Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young

17. The Return to Fox—and Zanuck

154 S C H A P T E R 1 7 The Return to Fox—and Zanuck In 1939 Loretta told Zanuck she would never work for him again (which, in effect, meant never working at Fox), but the passage of time, an Oscar, and a three–picture contract—including one in which she would play a nun—prompted Loretta to think differently about the studio where she had spent five years, making twenty-two films. However, only one of three that Zanuck offered her, Come to the Stable (1949), was significant. If the other two, Mother Is a Freshman (1949) and Half Angel (1951), had never reached the screen, audiences would have been spared two more mediocre movies. A college administrator should have been hired as technical advisor for Mother Is a Freshman, which gleefully flaunted academic protocol. It was filmed in Technicolor, never the ideal medium for Loretta, whose sculpted cheekbones were suffused with red, making her face look flushed. Anyone planning to send a child, particularly a female, to college might have thought twice after seeing the movie. Loretta played Abigail Fortitude Abbott, a widow with a spendthrift daughter, who finds herself in financial straits—although one would never know it from Abigail’s elaborate wardrobe and Park Avenue apartment. When Abigail remembers that her grandmother had established a scholarship at her daughter’s college for anyone with the name of Abigail Fortitude (Abigail’s unmarried name), she decides to apply, even though she and her daughter Susan (Betty Lynn) would be attending the same school and perhaps taking some of the same classes. Loretta’s costar was Van Johnson, five years younger than the thirtysix -year-old Loretta, and still looking like the boy next door. We must take it on faith that he is not only an English professor, but has also become so attracted to Abigail that he pressures her into coming for tutoring to his house, where he has prepared a candlelit dinner. Although he /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  155 has also invited his parents, he makes sure that Abigail arrives early. We are also asked to believe that the professor and Abigail’s lawyer (Rudy Vallee) were contemporaries at Yale, even though Vallee was seventeen years older than Johnson—and looked it. “That’s Hollywood for you,” as columnist Sidney Skolsky used to say. Complications arise when Susan develops a crush on the professor. Once she learns that he is her mother’s prom date, she invites the lawyer to attend as Abigail’s escort, pitting the two men against each other. Any veteran moviegoer could predict the ending: Abigail will continue working toward her degree—but in the dual role of student and professor’s wife—and Susan will discover someone her own age. Although Loretta did not disappoint her fans, who wanted their fashion plate in Christian Dior’s “new look,” Mother Is a Freshman is more of an ellipsis than a footnote in her career. Loretta was in her element in her next Fox film, Come to the Stable (1949), as Sister Margaret of the Holy Endeavor, humble but wily enough to use her charm and powers of persuasion to achieve her goal. She was a Catholic child’s ideal grade school nun: not the knuckle-rapper, but the kind who would enter a classroom with a gentle rustle of her habit as it trailed along the floor and the jingle of the fifteen-decade rosary suspended from her belt, heralding her arrival as she approached the desk. The habit was only the exterior; beneath it lay a determined educator and, in Sister Margaret’s case, an entrepreneur. Loretta would play nuns again, but not on the big screen. Loretta looked as if she were to the habit born. There have been other authentic movie nuns (Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s, Gladys Cooper and Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story, Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels, Claudette Colbert in Thunder on the Hill, Donna Reed in Green Dolphin Street), and actress-nuns for whom the habit was just a costume (Greer Garson in The Singing Nun, Maggie Smith in Class Act). Loretta was the genuine article. Come to the Stable was one of Fox’s top-grossing films of 1949, nominated for seven Oscars: Best Actress (Loretta), Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester), original story (Claire Boothe Luce), original song (“Through a Long and Sleepless Night”), set direction, and blackand -white photography (Joseph LaShelle). It did not matter to Zanuck that Come to the Stable failed to win a single award. He was happy with the gross and thrilled that Dean Jagger was voted Best Supporting Actor for Fox’s Twelve O’Clock High, Zanuck’s personal favorite that year. If some of the others made money, all the better. /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  156 Although Come to the Stable was not Zanuck’s kind of film, he took it more seriously than one might expect. Loretta was his only choice to star as Sister Margaret, even though Luce envisioned Irene Dunne in the role. Zanuck wanted “a great Catholic,” which to him meant Loretta, and a “great Catholic” required a “great script.” Zanuck made sure the great Catholic got it. Dorothy Parker and John B. Mahin collaborated on one, but it was not great enough. By mid November 1948, Sally Benson came on board and managed to write, with some assistance, a script that conformed to Zanuck’s requirements: “a comedy about faith that is not preachy or religious.” Come to the Stable is a comedy in the classical sense: a work with a happy ending, despite what transpires earlier. Come to the Stable was inspired by the visit of Catholic convert and playwright Clare Boothe Luce (The Women, Margin for Error, Kiss the Boys Goodbye) to what was then the Priory of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Luce believed that the priory’s backstory was movie material and proceeded to write a screenplay, “From a French Battlefield to the Connecticut Hills”—not exactly the sort of title that would attract moviegoers. Luce was eventually given story credit, but the screenplay was primarily the work of Sally Benson, known for injecting a shot of humanity into scripts, particularly those about families (Meet Me in St. Louis [1944], Junior Miss [1945], Joy in the Morning [1965]). Benson had read Luce’s script, which catalogued the frustrations a Benedictine nun, Mother Benedict, experienced in her efforts to build Regina Laudis, which later became the Abbey of Regina Laudis. Benson also realized that certain changes had to be made. In the film, the nuns bury a medal of St. Jude at the top of the hill that marked the Abbey’s future site. Actually , it was a St. Benedict medal, as one would expect from Benedictine nuns. But Benson knew that more moviegoers were familiar with St. Jude, the patron saint of the impossible, than with St. Benedict. Zanuck ignored Luce’s casting suggestions: Irene Dunne in the lead, Cary Grant as the composer, Zazu Pitts as the artist, and Monty Woolley as the owner of the property that the nuns desire. Irene Dunne, like Loretta, was a Hollywood Catholic, but while she succeeded in getting a king to honor his promise to give her a house (Anna and the King of Siam [1946], also coauthored by Benson), she was not Zanuck’s idea of the Chicago-born Sister Margaret: stationed in France during World War II, where she made a bargain with God that if her children’s hospital were spared, she would establish a similar one in the United States, named after St. Jude. Prayers are usually answered in movies, and Sister Margaret ’s was no exception. Inspired by a postcard reproduction of Come to the /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  157 Stable, and believing it was providential that the artist, Amelia Potts (the ever delightful Elsa Lanchester) lives in Bethlehem, Connecticut, Sister Margaret and her companion, Sister Scholastica (Celeste Holm, sporting a flawless French accent) set out for the American Bethlehem. Although Holm was not a scene-stealer, she had a way of deflecting attention from others—except Loretta, who held her own. But unlike Loretta, who had to speak some French, but with an American accent, Holm had to sound like a native, which she did, even though she was born in New York. Holm also had to compete in a tennis match to raise the money the nuns need for their hospital. The intercutting of closeups , medium shots, and long shots indicated that Holm had a double for some of the scenes, which were so skillfully edited that the audience assumed Holm was also a tennis pro. She was not, but Sister Scholastica had been. Still, Holm could work the court until it was time for a double. How many actresses could play tennis in a nun’s habit, as Holm did? Celeste Holm deserved the Oscar nomination she received. She did not win (Mercedes McCambridge did for All the King’s Men), although she had won the previous year for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), which was more of a Zanuck production than Come to the Stable. Although Sister Scholastica lost the match, the screenplay adhered to the setback-success model à la Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), in which a church is rebuilt and a school is saved from the wrecking ball. The nuns also realize their dream after overcoming such obstacles as an initially dubious but eventually persuaded bishop, a shady businessman (charmingly played by Thomas Gomez), and a composer of popular music (Hugh Marlowe), who has no intention of having nuns as neighbors—until he discovers that the “original” song he composed derived from a chorale he heard the nuns sing when he was serving in France during the second world war. Benson was not the sole screenwriter; she shared credit with Oscar Millard, who early in 1948 submitted a brief to Zanuck, identifying Loretta ’s character as the historical Mother Benedict Duss, “an American raised since early childhood in France.” The London-born Millard had only turned to screenwriting in 1945, after having been a journalist, novelist, and short story writer. He may have been hired because he had worked for French and Belgian publications and could write the kind of English that Sister Scholastica would speak—the words carefully chosen , precise and unambiguous, as might be expected of a woman whose native language was French. Millard’s brief supplied the facts. The St. Benedict medal that the nuns buried was on a forty-five-acre property /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  158 on the outskirts of Bethlehem. Determined to build the priory on that site, Mother Benedict contacted Lauren Ford, the artist whose painting inspired the trip to America, and who provided a home for her and her companion. On the site was a vacant factory, whose owner agreed to sell if the nuns could pay off the mortgage. To raise the money, other Benedictine nuns and a German priest come over to sell their handicrafts and ceramics, but the profits only amounted to a down payment. In the same file with Millard’s brief is a treatment that adds an important plot point: the owner agrees to give the nuns the property if the body of his son, who was killed during World War II, is buried there. The father (Thomas Gomez) makes a similar bargain in the film, but it’s for a stained glass window commemorating his son. Eager to get papal recognition, the historical Mother Benedict and her companion, Mother Mary Aline, with the aid of a contessa, fly to Rome where they have an audience with the pope, who gives them his blessing but nothing more. With the officially designated “Holy Year” coming up in 1950, the year after the film’s release, an apathetic pope, who could only have been Pius XII, would not have set well with Catholics. Naturally, neither the contessa nor the papal audience even reached the script stage. But the composer did, religion unspecified. In an early draft he was a Jew, Tony Marx, who is at first opposed to the nuns’ founding a priory on the property adjacent to his, but soon does a spiritual turnaround and composes a Christmas symphony. In the film, the religion-neutral composer (Hugh Marlowe) writes pop music, but has unconsciously appropriated the melody of his latest song from a medieval chorale. Benson and Millard did not make the composer a Jew, who decides to convert to Christianity after being exposed to the nuns’ transcendent faith. A Jewish convert in a film about Catholics might have proved edifying to some, but anti-Semitic to others. Zanuck wanted a moneymaker that incorporated religion in a plot about overcoming setbacks, convincing moviegoers that they, too, could realize their dream with the right combination of grit, luck, and divine assistance. Antoinette Bosco’s Mother Benedict: Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis provides the historical context for Come to the Stable, inspired by the true story of the Pittsburgh-born Vera Duss, who spent much of her early years in France pursuing a degree in medicine until she discovered her true calling. Vera was the daughter of a controlling mother and a father whose gentle ways were misinterpreted as lack of ambition. Since Vera’s mother, Elizabeth Duss, had converted to Catholicism, divorce was out of the question; instead, Elizabeth left for Paris, her father’s home, /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  159 with her (almost) two-year-old son and three-year-old Vera. They arrived at the outbreak of World War I, which they survived. Since Elizabeth returned periodically to America, Vera was raised for the most part by her grandmother. Although a Catholic education attracted Vera to the religious life, she preferred to study medicine at the Sorbonne before making her decision. By graduation time, she was ready to enter the Benedictine abbey at Jouarre, first as a postulant, then as a novice with the name of Sister Benedict, and finally a nun, known for the rest of her life as Mother Benedict. Mother Benedict believed it was her mission to establish a Benedictine presence in the United States. When World War II erupted in 1939, and France fell to the Nazis the following year, Mother Benedict, technically an American, was in danger of being imprisoned or perhaps sent to an internment or, worse, a concentration, camp. When the Nazis began checking the papers of Americans living in France, members of the Resistance furnished Mother Benedict with a new identity card and name. If Come to the Stable seems like a boilerplate “triumph in the face of adversity” film, the true story, with its supporters and skeptics, is not that dissimilar. The difference is that the actual supporters were a heterogeneous group that included Major General George S. Patton, the future Pope John XXIII (then papal nuncio, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli ), President Truman’s personal representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, philosopher Jacques Maritain, and Monsignor Giovanni Montini, the Vatican Undersecretary of State and future Pope Paul VI. Once Mother Benedict and Mother Mary Aline (Come to the Stable’s Sisters Margaret and Scholastica) learned that they could stay with painter Frances Delehanty (who shared her Bethlehem home with another artist , Lauren Ford, like her a devout Catholic), they sailed from Le Havre on 20 August 1946, arriving in New York eleven days later. Like their film counterparts, the two nuns ran a similar obstacle course, including an encounter with an indifferent bishop. Their savior is a wealthy donor, who wants his property used as a place of worship. By 1947, a converted factory became the Priory of Regina Laudis, then and three decades later The Abbey of Regina Laudis. Mother Benedict’s life was far more complex than the simplified version in Come to the Stable. In 1949, the true story could never have succeeded on the big screen—any more than it could today, despite the intriguing plot points: a troubled marriage ; a three-year-old expatriate child; a woman with a medical degree subjected to the rigors of convent life; endangerment during an enemy occupation; and the realization of a goal born of belief, courage, and /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  160 unstinting effort. Rather, Mother Benedict is the perfect subject of a TV documentary, for among the nuns at the Abbey is Mother Dolores Hart, currently Mother Abbess. In 1963, Dolores Hart—a Broadway (The Pleasure of His Company) and movie (the Elvis Presley films Loving You and King Creole, and others including Wild Is the Wind and Where the Boys Are) star—made a decision that shocked Hollywood: She gave up an acting career to become a postulant at Regina Laudis, which she had visited earlier, hoping to find the longed-for peace that passes understanding. That she found it there resulted in a commitment that lay beyond the powers of ordinary mortals . But then, Regina Laudis is not a community of ordinary women. Despite some unfavorable press, the Abbey has survived, attracting visitors from the entertainment world such as Maria Cooper Janis (Gary Cooper’s daughter and pianist Byron Janis’s wife), and actresses Patricia Neal, Gloria DeHaven, Celeste Holm, and Martha Hyer Wallis, all of whom have benefited from exposure to an environment that comes close to offering what T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday calls “the still point of the turning world.” Strangely, perhaps, Loretta never visited. Half Angel completed Loretta’s three-picture agreement with Fox. Although Julian Blaustein was nominally the producer, Zanuck, as production head, gave the film his imprimatur, considering it a minor addition to Fox’s 1951 slate of releases that was rather thin in terms of quality. The best of the lot were People Will Talk and Decision before Dawn. That Half Angel’s running time was a mere seventy-eight minutes was an indication of the studio’s lack of faith in its drawing power. Critics and audiences felt similarly, and Half Angel disappeared shortly after it opened in 1951. Zanuck had no reason to make Half Angel, except to provide Loretta with a third film. Story analyst Michael Abel wrote a two-and-a-half page critique of a draft, then entitled “Half an Angel,” dismissing it as “unreal and imaginary,” with a “contrived and artificial” plot. Abel was also disturbed that the heroine’s alter ego was a “crude and self-centered tart, with her dangling cigarette, undulating hips, and a general emphasis on sex.” By 1950’s standards, the script seemed to be—to use the vernacular of the period—“hot stuff.” Abel was not the only one offended by the script. Joseph Breen found the material “totally unacceptable,” chiding Fox’s director of publicity for submitting a script to the Production Code Administration in which marriage was treated shabbily and “without dignity.” He was also concerned about the heroine’s less angelic self, insisting that “breasts should /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  161 be completely covered” and “the subconscious conduct herself” in good taste—as if a film with Loretta could be otherwise. Amazingly, Robert Riskin, Capra’s best screenwriter (American Madness , Platinum Blonde, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) was responsible for the screenplay. Riskin was in his early fifties, with his best work behind him. However, since he had to adapt George Carleton Brown’s story, he treated it as just another assignment. Possibly, he exaggerated the pervasive sexuality of the scenes depicting the heroine’s other self to emphasize the disparity between the daytime woman and the nighttime seductress. The sexed-up scenes could also have been the inspiration of the original director, Jules Dassin, whose forte was certainly not romantic whimsy. He was a specialist in the dark side (Brute Force [1947], The Naked City [1948], Thieves Highway [1949], and especially Night and the City [1950]) and assumed that even a repressed nurse had hers. When Half Angel was at the story conference stage, Dassin was still involved. But Dassin was also a Communist, who decided to return to his native France, knowing that it was only a matter of time before he would be blacklisted. It was a wise move; on 23 April 1951, director Edward Dmytryk one of the original Hollywood Ten, realizing that unlike writers he could not work under a pseudonym, cooperated with HUAC, naming Dassin along with five others. The title is misleading; Half Angel is a comic variation on the dual personality film that could have been called “The Two Faces of Nora.” Loretta played Nora Gilpin, a nurse by day, who has relegated her infatuation with a prominent lawyer, John Raymond (Joseph Cotten), to the depths of her unconscious, only to find it surfacing at night. Like her mother, Nora is a sleepwalker who, at night, becomes the woman she imagines herself to be. Once Nora the vamp—slinky, provocatively dressed, and coquettish—takes over, she literally stalks Raymond, who is fascinated by the fey creature who has entered his life. The problem is the discrepancy between Nora the vamp and Nora the nurse. Loretta gravitated to the former, reveling in her low cut aquamarine dressing gown that revealed the lacy edge of her petticoat, which she had no qualms about displaying as she assumed an enticingly recumbent position . Neither she nor director Richard Sale, Dassin’s replacement, seemed to have any interest in the daytime Nora, whose troubled psyche eluded both of them. When day breaks, all Loretta can manage is a reversion to Nora’s dull professional self, much to Raymond’s confusion. The film can stand only so much role reversal. The ending is a variation on the “flight from the altar” movie (It Happened One Night, Cover Girl, It Had to be You, /  Ê , / 1 , Ê / " Ê  " 8 p
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1  162 The Runaway Bride): The sleepwalker ends up marrying Raymond, then upon wakening, she realizes there is a man in the next bed, who indeed is Raymond. (Twin beds were the norm then.) Nora also awakens on the day of her wedding to dull Timothy McCarey (John Ridgley), which Raymond interrupts, causing Nora to faint and the film to expire. If Capra had made Half Angel in the 1930s with a screenplay by Riskin, it would have been a model screwball comedy, a genre that was never Loretta’s forte. Ideally, it needed an actress like Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert, who could slip in and out of Nora’s two selves more effortlessly than Loretta, who could handle the sexy, but not the sexless self. What Half Angel became in 1951 was a depressingly unsophisticated and humorless movie, unworthy of Riskin, Cotten, or Loretta. If Riskin had ever planned to enrich the script with the same wit and humanity that he brought to his Capra films, it would have been impossible after 27 December 1950, when he suffered a major stroke, leading to his death five years later. The Riskin touches are few: a father-daughter relationship in which “father knows best”; an interrupted wedding (It Happened One Night); a trial in which Raymond is discredited (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) until his marriage to Nora is authenticated. But Riskin, always one to tie up loose—not to mention dangling—ends, could not do so after his stroke. And so, what should have been an important plot point is never resolved: Raymond ignores his opportunity to plead a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to pursue the nocturnal Nora. If any lawyers saw the film, they would have been disgusted at such indifference to an occasion that could have been a milestone in his career. But the moviegoers who saw it—and could remember it a few weeks later—went for the stars. And those, who saw it in June 1951 at New York’s Roxy, “the cathedral of movie palaces,” were at least treated to a stage show that included the Andrews Sisters—perhaps not as popular as they were during the World War II years, but still able to draw an audience. Sadly, Zanuck felt the film had potential, and he expressed his views in an eight-page summary of a May 1950 story conference with Blaustein, Dassin, then set to direct, and Riskin, seven months away from his debilitating stroke. All Zanuck seemed to want from the script was more humor: “My only worry about this story now is—is the last act funny enough?” He should have asked the same question about the first two. The only moviegoers who found Half Angel humorous were those who were amused by the idea of a plain Jane by day morphing into a sex symbol at night. Loretta did not play the role for its humor because she did not find any in it. Actually, there wasn’t. ...