Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

10. Myrna Loy and William Powell: The Perfect Screen Couple

220 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 10 Myrna Loy and William Powell The Perfect Screen Couple JAMES CASTONGUAY During the 1930s, Myrna Loy and William Powell co-starred in eight films, including the first three entries in the Thin Man series (The Thin Man [1934], After the Thin Man [1936], and Another Thin Man [1939]) as well as Manhattan Melodrama (1934), Evelyn Prentice (1934), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Libeled Lady (1936), and Double Wedding (1937). From 1940 to 1947, Loy and Powell were paired five more times, three of them in Thin Man films. These thirteen collaborations over as many years make Loy and Powell the most prolific romantic screen couple in Hollywood history.1 Myrna Loy and William Powell. Both photos collection of the author. There would have been even more Loy-Powell films had it not been for Powell’s bout with cancer and the death of his romantic partner, Jean Harlow , and Loy’s contract dispute with MGM, all of which occurred during the height of their fame as The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles in the 1930s. Using a wide range of mass-market and archival material—including newspapers from towns large and small2 —this essay examines Loy’s and Powell’s careers and phenomenal popularity during a tumultuous decade, beginning with how their images, established as exotic or foreign during the 1920s, were transformed into the raw material of their partnership as “The Screen’s Perfect Mr. and Mrs.” ★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ From Exotic Type to Leading Lady Myrna Loy (then Myrna Williams) was “discovered” by Natacha Rambova in 1925 while working as a prologue dancer at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. A publicity photo of Loy with a bobbed hairstyle and dark lipstick appeared in the September 1925 issue of Motion Picture, with the announcement that “[Loy]’s what Mrs. Rudolph Valentino [Rambova] says is going to be the 1926 flapper model” (27). She was signed by Warner Bros. in 1925 because of “her distinctly unusual and Oriental type” (Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1925, 14) and introduced in newspapers across the United States as the new “exotic screen vamp of 1926.” For the rest of the decade and into the early 1930s, Loy remained the paradigmatic “Oriental siren” while also playing minor chorus girl roles. Early reviews of Loy’s performances focused on her physical appearance instead of her acting ability or her skills as a dancer, which were developed in part by studying with Ruth St. Denis. Fan magazine articles from this period also scrutinized Loy’s facial characteristics, especially her eyes (“Myrna has the strangest eyes of the screen, narrow and slanted [like] twin chameleons”) in order to explain her mysterious and innate exoticism, accompanied by assurances that Loy was in fact an “all-American girl” from Montana (“The Siren from Montana ,” Photoplay, September 1929, 63).3 After being released by Warner Bros. in 1929 following the stock market crash, Loy worked freelance before signing a long-term contract the same year with Twentieth Century–Fox. She asked to be released in 1931 after becoming frustrated with her limited “bad girl” roles and signed a sevenyear contract with MGM, where her first role as Fah Lo See in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) would be her last as an “Oriental exotic” (see KotsilibasDavis and Loy 63). During this transitional period in the early 1930s, Loy received more positive reviews and favorable publicity for her acting as she MYRNA LOY AND WILLIAM POWELL 221 began to play a wider range of roles. In 1933, the New York Times found “Myrna Loy, soft-spoken and lithe,” to be “in her element as Mary” in When Ladies Meet (24 June 1933, 16); and despite her insistence in an interview that “I am not a star yet,” Screenland told readers that her performance in Animal Kingdom (1932) left “no doubt that she [was] headed for sure stardom ” (“Sweet and Loy,” July 1933, 84–85). Interestingly, much of the promotional and publicity material from Loy’s “exotic phase” assigns her a significant degree of agency and control over the construction of her onscreen image and identity. For instance, one article claims that she “created [a] new screen self-oriental type . . . due in part to her distinctive appearance.” Loy is then quoted as saying, “I was not startling enough to attract the attention an unknown needs. I was a bit player, but I didn’t want to stay a...