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112 S C H A P T E R 1 3 The Price of Freedom Loretta could have continued indefinitely at Fox, but if she stayed beyond 1939, there would have been nothing for her except more of the same. She must have known that Zanuck had his favorites: the more bankable talent, the bigger box office draws such as Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Maureen O’Hara, and Loretta’s replacement, the sylphlike Gene Tierney, the perfect mirror image for Tyrone Power, who still had his looks, but without the androgynous glow. Loretta was no longer one of the inner circle. While Loretta was shimmery and angelic, a beam from the moon’s bright side, the exotic Tierney seemed to emanate from both the light and the dark. She could play the daughter of Hecate or Diana. Put Tierney in a rowboat, with sunglasses shielding her eyes from the sight of her drowning disabled nephew (a fate that she diabolically engineered in Leave Her to Heaven [1945]), and she is even deadlier than Regina in The Little Foxes (1941), who makes no effort to retrieve her husband’s medicine when he is having a heart attack. Loretta could never have played Ellen in Leave Her to Heaven. Nor was there any likelihood that, when Zanuck decided to remake Love Is News as That Wonderful Urge (1948), he would have had Loretta reprise the role she had originated. Once Zanuck saw Tierney on the stage in The Male Animal (1940), he knew he had found Loretta’s successor. Tierney was not long for Broadway; she was off to Hollywood that same year, making her movie debut in Fox’s The Return of Frank James (1940). Zanuck had no problem with Power—ten years older and now merely handsome rather than beautiful —re-creating his role in the Love Is News remake. But Power needed a younger and fresher talent, and Tierney could easily step into Loretta’s shoes. Like Loretta, Tierney could also play Asians (China Girl). She was T H E P R I C E O F F R E E D O M 113 the new Loretta, even as Jeanne Crain was the ingénue and budding dramatic actress that Loretta once was. Zanuck was also going through his blonde period. At first he touted Alice Faye, holding Betty Grable in reserve. But Grable gradually came into her own, supplanting Faye as Fox’s musical queen. Longevity was a major concern of Zanuck’s. As Grable was nearing thirty, he began grooming the younger June Haver, a superb dancer but no match for the World War II pinup in a white bathing suit. Haver was “the girl next door,” not the kind that GIs taped inside their locker doors. Perhaps out of gratitude, Zanuck threw Grable a few crumbs, even costarring her with her successor, Marilyn Monroe, in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). Since Monroe was only a passable dancer, he tapped Sheree North, whose dancing was the highlight of the Broadway musical Hazel Flagg. But the Fox musical had seen better days, and Marilyn was too bedeviled by the demons of insecurity to be reliable. Still obsessed with blondes, he found a Marilyn clone in Jayne Mansfield, a comically gifted actress with a sense of self-parody she revealed in the Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Mansfield re-created her role in the 1957 movie version that bore the same title but little resemblance to the original, a mordantly clever Faustian take on the extent to which some will go to achieve fame in a medium where “integrity” is not in anyone’s lexicon. Mansfield’s tenure at Fox was brief, as was her career, which ended with a fatal car crash in 1967. Fox in the 1940s and 1950s was no place for Loretta Young. Loretta insisted on claiming that Zanuck had her “blacklisted” for walking out on him. She did not know what it was like to be blacklisted. The writers and actors who were persecuted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the late 1940s and 1950s for their politics knew. Loretta was a blacklistee who continued to work. Zanuck had no choice but to express outrage at Loretta’s decision, although whether or not he felt it was another matter. It was a variation on the “Nobody leaves a star” syndrome: Nobody leaves Zanuck until he decides it’s time. Zanuck probably was relieved. He had essentially...

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