Zanuck was so pleased with the box office receipts for Wife, Doctor and Nurse that Loretta and Warner Baxter were teamed again in Wife, Husband and Friend, adapted from James M. Cain’s novella, Career in C Major (1936). By 1936, Cain’s bestseller, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), had already established him as a novelist who transcended the gaudy prose of the pulps. By the time Wife, Husband and Friend was released, he had published another novel, the controversial Serenade, fraught with racial stereotyping and homophobia, none of which appeared in the 1956 movie version with Mario Lanza as an operatic tenor caught between two women. Opera was not alien to Cain. Although he was an acknowledged master of hardboiled fiction, he aspired to be an opera singer but soon discovered that his forte was language; however, he never lost his love of opera, which resonates throughout Career in C Major, in which a contractor discovers he is a natural baritone, as opposed to his un-talented wife, who aspires to be a concert artist. Career is a first-person narrative, told almost exclusively from the point of view of the contractor, Leonard Boland, in a style hardly befitting an opera singer. It mixes streetwise vernacular, tangy and colorful, with the kind of metaphors (a conductor’s demeanor is “as cheerful as cold gravy with grease caked on the egg”) that became the hallmark of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Ellroy.
The specter of the Great Depression broods over Cain’s novella. Leonard’s business is suffering, although his socialite wife, Doris, is oblivious to the country’s economic woes and focuses solely on her concert debut, which proves a disaster. When Cecil Carver, a concert and opera star, accidentally hears Leonard sing, she experiences the “star is born” syndrome and immediately grooms him for a singing career, introducing him to the rituals of the concert and operatic stage. Leonard is an overnight sensation, and Cain allows his narrator to describe his initiation into an alien world as he dissects the plots of La Bohème and Rigoletto in a refreshingly muscular style, lacking in highbrow pretentiousness. But Cain knows enough not to have Leonard triumph at his wife’s expense. After a catastrophic Rigoletto, Leonard realizes he is out of his element. Then, in an eleventh-hour reprieve, an offer comes through to build a bridge in Alabama. And Career ends with the Bolands en route to the Deep South as they sing, off key, the duet, “Là ci darem la mano “ from Don Giovanni.
Wife, Husband and Friend follows the broad outlines of the novella, with Loretta and Baxter as the Bolands, and Binnie Barnes as Cecil Carver. In the film, Leonard’s operatic debut is a singer’s nightmare. A grotesque costume that looks like a fat suit, a stringy beard, and a floppy hairpiece all conspire against him. Leonard storms off stage, now able to understand how Doris felt when she read her hostile notices. Nunnally Johnson wrote an engaging script, which Gregory Ratoff directed capably, but without much flair. Still, the film featured a number of good performances, particularly from Loretta and Barnes, who played Cecil as if she were as serious about making Leonard into an artist as she was about netting him for herself—thus adding another dimension to the “other woman” type. The character actors did their usual scene stealing: the blustery, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette as the owner of the construction company, and the imperious Helen Westley as Doris’s mother.
Ten years later, Fox remade Wife, Husband and Friend as Everybody Does It (1949), and in this case the remake was superior to the original. But it used the same basic plot, with Cecil (Linda Darnell) becoming Leonard’s (Paul Douglas) muse, determined to launch his career and steal him from his wife (Celeste Holm). The production values were much higher in the remake, and Douglas, looking burlier and more befuddled than Baxter, was a more suitable quarry for the predatory Darnell. To coincide with the remake, New American Library published a Signet paperback with the same title, Everybody Does It, noting that the novella was originally published as Career in C Major.
There was a powerfully acted scene in the original that did not appear in the remake, perhaps because either the writer (Johnson again) or director (Edmund Goulding) thought it would not work with Holm and Douglas as the Bolands. In Wife, Husband and Friend, when Doris discovers the truth about Leonard’s supposed business trips, she lashes out at him, pelting him with blows and landing both of them on the floor. Loretta played the scene so realistically that her slim, 105-pound body must have sustained more than a few bruises. The sight of Douglas—looking like a construction worker getting pummeled by the petite Holm—would have produced guffaws. In the original, Loretta acted the scene so convincingly that it can still make one feel uncomfortable.
Four Men and a Prayer (1938) was Loretta’s first and only experience working with John Ford. Despite the title, Loretta’s character—a globetrotting socialite who, in a different film, would have been a screwball heroine—is the movie’s catalyst; without her, the plot could not have been resolved. Although Ford dismissed the film (“I just didn’t like the story, or anything else about it, so it was a job of work”), a few scenes bear his signature. One such scene is a barroom brawl set to an Irish jig coming from a player piano and Barry Fitzgerald feinting like a boxer without any opponents. Ford’s fondness for Irish shtick could derail a film, as it almost did in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), where Victor McLaglen’s high jinx left a smudge on one Ford’s most poetic works.
There was no poetry in Four Men and a Prayer, in which the four sons of a disgraced colonel (C. Aubrey Smith) vow to restore the reputation of their father, who was murdered before he could prove his innocence. For lack of evidence, his death is classified as a suicide. The sons know otherwise and set out for India and South America, where they discover that their father was a victim of an arms cartel that had no qualms about selling weapons to both insurgents and their oppressors. The film includes an uncommonly violent scene, in which Loretta watches in horror as soldiers gun down the rebels, leaving the steps on which they have assembled strewn with bodies. One cannot help but think of the massacre on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein’s Potemkin. The romantic idyll that the socialite envisioned has brought her into the midst of a struggle for self-determination, where men and women are willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause. Once Loretta learns that her father is the president of the cartel, she confronts him, not acting as if she were morally superior, but simply wanting to right a wrong—particularly after having fallen in love with one of the sons (Richard Greene). The father explains that artillery is not the company’s sole export and henceforth will cease weapons production. Developing a conscience or activating one that has been dormant is not usually that sudden, but the film had to come in under ninety minutes (it ran eighty-five), so the conversion process was reduced to an epiphany. The colonel’s killer is unmasked, the sons see their father honored posthumously, and Loretta becomes part of the family.
Loretta’s character is integral to the plot. The socialite moves in international circles, attracting the attention of shady characters like war profiteers and making it possible for the brothers to learn their identity. Although Ford expressed disinterest in the script, Loretta—her stylish wardrobe not withstanding—gave the film whatever degree of credibility it had. The brothers’ two-continent manhunt is the stuff of espionage and detective fiction, and their way of piecing information together is a variation on connecting the dots, with Loretta doing some of the connecting. Loretta’s character is achingly real. A child of privilege, indulged by a multimillionaire father, she witnesses the dark side of colonialism. She may have grown up hearing the familiar jungle movie line, “The natives are restless,” but she never saw the extent of that restlessness until she was caught in the crossfire of a rebellion. Her revulsion at the sight of innocent men, women, and children gunned down in cold blood may have been required by the script, but her face, drained of its beauty by shock and anguish, suggests that she was reacting to the scene on a more personal level. Loretta had never before been in a film in which violence erupted with such frightening immediacy that horror was the only possible reaction. Politically, Four Men and a Prayer was liberal and mildly anti-capitalist—except when politics took a back seat to high adventure, with the action shifting from India to England, then back to India and Argentina, and finally to England. Moviegoers who sensed that the film was ambivalent about imperialism were in the minority. This was 1938, when honor, reputation, and romance were more important than self-determination. For the prescient few, Four Men and a Prayer offered a glimpse into the future, when liberation movements became more widespread after the European superpowers divested themselves of their colonies.
Suez (1938) was Loretta’s last film with Power, who received first billing—as one would expect in a biopic about Ferdinand de Lesseps (Power) and his dream of building the Suez Canal. Philip Dunne and his collaborator, Julien Josephson, devised a script involving an ill-starred romance between de Lesseps and the Countess Eugenie de Montijo (Loretta), who must choose between Louis Napoleon (Leon Ames), later known as Napoleon III, and de Lesseps. She is not influenced by Louis’s looks. Ames was a fine actor, but no match for Power’s dark beauty. Power and Loretta had already become such a romantic team that audiences expected a combination of love story and spectacle. But history, when passed through the Hollywood prism, separates into a spectrum of fact and fancy. True, there was a Ferdinand de Lesseps who, physically, would never have been mistaken for Tyrone Power; however, Napoleon III was every bit as dictatorial as he is portrayed in the film, dissolving the legislative assembly and imprisoning dissidents. Since the historical Eugenie was reputedly a beauty, who else but Loretta could play her? Loretta could turn costumes into period attire and wigs into authentic coiffure. You could almost hear the rustle of silk when she walked—or rather glided—across a room. But Eugenie, unlike de Lesseps, is royalty, and in mid-nineteenth century Europe, a countess does not marry a diplomat obsessed with creating a waterway connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The film’s omission that Eugenie’s mother was the niece of de Lesseps’s mother, making Eugenie and de Lesseps cousins, is more significant. The historical de Lesseps married his first wife in 1837, thirteen years before the time of the main action. No matter; unrequited love plays better than domestic drama.
Although Suez was directed by the venerable Allan Dwan, it owes much to the second unit director, Otto Brower, who knew how to stage action in the desert, as he proved in Under Two Flags. A landslide that dislodges a mass of rock and earth was the work of Brower and the great special effects artist, Fred Sersen; so was the cyclone that sucks Toni (Annabella), the army brat who worships deLesseps, into it and disgorges her body on the sand. These are the scenes that linger in the memory.
Annabella, who received better notices than Power or Loretta, became the first of Power’s three wives a year after the film’s release. The marriage was short-lived, ending in divorce seven years later. Power’s second marriage, to Linda Christian, also lasted for seven years. His third marriage, to Debbie Ann Minardos, was tragically brief; six months after they were wed, Power suffered a heart attack and died on 15 November 1958 at the age of forty-four. His son was born two months later.
Loretta might well have been Power’s first wife. Once she learned that Power was Catholic (probably one in need of a refresher course), he was no longer an adolescent crush, but a desirable costar and potential mate. Whether Power felt similarly about Loretta is a matter of conjecture. The press felt they were made for each other, and the public did, too—but not Zanuck. To him, they were good copy—fan food, like hors d’oeuvres, not the main course. If they married, Zanuck feared he would lose his investment, and he had no intention of taking such a loss. It would be better if Power were seen with someone much plainer, another Fox contract player without a definable persona or the promise of a major career. In other words, Sonja Henie. Loretta continued to harbor some affection for Power, even though she was demoralized, as she later told Zanuck, when she learned that after Power’s first year at Fox, his salary was raised twice, and hers was not. At Power’s funeral, she arrived in costume after filming an episode for her television show, in which she played an Asian. Loretta claimed she had no time to change, but flashbulbs popped, and her appearance was the highlight of the occasion. Photo op or farewell? Probably both.
The last of Loretta’s 1938 films was Kentucky; released just before the end of the year to qualify for the Oscars. It was nominated in one category: Best Supporting Actor. The winner was Walter Brennan as a Yankee-hating son of the Confederacy, whose bias is explained in the 1861 prologue, when his character, Peter Goodwin, appears as a boy. Although Kentucky remained in the Union during the war, there were families, like the slave-holding Goodwins, that sympathized with the Confederate cause. To the Unionists, such families were rebels. When a Union official, John Dillon, arrives at the Goodwin plantation with an order to confiscate the livestock, Peter’s father, Thad Goodwin, becomes so enraged that he draws his pistol, but he is shot before he can fire. Peter witnesses the killing; unable to avenge his father’s death, he harbors a deep hatred for Dillon’s descendants.
The prologue had more potential for drama than the film proper, which cannot make up its mind if it is a domestic tragedy, a romantic melodrama, or a horse-as-hero movie on the order of Capra’s Broadway Bill (1933). Seventy-five years go by, and the main action takes place in 1938. Thad Goodwin Jr. has a daughter, Sally (Loretta), who is also Peter’s niece, and John Dillon Jr. has a son, also named John (Richard Greene). Even though Sally is a Goodwin, and John a Dillon, we are only in feuding family, not Montague-Capulet, country—which does not mean that the course of true love will run smoothly. Sally eventually gets John Dillon III, even though the audience is denied the usual kissing couple fadeout—perhaps because the romantic subplot is secondary to what is implied by the title. No matter how the credits read, the star is Kentucky, the costar is Walter Brennan, and the supporting cast is headed by a horse, followed by Loretta and Greene.
Any movie entitled Kentucky would have to highlight the Derby, which is cleverly worked into the plot so that the climax can take place at Churchill Downs. A horse joins the cast: Bluegrass, the proverbial dark horse that everyone hopes will come in first. And if Bluegrass does, will he suffer the same fate as Broadway Bill, the horse that gallops triumphantly through the finish line and then collapses in death? Bluegrass is a bona fide character; he may be a horse, but he stands in for anyone who has been pegged a loser and confounds the skeptics by doing a star turn. We know Loretta and Greene will resolve their problems and go into a clinch, on or off the screen. It will be much easier with the death of Peter, who is adamantly opposed to his niece’s involvement with a Dillon. Once Bluegrass wins the cup, it is Peter whose heart gives out from excitement, and it is Peter who posthumously gets the last scene when John Dillon Jr. delivers the eulogy at his funeral, reminding the mourners that, with Peter’s demise, “We are burying a way of life. “
Some moviegoers might have felt that Peter’s was a way of life that should be buried, based, as it was, on false ideals and festering hatred—not to mention racism, which is also reflected in the film’s portrayal of the Southern black as illiterate darkie, a stereotype that Hollywood perpetuated over the years and that many whites accepted as fact. Although the Goodwins treated their slaves and later their servants humanely, they did so condescendingly, as if, as Christians, they were expected to be tolerant of inferiors. And for all the accolades heaped on Walter Brennan for his portrayal of Peter, he gave a performance in one key, in a voice so petulant that he would have been a prime candidate for anger management classes if they had existed in 1938.
This was Loretta’s second color feature. She was given a wardrobe with soft colors: white, yellow, pink, and pale blue. Although an equestrian like Sally Goodwin would have been comfortable in jodhpurs, they did little for Loretta except call attention to her backside. Her makeup was also a problem. Her face lacked its usual translucence and delicately sculpted cheekbones. Instead, it looked like an alabaster mask with rouge-tinged cheeks that seemed stained. Neither her makeup nor Greene’s was consistent. At times, Greene looked as if he were not so much made up as painted. When Loretta’s makeup was applied less extravagantly, the old aura returned. But black-and-white truly did her justice, and it was not until 1949, when she was thirty-six, that she appeared in another color film. Zanuck was pleased with the final script, requesting only minor changes. But the film did nothing for Loretta, who was eclipsed by a state, a horse, a race, and Walter Brennan, who for some reason endeared himself to the public.
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Loretta’s last film at Fox, was not hers; both the title and the credits confirmed as much. Don Ameche in the title role headed the cast, followed by Loretta and Henry Fonda as Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, the recipient of the world’s first phone call: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Bell was Ameche’s most memorable role, which he played with an ardor that reduced everyone else to supporting cast status, despite their billing. Like Loretta, Fonda learned that at Fox, contract players were the equivalent of repertory actors: a lead today and a supporting role tomorrow. The year that The Story of Alexander Graham Bell was released also saw the release of one of Fonda’s best-remembered films, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, in which Fonda played the title role. Only a movie buff would associate Fonda with The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, which was Ameche’s film, and his alone. Everyone else was relegated to the wings until needed on stage.
Loretta was not needed that often. When she was, she looked ravishing—particularly when Bell proposes marriage on the staircase, both of them using an encoded language that might seem too decorous for ordinary mortals, but not for the angelic Loretta or her character, Myrtle Hubbard, who is propriety incarnate. Myrtle is also deaf; it is Bell’s reputation as a teacher of the hearing-impaired (who performs scientific experiments in his spare time) that results in his meeting Myrtle, who has mastered the art of lip reading. Since the historical Myrtle Hubbard was deaf, the screenwriter, the invaluable Lamar Trotti, acknowledged her condition and then consigned it to plot point limbo, the repository of once used and then discarded information, so Loretta would not be burdened with the dual task of looking beautiful and reading lips. Once the film takes a romantic turn, Myrtle’s deafness becomes irrelevant; Loretta plays her scenes with Ameche as she would with any leading man with whom she is supposed to fall in love.
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell is one of Fox’s more accurate biopics; certainly there is less embroidering of the facts than there was in Suez, even though the latter is cinematically more impressive with its disaster scenes and special effects. But there is some massaging of facts. The historical Myrtle was not enthusiastic about her husband’s experiments with the telephone; her father, one of Bell’s chief financial backers, preferred that he concentrate on the telegraph. Trotti’s Myrtle, in contrast, is the perfect inventor’s wife: She simply tells her husband to continue with the telegraph, while he secretly works on the telephone.
The film was handsomely mounted and well acted, but with little sense of urgency or drama. Essentially, it was an information retrieval movie. Since everyone knows the outcome, there is no suspense. Trotti realized he could not make the world’s first phone call the climax. For those who did not know that Bell might have become a historical footnote, and that the invention of the telephone could have been attributed to Western Union, Trotti devised as dramatic a conclusion as the facts would allow. Bell initiates a law suit that generates little heat. Myrtle, now pregnant, is in the courtroom; she is also in possession of a letter proving that Bell succeeded in transmitting sound through a wire. When she goes into labor, Bell uses his invention to contact the hospital. Bell wins his suit, and the film ends as he describes his dream of air transportation.
For Loretta, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell had a personal significance. It was the only time she and her three sisters appeared in the same film. The three played Myrtle’s sisters: Gertrude (Sally Blane), Grace (Polly Ann Young), and Berta (Georgiana Belzer). Sally’s resemblance to Loretta is so striking that seeing them together is like the charm of recognition that comes from leafing through the family album on a rainy afternoon. Perhaps in any year other than 1939 Ameche might at least have garnered an Oscar nomination. But 1939 was the year of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Destry Rides Again, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Women, and the one and only Gone with the Wind. Who cared about an invention that in 1939 was taken for granted?
Loretta had mustered enough courage to say her own farewell to Zanuck, not knowing that she would be back for three more films. In 1939, she felt that the cord had been severed. At a meeting with Zanuck and Joseph Schenck, then president, she voiced her disillusionment: “Darryl, I won’t work with you …. In all the years I’ve been here, you never once sent me flowers or given me a bonus or even a raise …. I went back for ‘Mother Was (sic) a Freshman’ and ‘Come to the Stable’ And boy, Fox paid!” Zanuck felt the same about Loretta, going to whatever lengths he could to see that she paid for her ingratitude. Hollywood buzzed with “Loretta will never eat lunch in this town again” rumors. But Loretta was always able to find a protector, at least temporarily. And she found champions now in Walter Wanger and Harry Cohn.