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10 S C H A P T E R 2 The Creation of Loretta Young In Hollywood, both past and present (but more commonly past), myth and fact have mingled indiscriminately. Myth is elevated to the level of truth, while facts are given a mythic makeover, so that what was drab and ordinary acquires a glossy overlay, like lacquered wood. But there are facts that are verifiable. Norma Jean Baker did not become Marilyn Monroe in the same way Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) become Vicki Lester in A Star is Born (1937) by picking up her paycheck and discovering that she had been renamed. Although Marilyn has inspired an ever-burgeoning mythology, there was nothing mythic about her name change. Ben Lyons, Fox’s casting director, was obsessed with the Broadway star, Marilyn Miller. He believed Norma Jean was a “Marilyn .” But what about the last name? Alliterative names, or names with liquid consonants (l, m, n, r), always had cachet. When Norma Jean mentioned that Monroe was her grandfather’s surname, Norma Jean Baker became Marilyn Monroe. How Gretchen Young became Loretta Young is another matter: There is the received version, which seems plausible, and the alternative one, which is less so. The received version: In her autobiography, Colleen Moore recalled the time she was making Her Wild Oat (1927) at First National. Among the extras, was “the most beautiful little girl I had ever seen.” “Little” was not the right word: Loretta was then fourteen. Like Mae Murray, Moore was enchanted by Loretta who, even as a teenager, had the look of a fairy child. Moore arranged for a screen test and was elated with the results. So was First National, but the studio was not happy with Loretta’s teeth, which were too obtrusive. Braces were recommended, to be followed by dental work. But Loretta remained a bit toothy until the early thirties, when her perfectionism—perhaps enhanced by creative dentistry—completed what nature had left unfinished. T H E C R E AT I O N O F L O R E T TA Y O U N G 11 Moore, not incidentally, also took credit for the name change: “I named her after the most beautiful doll I had ever had: Loretta.” Loretta, who appeared in two films that starred Moore, was unbilled in both. The second was Naughty but Nice, released in June 1927, six months before Her Wild Oat, which premiered at the end of the year. In all likelihood, the former film made Moore aware of Loretta. Moore may not have known that shortly after Loretta’s one-day stint in Naughty but Nice, she was at Paramount playing a supporting role in The Magnificent Flirt, filmed between March 6 and March 27, 1928, but released in June of that year. Loretta’s days as an extra had ended, as her Paramount salary showed: She received $633 for three weeks of work. Now billed under the name that Moore had given her, Loretta played Denise Laverne, the daughter of the glamorous Florence Laverne (Florence Vidor), a widow whose flirtatiousness sets the plot in motion: the mother is wooed by a bachelor, the daughter by his nephew. As in a typical boudoir comedy, true love travels a rocky road: The bachelor jumps to the conclusion that Florence is a cocotte when he sees her embracing his nephew, little knowing that she is expressing her happiness about the younger man’s engagement to her daughter. But soon the ground levels off, and the two couples embark on a smooth journey into a world where marriages are made not in heaven, but on Mount Olympus. Moore may have renamed her, but after The Magnificent Flirt, Loretta was no longer anyone’s protégée. Indeed, she even surpassed her patron. Although Moore proved she was a serious actress in such films as So Big (1925), Lilac Time (1928) and finally The Power and the Glory (1933), the public and critics preferred Colleen Moore, the embodiment of the 1920s flapper, who was wholesomely sexy, but neither as voluptuous nor as brash as Clara Bow. Loretta even became more versatile than Moore, taking on roles seemingly unrelated to her persona and proving that a star’s screen image is a composite of many faces, each of which can be superimposed on a character. The script determined the face, and Loretta ’s portrait gallery continued to grow. The alternative version of Gretchen Young’s metamorphosis is suspect , even...

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