Loretta never worked with Lucille Ball, although she knew who Ball was, and closely followed her growing fame in the medium that Loretta was planning to enter. Lucille Ball was star writ small. She appeared in some films—Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Jules Dassin’s Two Smart People (1946), Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner (1946), Douglas Sirk’s Lured (1947)—that have attracted film scholars, not because of her, but because of the directors. Ball’s MGM career was erratic; she could have brought her own brand of zaniness to the MGM musical, except that the studio had its resident zany, Red Skeleton, with whom she costarred in DuBarry Was a Lady (1943). “Costarred” is not entirely correct—the only star was Skelton. Otherwise, she was upstaged by a musical comedy trouper (Nancy Walker in Best Foot Forward [1943]), or the MGM family (Thousands Cheer [1944]), or relegated to sidekick status (Without Love [1945], Easy to Wed [1946]). When Ball had a chance to release the scatterbrain within, using her body as a comic conduit, it was in a string of Columbia B movies—Her Husband’s Affairs (1947), Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949), and especially The Fuller Brush Girl (1950)—released the same year that she and her husband, Desi Arnaz, hit the road, offering audiences a prevue of the sitcom that made television history when it premiered in October 1951: I Love Lucy.
Although stars who defected to television were threatened with blacklisting, those whose movie careers had run their course were not alarmed. Television was small-screen film. Don Ameche, who made four movies with Loretta, entered television in 1950 as the Manager of Holiday Hotel, an ABC variety show. The same year, he emceed a quiz show, Take a Chance. Since Ameche was never a major movie star, threats—if he even heard them—did not matter. He had the next best thing in television, and Broadway as well. In April 1951, Claudette Colbert, who also knew her glory days were over, shocked Hollywood by appearing in a comedy sketch on The Jack Benny Show with one of film’s masters of gravitas, Basil Rathbone (whose movie career petered out with the end of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series). Others had nothing to lose. Live television was another form of live theater for those who were as comfortable on the stage as they were on the screen (e.g., Madeleine Carroll, Melvyn Douglas, Zachary Scott, Jane Wyatt, William Lundigan, Diana Lynn, Lloyd Nolan, Margaret Wycherly, Claudette Colbert, Ethel Barrymore, and the venerable Lillian Gish, who knew that if she could make the transition from the silents to the talkies to the theatre, she could move on to television and work the tripartite circuit for the rest of her career). If live TV proved daunting, there was always filmed television, particularly sitcoms, such as I Married Joan with Joan Davis, My Little Margie with Gale Storm and Charles Farrell, and The Donna Reed Show.
Loretta had no fear of blacklisting. When Louis Mayer bluntly told her that if she defected to television, she would “never get another script—ever,” Loretta replied that television was “the next, natural step” in entertainment. Mayer was wrong, but his death in 1957 precluded his realizing it. Loretta received movie offers over the years: for example, the part of the unmarried secretary vacationing in Venice in Summertime, which Katharine Hepburn inherited, along with an Oscar nomination. Producer Jerry Wald felt confident enough to inform the press that Loretta would costar with James Stewart in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962). She probably took one look at the script and realized that, despite costar billing, she would be in the supporting cast; the title made it clear who the main character was, and it wasn’t Mrs. Hobbs. For an actress who was a natural nun, it was surprising that Loretta even passed on the role of the mother superior in Lilies of the Field (1963), in which an itinerant handy man (Sidney Poitier) helps a community of German nuns build a chapel. Just as Loretta would have been miscast in Summertime, she would have been eclipsed by Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. Poitier deservedly won an Oscar for his performance, becoming the first African American actor to be so honored. The role of the mother superior, with whom Poitier spars, went to the Austrian actress Lilia Skala, who did not have to affect an accent and who was also rewarded with an Oscar nomination.
From the early fifties on, television was Loretta’s only medium. She had Helen Ferguson present her to the public as an ex-movie star eager to embrace the new medium, not as a Hollywood diva slumming on the tube. Ferguson did not have to be told; she knew her job, even boasting, “I can give a better Loretta Young interview than Loretta herself. “ Helen Ferguson Public Relations at 151 El Camino Drive in Beverly Hills was the address of Loretta’s authorized image-maker, who wove together fact, conjecture, and myth so seamlessly that truth and fiction were indistinguishable. Ferguson represented other stars, such as Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Maureen O’Hara, and Robert Taylor, but Loretta was special. For the others, Ferguson went the distance; for Loretta, she went beyond it, perhaps sensing that, despite her propulsive drive, Loretta could not banish the specter of failure that broods over any new venture. Not only was Loretta anxious about the show, she was also concerned about the way audiences would react to her. Being a star was no guarantee of success. Frank Sinatra disappointed his fans when The Frank Sinatra Show premiered in 1950, lasting for only two seasons. When the show was revived in 1957, it barely lasted the season, even though Sinatra was now an Oscar-winner for From Here to Eternity (1953). Television represented the greatest challenge Loretta had ever faced. She needed an image for the tube, a scaled-down version of her Hollywood persona. She had to be friendly and inviting, as if the audience were her guests and she their hostess. And that is exactly the image that she projected during all the years The Loretta Young Show was on the air.
Ferguson handled the packaging of Loretta carefully, portraying her as a convert to television, which was true. Equally true was Loretta’s determination to perpetuate her image on the small screen. Since she had done film and radio, and had earlier ruled out the stage, television was the logical next move. Loretta may not have been a narcissist, but she refused to join the ranks of the forgotten when she had a public that remembered her. The Lewis household, as Ferguson described it, entered the television age in the early 1950s with the purchase of their first TV set. It was literally love at first sight. Loretta was delighted with such shows as Hopalong Cassidy, The Kate Smith Evening Hour, The Ted Mack Family Hour, and Arthur Godfrey and Friends, all good, wholesome entertainment—as if there was anything else at the time. “Loretta felt they were friends …. She loved everything about T.V.” And soon TV would love her.
Loretta may actually have gotten the TV bug in 1950, when she was scheduled to speak at a Variety Club convention in Philadelphia hosted by Ken Murray, an ex-vaudevillian with a popular variety show, The Ken Murray Show (1950–53). When Murray heard that a baby girl had been abandoned in a local theater, he sensed a coup. Since his show that evening was a tribute to the Variety Club, he wanted to announce that the club would adopt the child. But Loretta upstaged him: She headed over to the hospital in street clothes and street makeup, and returned to the studio with the baby, knowing that there would be no studio lighting. At that moment, she was both a star and a mortal—a 75 percent star/25 percent mortal combination that would transfer to the small screen, when the time came. And two years later, the time came.
When Loretta informed the William Morris Agency that she was no longer available for movies, she was telling only a partial truth. Actually, Loretta was not being besieged with film offers. Although occasionally a few came her way, none of them would have been a comeback on the order of Gloria Swanson’s in Sunset Boulevard. The same year that Loretta made her television debut, her last film, the enjoyable but inconsequential It Happens Every Thursday, was in release. And that was her Hollywood swan song. In 1952, even before It Happens Every Thursday began shooting, Loretta made up her mind: She was going to enter television. That year, the Los Angeles Times reported: “[Loretta Young] has succumbed to television [and] starts shooting in January on a series entitled ‘Loretta Young and Your Life Story.’” The series would be produced for NBC by the Ruslew Corporation, the company’s name a combination of the last names of its founders, Harry Ruskin, a screenwriter (King of Jazz, Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble, Between Two Women, Julia Misbehaves, etc.) and Tom Lewis. Ruskin and Lewis acted as vice president and president, respectively.
At this stage, Loretta preferred to function simply as star. Her marriage was, as yet, not imperiled—although that would change once the series got underway. The cumbersome title was scrapped in favor of Letter to Loretta, but the basic concept—stories from Loretta’s fan mail that would be dramatized, with Loretta appearing as herself in the prologue and epilogue and as the main character in the teleplay—remained the same until the middle of the second season, when the letter format was discarded.
Although Loretta never expressed any reservations about Ruslew, she obviously had some. A year later, Ruslew was supplanted by Lewislor, a combination of letters from Lewis’s and Loretta’s names (his full surname, and the initial three letters of her first name), probably an imitation of Desilu, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s television corporation. At the time, Loretta did not question the order or the disparity. Lewis, after all, would be president and the accountant, Robert F. Shewalter, secretary-treasurer, with Loretta and Lewis splitting the stock and each transferring one-half, so that Shewalter would receive a munificent one percent.
In interviews, Loretta downplayed her role in Lewislor, insisting that her husband was executive producer and she the star: “I am not going to interfere with the production. I just like to act.” But Loretta had no intention of separating production from performance, nor was she willing to relinquish the reins to her husband. Loretta was a micromanager before the term was even coined. When Loretta was displeased with the set for her television debut, she turned to her mother, Gladys Belzer, who had decorated the homes of Hollywood’s A-list (John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope). Within fifteen minutes, Gladys gave her daughter the right kind of set. Loretta was at a loss to describe her mother’s magic act: “It’s hard to explain just what happened but I know that mother had performed her usual miracle.” Nothing could be left to chance, now that Loretta had sworn fidelity to television. The screen’s dimensions did not matter; small screen was better than no screen. Television would be an extension of the portrait gallery to which she had been adding for thirty-five years in film and over fifteen in radio. In 1953, Loretta was only forty, and the gallery was far from complete.
When Loretta took a candid look at early 1950s television, she realized it lacked an essential element: glamour. She was determined to bring star quality to her program, which would not be the ongoing adventures of a series character, but rather anthology television, with a new story each week and disparate characters: a salesperson; a Muslim; a model; a gangster’s moll; historical figures like Clara Schumann and Charlotte Brontë; a Japanese fisherman’s wife; a maharani; an alcoholic; a nurse; a doctor; a deaf woman threatened by a murderer; and a television executive with a brain tumor. Regardless of what her character wore, Loretta would make her entrance breezing through a door, executing a perfect turn as she closed it, and sweeping into a living room where she would deliver a warmly effusive welcome. Her delivery was slightly theatrical and often too meticulously scripted, but on 1950s television, artifice was a sign of good diction. The pivoting about was not Loretta’s idea. When her dress designer, the Polish-born Marusia, complained that viewers could not see the back of the dress, Loretta obliged by twirling around. At the end of the first season, Marusia was out, but the pivoting bit remained, embedding itself so deeply in audiences’ memories that even those who cannot recall one episode have never forgotten the entrance.
The inspiration for the series came from radio drama, especially Lux Radio Theatre and Father Peyton’s Family Theatre. On Lux, a different movie was dramatized each Monday, with the stars appearing at the end for a brief chat with the host. Family Theatre adhered to the same format, featuring a different story each week, an adaptation or an original—but always with a moral. Loretta imagined the visual equivalent of Family Theatre. Could it have been otherwise with an actress who fasted on bread and water two days a week “for spiritual reasons?” And Lux inspired the appearance of the star not just at the end, as was the case in the radio show, but at the beginning as well, so that viewers could see Loretta as both herself and her character.
On 20 September 1953 Letter to Loretta premiered, claiming to be based on letters that Loretta received from fans seeking advice about a problem or a dilemma. Movie magazine readers were familiar with advice columns, in which women (and occasionally men) sought answers to questions about conundrums ranging from romantic entanglements to the fast track to stardom. The letters were supposedly written by the viewers and the replies by the stars, although more likely a staff member was responsible for both. In fact, Loretta’s letter motif may have derived from such columns. In the late 1940s, Photoplay, the leading fan magazine, featured a column by Claudette Colbert, “What Should I Do? Your Problems Answered By Claudette Colbert.” Since Colbert was the embodiment of chic, her replies were carefully worded and unemotional. She was asked a variety of questions: Are teenagers “tops?” Answer: Yes, but not all. How should a widow deal with a man she loves but who is unable to commit to marriage? Answer: “End this affair.” One of the most authentic-sounding letters simply inquired about the role of a movie producer. The answer, regardless of who composed it, is an accurate job description of a producer in the studio era: “A producer is to a motion picture exactly what a general manager is to a commercial concern. He selects or is assigned a story to turn into a picture; he selects or is assigned the personnel (stars, director, a technical crew). He is allowed a certain sum of money … and is also expected to complete a picture in a given length of time.”
In 1945, Movieland had a similar column, “Your Problem and Mine,” with Jane Wyman as problem solver. Wyman projected a down-to-earth, big sister image; hence the title, which suggested that the correspondent and Wyman were not just locked into the letter-reply format, but that they were sharing an experience, with Wyman as an empathetic respondent. These letters seemed more authentic that Colbert’s. Wyman’s came from, among others, an amputee who has lost her desire to live, and a woman whose fiancé, an army veteran, was in danger of becoming an alcoholic. Wyman at least gave practical advice, providing the amputee with information about another young woman who learned to use prostheses and could now even go out dancing, and telling the woman with the hard-drinking fiancé about organizations where service personnel and their families could go for help. Three years later, Joan Crawford took over the Movieland column, which had a new title that put the burden on the writer: “Can I Help You?” Crawford donned the mantle of oracle, delivering the same kind of ambiguous replies to rejected suitors, jilted lovers—and, in one case, a white woman in love with a Mexican. The last required careful wording. Deliberately avoiding any hint of racism, Crawford replied that the most successful marriages are between men and women with similar backgrounds, implying that theirs were not. But the time was 1948, when such unions were frowned upon. Although Ricardo Montalban, a Mexican, was married to Loretta’s half sister, Georgiana, he was a movie star as well as the brother-in-law of one. The fanzine letters, regardless of who wrote them, rang true. There was an honesty about them, some even sounding heartfelt. The ones dramatized in Letter to Loretta (the title was wisely changed to The Loretta Young Show in February 1954), on the other hand, read more like segues into stories than requests for advice.
Anyone who turned on NBC at 10:00 p.m. on 20 September 1953 saw Loretta make her grand entrance into a soundstage living room that purported to be hers, and by extension, ours. She wafted her way from the living room door to a camera waiting to capture her greeting in close up. Loretta flashed a radiant smile with capped teeth looking like burnished ivory. In a honeyed voice, she delivered a greeting, “I’ve been looking for a special way to entertain you,” as if she were offering something other than the usual fare. That much was true. Leafing through her mail so naturally that it seemed as if we were witnessing her daily routine, she came upon a letter written by Carol Brown, a “working girl” courted by a Philadelphia blueblood, who plans to introduce her to his Main Line family. When a spiteful rival hints that his mother expects her son to arrive with a trashy shop girl, Carol exchanges her conservative outfit for a polka dot dress, encircling her neck with a collar of costume jewelry, and clasping her wristwatch around her ankle. Not knowing that Carol had been misled, the family is scandalized. But the suitor (George Nader) is still enamored of her, even to the point of risking his inheritance. The writers were familiar with the classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth (1937), in which Irene Dunne, hoping to extricate her ex-husband (Cary Grant) from the clutches of an heiress and her suffocating family, masquerades as his flashy sister, leaving the family in a state of shock when she exits. Loretta’s version was screwball for mass consumption, devoid of subtlety and double entendre. Regardless, the series slowly acquired a faithful audience, which was all that mattered.
Although Carol alienated her suitor’s patrician mother, Loretta knew that Carol must make amends if she is to marry into a family that prides itself on decorum. In the epilogue, Loretta moved to the bookshelf and took down the Bible. Her text for the evening was from Proverbs: “A sensible wife is a gift from the Lord,” implying that, to be worthy of that gift, Carol must explain her outrageous behavior and apologize. Father Peyton had done his job well. The revelation that evening was not Loretta, who had proved earlier that she could handle comedy that broadened into farce (e.g., He Stayed for Breakfast, Half Angel). It was the Paris-born director, Robert Florey, who directed all of the shows during the first season. Interestingly, his forte was not farce, but melodrama, florid and often macabre (Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Face Behind the Mask, The Beast with Five Fingers). Farce was not entirely alien to him (he co-directed the Marx Brothers’ film debut, Cocoanuts), but it was never his strong suit. Fortunately, he only had to work with a half-hour script and a cast that knew it was not doing Restoration comedy. The formula was simple: democratize the script, raise the volume on the laugh track, and what would have been screwball morphs into farce.
Playing women facing a crisis or unmasking a murderer was second nature to Loretta, who had gone that route in such films as Heroes for Sale, The Lady from Cheyenne, China, The Stranger, The Accused, and Cause for Alarm! Handling a crisis was therefore a common theme in the series. In “Earthquake” (25 October 1953), a wife with a husband confined to an iron lung must operate the machine manually when an earthquake causes a power failure. This was the kind of script that Florey could easily direct, one in which most of the action takes place in the dark, enabling him to use low-key lighting, his favorite form, and alternate between semi-darkness and shadowy surfaces.
Florey was also in his element in “Lady Killer” (10 January 1954), with Loretta as a mystery novelist with a penchant for sleuthing. When an airline passenger, whose ticket she was using, is found dead, and the female detective investigating the case experiences a similar fate, the novelist connects the incriminating dots that point to her seatmate and his associate, the corrupt district attorney. Just when it seems that the novelist is the next in line, the police (whom she had alerted) break in. The moral was simple: men do not have a monopoly on the art of deduction.
When Florey had the opportunity to take the script to operatic heights, he indulged himself, as if he were back at Warner’s. Everything was over the top in “The Clara Schumann Story” (21 March 1954), from the opening scene (Loretta as Robert Schumann’s fluttery bride) to the end (Schumann’s descent into madness). In between, Loretta moved from romantic to realist, as she came to terms with her husband’s condition. Viewers, whose only exposure to Robert Schumann might have been MGM’s glossy biopic, Song of Love (1947), were treated to an authentic—as authentic as a teleplay can be—portrait of a talent derailed and eventually silenced, an important aspect of the composer’s life that the 1947 film ignored. Loretta’s performance was the equivalent of opera without music, wildly gestural, with gradations of hysteria and pained resignation. It was a script that required little acting, only histrionics. “The Clara Schumann Story” was Florey’s half hour, not Loretta’s or George Nader’s, whose Schumann came close to conveying the radical mood swings from which the composer suffered.
Claiming that she had received letters from young women dreaming of becoming movie stars, Loretta decided they should learn the truth, not in the What Price Hollywood? or A Star Is Born way, but rather in the form of a parable. In “Hollywood Story” (31 January 1954), an Iowan (Loretta), the star of her community theater, is convinced that she can conquer Hollywood. But the time was 1954, when the new mass medium was television. Television could have been the character’s medium, too, except that a producer was honest enough to tell her that she must get more training, learn to put her career first, and, if she ever reaches the top, resort to any means to stay there. The manifesto was too much for a small-town girl who was never meant for the big time. Resigned to being a local celebrity, she rejoins the community theatre and marries her high school beau (refreshingly played by William Bishop). The parable was not dated; “Hollywood” still has a mystique as a synonym for America’s entertainment capital. The television subplot was a canny move on the part of the writer, who downplayed film’s cachet in favor of TV’s broader appeal. “Hollywood Story” subtly justified Loretta’s decision to enter the medium, while at the same time warning hopefuls that the odds of achieving her kind of stardom were slim. There was a significant difference: Loretta was already a star when she entered television, and she became a bigger one because of it. Loretta also had it much easier than her character. She became a movie star primarily because of her transformative art, which enabled her to play a wide range of characters. But stardom is not rooted solely in talent; in Loretta’s case, there were other factors such as a family contact (her assistant-director uncle), mentors (Mae Murray, Colleen Moore), directors (Frank Capra, Frank Borzage, William Wellman), and producers (Dore Schary, Hal Wallis), with whom she made some extraordinary films, and leading men from whom she learned that acting is the art of reacting (Lon Chaney, Robert Williams, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable). Of course, physical beauty was not a deterrent, nor was an inner radiance born of faith. And starting at four gave Loretta a head start.
Of all the teleplays in the first season, “Forest Ranger” (18 April 1954) was the best. Loretta may have thought so, too. A stranger appears at the back door of a ranger’s home, offering to chop wood in exchange for breakfast. The wife agrees, unaware that he is an escaped convict with an animus toward her husband. As the tension mounts, the wife succeeds in talking him out of his revenge. Some of Florey’s compositions harked back to the tight framing of film noir. When the convict threatened the wife, Florey juxtaposed their faces: his menacing, hers apprehensive but not terrified. By flattening space, he created a depthless two-shot with the texture of a film still. Like so many teleplays in the first season, “Forest Ranger” undermined the myth of “woman’s intuition” by showing that there are women who can handle crises and solve problems because they have something far superior to intuition: ingenuity.
Once the series was launched, Loretta grew more secure in her choice of script, selecting stories that reflected her beliefs, such as maintaining family unity, triumphing over adversity, subordinating self-interest to the needs of others, and accepting the divine will. She hired a story editor, Ruth Roberts, to commission teleplays embodying those themes. Roberts was invaluable to Loretta, so much so that by 1959 she had become associate producer as well as story editor. Roberts, who had been Ingrid Bergman’s dialogue coach for Arch of Triumph (1948) and Hedy Lamarr’s for The Conspirators (1944), was also “dialogue director” of one of Loretta’s last films, Because of You (1952). Loretta sensed that Roberts understood the kind of material she wanted and could provide it—and Roberts did. Other members of the team included Harry Lubin, the music director until 1958; Norman Brodine, the cinematographer for most of the teleplays; and Frank Sylos, the art director, except for the first season. These were Loretta’s people or, as she preferred to call them, her family.
Robert Florey did not return for the second season, which made up in human interest what it lacked in stylish direction. Nor did the second season see the return of Marusia, who was replaced by two other designers: (Daniel) Werlé, whose line was showcased in major department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and I. Mangin; and Helga, who also dressed Ava Gardner, Lily Pons, and Mamie Eisenhower. Harry Keller, another addition to the team, directed most of the teleplays during the next two seasons. A former film editor turned director, first at Republic, then at Universal-International, where he was a regular from 1956 to 1968, Keller, unlike Florey, had no signature, only the ability to bring a script to the screen. All but two of Keller’s films were distinctive: The Unguarded Moment (1956), a total about-face for ex-swimming star Esther Williams as a high school teacher terrorized by an emotionally disturbed student; and Voice in the Mirror (1958), an uncompromising look at alcoholism, with Richard Egan as an artist whose drinking problem has spiraled out of control. Given a script that made little or no demands—especially one about everyday problems—Keller could deliver a no-frills product. It was only when film directors who could personalize their work were behind the camera—for example, Loretta’s brother-in-law, Norman Foster, who directed fifteen episodes; or Tay Garnett, who directed four; or Rudolph Maté, who directed sixteen—that an episode looked more like a film in miniature than a teleplay.
Once the letter opening was dropped, Loretta just introduced the play, typified by “The Lamp” (19 September 1954), with Loretta as a superstitious homemaker who believes that her husband’s walking under a ladder cost him a promotion. When a package arrives with a present from her uncle, a lamp with the trademark “Aladdin,” she instinctively rubs it, and immediately receives a designer dress from her grandmother. Then her husband gets a dream job in Arizona, but to her dismay the wife learns that “Aladdin” is the manufacturer’s brand name. At message time, Loretta adopted a sober expression and reminded viewers that superstition is pseudo religion, and that its replacements are the virtues, faith and hope.
“Something about Love” (21 November 1954) could have been a gooey confection about two people with disabilities. Instead, it took an unsentimental approach to a relationship between a dancer, whose legs had been broken, and an embittered vet, once a promising architect, whose injured hands caused him to abandon his profession. Refusing to succumb to self-pity, the dancer reinvents herself as a singer, and her optimism inspires the vet to return to his trade. The conclusion is not a plot sweetener, but flows naturally from the action, in which one person’s determination affects another. It may have been a bluebird ending, but there was no chirping.
By now, Loretta knew that crisis stories were ratings boosters, especially if they involved children. “The Flood” (9 January 1955) was formulaic: The dilemma of rising waters, life-threatening condition and delay of doctor, was resolved by the doctor’s last-minute arrival and a successful surgery. A widowed nurse (Loretta), with a child in her care in need of an appendectomy, persuades a Korean vet, a former medic, to lay off the booze and help her perform the operation. Before they have a chance, the doctor arrives, the operation is a success, the vet embraces sobriety, and the nurse is on the verge of shedding her widow’s weeds. This time, one could almost hear the bluebird warbling.
“The Case of Mrs. Bannister” (6 February 1955) was atypical. A child has a doll that she has named “Mrs. Bannister.” When an actual Mrs. Bannister falls to her death from the terrace of the adjacent apartment, her death turns out to be the result of murder, not suicide. The child either had psychic powers or heard the name from conversations filtering in from the next apartment. For her adage of the evening, Loretta chose a quote from Seneca, more inspirational than apropos. A better one would have been “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet 1.5).” Regardless, that was the point.
Loretta may have toyed with the idea of a television spin-off based on a character from her show. There were two possibilities: Inga, a farm worker; and Sister Ann, a hospital nun. In “Inga” (3 January 1954), Loretta appeared in the title role as a Norwegian woman who runs a farm almost single-handedly. Believing that farm work would be a way of rehabilitating convicts, Inga persuades a prison psychiatrist to release some inmates to her custody. This was the kind of Janus-faced scenario that could go in one direction (lustful convicts menace helpless woman) or another (convicts bond with Inga and become veteran farm hands). Having played her share of imperiled women, Loretta preferred something upbeat and sunny, like The Farmer’s Daughter—clearly the inspiration for “Inga,” which also allowed Loretta to revive her flawless Scandinavian accent.
Audiences reacted so favorably to “Inga” that Loretta brought her back for the second season (“Inga II,” 20 March 1955). Although the rehabilitation (which the politically correct psychiatrist has termed “experimental retention”) is successful, Inga runs into a problem when the son of a local real estate honcho totals one of her cars. The indomitable Inga persuades the father to have his pampered son pay off his debt by working on the farm. The son reluctantly agrees, then disappears, but redeems himself by saving the farm from foreclosure. Inga returned two more times in the third (8 January 1956) and fourth (18 November 1956) seasons, suggesting that the character’s audience appeal might warrant a series of its own. An “Inga” series never materialized; if it had, it would have probably adhered to the timeworn crisis-resolution template, with either the convicts or Inga steering the narrative to a happy ending or a “to be continued” one. And how much drama could be extracted from a farm where the main concerns were crops and equipment? More to the point, Loretta was now in her early forties, not exactly the right age for a “farm girl.”
A more likely series (which also never came off) would have been the one about Sister Ann, the head nurse and trainer of nurses at an urban hospital. The first episode was “Three and Two, Please” (“Sister Ann’s Christmas,” 16 December 1956), the title referring to the emergency code used to summon Sister Ann. Loretta had a great affinity for the character. The three “Sister Ann’s”—the second and third being “Sister Ann” (11 January 1959) and “Faith, Hope and Mr. Flaherty” (8 May 1960)—revealed a different Loretta, an accomplished character actress who did not have to rely on makeup and wardrobe. “Sister Ann” was inspired by a nun, Sister Mary Rose, who was Loretta’s nurse in 1955 during her four-month hospitalization at St. John’s Hospital in Oxnard. The two became close friends. When Loretta’s television career ended, they joined forces to establish a home for delinquent boys in Phoenix, Arizona. Loretta even went so far as to purchase a mansion and have her mother decorate it. But what began as an act of charity backfired when the neighbors vehemently objected to the presence of a rehabilitation center on their block. If her show were still on television, Loretta might have commissioned a teleplay, in which an act of benevolence, such as hers and Sister Mary Rose’s, ran into opposition and triumphed over it. That was not the case in Phoenix, which was located in real life, not happy land. Still, Loretta and Sister Mary Rose remained close friends, and when Loretta last heard from the indomitable nun, she was running an orphanage in the former Yugoslavia.
If Sister Mary Rose were anything like St. Ann, it is no wonder that Loretta was attracted to her. In “Three and Two, Please,” the best of the Sister Ann’s, Loretta bustled about in her white habit, dealing with emergencies, consoling the sick, staging a Christmas pageant, arranging a wedding for a unmarried couple, and turning a curmudgeon into a humanitarian on whom she practices a bit of Christian trickery by cajoling him into paying for a bicycle that she bought as a Christmas present for a lonely young patient—and she accomplished everything in a single day. “I must be about my Father’s business” is her mantra, as she solves one problem after another, interspersing her good works with a visit to the chapel. Bespectacled and wearing a costume that made her appear plumpish, she is the embodiment of benevolence, doing God’s will in her own way—which often required a bit of fabrication, but for a good cause.
A “Sister Ann” series could have been effective. If it had come off, it would have been the precursor of The Nurses, which debuted in 1962. An urban hospital offered more possibilities for a series than a Minnesota farm. However, a predominately Catholic series would have had limited appeal. Going My Way (1944) won an Oscar for Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley who, like Sister Ann, knew how to convert crusty millionaires into church benefactors. The television series, with Gene Kelly as Father O’Malley, only lasted a season (1962–63), while the movie is a television staple, especially at Christmas time. NBC’s Sister Kate fared somewhat better, airing from September 1989 to July 1990. But NBC could not find the right time slot for a series about a no-nonsense nun, moving it from Saturday to Sunday, and finally to Monday before it went off the air on 30 July. A Sister Ann, who was a sleuth like Father Dowling in the highly successful Father Dowling Mysteries (with Tom Bosley as the title character and the endearing Tracy Nelson as his sidekick-nun), might have worked. It certainly would have been a television “first.” But Loretta had done her share of sleuthing in the forgettable A Night to Remember and would have balked at the suggestion of reducing Sister Ann to Miss Marple in a habit. Sister Ann remained just one of the characters in her vast repertory.
As important as it was for Loretta to integrate message and story, it was just as necessary for her to show Hollywood the range of types she could have played on the big screen if moguls like Zanuck and Mayer had believed in her potential. The greater the challenge the role posed, the more eagerly she embraced it. In the movies, Loretta had only played non-whites twice: in The Hatchet Man, with lacquered face and eyes elongated into slits, and, more naturally, in Ramona, where dark makeup and a wig did the trick. On television, Loretta was in her element when she played Asians. She understood their quiet demeanor, often interpreted as subservience. But she would not take a role that reduced a woman to an inferior status. She found the tranquility in the character, realizing that such women do not flare up in anger or display embarrassing emotion. In “I Remember the Rani” (1 May 1955), a British journalist recalls a proto-feminist maharini, who, when told about Queen Victoria, wonders why she herself couldn’t be called “queen.” Wiser than her male advisors, she knows that irrigation alone provides the solution to the lingering drought. Although the journalist and the maharani fall in love, an interracial marriage would have been unacceptable in India or on network TV. Instead, the maharani teaches him to say “I love you” so that it echoes through the palace halls. Unlike the lovers in The King and I, the two do not “kiss in a shadow,” but in an echo chamber. At least the maharini achieves her goal: Irrigation, and with it, the arrival of the twentieth century. “I Remember the Rani” is almost a chamber piece in its orchestrated simplicity and avoidance of dissonance or sudden changes of tempo.
Loretta was a Muslim in “Incident in India” (25 January 1959). Then, casting white actors as nonwhites was not denounced as racist, although it certainly was. The time of “Incident” is shortly after India received its independence from Britain in 1947, followed by the separation of India from Pakistan. The sectarian violence is never mentioned. The show was feminist but apolitical—unless a clever Pakistani woman (Loretta) is considered a political tool. Hardly, in 1959. The woman succeeds in outwitting the Indian slave traders who captured her and her attendant. Loretta may have modernized the character, but she looked and acted authentically Muslim, showing a police officer how he can capture a notorious bandit in exchange for allowing her to return to her husband. Naturally, the woman succeeds, and at the end, Loretta dispenses her weekly bromide: “Where love is, there is no fear.” It may have been an uplifting sentiment in 1959, but, in the twenty-first century, staying alive as a hostage in the Middle East requires much more than cleverness.
Her finest portrayal of an Asian was in “The Pearl” (13 February 1956), as the wife of a Japanese fisherman who finds a pearl in an oyster and begins fantasizing about what he can buy with it. To prevent him from squandering his money when he goes to Tokyo, the wife substitutes a stone. In his absence, she uses the pearl to purchase a boat, christening it “The Pearl,” so he can have the latest model. Loretta found the core of the character, the still point within the wife that is unaffected by the turning world—her eyes bespeaking wisdom without sending up flares. It was her subtlest interpretation: minimalist, perhaps, but magnanimous in its expression of the inner tranquility that accompanies true wisdom. The moral: “Therefore, get wisdom, but with all the getting, get understanding.” The wife had both.
As the series grew in popularity, ratings increased to the point that, by 1954, Loretta was honored with an Emmy for “Best Actress Starring in a Regular Series,” which, of the thirty top TV programs, ranked twenty-eighth. (Interestingly, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was twenty-sixth.) Loretta was now a television celebrity, whose image graced the cover of TV Guide twelve times between 1953 and 1962. Two more Emmys followed in 1956 and 1958. Movie actors, whose careers were moribund, but whose names still carried weight (e.g., Virginia Bruce, Virginia Mayo, Merle Oberon, Jan Sterling, Teresa Wright, Phyllis Thaxter, John Hodiak, Robert Preston, and Herbert Marshall) signed up as guests. No longer a movie star, Loretta was honored for her work in television. For three consecutive years, 1957–59, she received the National Education Association’s “School Bell” for “distinguished service in the interpretation of education”; for six consecutive years (1954–59), she was awarded the TV-Radio Mirror gold medal as “favorite dramatic actress on television.” Organizations as diverse as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, California Teacher’s Association, Hollywood Women’s Press Club, Fame magazine, Dell Publications, Radio and Television Women of Southern California, and the American Legion added to her laurels. Perhaps Loretta’s proudest moment occurred in 1960 when TV Guide’s readers’ poll voted her “the most popular female personality.”
If such nationally recognized organizations as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and American Legion honored Loretta, it was because her show raised television to the level of edifying entertainment, going beyond anything that existed at the time. ABC tried an anthology series, Summer Theatre, from July to September 1953, when The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet was off the air. Summer Theatre never found an audience, suggesting that the concept was not viable. The Loretta Young Show disproved that myth, raising the bar several notches higher than sitcom and providing viewers with a series that guaranteed a different story each Sunday evening with an Oscar-winning actress in the lead.
The Loretta Young Show debuted at the right time. In fall 1953, the Red Scare had become the latest American bogeyman with its supporting cast of nuclear spies, media-infiltrating subversives, and screenwriters accused of injecting communist propaganda into their scripts. This was the time of Reds and pinkos, denunciations of “godless, atheistic Communism” from church pulpits, informants, Fifth Amendment pleaders, sycophants, exiled writers working through fronts or pseudonyms, and unrepentant radicals. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a much-honored World War II hero, was in the White House. Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy were attempting to combat the (non-existent) communist threat to America’s internal security, shattering reputations in their zealotry. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings on organized crime garnered high ratings. Morality, with its concomitant self-righteousness, dictated the tenor of mass entertainment that, in 1953, meant television.
A few movies of the late forties and early fifties addressed social issues such as juvenile delinquency (The Blackboard Jungle [1955], Rebel without a Cause [1956]); blacks passing for white in segregated America (Lost Boundaries [1950]) and those who refused to pass (Pinky [1949]); suburban class-consciousness (All The Heaven Allows [1955]); the Ku Klux Klan (Storm Warning [1951]); and corruption on the docks (On the Waterfront [1954]). On the other hand, 1950s television offered an alternative: idealized families (Father Knows Best); model high schools (Our Miss Brooks); ditzy wives/exasperated husbands (I Love Lucy, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, I Married Joan, My Favorite Husband); impish daughters and benevolent fathers (My Little Margie); and smart kids with a bellowing father (Make Room for Daddy). Such programs were evening entertainment for mass audiences who turned a deaf ear to McCarthyism. The Loretta Young Show never played politics; Loretta, who was probably apolitical, knew her target audience.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living, which bore the same title as his popular television show, became a best seller in 1954, as did Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and the revised standard version of The Holy Bible. Song hits included “Little Things Mean a Lot” and “Young at Heart,” both with lyrics that in an age of gangsta rap seem hopelessly square. Radio’s best-loved soap, Ma Perkins, was still on the air, and would be until 1960. When Letter to Loretta premiered, South Pacific, The King and I, and Guys and Dolls were still on Broadway, and the new musicals—Wonderful Town, Kismet, and The Pajama Game—would pass muster as family entertainment. These were shows that seem, in retrospect, disarmingly innocent despite a few risqué moments that would have sailed over the heads of most tourists and even precocious adolescents. How many of them would have picked up on the interracial affair in South Pacific and the nurse’s subtle transformation from racist to liberal? Concubinage in The King and I? The hooker with her calling cards in Wonderful Town? The aphrodisiac song in Kismet? Loretta entered the medium at the right time.
But The Loretta Young Show might not have continued as long as it did if the star had become as disillusioned as some of the characters in her series. Before the second season ended, Loretta was vacationing at her Ojai ranch when she experienced severe abdominal pains that seemed to signal an attack of appendicitis—but turned out to be more serious. On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, she was rushed to St. John’s Hospital, where she was diagnosed with peritonitis. A four-hour surgery followed that supposedly was successful. The prognosis was good, and Loretta was expected to be discharged in three weeks. But doctors also discovered abdominal adhesions that required another operation, a hysterectomy—although the press was only told about the “abdominal adhesions. “ Still, there was speculation about the nature of the surgery, which increased when the hospital refused to divulge information about Loretta’s condition or even accept phone calls. Questions were answered guardedly, suggesting knowledge of her condition but an unwillingness to reveal it. Three weeks dragged out to four months, and Loretta was finally discharged on 1 August.
Even when hospitalized, Loretta’s primary concern was her show. Fortunately, she had assembled a staff as loyal to her as they were to the program and knew fellow actors who would pinch-hit until she could return for the third season, which she did in 1956. Until then, a number of outstanding guest hosts substituted (e.g., Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, her brother-in-law, Ricardo Montalban, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck—who was so taken with the anthology concept that she used it for her own series, The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1960–61).
Loretta’s confinement secretly delighted Tom Lewis, who, despite his executive producer title, believed that his wife’s success relegated him to the wings, depriving him of the spotlight that shone on her. In her autobiography Judy Lewis, twenty at the time of her mother’s hospitalization, writes about overhearing her stepfather boast to Helen Ferguson, “Finally, I have my little Gretchen back.” Then Lewis started to behave more like a lover obsessed with reclaiming his lost love than a media professional committed to keeping a successful series on the air. Apparently, Lewis no longer thought of his wife as Loretta, but as Gretchen—as if he preferred the woman she might have been if she had never became a movie star. Lewis did not care about the series, either; it was Loretta’s, not his. He only wanted his Gretchen back. Loretta Young was not his property; she belonged to the world. Lewis decided to take matters into his own hands and inform Norman Brokow, Loretta’s agent at William Morris, that her present condition made it impossible for her to return to the show—in effect, canceling it. Once Loretta learned what he had done, she “called her own meeting” in her hospital room, announcing that The Loretta Young Show was hers, and assuring her sponsor, Proctor & Gamble, that, in her absence, high profile guests would substitute, as they did. Tom Lewis was a typical example of the “star wife” syndrome, dramatized so effectively in A Star Is Born (1937). In the film, Norman Maine, once one of Hollywood’s leading men, is eclipsed by his wife, Vicki Lester, and is known to mail carriers as “Mr. Lester.” Tom Lewis had become “Mr. Young.” As Loretta told an interviewer in 1987, “It was awfully hard when there was no way of stopping a headwaiter from calling my husband Mr. Young.”
Lewis may have been the original producer of The Loretta Young Show, but it was Loretta’s protean repertoire that made television history, proving that there was an audience for an anthology series. CBS’s Four Star Playhouse had debuted earlier in September 1952, but even with its four stars (Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, David Niven, and Ida Lupino), it only lasted until 1956. Loretta would double that record. None of the four stars had Loretta’s cachet—not even Charles Boyer, who was no longer the Great Lover, except to the Broadway audiences that flocked to see him in person in The Marriage-Go-Round (1959–60) with Claudette Colbert. (Significantly, neither Boyer nor Colbert reprised their roles in the movie version, in which James Mason and Susan Hayward played the leads.) Anthology TV was Loretta’s domain, which she intended to rule until she had to concede the throne. Nineteen fifties’ television had never seen anything like The Loretta Young Show, in which one actress released the myriad women within her and brought them into the American living room.
If Lewis wanted a stay-at-home wife, he had completely misread Loretta. The Loretta Young Show was her property; if Lewis wished to continue as producer, he would play by her rules. Even at the beginning, he should have inferred from her weekly schedule that their lives had changed. The episodes were filmed each year from July to March, with rehearsals on Mondays and Tuesdays; filming, Wednesday-Fridays; Loretta’s welcomes and au revoirs every other Thursday; and her quote of the week on alternating Sundays. Weekends were not that different: There were wig fittings; wardrobe shopping; scripts to be read; story, interview, cast, business, program, and rewrite conferences. For eight years, Loretta’s life was not her own—and it was certainly not her husband’s. The steel butterfly was afloat, and no one, particularly Lewis, would bring her down.
As of April 1956, the marriage was unofficially over. For the time being it was a separation. Divorce would not occur for thirteen more years, until Loretta finally realized that, like her mother, she too would be a divorcée. But there was no way that Loretta’s ruptured marriage could be sutured, much less healed. On 11 May 1956, Lewis resigned as producer from The Loretta Show, at the instigation of Loretta and Robert Shewalter, Lewislor’s secretary-treasurer and accountant, seeking control of Lewislor for themselves but knowing that the name would have to be changed. At first, Lewis seemed compliant. On 30 April 1956, he agreed to relinquish his role in the company, in return for which he was offered sole title to one of the apartment houses that he and Loretta owned on N. Flores Street, a house on Sweetzer Avenue, and the Ojai ranch. (There were actually two Flores Street apartment buildings; the final settlement, a decade later, allowed Loretta to chose the one she wanted, which, naturally, was the better one.)
By 13 March 1958, Lewis had second thoughts about his exclusion from Lewislor. He filed suit against Loretta and Shewalter, accusing them of treating him unfairly and depriving him of his rights as a shareholder; he also argued that, with his departure, Loretta and Shewalter doubled their salaries. Loretta countered with copies of their 30 April 1956 agreement, in which the couple divided their property, and Lewis disassociated himself from the company. The case dragged on until 1966, when it was finally dismissed by the appellate court. By that time, it was no longer front-page news. Nor was their divorce, which was granted on 20 August 1969, with Loretta receiving a dollar a year as token alimony.
The emotional toll that the litigation had taken on Loretta even caused her to question the career to which she devoted her life. Whether Loretta truly enjoyed acting or regarded it as a challenge that had to be met is problematical. Perhaps at the beginning, the excitement of stardom compensated for the grueling hours and often thankless parts. But when Judy announced that she wanted to be an actress, Loretta scoffed: “You’re too nice.… You’re going to have to be tough.” Loretta learned toughness from a childhood characterized not by privation but by desertion, from a mother who refused to succumb to depression and self-pity when her adulterous husband walked out on his family and instead reinvented herself, first as a boarding house owner and then as one of Hollywood’s leading interior decorators. A costar who impregnated her and turned her life into a scenario of fabrication, studios that exploited her, and a production head who failed to appreciate her range further seasoned her. At one point she even called acting a “dreadful profession.” To Loretta, it had probably become that, creating a tension between her religion and her art. The polarity drove her to priests for guidance in resolving that tension or at least bringing the two opposing forces into a state of equilibrium. When that proved impossible, Loretta decided that she could do it herself with a television series that would both entertain and instruct—and with a sign off quote for the viewers’ edification.