In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

218 S C H A P T E R 2 2 A New Life Despite the failure of The New Loretta Young Show to repeat the success of the first series, Loretta had not given up on either television or film. In the 1960s, Hollywood’s drama queens of yesteryear, eager to continue working, accepted roles requiring them to play grotesques (Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Nanny); women entrapped and terrorized by punks (Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage), or tormented by relatives (Bette Davis by cousin Olivia de Havilland in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte; Joan Crawford by sister Davis in Baby Jane, and by daughter Diane Baker in Strait-Jacket). Strange as it seems, Loretta was thinking of joining the dark sisterhood. The phenomenal success of Baby Jane, legitimized by an Oscar nomination for Davis, led to another film in which Davis and Crawford would costar, this time with Davis as victim, and Crawford as victimizer. The film became Twentieth Century-Fox’s Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), with Davis, but not Crawford, who came down with pneumonia and canceled. Barbara Stanwyck and Loretta were rumored to be possible replacements . Loretta’s would have been the better performance, since her character was a woman of charm and poise with an agenda that is only revealed at the end. Basically, she wants to get Davis, her cousin, institutionalized , not knowing that she is not as loony as she seems. Understandably , Fox thought of Loretta for the role of a woman who concealed her malevolence behind a saintly façade. Loretta had never played such a character; after reading the script, she decided she never would: “I don’t believe in horror stories for women.” Yet it would have been a good role for Loretta, giving her an opportunity to step out of the starlight and into the dark of the moon. A N E W L I F E 219 But for Loretta, there was only the bright side of the moon. She was not interested in altering her image, but Olivia deHavilland, also known for her feminine grace and gentility, accepted the challenge, having played twins—one good, the other evil—in The Dark Mirror (1946). In 1982, Norman Brokow approached her with the possibility of starring in two television films: The first was fictitious, chronicling the trials of the first female president of the United States; the second was factual, the life of Mother Angelica, the nun who launched the Eternal Word Television Network. Loretta could have managed the first (she ran for Congress in The Farmer’s Daughter and played a mayor in Key to the City), but she was too glamorous to be a convincing Mother Angelica. In the long run, it didn’t matter, since neither program came to pass. Three years later, Loretta was in the news again; she signed on as the lead in the prime time return of ABC’s popular daytime serial, Dark Shadows, whose ghoulish ambience kept it on the air from 1966 to 1971. The new Dark Shadows would be a TV movie that one of the industry’s most successful producers, Aaron Spelling, hoped would evolve into an evening series. That Loretta was even interested in starring as the matriarch of a vampire-haunted estate is unusual, but Spelling convinced her that the series would have less of the occult and more of the religious, informing the press that her character, Margaret Drake, is “the fabric that holds two families together [and] fights for morality when others lose theirs.” That was Loretta’s kind of woman. She did all the screen tests and even had Jean Louis design her gowns. But when it came time to film the pilot, she bowed out, citing “creative differences” with Spelling over the way her character was being developed. Joan Fontaine was announced as her replacement, but also demurred. Dark Shadows finally turned up on NBC with Jean Simmons in the lead, lasting only a few months, 13 January–22 March 1991. Vampirism was not as intriguing as it had been in the 1960s, although it made a comeback in 1997 with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But in 1991, viewers with a preference for the flip side of the cheery sitcom preferred Murder, She Wrote or Unsolved Mysteries to middlebrow gothic. Loretta may have toyed with the dark side, but, to her, brightness was all. So was her television legacy. Accepting the debacle of The New...

Share