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230 S C H A P T E R 2 3 The Last Reel Early in her career, Loretta was romantically linked with several men, including director Edward Sutherland; actors Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power; a British polo player; and a shady lawyer. All were attracted to her beauty, just as she was to their varying degrees of masculinity : paternal, carnal, androgynous, and protective. Most were older than she; some, significantly so (Gable, twelve years; Tracy, thirteen; Sutherland, eighteen). She and Power were the same age; they would have made a smashing couple, except that during the Suez shoot (1938), Power discovered the gamine-like Anabella in the supporting cast and married her the following year. Tom Lewis was another “older” man—eleven years Loretta’s senior, to be exact. It would be simplistic to reduce their courtship to Loretta’s quest for a father figure to compensate for the desertion of John Earle Young. Ironically, his desertion brought Loretta to Los Angeles, where she became a bona fide movie star at fifteen. For someone attuned to the divine will, as Loretta was, Young’s abandoning his family was providential . Eventually, everyone prospered, which would probably not have been the case if he stayed. Conversely, was Lewis contemplating a brilliant marriage to a Hollywood star? Or was he really in love with Gretchen , saving Loretta for his radio, and later television, productions? Loretta and Lewis were in their late twenties and late thirties, respectively, when they married in 1940. Riotous youth had passed, along with the heyday of the blood. Loretta was no longer a teenage fantasist or a moonstruck ingénue, flaunting convention even by Hollywood’s liberal standards and socializing with a married man—much less a married Catholic, like Spencer Tracy. Neither was she reacting to Gable’s erotic instant messaging with her easily decodable body language, which William Wellman T H E L A S T R E E L 231 and some of the Call of the Wild cast, particularly Jack Oakie, had no trouble deciphering. Loretta was a poor judge of men. None of her great loves ever lived up to her expectations. What she experienced with Grant Withers was first love, which when it was over left a void in her life that could never be completely filled. Even at seventeen, Loretta seemed to know that once she really fell in love, as she did with Withers, she might be able to love again, but never in the same way. Loretta was sincere when she admitted that she would always love Withers. First love may be evanescent , but it is not forgotten. The passing years and Withers’s suicide may have lessened the intensity of her emotions, but it was still her first encounter with, as Cole Porter put it, “this funny thing called love.” She was seventeen when she eloped with Withers, twenty-seven when she married Tom Lewis. “Love is too young to know what conscience is,” Shakespeare observes in Sonnet 151. At seventeen, Loretta certainly did not know; at twenty-seven, she did. She knew the distinction between first love, infatuation, and conjugal love. She wanted a stable marriage to make up for her own short-lived one and her mother’s two failures. When Loretta married Lewis, the scenario changed: It was no longer the princess and her betrothed; it was the movie star wife and her radio producer husband, followed by the TV celebrity and her TV producer husband, and ending with the former star and her ex-husband. Undoubtedly, Loretta and Lewis loved each other, but it was not a case of love given unconditionally and selflessly. In 1939, Loretta left Fox despite Zanuck’s threat of blacklisting. She had, she believed, survived worse: l’affaire Gable, the unplanned pregnancy, the subterfuge. But now it was time for a real marriage, a church wedding even though Loretta would not be wearing white. There should be life after Fox, Loretta reasoned , but where? Harry Cohn, who had no love for Zanuck, offered her a haven at Columbia, but after she fulfilled her five-picture commitment there, then what? A couple of movies at one studio, a couple at another? A stable marriage? That she found, temporarily, in Lewis. Lewis’s pursuit of Loretta was partly motivated by desire but also by his need for her talent—not to mention her contacts—for Screen Guild Theatre, the radio program that he was creating for Young & Rubicam. It...

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