Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young

5. Loaned Out

39 S C H A P T E R 5 Loaned Out At eighteen, Loretta must have had some idea about Columbia Pictures’ reputation and its president-production head, Harry Cohn. The studio originated as the CBC Sales Co., the Cs standing for the Cohns, Harry and his brother, Jack, the B, for Joseph Brandt, a lawyer who never practiced law. But Harry had no intention of being part of a triumvirate. By 1924, CBC had become Columbia; by 1932, Brandt, whose health was deteriorating, bowed out. Jack returned to New York, which he preferred to Los Angeles, as vice president for distribution. Harry was the one Cohn associated with the new studio, consolidating his old title, head of production, with his new one, president. Columbia was located on Gower Street, synonymous with “Poverty Row,” where fly-by-night film companies cropped up and disappeared, not far from “Gower Gulch,” where actors in cowboy outfits waited for extra work in westerns. Loretta knew little about the film for which she had been loaned out, or its director. The director was Frank Capra, who soon found his place in the pantheon. The film was Platinum Blonde (1931). In his autobiography, Capra includes Loretta among the “great cast” that he had assembled, implying that she would have been the star until a decision was made to add some sex in the person of Jean Harlow, whose “breastworks burst their silken confines.” Although Harlow’s addition to the cast required some rewriting and a change of title, it did not derail the film. Platinum Blonde boosted Loretta’s career. For film historians, it is more significant as the first of screenwriter Robert Riskin’s collaborations with Capra than for a Harlow sobriquet (derived from a title that was never the writer’s first choice). The original title was “Gallagher,” the surname of Loretta’s character (whose first name is never mentioned). Although Harry Cohn took credit as producer , this was, in every way, a “Frank Capra Production,” as was every L O A N E D O U T 40 one of the director’s films. By the time “Gallagher” was ready for release in November 1931, it had been retitled Platinum Blonde, with the hope of attracting audiences, whose curiosity was piqued by the title character rather than the presence of Loretta, who had yet to acquire a following. Harlow became a sensation after the opening of Hell’s Angels (1930), in which even the impressive aerial photography could not dim her sheen. Hollywood had discovered a force of nature who needed the right combination of script and director to channel her erotic energy. Capra might have originally been taken with Harlow’s breastworks, but her most distinctive feature was her hair, which looked like spun silver. She was a metallic earth mother with an undulating walk and ungirdled waist, elusive and otherworldly, pursuable but unobtainable. Robert Williams, a promising stage actor whose tragic death a few days after the film’s premiere precludes a true assessment of his talent, played Stew Smith, an endearingly cocky reporter assigned to cover a breach of promise suit involving celebrity Ann Schuyler (Harlow). Unaware that his colleague Gallagher is secretly in love with him, Stew becomes so infatuated with Ann that they elope, leaving Gallagher to pine in silence. Once Stew realizes he is the “Cinderella Man,” as the tabloids have christened him—and “a bird in a gilded cage,” like the canary in his bedroom—it is only a matter of time before he asserts his independence, prompting Ann to seek a divorce and Stew to admit that he ignored his growing attraction to Gallagher because of his infatuation with Ann. Riskin was too talented a writer to have Stew undergo an epiphany and confess his love for Gallagher. Stew is an aspiring a playwright without a plot, alternating between one exotic setting and another until Gallagher suggests that he write from experience, specifically his most recent one: a rich girl-poor boy whirlwind romance that culminated in a failed marriage . When Stew asks Gallagher how the play should end, she casually, but unconvincingly, explains that the wife should repent, return to her husband, adopt his name, and live in his shabby apartment. From her voice, Stew is now aware of the sadness she has suppressed; he offers his own resolution, in which the hero admits that there was another woman, whose worth he never realized while he was under the spell of the...