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65 S C H A P T E R 8 The Men in Her Life “I have been in love fifty times,” Loretta admitted to an interviewer in 1933. “If I didn’t fall a little bit in love with the men I play opposite, I could not do love scenes with them. “ This was not the boast of a starlet, eager to graduate to siren, or at least love goddess, status. Loretta was a star; she was also speaking truthfully. Her adolescence was spent in the movie business. While other girls her age went off with their boy friends to the local soda fountain and sipped ice cream sodas through two straws—the era’s idea of safe sex—Loretta was constantly in transit , spinning through Warner’s revolving door, with an occasional break. Few other actresses could claim to have appeared in fifty-five films by the time they were twenty. Not every actor made the cut. Walter Huston, who played Loretta’s racketeer father in The Ruling Voice (1931), giving the only memorable performance in a less-than-classic crime film, was too avuncular for fantasy . Besides, Huston was twenty-nine years her senior, and Loretta had been cast as his daughter. When Loretta spoke of falling in love, she was talking about a transferable infatuation generated by her imagination that enabled her to perform credibly on the screen. Whether she knew it or not, she was talking about the art of acting, an art so elusive that, once experienced, it can only be described, not defined. Even in her early thirties, Loretta sounded like a child of fancy. Quoting a limerick that ends, “I like men,” she cited some of her favorite screen lovers: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Don Ameche, Richard Barthelmess, Ronald Colman , Charles Boyer, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, and Alan Ladd. When she mentioned Clark Gable, it was only to record, like a school teacher, that knowing how she felt about swearing, he observed decorum on the set, even when something went wrong and justified a bit of profanity. T H E M E N I N H E R L I F E 66 Anyone who knew what had happened when they were making The Call of the Wild would have been amused that while Gable curbed his language, he did not do the same to his libido. When Loretta was sixteen, and making The Second Floor Mystery (1930), she fell in love with her leading man, Grant Withers. This time, it was not love filtered through the lens of the imagination, but an emotional attachment that may have been love. But how would Loretta know? She was so used to fantasy that, if she ever experienced the real thing, she might not have known the difference. Loretta was always attracted to older men. Withers, born in 1904, was nine years her senior. They seemed to have much in common: both were born in January, Withers on the sixteenth in Colorado, the state in which Loretta’s sister, Sally Blane, was born; Loretta on the sixth in Utah. Before becoming an actor, he loaded freight at the Santa Fe railroad yards, reported on the crime scene for a Los Angeles newspaper, and drove a riot squad car for the LAPD. Loretta responded immediately to his rough-edged masculinity. She had no idea that he had been married before, but soon learned when his ex-wife, Inez, filed for alimony the first week of February 1930, shortly after Loretta and Withers were married. That January, Loretta thought she had found her future husband and was even willing to ignore the mandates of the Church and elope with him. “When love comes so strong, / There is no right or wrong. / Your love is your life,” Anita sings to Maria in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Loretta felt similarly. However, when she experienced that love, short-lived as it was, she was sixteen, which was not a marriageable age in California. Once Withers learned that a woman could be married in Arizona at seventeen, they waited until Loretta had reached her seventeenth birthday. On Sunday, 26 January, Loretta and Withers boarded an early morning flight to Yuma, Arizona, where they were married. When the couple returned, a furious Gladys Belzer met them at the airport, threatening to have the marriage annulled, until she learned it was legal. Gladys was savvy enough to know that the press would make fodder of the three of them. She withdrew...

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