On the basis of “exhaustive tests … made of practically every feminine star and some hundred-unknowns,” Loretta was chosen to play the convent-educated heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1886 novel, whose strongest appeal was to young women. The “exhaustive tests” bit was pure hype. Zanuck already had his Ramona.
Since Loretta was cast as the daughter of an interracial union (white mother, Indian father), she was given an exotic look, with burnished cheekbones tinged with red, and long black hair, parted in the middle and cascading down her shoulders in folds. The wig and makeup were in keeping with the character, who, once she learned about her origins, considered herself an Indian. Jackson never describes Ramona in detail, writing only that her protagonist had a “sunny face” and a “joyous voice” and extended a friendly greeting to everyone. The nuns at her convent school referred to her as the “blessed child.” Screenwriter Lamar Trotti did not have a problem with the racial aspects of the plot; he merely followed Jackson’s lead and had Ramona become romantically involved with another Indian, Alessandro (Don Ameche). Although by contemporary standards Ameche looked like a racial stereotype, with a feather sticking out of his headband, he was the film’s sole revelation, creating a genuinely moving—and ultimately tragic—figure. Ameche divested himself of his sometimes-oily smugness and connected empathetically with his character, as did Loretta with hers.
King was in his element, reveling in slow tracking shots and the opportunity to embellish what he probably thought was a hokey melodrama by supplying local color and detail, including sheep-shearing and a fiesta, in which Loretta danced so authentically that some moviegoers might have wondered what she would have been like in a musical, a genre that she never attempted. Melodramatic as Ramona is, there are scenes that generate real tension, especially when the newly married Ramona and Alessandro discover that the whites whom they had befriended and fed have returned to practice their own version of manifest destiny by taking over their property, the property of mere Indians. Another near tragedy occurs when their newborn child becomes gravely ill. Alessandro locates a doctor, who is too busy to travel and can only give him the medicine. One of the whites, to whom the couple was so generous, shoots Alessandro for commandeering his horse after his own became lame.
These scenes elevate Ramona from the level of storybook romance to tragedy, in which Indians suffer at the hands of rapacious whites. The film ends with a shot of Ramona after Alessandro’s funeral, greeted by Felipe (Kent Taylor), who was always in love with her. Ramona sighs ecstatically, “Don Felipe.” Fade out, The End. Ramona discreetly skirted the implications of another interracial union—this time between a white man (Felipe) and a woman of mixed blood. The novel, however, does not end ambiguously. Ramona and Felipe relocate in Mexico, where she and her daughter, also named Ramona, can live without prejudice. We read that the couple had a large family, “but the most beautiful of them all and … the most beloved by both father and mother, was the eldest one, the one who bore the mother’s name … Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian.” If the film version had included Jackson’s epilogue, Zanuck would have been hailed (and in some circles, denounced) as a champion of civil rights. In the post World War II era, Zanuck would tackle such controversial themes as anti-Semitism and racism. But to quote Cole Porter, 1938 Hollywood was “the wrong time” and “the wrong place.”
One would think from the movies of the 1930s that heiresses merited front-page headlines, however frivolous their actions. In It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert can dive off her father’s yacht and embark on a series of escapades that capture the attention of the nation during one of the worst years of the Great Depression. It is as if It Happened One Night, classic that it is, were taking place in a world antipodal to the real one—a world where wealthy runaways and scoop-hungry reporters dispelled the grim present and offered the public a Neverland where all that matters is that boy gets girl, regardless of class distinctions and compatibility. If they embrace at the fadeout or, as in It Happened One Night, when the blanket barrier between their beds falls to the floor, the audience exits, believing that happiness is right around the corner.
When Love Is News was released in March 1937, the Spanish Civil War was in its second year, the Rhineland had been remilitarized, and the bloody Detroit steelworkers’ strike that left ten dead and more than ninety wounded was over. But what did it matter if a brash reporter (Tyrone Power) was writing unflattering pieces about a fabulously rich young woman (Loretta), who retaliates by informing the press that they are engaged? All audiences wanted to know is how two people who hate each other could possibly fall out of enmity and into love. With Loretta and Power in the leads, the film could hardly have ended with the two going their separate ways.
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.
There was no “working actress” job description during the studio years. If one had existed, it would state that a working actress is one who works, despite the quality of the material handed to her. And if she balks at the assignment, she goes on suspension, switches studios, or freelances, as Loretta began doing when she left Fox in 1939. She must have sensed that in the coming decade the roles would be fewer or not worth accepting, unless money or ego were the sole considerations.
At the end of 1937, Loretta knew it was only a matter of time before her days at Fox were over. The previous year, she refused to do Lloyds of London (1936), claiming that the role she was offered, which went to Madeleine Carroll, was too small. “Loretta Young Walks Out In Huff Over Film Role,” a Los Angeles Times headline (6 September 1936) announced. It was true: Loretta flew to San Francisco and took a boat to Honolulu. She was developing a reputation for being difficult. Zanuck did not know how difficult she could be. Loretta had not yet begun to fight.