The lady made 98 movies and I've seen 10. She stopped making them at the time I was just catching on. I just looked over the list of the ones I have seen and I can truthfully say I have only seen one because of her. Usually it was because I wanted to see her leading man or the story captured my interest. Once I saw the films, most I did enjoy and I've long thought I should give more of them a try but it never seems to work out. She simply was never a draw for me.
She was an efficient enough actress and there was an alacrity about her that bordered on gooey which usually rubbed me wrong for some reason. Hollywood wags said she made it in the movies and stayed there for as long as she did not because she was one of the acting greats but because she was beautiful and possessed a certain grace. She was not pleased.
She courted fame and she admitted it. It wasn't so much at first about being an actress but more that she craved the attention. She always wanted audiences to see her as wholesome. She would gain a savvy business sense and was not only concerned about her image but heavily orchestrated it.
The trouble I had with Young was her moral indignation and hypocrisy that was wrapped up in her religious and moral views. I used to read or hear about how she and her friend, fellow Catholic Irene Dunne, would put down the acting community (who called her Saint Loretta and Attila the Nun), establishing themselves as the arbiters of the town's morals. I can't speculate more about Dunne but I wonder if Young ever heard of glass houses. We'll open the doors to one in a few paragraphs.
She was born in Salt Lake City in 1913. She had two older sisters, Polly and Elizabeth, and a younger brother John. Mama and the brood moved to Los Angeles in 1916 after the father deserted them and Mrs. Young opened up a boardinghouse. She knew a few people on the lower rungs of show biz and managed to get all three of her daughters bit roles. After awhile Mama thought all three were a little too uppity for their own good and she shuffled them off to a convent. Around the same time Mrs. Young remarried and had a fourth daughter, Georgiana.
Ultimately her older girls begged for more of the limelight. After Loretta appeared as Lon Chaney's (15-year old) leading lady in Laugh Clown Laugh (1928), she determined she would become a bigtime actress come hell or high water. Ooops, sorry, Loretta, here's a quarter for that swear word.
At age 17 she married a costar, Grant Withers, and some 20 months latter Mama had it annulled. Young frequently dated her leading men for at least as long as the film was in production but she went ape over the married Spencer Tracy in 1933 when they made A Man's Castle. Their affair became very public and very messy for both of them.
Also in 1933 Young signed with Darryl Zanuck and his Twentieth Century Pictures. She had made an astonishing 49 movies and what was even more astonishing was how poor most of them were and her in them. There were exceptions but Young was in so many films featuring a trio of actresses because, lovely as she was, others were needed to carry the films.
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| With frequent costar, Tyrone Power |
Zanuck was determined to make her a star. She had never been popular as an actress (never, for instance, in the top 10) but she was a big hit in movie magazines and newspapers' gossip columns and society pages. She rarely had top billing and that would continue to largely be so until the end of her career and then the films were inferior. She signed on at the studio even before it became 20th Century Fox. She, along with Will Rogers, Shirley Temple and Tyrone Power would become the studio's biggest moneymakers for years. In 1936 and 1937, she and Power would make five films together. They became quite the hot team. I have seen none of these movies.
Zanuck was excited about his upcoming movie based on Jack London's Alaskan gold rush adventure, Call of the Wild (1935). Young would nab the female lead and from MGM they would get Clark Gable for the lead. It was the call of the wild alright.
Word got out that she and the married Gable were having an affair on location. She made comments about loving a man who could not love her back. When the filming concluded and she realized she was pregnant, all of the Young women decided mother and daughter would go on a European vacation for an extended stay. When she returned she hid out in Venice, California, giving press reports that she was ill. In late 1935, Young gave birth to her daughter Judith.
She had to keep everything quiet because, first of all, Fox would have pressured her to have an abortion, something morally against her religion. At the same time, she could hardly have the baby being unmarried. Once the scheme went as planned, Judy was shuffled off to a few foster homes for several months and then returned to Young who made the glorious announcement that she had adopted a child.
Besides her family and a few others, Gable knew the truth but chose to never have much of anything to do with Judy and still publicly lament that he missed having children. Most of Hollywood also knew mainly because Judy looked so much like her father, including those big ears. The sad thing is that Young, who surely knew that Judy would hear rumors, never herself told Judy the truth until her daughter was in her 30's.
In her 80's Young cooperated with a writer to write a biography with the proviso that it wouldn't be published until after the actress' death. Apparently it was stated that Young was now considering the location affair to be a rape, now that she had heard of date rape.
The studio was big on a horse-racing story, Kentucky (1938), and gave top-billing to Young but hopes were riding on a second teaming of Young and handsome British leading man, Richard Greene. Walter Brennan would win the film's only Oscar.
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) was a huge crowd-pleaser although little of it had to do with Young. The public couldn't get enough fiction about the invention of the telephone while enjoying Don Ameche as Bell and Henry Fonda as Watson. Young did get plenty of copy, however, because her three film sisters were portrayed by her real-life sisters. Polly Ann and Georgiana went by their own names but Elizabeth changed hers to Sally Blane.
In 1940 Young married producer-writer Tom Lewis. Their on-again- off-again marriage would last on paper for nearly 30 years, produce two sons and he would formally adopt Judy.
China (1943) featured Alan Ladd as a tough profiteer during the Japanese invasion of China. Arizona stood in for China and someone else should have stood in for Young who played a schoolteacher. She looked so hopelessly out of place in a war film.
I did find her and Ladd to be a good match and so did the public which is why they were partnered again for And Now Tomorrow (1944).
Ladd is a doctor who is trying to cure rich girl Young's deafness. This time, of course, Young is in her element. It was a decent soaper. Susan Hayward co-stars as Young's sister (migawd, two such different actresses I cannot imagine) who is fooling around with Young's fiance (Barry Sullivan).
Perhaps she was enjoying a hiatus from her marriage when she had an affair with the married Gary Cooper (a serial philanderer) while they made the comedy western Along Came Jones in 1945.
In 1947 came the film for which Loretta Young is best-remembered... and by the Oscar folks, too, for they claimed her best actress. The Farmer's Daughter is a romantic-comedy that has Young as a Swedish farm girl from Minnesota who becomes a domestic in a congressman's home. They fall in love around the time that she decides to run for office herself.
It is a charming film with lovely performances from Young (in blonde braids piled on top of her head... the go-to Swedish look) and Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore and Charles Bickford. It didn't hurt that Young's hunky brothers were played by Keith Andes, Lex Barker and James Arness.
Aside from the romance and comedy, it shines a light on the importance of voting and focusing on how virtually anyone can run for office and smear campaigns, payoffs and lies. How crazy and imaginative is that?
The Bishop's Wife (1947) didn't work out as anticipated despite the presence of Cary Grant and David Niven. It was the second of her two films with Grant and the fifth of her five with Niven. Niven is the bishop, Young the wife and Grant an angel who comes to earth to help the bishop raise money to build a cathedral.
Niven was signed first to play the angel, the best role, and was angered when Grant came aboard and claimed the role for himself. With its religious theme, Young should have been in her glory but she comes across as unctuous and artificial as she often did. Perhaps she's why the film was a bomb for so many years although it certainly gained strength over the years as a holiday TV favorite.
The Young film I like the most is the western Rachel and the Stranger (1948). Sure, the western theme helps but the presence of not one but two of my all-time favorite leading men-- William Holden and Robert Mitchum-- helped more. Young plays an indentured servant who becomes the bought-and-paid-for wife of a farmer (Holden) with a young son and goes to live with them in the woods. Their difficult life getting to know one another is made more complicated by the appearance of Holden's friend, Mitchum, who takes a fancy to the new wife.
It was a most unusual role for Young with her messy hair, farm clothes and all that arguing and yelling. I thought she was a delight. All three were known for their randy behavior on film sets and I'm betting no one was a stranger for too long.
This film brought back to light something that gathered attention occasionally over the years. Whether she had such a thing written into her contracts or not, she installed a swear box on her film sets. Young didn't swear and didn't like hearing others do it. So when she heard someone swear they had to put money into the swear box (which she would give to charity). The cost depended upon the word. Mitchum apparently would just drop in a $20 when he came on the set in anticipation of how his day would go.
I thought The Accused (1949) was a tidy little noir about a psychology professor who tries to hide an unintentional, self-defense killing. She rarely did such serious dramas and it was a pleasure seeing her in one.
Young's last shot at a decent film came with Come to the Stable (1949). She and Celeste Holm played nuns (in a story not all that dissimilar from The Bishop's Wife) who want to have a children's hospital built. Not only had both actresses recently won Oscars but both would be nominated for this film.
Her penultimate film, Because of You (1952), was actually the first one of hers I saw and that was because I was the super fan of
leading man, Jeff Chandler. The plot concerns her inability to tell her new beau about her criminal past. I really soaked it up at the time but years later I saw it again and found it nauseatingly soggy. It does, however, have a beautiful title song played throughout.
In 1953 she was one of the first movie stars to defect to television and she took a lot of heat for it. Few who followed were as successful as she was with her immensely popular The Loretta Young Show. She hosted the show and sometimes starred in an episode. What remains famous about it to this day is her entrance at the beginning. She would open the doors, twirl and float about in one fabulous gown after another for eight years. She would end the show with some uplifting, moralistic quote, often from the Bible.
In 1960 I sat a row in front of her at the L.A. premiere of West Side Story. I was early so I could ogle all the stars who might be attending and she arrived late so everyone could see her. After she sat I could easily see her over my left shoulder. It was quite a production for her to move through her row because of the voluminous amount of rustling material that was her gown. She could barely get it tucked into her seat and when some woman who accompanied her began to help, Young sharply reprimanded her. Oh my. Bring on the Jets.
In 1973 she sued NBC for violating a long-ago contract over showing reruns of her popular show. She maintained that audiences could ridicule her for gowns and hairstyles that were 20 years old and out-of-date. She was awarded $500,000.
She spent much of her time in the 70's and 80's doing charity work, usually, of course, for Catholic charities. She still did print interviews, with tons of pictures of herself in different outfits, often giving vent to that ever-present moral indignation. One of my favorites was sex is fine but lust is not.
In 1993 she married for the third time, to the surprise of many. She was 80 and Hollywood fashion designer, Jean Louis, was 85. She had been friends with his late wife for 50 years.
Young died in 2000 of ovarian cancer at the age of 87 at the Los Angeles home of her sister Georgiana, wife of actor Ricardo Montalban. She was beautiful to the very end.
So, here you are, Mimi. You asked and I responded. I hope you aren't too offended.
Next posting:
A glittering cast
Thank you so much! very good post. I am not offended, of course. I don't like Loretta as a person very much. And as an actress she is a little vapid to me. Nevertheless, her magnetism and beauty enchanted me:)
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