Loretta owed Paramount two more pictures, which turned out to be Hal Wallis productions. As production head at Warner Bros. from 1930 to 1944, with credits ranging from Little Caesar (1930) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and the forever fabulous Casablanca (1942), Wallis could have remained at the studio indefinitely. Instead, he chose to leave in 1944 after Jack Warner’s hubris brought their once amicable relationship to an end on Oscar night, 2 March 1944. When director Sidney Franklin opened the envelope and announced that the Academy’s choice of best picture was, not surprisingly, Casablanca, Wallis immediately rose from his seat to accept the award. It was he who monitored the transformation of an unproduced play into a classic film bearing a title that he personally gave it. But Warner, assuming that Casablanca was the studio’s film—and, therefore, his—beat him to the stage and accepted an Oscar for a movie to which he had contributed nothing.
Tired of playing the crown prince to the clown king, Wallis moved to Paramount, where he set up his own production company with Joseph Hazen, a lawyer friend from his Warner Bros. days. With the formation of Wallis-Hazen, Inc., which by 1952 would be Hal Wallis Productions, and with backing from Paramount, Wallis began recruiting talent that would form the basis of a repertory company. He fancied himself a “starmaker,” the title he gave his highly selective autobiography. But his stars could not equal the Warner galaxy that he once had at his disposal. Wallis discovered some promising newcomers, such as Lizabeth Scott, Wendell Corey, Kristine Miller, and Douglas Dick. But, with few exceptions, he failed to find starmaking vehicles for them, even though Dick and Corey delivered standout performances—Dick in The Searching Wind (1946) and The Accused (1948), and Corey in The File on Thelma Jordan (1949) and The Furies (1950). Three of his discoveries—Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Charlton Heston—appeared in a few Wallis productions, but defected once they achieved stardom. The films for which they will be remembered—The Bad and the Beautiful, Paths of Glory, Lust for Life (Douglas); Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Gantry, Birdman of Alcatraz (Lancaster); The Greatest Show on Earth, Touch of Evil, Ben Hur (Heston)—were not Wallis’s. It was not until 1949, when Wallis discovered Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and later Elvis Presley, that he could truly claim to be a starmaker. Most of the others were stars in the making who never made it to the firmament.
Wallis was a regular theatergoer, who found Lancaster and Douglas in short-lived Broadway plays that revealed a talent that could be transferred to the screen. Significantly, some of Wallis’s best films were stage adaptations: Tovarich, Jezebel, The Male Animal, Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind, Come Back, Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, Summer and Smoke, and Becket. Naturally, quality mattered, but even if the play were not a masterpiece, Wallis would option it if he thought it could work as a film. Samson Raphaelson’s The Perfect Marriage, costarring Miriam Hopkins and Victor Jory, had a respectable, but not impressive run during the 1944–45 season. The play had a promising premise, involving a couple on the verge of divorce after ten years of marriage. Wallis thought The Perfect Marriage (1946) might be another Skylark (1941), which was also based on a Raphaelson comedy about an imperiled marriage. When it came to casting the film, Wallis decided that none of his discoveries had the style for the leads—but Loretta Young and David Niven did.
Wallis knew that Loretta could handle repartee, and Niven could exude a sophistication that moviegoers would not find snobbish. Wallis and Loretta were also not strangers; their relationship had been forged at Warner’s, where Wallis witnessed Loretta’s versatility and later acknowledged her as not just a “star” but also a “friend.” In 1946, Loretta was not a prima donna, nor would she ever be; but she had reached a stage in her career when she could insist, as she did when she signed on for China, on a 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (sometimes 5:00 p.m.) schedule. She had to make an exception for Orson Welles when she did The Stranger. Loretta’s policy was meant for mortals, not for Welles. She accepted his erratic shooting schedule, even if it meant working past midnight. She had often done so during her apprentice years and now found herself marching to the beat of a drummer whose tempo was like no other’s. Although Loretta gave her usual professional performance, she could not compete with the boy wonder of Hollywood, who was no longer a boy but would always be a wonder. The Perfect Marriage contracts imply that Niven was the bigger draw (compare his $150,000 for ten weeks, and $15,000 per week thereafter to Loretta’s $100,000 for the same period and $10,000 per week thereafter). The reason, however, was that Niven was under contract to Goldwyn, who determined salary when he loaned the actor out to Paramount. The Perfect Marriage turned out to be a twelve-week shoot beginning on 2 January 1946, with Niven and Loretta receiving an additional amount ($30,000 and $20,000, respectively) for additional filming.
Loretta had a genuine flair for sophisticated comedy—as opposed to a flair for comedy as a genre, a characteristic shared by Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, and Claudette Colbert, all of whom were especially adept comediennes. But if Loretta had lines that were elegantly crafted, without sounding sententious or pompous, she could toss them off with aplomb. She was at her best with dialogue that was more parlor than drawing room, more town house than penthouse. Samson Raphaelson was not Philip Barry, but he could write dialogue that, if it did not conjure up the image of cut glass, at least suggested a 60-watt chandelier.
Skylark was a better play than The Perfect Marriage and enjoyed a longer run. Leonard Spiegelgass adapted The Perfect Marriage, opening up the single-set play in the interest of realism and moving the action toward a believable conclusion, in which the couple’s fathers, each of whom disliked his child’s choice of spouse, became co-conspirators, pooling their wiles to save the marriage. Wallis assembled an excellent supporting cast: Virginia Field, the “other woman” angling to become Niven’s second wife; Eddie Albert, who has similar designs on Loretta and is already planning to send her ten-year-old daughter to boarding school; and Zazu Pitts, as the maid whose pixilated expression got a laugh with every entrance.
Loretta made one more film for Wallis, The Accused (1948), which tested her ability as a serious actress in a way that no other film had. The Accused begins with a shot of a car at the edge of desolate cliff, overlooking the Pacific. A woman emerges in a trench coat, clutching a briefcase. She heads for the Freeway, shielding her face from the glare of the headlights. She finally accepts a ride from a truck driver, who drops her at a bus stop. The woman is Dr. Wilma Tuttle, a Los Angeles psychology professor, who has just killed one of her students. In a flashback, the cliff is revealed as the murder scene, the car, as the student’s, and the motive as self-defense. The flashback also explains why Wilma was with a troubled student at such a lonely place.
Ketti Frings’s screenplay is a model of criminal detection, until the denouement. Academics might quibble about Wilma’s way of dealing with Bill Perry (menacingly played by Douglas Dick), a brilliant but disturbed student who studies her in class, mimicking her mannerisms. Although Perry makes Wilma uneasy, she has no qualms about accepting a ride, as well as a dinner invitation, from him in her naïve belief that she can rehabilitate him. Or is the coolly dispassionate professor intrigued by Perry’s penetrating stare, as if he can see through her emotionally calcified exterior to the unfulfilled woman within? Loretta played Wilma with startling ambivalence, as if dinner with Perry was as much of an adventure as a form of therapy. Perry, however, has other plans. He drives her to the fatal cliff and changes into a tight-fitting bathing suit. Although Wilma is fascinated by the swirling water below and perhaps by the buff Perry, she also suspects his intentions. Loretta now makes it clear that Wilma is alternately attracted to, and repelled by, the libidinous Perry, who pins her down on the back seat of the car, kissing her passionately. The kiss restores the professional virgin to her senses; realizing what comes next, she reaches for the steel bar on the seat and clobbers Perry to death. Anyone hoping Wilma would get away with ridding herself of a creepy kid had more plot to contend with. Perry’s guardian, Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), a San Francisco lawyer, comes looking for his ward but falls for Wilma instead. Police detective Ted Dorgen (Wendell Corey) starts building a case, at first suspecting a lovesick student (Suzanne Dalbert), but finally settling on Wilma, who eventually confesses.
The plot twists and counter twists keep the action from flagging until the courtroom ending, when Ford delivers an impassioned but morally flawed speech to the jury, admitting that Wilma was guilty of concealing evidence out of fear but not of committing homicide. Cummings sounds so persuasive, that, although the film ends before the verdict comes in, audiences assumed that Wilma would not do time for defending herself against a rapist.
Edith Head designed a wardrobe for Loretta that was faithful to her character. At the beginning, she looks like a typical unmarried professor, with hair piled high, sexless suits, and an austerity that keeps her from enjoying the give-and-take of the classroom. To avoid being recognized as the woman on the freeway, Wilma abandons the academic look, morphing into an ultra feminine, even alluring, woman, with hair framing her face and a wardrobe that few academics could afford. The transformation from uptight professor to woman in love is even reflected in her relaxed classroom manner.
The director, William Dieterle, who with his white hat and gloves behaved like a Prussian general, was known for his habit of subjecting one member of the cast (never a star) to withering criticism, whether it was merited or not. In The Accused, the scapegoat was Suzanne Dalbert, and according to Douglas Dick and Wallis’s publicity director, Walter Seltzer, Dieterle almost succeeded in breaking her spirit. Loretta had no problem with Dieterle. Wallis was another matter. She now insisted on not working after 5:00 p.m. and even refused to do an over-the-shoulder shot favoring her. She and Wallis also disagreed on a variety of issues: stills (“old fashioned”), close-ups, and even the soundtrack. Wallis was unsympathetic, accusing her of taking an “arbitrary stand”; when she persisted, he reminded her in no uncertain terms that there were “legal steps” he could take if she continued to be uncooperative. Loretta understood; she was in no position to challenge Wallis. All Loretta wanted was to be recognized as a serious actress, as if that was necessary. But Hollywood has a short memory; in 1948, few remembered her extraordinary performances in Life Begins, Man’s Castle, Platinum Blonde, and Midnight Mary.
Loretta was also briefly reunited with Samuel Goldwyn, for whom she had last worked in 1930, when she replaced Constance Cummings in The Devil to Pay, which was not a happy experience for either party. At seventeen, Loretta had been out of her element, unable to master a British accent and still in awe of the star, Ronald Colman, who had been one of her fantasy lovers. Since Goldwyn disliked both The Devil to Pay and Loretta’s performance, he had no intention of rehiring her, even though he must have known that she had improved considerably since 1930. Goldwyn desperately wanted Teresa Wright for The Bishop’s Wife (1947). He had a great affection for Wright, whom he considered one of his protégées. Wright made her film debut in his production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1941), for which she received a best supporting actress nomination. The following year she was nominated again—but as best actress—for another Goldwyn film, Pride of the Yankees (1942). However, the movie that brought Wright an Oscar was not one of Goldwyn’s; it was MGM’s Mrs. Miniver (1942), for which she was voted best supporting actress. In 1946, Wright appeared in one of Hollywood’ s most time-honored films, Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which received eight Oscars, including best picture, actor (Fredric March), supporting actor (Harold Russell), director (William Wyler), and screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood). Teresa Wright was Goldwyn’s first—and, in 1947—his only choice for the title character.
Just before filming began, Wright, then married to author Niven Bush, discovered that she was pregnant. Goldwyn had to find a replacement—and quickly. He needed a “name” who looked as if she could be the wife of an Episcopal bishop. And who could better fill the bill than Loretta? David Niven and Cary Grant had already been cast as the bishop and an angel, respectively. Goldwyn recalled that Loretta and Niven worked well together in Eternally Yours. When he read that they would be re-teamed in The Perfect Marriage, which began filming during the first week of January 1946, he assumed that, once it was finished, Loretta would be available. She was, but not immediately. She had signed on for The Farmer’s Daughter at RKO, having no idea that it would result in her one and only Oscar.
Later, when Goldwyn finally met Niven Bush, he berated him for making Wright a mother: “When you were fucking Teresa, you were fucking me.” Actually, The Bishop’s Wife, despite its title, would have done nothing for Wright’s career. After two forgettable 1947 Paramount films (The Trouble with Women and The Imperfect Lady), Wright returned to the Goldwyn fold, giving an eloquent performance in Enchantment (1948), opposite Niven. At least they costarred once.
Loretta was wasted as Julia Brougham, whose husband’s dream of building a new cathedral could only happen through some form of divine intervention. The Bishop’s Wife is one of several post–World War II films suggesting that America was in need of spiritual renewal—if not from the clergy, then from above. In 1946, two films were released with angels in major roles: A Matter of Life and Death (also known as Stairway to Heaven), and the most famous of all heavenly messenger films, It’s a Wonderful Life. The following year, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) was remade as Down to Earth (1947), a Rita Hayworth musical in which an angel (Edward Everett Horton) and the muse Terpsichore (Hayworth) turned a troubled Broadway show into a hit. There were other films that were intensely spiritual without invoking an angelic presence. Henry Fonda played a priest who risked his life to minister to Mexicans during a time of religious persecution in The Fugitive (1947), John’s Ford dark and brooding version of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Frank Sinatra donned a Roman collar for The Miracle of the Bells (1948). In Winter Meeting (1948), a naval hero (Jim Davis) confesses to a lonely poet (Bette Davis), with whom he has fallen in love, that their relationship must end because he has decided to become a priest. And in Joan of Arc (1948), Ingrid Bergman hears heavenly voices, urging her to help the dauphin, Charles VII, reclaim his throne.
Hollywood got religion when the times required it. The religion boom continued once writers discovered the Cold War, with Communists replacing Nazis and Japanese imperialists. God took to the airwaves in The Next Voice You Hear (1950); angels turned the Pittsburgh Pirates into a winning team in Angels in the Outfield (1951); and the communist son of staunch Catholic parents recanted too late in My Son John (1952). Since the nuclear age conjured up the specter of a nuclear war, the Deity alone could save the planet. A spate of doomsday films (Five [1951], When Worlds Collide [1951], War of the Worlds [1953]) stressed the need for belief. In their sermons, priests often emphasized the significance of the dates of America’s official entry into World War II (December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception) and V-J Day (August 14, the eve of the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary), implying that a country so ill prepared to enter a global war was granted a miracle. Perhaps another was needed to prevent World War III. Historians, naturally, would argue otherwise. Yet many Catholics, and perhaps others as well, did not discount the possibility of some form of divine assistance, the same way moviegoers hoped for a deus ex machina in the form of a last-minute reprieve for an innocent prisoner on death row, or the arrival of the cavalry when the fort under Indian attack seemed doomed.
The Bishop’s Wife combines both the need for faith and for miracles. An angel, Dudley (Cary Grant), is dispatched to assist Bishop Brougham (David Niven) achieve his goal. As played by Grant, Dudley is the most sophisticated angel who ever came down to earth. His clothes are impeccably tailored, he plays the harp exquisitely, and he is an accomplished figure skater. But his emotions (one must assume angels have them, once they take on human form) surface when he meets Julia. Loretta’s best scenes are those with Grant, especially the scene in which they turn skating into a courtship ritual. Their growing rapport is even apparent in another scene that would ordinarily have no romantic connotations: the one in which Dudley helps Julia choose a hat, behaving more like a beau or a husband than an angel. A happy ending is inevitable, as one would expect of a film that ends on Christmas Eve with the conversion of an agnostic (Monty Woolley) and Dudley’s winning over the wealthy Mrs. Hamilton (Gladys Cooper), who had previously opposed the construction of the cathedral. When one thinks of The Bishop’s Wife, Loretta’s is the last name that comes to mind. It was Grant’s film. Loretta had nothing to equal Niven’s climactic Christmas Eve sermon, nor could she compete with the outstanding supporting cast (Monty Woolley, James Gleason, Gladys Cooper, and especially Elsa Lanchester).
Loretta’s two 1947 films—The Farmer’s Daughter, released in March, and The Bishop’s Wife, released in December—were never intended for her. Ingrid Bergman was producer David Selznick’s preference for the former; Teresa Wright, Goldwyn’s choice for the latter. In the mid 1940s, Selznick came upon an obscure play, Hulga for Parliament, by a Finnish playwright writing under the pseudonym Juhni Tervataa. Hulga was a politically astute woman from a Swedish farming community who succeeded in getting elected to parliament. After buying the rights, Selznick assigned the adaptation to Laura Kerr and Allen Rivkin, with instructions to Americanize the plot. They entitled their first draft “Katie for Congress,” in which a young Swedish woman from Minnesota runs for Congress and wins, despite an unsuccessful attempt to defame her. “Katie for Congress” underwent a name change, becoming The Farmer’s Daughter, designed as a vehicle for the Swedish-born Ingrid Bergman—the title change presumably a way of attracting audiences familiar with risqué jokes about the farmer’s daughter that were a staple of every burlesque comic’s repertoire. Bergman, now an Oscar winner for her performance as the terrorized wife in Gaslight (1944), passed on it, claiming that she could do more than act with her accent, especially after it had become a plot point in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945).
Once Bergman bowed out, Selznick lost interest in the project and sold the rights to RKO, where Dory Schary had just become production head. Schary was eager to produce the film, but as compensation for losing Bergman, Selznick wanted to maintain a measure of control by loaning out two of his other stars: Joseph Cotten, who played Congressman Glen Morley, and Ethel Barrymore, who appeared as his influential mother, thereby maintaining a presence in a film that was no longer his. Selznick also tried to cajole Schary into hiring Sonja Henie for the lead, believing that the Norwegian Henie could pass for a Swede. Schary, refusing to be cowed by Selznick, insisted on Loretta: “I honestly feel with deep conviction that Loretta Young could approximate much more of what we want.”
Schary was familiar with Along Came Jones and The Stranger, which were released by RKO. Obviously he knew of Loretta’s other work as well, but it was the RKO connection that made her a perfect candidate for the role. In addition, Loretta was a good friend of the Scharys and a regular at their parties, despite political differences. Schary was an impassioned liberal (but not a radical); to Loretta, the only politics that mattered were studio politics. Once Loretta signed on, she “plunged into the role,” mastering the Swedish accent and settling for clothes that Katie, not Loretta, would wear. Her efforts paid off, and the Oscar that Schary predicted came to pass.
Schary entrusted the direction to H.C. Potter, who was equally at home in the theatre, where he directed such notable Broadway plays as A Bell for Adano, Anne of the Thousand Days, and Sabrina Fair. Potter took a stage director’ s approach to film, using occasional long takes to minimize cutting, and composing shots so that—at least for a minute or so—they looked as they would on the stage, with the action framed within the proscenium. Then Potter would cut, but at least for those few moments, audiences experienced the wholeness of theatre. Potter also understood that, in film, a shot from above or below should match the character’s perspective. Thus when Clancy, the gruff but kind-hearted butler (Charles Bickford), observes activity in the parlor from the second story, the shot matches his angle of vision. The script required a skating scene between Cotten and Loretta. Both of them appeared to be passable skaters, but when it was time to waltz on the ice, Potter cut to a long shot, with doubles dressed like the principals but capable of doing what they could not. There is no way of knowing whether Potter or the writers were aware of a similar skating scene in The Bishop’s Wife, in which Henry Koster used a double when Cary Grant’s character did some fancy figure skating. But in each film, skating seemed more like a mating dance than a spin on the ice.
As Katie Holstram, Loretta sounded like an authentic Swede. Sent from her parents’ farm to work as a domestic for the Marleys, Katie revels in being part of a household that throws cocktail parties for politicians and journalists, eventually becoming brave enough to attend a political rally in support of Anders Finley (Art Baker), for whom she has no respect. During Q & A, Katie innocently asks Finley, “Why are you running for Congress?” Once the hecklers are silenced, she summarizes his shoddy record during the Great Depression: practicing nepotism, complaining that bread lines were too costly, and requiring apple sellers to have a license. Mocked at first, Katie garners so much popular support that she is on the verge of winning the nomination, when the opposition mounts a smear campaign that almost destroys her self-confidence.
Encouraged by her father, Katie reenters the fray; in a montage straight out of Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with newspaper headlines dissolving into each other, Katie wins both the election and Morley. What the film leaves unresolved is the question of how two members of Congress with different agendas can have a successful marriage. But moviegoers who prefer the ending of their dream scenario to the film’s would not even have raised the question. To them, Katie is so strong-willed that whatever political disagreements arise, it is clear Morley will come around to her way of thinking.
The Farmer’s Daughter was the first time Loretta worked with Joseph Cotten; the second was in a less worthy vehicle, Half Angel (1951). Cotten, the courtly Virginian and connoisseur of beauty and talent, was awed by Loretta: “Her knowledge of her own technique as well as the offstage mechanics of movie makeup, is enormous. She can never be unglamorous, and her beautiful eyes are as innocent today as ever.” That technique paid off in 1948 when Loretta received her first Oscar nomination, not for The Bishop’s Wife, but for The Farmer’s Daughter. Also nominated that year were Joan Crawford (Possessed), Susan Hayward (Smash-Up, The Story of a Woman), Dorothy McGuire (Gentleman’s Agreement), and Rosalind Russell (Mourning Becomes Electra). Although Loretta was thrilled with the nomination, she was convinced she did not stand a chance after the trades had all but awarded the Oscar to Russell.
When RKO agreed to co-produce Dudley Nichols’s scrupulously faithful version of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra with the Theatre Guild, the studio knew it would only be a prestige film that needed some incentive (an Oscar nomination or preferably an Oscar) to build an audience. As it happened, Mourning Becomes Electra found favor with neither the public nor the critics. The subject matter, Aeschylus’s Oresteia as it might have unfolded in post-bellum New England, became a lexicon of neuroses: a brother and sister are in the advanced stages of the Oedipus and Electra complexes; an adulterous wife poisons her husband and commits suicide after her son avenges his father’s murder by killing his mother’s lover and later himself; the daughter makes a Freudian slip, calling her suitor by the name of her mother’s lover and then admitting that he had been her lover, too. If the wildly operatic plot seems like a retrospective of a daytime soap, O’Neill’s trilogy has the power to draw audiences into the mind’s dark places, holding them there for the duration (four hours for the play, three for the film) and leaving them exhausted but purged.
Mourning Becomes Electra was not so much a movie as an event. It opened at the Golden, a legitimate playhouse on West 45th St. in New York, which during World War II was home to the long-running (1,293 performances) Angel Street. Mourning was a road show engagement, with two performances daily, and three on Sunday. By 1947 standards, the tickets cost about the same as most stage plays: $2.40 (orchestra and mezzanine) and $1.80 (balcony) in the evenings; $1.80 (orchestra and mezzanine), $1.20 (balcony) at the matinees. The Farmer’s Daughter, on the other hand, opened in New York at the “showcase of the nation,” the egalitarian Radio City Music Hall, where the price of a ticket included a movie and an elaborate stage show featuring the world-famous Rock-ettes. Mourning was tough going for the uninitiated; Daughter was pure mass entertainment.
On 28 March 1948, the Academy Awards ceremony took place at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. When Fredric March opened the envelope to announce the name of the best actress of 1947, he looked shocked. Meanwhile, a confident Russell, sitting in the rear, was about to rise, until she heard March say, “Loretta Young for The Farmer’s Daughter.” To avoid embarrassment, Russell made it seem that she had risen to lead an ovation for her friend. A euphoric Loretta, in a green silk taffeta dress, her neck encircled by a diamond necklace, swept down the aisle. She graciously acknowledged the other nominees but could not resist adding, as she kissed the statuette, “And as for you, at long last.”
It was not surprising that Loretta won. The Farmer’s Daughter was an American Dream movie: You, too, can run for Congress and win—despite your background. In fact, your background can work for you, freeing you from hangers-on and smarmy campaign managers and imbuing you with courage even in the face of defeat. Mourning Becomes Electra was marketed as cinema: highbrow entertainment for the elite, caviar for the masses. Since The Farmer’s Daughter was movie rather than cinema, more Academy members saw—and enjoyed—it, contrasting its ninety-seven-minute running time with the three-hour Mourning Becomes Electra. Imagine students given a choice between writing a paper on either “The Aeschylean Background of Mourning Becomes Electra” or “The Farmer’s Daughter as a Reflection of the American Dream.” Most would have chosen the latter; the Academy certainly did.
Three months later, another event occurred that received as much publicity as Loretta’s Oscar. Shortly after 6 June, Loretta received a brief note from her maternal grandmother informing her that her father, John Earle Young, died of a stroke. Loretta reacted unemotionally; to her, he was the man who abandoned them when she was four. “He may have been my father,” she told the Los Angeles Times (14 June 1948) about the man who died under the name of John V. Earle. She went on to explain that, on the advice of her parish priest, she sent her father monthly checks, even though he made no effort to see her. Polly Ann and Sally Blane attended the funeral; Loretta did not—or would not, claiming that she was making a film. John Earle Young was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. On the day of his burial, there was no headstone to mark his grave, although there were baskets of flowers without cards to identify the senders. To Loretta, 1948 meant her Oscar, not her father’s death.
Like other Oscar winners, Loretta found that the statuette was a blessing and a curse. Judy Holliday was also a dark horse in 1951, when most insiders expected the 1950 Best Actress Oscar to go to either Gloria Swanson for her spectacular comeback in Sunset Boulevard or to Bette Davis for All About Eve, which resurrected her career—but not to Judy Holliday for reprising the role that made her a Broadway star, Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. Yet Holliday won, and probably for the same reason that Loretta did: Born Yesterday was accessible. Holliday’s Billie was a refreshing alternative to the gothic bravura of Swanson’s Norma Desmond and the epigrammatic egomania of Davis’s Margo Channing. Billie Dawn was a recognizable human being, the mistress of a loutish junk dealer, resorting to self-deprecating humor to hide her vulnerability. Billie needs—and gets—a deliverer (William Holden), who convinces her of her potential, equipping her with enough of an education so that she can leave her overbearing lover. More Academy members could identify with Billie than with Norma or Margo; like Katie, Billie was palpably real.
But the public wanted Holliday, the dizzy dame, not the educated woman; sadly, her subsequent films were a footnote to Born Yesterday, and her great potential was never realized once she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which brought her life to an end at the age of forty-two. Swanson’s movie career dead-ended after Sunset Boulevard, and Davis did not have another film that clicked with the public until the ghoulish Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which at least brought her a Best Actress nomination.
Loretta was also not inundated with quality scripts after her Oscar; few winners are. But those that she chose to do were respectable, even when the material was tissue-thin. At least her next and last RKO film, Rachel and the Stranger (1948), was anything but flimsy.
When Loretta’s sister, Sally Blane, married Norman Foster in 1935 after his divorce from Claudette Colbert, Loretta never thought that, a decade later, her brother-in-law would direct her in a film. Loretta first met Foster when he was an actor, costarring with him in Play-Girl and Weekend Marriage (both 1932). In the mid 1930s, Foster discovered his true calling: directing. He revealed a knack for avoiding racial stereotypes in the Mr. Motto series about a Japanese amateur sleuth played by Peter Lorre. Foster directed and coauthored six of the eight Mr. Moto films. Before Orson Welles began Citizen Kane (1941), he screened a number of films, including the Mr. Motos. Welles was particularly taken with Foster’s ability to evoke a menacing environment through the manipulation of light and shade. His subtle use of chiaroscuro was exactly what Welles wanted for Citizen Kane. When Welles realized he could not edit The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and direct Journey into Fear (1942) at the same time, he entrusted the latter to Foster. Sadly, RKO had its own ideas about Ambersons, and Welles’s masterpiece underwent radical surgery. But even in its truncated form, it remains a testimony to Welles’s genius.
Nineteen forty-eight saw dramatic changes in the film industry. The boom year of 1946, Hollywood’s annus mirabilis, when paid attendance was at an all-time high, was followed by a period of budget cutting and the curtailment of unnecessarily lavish productions. As RKO’s new production head, Schary sought a mix of the prestigious but financially unsuccessful (Mourning Becomes Electra [1947], Joan of Arc [1948]), and the popular (John Ford’s Fort Apache and Rachel and the Stranger, which reaped profits of $445,000 and $395,000, respectively). Schary expected Rachel and the Stranger to have great popular appeal, which it did. Since Norman Foster was a known quantity at RKO, Schary entrusted him with the film, which was based on Howard Fast’s short story, “Rachel,” with a screenplay by Waldo Salt. Knowing that Loretta was not bound to any studio and had time before starting The Accused, Foster cast his sister-in-law in the lead. Her costars were William Holden, on loan from Paramount, and RKO contract player Robert Mitchum.
Anyone who expected a movie with an anti-capitalist subtext was disappointed, even though Fast and Salt had both been members of the Communist party. Fast served three months in prison in 1950 for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). In 1956 he severed his connections with the Party after learning that Josef Stalin, the avuncular “Uncle Joe, “ was nothing more than a genocidal dictator. Salt had been subpoenaed by HUAC in fall 1947 to testify to the preposterous charge of Communist subversion of the movie industry. Eleven were called, the last being German playwright Berthold Brecht, then residing in Los Angeles, who denied being a Communist and immediately returned to East Berlin. If the hearings had not been temporarily suspended, Salt would have been next. But, as an unfriendly witness, Salt was soon blacklisted, working only intermittently and under pseudonyms. He was finally vindicated when his adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) was awarded an Oscar, followed by a second one for 1978’s best original screenplay, Coming Home.
Rachel and the Stranger, however, is apolitical. Loretta was cast as a bondswoman in the 1820s, bought by widower David Harvey (Holden) to run his household and educate his young son. Until the end of the film, Rachel is a wife in name only, a combination servant-housekeeper. Loretta was the perfect frontierswoman, in her high-necked dress that made her look austere but could not conceal her body’s natural curves—actually, the dress emphasized them. The high neck worked to the character’s advantage, forcing her to hold her head high, despite the treatment she received from her husband. A specially created makeup gave Loretta’s face an earthen glow, the opposite of the lustrous look she had in romantic comedies.
Of all her mother’s films, Rachel and the Stranger is Judy Lewis’s favorite. It is certainly one of Loretta’s best. To see her churning butter is to watch an actress inhabit a character that was completely at odds with her persona. Yet when Loretta had to play women from society’s lower echelon (e.g., Life Begins, Man’s Castle, Taxi!, Midnight Mary), she gave them a sense of dignity that steeled those women against life’s injustices and men’s callousness. Loretta played Rachel as a woman so inured to a hard-knock life that she would never break down. Like Cherry in Along Came Jones, Rachel can handle a rifle. During a Shawnee attack, Rachel kills one of the Indians, her face registering the pain she feels about taking a life as she presses herself against a wall.
Robert Mitchum gave an unusually sympathetic performance as Harvey’s itinerant friend, Jim Fairways, who falls under Rachel’s spell. Knowing that Harvey regards Rachel as little more than a hired hand, Fairways makes a bid for her, as if she were up for auction. Here, perhaps, is a vestige of Salt’s leftism: two men vying for a woman as if she were chattel—at least from the woman’s point of view. After the Indian attack interrupts what would have been a violent confrontation between the men, Fairways realizes that, from the way Rachel rallied to protect a family that was not even hers, she is meant for Harvey. And the film ends with a close up of Harvey kissing Rachel, who emerges as morally superior to both her husband and her suitor.
Expecting a stream of obscenities from Mitchum, whose maverick ways and public brawls always made the papers (he was jailed for marijuana possession in 1948, the same year Rachel came out), Loretta arrived on the set with her swear box. When Mitchum learned what each bit of profanity or blasphemy cost, he asked within Loretta’s hearing distance, “How much does Miss Young charge for a ‘fuck’?” He then stuffed a $5.00 bill into the box and indulged himself with his favorite expletive. Loretta’s response is unknown. In her profession she must have heard the national obscenity before, but she probably referred to it as the “f word.”