"Lucky Night" starring Myrna Loy & Robert Taylor

Scenes from "Lucky Night" (1939) directed by Norman Taurog, starring Myrna Loy & Robert Taylor.

1939 is considered one of the all-time great years in Hollywood history. Many critics consider it the greatest ever with regards to outstanding films being released in one golden year. Among the films that MGM released that august year were: The Women, Ninotchka, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, and The Shop Around the Corner. The other studios had strong entries as well: Dark Victory, Stagecoach, Destry Rides Again, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Love Affair, Young Mr. Lincoln, Only Angels Have Wings and Wuthering Heights.

Bob Taylor’s first project of the year was a film that few thought could have missed: a comedy opposite one of the screen’s most popular actresses, Myrna Loy.

Loy had reached great popularity as Nora Charles in the Thin Man films and scored in other hits such as Libeled Lady, Test Pilot and Too Hot to Handle. In 1937 she was proclaimed “The Queen of the Movies” with Clark Gable voted as her King. Unfortunately, the film that Metro selected to pair Loy and Bob is not in the league of their better films.

Myrna Loy is one of the rare Taylor costars who didn’t particularly like him. “The studio thought it would be a good idea to team me with Robert Taylor, Metro’s reigning heartthrob,” she later wrote in her autobiography. “Our first day on the set I played records, which we did sometimes to fill those endless waits between shots... I was listening to some wonderful Cuban music when Robert Taylor approached, ‘Do you have to play that sexy stuff all the time? It’s the dirtiest music I ever heard.’

‘That was my first day with him. I thought, ‘Oh, brother!’ He was a bit stuffy, but we got along all right —during the picture, that is: later on I didn’t get along with him.” In fact, Loy’s overall opinion of Bob is clouded by the role he played in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of the late 1940s. Loy was a lifelong liberal who publicly opposed the hearings and the blacklist that resulted and took a dim view of those who supported the committee, the so-called “friendly witnesses.” She called Taylor one of the “tattletales.”

Loy also alleges that during the filming of 'Lucky Night' Taylor tried to cook up a “triangle” with hopes of making Barbara Stanwyck jealous. “He wanted her [Stanwyck] to think I was after him,” Loy wrote nearly forty years later. “Barbara’s maid mentioned this to Theresa [Loy’s maid], who assured her that nothing could have been further from the truth. I’m not sure Barbara believed her, because on the last day of shooting she came by in a limousine and whisked him off to be married.” (Not quite true, Bob and Stanwyck “whisked” off to be married during the making of his next film, Lady of the Tropics , with Hedy Lamarr.) -"Robert Taylor: A Biography" (2013) by Charles Tranberg

Film historian Lawrence Quirk later wrote, "The picture was obviously meant to be light and amusing, but it cried out for a sophisticated, subtle script, and the directorial touch of a Lubitsch or a McCarey." It's curious that MGM thought to put Taylor and Loy in a production like Lucky Night when the script obviously wasn't up to snuff for stars of their stature.

Nonetheless, both actors recovered quickly: within months, Loy would appear successfully opposite Tyrone Power in The Rains Came (1939),

while Taylor would soon score his own sizable -- and much-needed -- hit with Waterloo Bridge (1940). Lucky Night director Norman Taurog was never a significant stylist, but he was a workhorse in several genres. In early 1939, while in production on this film, he received an Oscar® nomination for Boys Town (1938); he lost the award to Frank Capra, for You Can't Take It with You (1938). Taurog had previously won the Best Director award for Skippy (1931). Source: www.tcm.com

Barbara Stanwyck: more mysterious than Garbo

“Anyone who seeks constant happiness seeks the unobtainable. The moments of happiness are not like pebbles on the beach; they are as rare as emeralds, as bright and flashing as diamonds. Happiness is the most ephemeral of emotions - but it is the brilliance that points up living. I cherish my happy memories and hopes, as though they were jewels.” —Barbara Stanwyck

The director of photography on “Ladies of Leisure” was Joseph Walker, who made five more films with Stanwyck, and who used to grind special lenses for each of his favorite actresses, the better to catch and refine their look. The lighting, too, as in “The Miracle Woman”—Stanwyck, Capra, Walker again, released the following year—is of an almost wounding beauty, far in advance of the amateur acoustics, with rim-lit details picked out like stars against the semi-dark. From there to the shadows of “The Godfather,” as rich as chocolate, is really not so far.

The other note that rings out clearly from “Ladies of Leisure,” and that would toll like a bell through the rest of Stanwyck’s career, is the sound of a smart woman surveying, with a snicker and a sigh, the dumber sex. Kay Arnold, on first meeting the painter, lifts her gaze, and there is a cool, smoky steadiness about it that is hard to read. It doesn’t say, “Hello, big boy,” or “Come down and see me sometime.” The message it sends is “Hmm. Ain’t no mountain.” If she likes the fellow, she will scale him, but make no mistake: as a female, she is already a superior soul.

Should she choose to open her heart, it will be only on the most condescending of terms. “I love him because he’s the kind of a guy that gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk,” Sugarpuss eventually says of Professor Potts. “I love him because he doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk.” Ouch.

The ouches would go off like firecrackers when Stanwyck was around, and she never let up, having learned her explosive trade before 1934, when the enforcement of the Hays Code—with its emphasis on “correct standards of life”—came along and dampened all the squibs. “Night Nurse” (1931), “Ladies They Talk About” (1933), “Baby Face” (1933): these are the kinds of Stanwyck projects that gave movies a bad, bad name.

In the first, she waltzes into a hospital, smiles her way into a job, then changes into her uniform, hiking one leg into the lap of her fellow-nurse Joan Blondell, whom she has known for minutes, and letting her peel off the stocking. At night, a leering intern puts a med-school skeleton in Stanwyck’s bed, so she hops into Blondell’s, and the two of them giggle together in undergarments and fright. Buñuel himself could not have done better. “Night Nurse,” directed by William Wellman, is a stirred-up soup of a movie. We get abused children, a drunken mother, a wounded bootlegger, and a young, unfriendly Clark Gable as a chauffeur in black jodhpurs. He looks like an Italian Fascist, and he slugs Stanwyck so hard that her chin bleeds.

There is a case for saying that Alfred E. Green’s “Baby Face” (which screens at bam on a juicy double bill with “Ladies They Talk About,” a female jailbird drama) didn’t just predate the Hays Code; it actually brought the code crashing down onto Hollywood heads. Stanwyck is Lily Powers, who escapes from the steel mills of Pennsylvania, where her father tries to pimp her to anyone he chooses. With her black friend Chico (Theresa Harris), Lily arrives in New York, where she proceeds to sleep her way up a company; as her conquests mount, the camera ascends the side of the office building. She starts in personnel (“Have you had any experience?” “Plenty”), proceeds through filing and mortgages, and winds up bedding the vice-president (“Did Fuzzy-Wuzzy enjoy his dinner?”). Lily: “I’m not like other women—all the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.”

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper in "Meet John Doe" (1941) directed by Frank Capra

Nobody knows for sure whether Capra and his leading lady were ever an item. His biographer Joseph McBride proclaims it as fact; hers, Axel Madsen, is less certain, one of the abiding mysteries of Stanwyck being that her public image—unlike Jean Harlow’s, say—could never be mapped in any detail onto the contours of her private existence. She was definitely there, funny and silvery, up on the screen, but the definition faded as you tried to peek behind. Her movies felt like cryptic clues to a backstory of will power and frustration, the truth of which would not have pleased her fans.

“Miss Stanwyck is not the sort of woman I’d have met in Nebraska,” Taylor had said. He was the more godlike performer, she the more racy. Their coming together was a gift to the fan magazines and the publicists: “They made you—made you—go out two or three nights a week,” Stanwyck said of her employers at M-G-M. Husband and wife were robust Republicans; both belonged to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was responsible for, among other things, alerting Washington to what was perceived as the Communist menace in Hollywood. Stanwyck’s conservatism never did an inch of damage to her reputation, but Taylor is now remembered primarily, if unfairly, as a snitch, the guy who named names at the huac hearings in 1947. In the end, what led to their divorce, in 1951, was not political ardor, or even romantic gossip.

Taylor was seduced by Ava Gardner, but in the movie industry that was like pulling into a gas station for an oil check. He and Stanwyck just peeled apart, seeking different things. Revered for her calm at work, she was a scold and a shouter at home, and he, after wartime service in the Navy, couldn’t take orders forever. When Stanwyck led Gary Cooper by the nose, in “Ball of Fire,” it was a riot, but in real life the laughter died at her door.

“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” That line always gets a laugh, as it should, for it springs from “The Lady Eve” (1941), one of the most liberatingly funny films ever made. Step back for a second, though, and you can still hear the “alert, precocious, and savage” tone that Stanwyck ascribed to her ruptured childhood. “The Lady Eve” is a Preston Sturges movie, which means that it does not and probably cannot stop, hurling Stanwyck headlong into the chase. First, she is a cardsharp who sucks money from a wandering heir (Henry Fonda) on an ocean liner; then, scarred by his rejection, she becomes an English grande dame, bewitching him into a series of emasculating pratfalls; finally, she reverts to her first persona, fooling everyone except Muggsy, the hero’s cynical valet. “Positively the same dame,” he growls in the final shot, refusing to believe that life is anything but a fix.

Stanwyck could turn on the chill—her performance opposite Van Heflin and a boyish Kirk Douglas in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946) appears to run on liquid nitrogen—but she could also throw out hints of tenderness when you least expected it, and languid little one-liners when they weren’t appropriate. Stanwyck’s greatest strength, in other words—her range—was also the reason that she is impossible to tie down and tame. No genre was beyond her, and no one movie sums her up. She motors from role to role like Heflin cruising into Iverstown, or Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past,” drifting from town to town as though in and out of a fever.

You think that “The Lady Eve” marks her as the best and most devil-tongued comedienne of her time, up there with Katharine Hepburn and the Rosalind Russell of “His Girl Friday”? Correct, but consider the moment when Henry Fonda, an amateur natural historian, claims that snakes are his life. “What a life!” reads the published screenplay, but that’s not what Stanwyck delivers. “What a life,” she says, with mild wistfulness, as if noting for an instant what a loner this rich boy truly is, and how he might want to be wooed for something other than his cash.

Stanwyck spoke sparingly of her past; history, for her, had begun in Hollywood, and it would end there. She travelled a few times to Europe and loathed everything about it. (“All the charm of the Old World, and the Old World plumbing,” as Lily Powers says in “Baby Face.”) Her career was at its most hectic and fruitful in the thirty-two years between “Ladies of Leisure” and “Clash by Night,” in which she confided to Marilyn Monroe that all she required in a man was “someone to fight off the blizzards and the floods.”

Douglas Sirk found in her “an amazing tragic stillness,” while praising her discretion: “She gets every point, every nuance without hitting on anything too heavily.” The closeup of her tears, in the first of those films, as her character walks up the path to her family home, to the sound of violins, should be the merest hokum, yet it stirs us like the last dying echo from the age of Garbo. And remember: Stanwyck herself never had a family home.

Everything about Stanwyck, whatever the mood of the movie, bears a slight graze of screwball, as if, deep down, Ruby Stevens was sly enough to have rumbled mankind for the untrustable species that it was. That is why “Double Indemnity,” though it sweats blood and deals with the lowest of low morals, somehow streams along with the glee of black comedy. The damn thing flows like Mozart. I even worship the leading lady’s wig, with its radioactive spring roll at the front. (“We hire Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington,” the head of Paramount said.) Watch the early scenes in Stanwyck’s home and try not to grin like MacMurray when he first spies her at the top of the stairs, wearing a bath towel and a look of infinite mischief. She gets dressed, for decency’s sake, although, given that her outfit includes high heels with pom-poms and an ankle bracelet engraved with the name Phyllis, it might have been better for MacMurray if she hadn’t. Decency was never dirtier.

In the world according to Barbara Stanwyck, all the mice are men. She was something else, with claws, and her genius was to show us plenty of fur but never let us agree on what that something was—the moll, the missionary, the bad mother, or the Keep Kool Cutie. On the set, she was a paragon of control, yet Capra used to run three or four cameras in an effort to capture her on the first and freshest take, believing that with every repeat she lost the shine of spontaneity. Listen to her in “Clash by Night,” fending off a dolt: “What kind of animal am I? Do I have fangs, do I purr? What kind of jungle am I from? You don’t know anything about me.” No, and it drives us mad. Crazy about you, baby. Source: www.newyorker.com

Frank Capra, her great early director, would say she “could grab your heart and tear it to pieces,” though Variety would observe, “Her chief virtue is poise, and her salvation is restraint.” Here we encounter that seemingly contradictory blend of reflectiveness and emotional intensity that defined her, and is perhaps not so surprising in one whose mantra was “acting is thinking.” Of course there were roles she couldn’t play. A movie star is defined as much by her limitations as her strengths. Hence, this tomboy street-fighter and scourge of phonies and swells couldn’t do period and she couldn’t do privilege. Even the artifice of an accent — the Irish brogue she used in several films — was a hit-or-miss affair, breaking the naturalistic spell. Capra loved her, and knew how to illuminate her, playing to her strengths. “When she wasn’t in front of the camera,” he once said, “she was almost mousy... But when the camera rolled, she turned into a huge person.”

Wilson reports an incident from Stan­wyck’s life that I found eerily reminiscent of the final scene in “Stella Dallas.” The star and her then-love Robert Taylor attended a preview of the film; Stanwyck wore street clothes with her hat pulled down over her face, hoping to pass unnoticed. She was clutching at the coattails of her crowd-magnet lover when a cop yanked her aside. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, “none of that stuff,” and the burly cop began roughing up the tiny actress until Taylor came to the rescue.

With Stanwyck as the star, these films are less simple tales of sacrifice and surrender than something both triumphant and spiritual: She doesn’t so much transcend the material as take it to another plane.

Most of all, Taylor, though a bit more social, conspired to keep Stanwyck in seclusion, away from the eyes of the world. The same veil of secrecy presents itself to her biographer.

Ultimately, she was more mysterious than Garbo. After all, Garbo’s mystery was there to see and bewitch, as obvious a part of her screen persona as her profile and her heavy-lidded look. Stanwyck’s, however, lay deep beneath the transparency of her emotions. Hers is not a mystery capable of being unraveled and Wilson wisely doesn’t try. What she gives us is a brilliant enigma, firmly grounded only in her artistry and sense of craft. Source: www.nytimes.com

Happy New Year 2014!

“Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.” ―Walter Scott

Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard in "Swing High, Swing Low" directed by Mitchell Leisen

Gloria DeHaven

Ann Miller

Christmas in Weirdland: "Remember the Night"

"As long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, Christmas is." -Eric Sevareid

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Remember the Night" (1940) directed by Mitchell Leisen



From DeMille’s Irish postmistress at end of track to Clifford Odets’s worldweary “tramp from Newark,” Barbara, in her next picture, was to play a seen-it-all, light-fingered jewel thief on trial in New York for shoplifting a blindingly sparkling bracelet. Mitchell Leisen, one of Paramount’s leading directors, was assigned the picture. Each of Leisen’s fourteen pictures had been a box-office success.

Leisen was in great demand with actors. He was Paramount’s answer to George Cukor. Leisen wanted Barbara for the part of Lee Leander, jewel thief. He felt the part was written for her. Fred MacMurray was to be the hard-driving assistant district attorney prosecuting the case who, instead of sending her to jail, falls in love with her. Leisen thought MacMurray a goodlooking actor —with a beautifully built body and great legs, six feet four, tall and lanky —but MacMurray was quiet, genial, modest, and inexperienced. Though Preston Sturges came from the top and Barbara from the bottom —he from a European bohemian aristocracy and she from a showgirl street life— Barbara felt a great compatibility with Sturges. She thought him enormously talented and his script one of the best she’d ever read. “What’s on paper is on the screen,” she said. Sturges and Leisen were an interesting combination of sensibilities. Sturges wrote comedy with flashes of feeling and warmth; Leisen directed pictures that were warm with bursts of comedy.

The DA (Fred MacMurray) is getting ready to drive home to Wabash, Indiana, for the holidays to the family farm to see his mother and aunt. In the spirit of Christmas, he bails out the girl he’s about to prosecute so she won’t have to spend the holiday behind bars. The bondsman delivers her —with his compliments and a wink— to the DA’s apartment, the last thing he wants or expects (“What are you doing here?” he asks her. “I don’t know,” she says, “but I’ve got a rough idea”). Now he’s stuck with her; she’s been locked out of her hotel; she’s got nowhere to go, and she’s in his custody.

In the scene in which the family has gathered in the parlor around the Christmas tree, MacMurray plays the piano and sings “Swanee River,” and Barbara plays “A Perfect Day” on the piano as Willie (Sterling Holloway) sings. Leisen knew how to use visual business in a scene to create character, mood, story. His subtle eloquence and deftness was called the Leisen magic. Barbara teased MacMurray for being shy about filming love scenes. Barbara handled it by saying to the crew, “This is really going to be something, I am supposed to be kissed passionately by Fred.” She kidded Fred about it, as did the crew. When the day arrived, MacMurray gritted his teeth, determined to show them he wasn’t such a bad lover, and did the scene perfectly.

Barbara never looked more beautiful, more luminous, than she does in Remember the Night. In the end of Sturges’s script, “love reformed her and corrupted him, which gave us the finely balanced moral,” said Sturges, “that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, or caveat emptor.” In Remember the Night, Barbara is both classy and shopgirlish. Sturges was a loner, as Barbara had been before Bob Taylor came into her life. Barbara operates on many levels in 'Remember the Night': she is a believable crook; believably vulgar; believably sensitive and vulnerable; rebellious (in the scene with her mother, it is clear her defiance is bonded to her mother’s take on her). What Sturges gives Stanwyck is her longing for roots, her longing to go home for Christmas.

The combination of Barbara and MacMurray works: he is light and a good egg; she is breezy, grounded, larcenous, with a heart of gold and a yearning for home, like Sturges himself, who had such an uprooted childhood. “As it turned out,” said Sturges, “the picture had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz and just enough schmutz to make it box office.” It was Leisen’s best picture to date and Barbara’s best performance. -"A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True (1907-1940)" by Victoria Wilson

They go out to eat and talk about their situation. “Sounds like a play, doesn’t it?” asks Lee, which is Sturges acknowledging the whole “movie pitch idea” of his basic screenplay, then mocking it when John replies, “Sounds like a flop.” In 'Remember the Night,' this exchange leads us directly into the most important scene in the film, where Lee tries to explain her concept of right and wrong to John. Mrs. Sargent, who knows the truth about her, gently warns Lee that she might spoil John’s career if they were to get married. Lee is standing in front of a mirror, and when Mrs. Sargent puts her hands on Lee’s shoulders, Stanwyck freezes, with her mouth wide open, one arm up holding a comb, a vision of complete Mouchette-style awkwardness. Mirrors always bring out Stanwyck’s deepest feelings. Leisen films the hushed parting between John and Lee with real tenderness, but the complexities of the early scenes get politely swept under the rug. In many ways, it was a kind of holiday movie for Stanwyck. She said that the atmosphere on a Capra set was “like a cathedral,” while on a Sturges set it was “a carnival.” -"Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman" (2012) by Dan Callahan

Christmas with Barbara Stanwcyk & Robert Taylor

During production on The Gorgeous Hussy, Joan was impressed with Bob Taylor’s easy, graceful naturalness as an actor, but she was baffled by Barbara and Bob as a couple. Joan knew what Barbara had been through with Fay, and he and Bob were different in so many ways. Joan didn’t see Bob as Barbara’s type.

Metro was touting Robert Taylor as the “most sensational box-office draw since Clark Gable first leaped to fame.” Taylor’s role in His Brother’s Wife was that of a young research scientist, Chris Claybourne (it was Taylor’s fourth role in a year as a doctor), the playboy son of an acclaimed medical doctor, about to embark on his first expedition to the jungles to find a serum for spotted fever. Barbara was Rita Wilson —a professional “mannequin” —worldly, beautiful, out for a lark, who meets the young scientist just before he is to set sail for South America.

Their high romance is a fling, days and nights of nonstop fun and high jinks. No questions asked, no attachments. At the end of ten days, each has been drawn into a web of feeling for the other, and hours before his departure Chris decides to abandon his mission, and the promising career that will come from it, and marry Rita. Later, Rita seduces Chris’s brother into falling in love and marrying her and walks out on her vows minutes after the ceremony. The righteous Tom Claybourne —earnest, responsible, hardworking— is desperate, unable to work or think of anything but Rita, and his own rising star as a brilliant doctor is suddenly in free fall.

Barbara and Bob went to the studio together by car. He sent flowers to her dressing room, as he had with Janet Gaynor and Joan Crawford. He lunched daily in Barbara’s dressing room and left with her at the end of the day. On Saturdays they went riding in the late afternoon or early evening and ate at the Brown Derby or at a drive-in sandwich stand near Bob’s house. When not filming, Barbara and Bob stayed in their dressing rooms. Bob brought a Victrola to the set and kept it there during the fourteen-day shoot so Barbara would be able to listen to her favorite records, among them Ray Noble, the Ambrose and Hylton orchestras, and Ellington’s and Goodman’s bands.

After four months of seeing each other, Bob thought Barbara “one of the great women of the Twentieth Century, a great woman and a very great actress.”

Stephen Dallas surprises Laurel on Christmas Day and asks Stella if Laurel can spend the day with him. Stella and Laurel have planned to open presents and then “take in a show.” Stella is glad to see Stephen, and when he asks her to join them for dinner before they are to catch the train back to New York, Barbara’s Stella sees in Stephen the man she fell in love with. When shopping for her resort wear before she and Laurel go off to the Mirador, Stella buys the kinds of tacky shoes no one but a nineteenth-century London trollop would wear, and not the modest Stella who greets Stephen on Christmas Day or who tells Ed Munn she doesn’t have feelings for anyone but Laurel. Stella at the resort, getting out of her sickbed all dolled up to go and find Laurel, has put on such an assortment of clothes, jewelry, and makeup to toddle across the manicured lawn that one young man remarks, “She isn’t a woman; she’s a Christmas tree.”

“I had to indicate to audiences, through the emotions shown by my face,” said Barbara, “that for Stella, joy ultimately triumphed over the heartache she felt. Despite her shabbiness and loneliness at that moment, there was a shining triumph in her eyes, as she saw the culmination of her dreams for her daughter.”

Bob gave his mother a Christmas present of a trip to Idaho Falls to spend the holiday with relatives. Barbara referred to her as a “miserable old bitch” and started arguments with Ruth who didn’t know what to say or how to respond. Ruth often complained to Bob that she was frail and sickly; she controlled her son through her constant illnesses and the threat of her imminent death. Before she left for Idaho, Ruth and Bob and Barbara had Christmas dinner and unwrapped presents around the tree. Among the presents Bob gave Barbara was a cow that mooed when its tail was pulled. Barbara gave Bob a set of magic tricks. On Christmas Day, they went with Marion and Zeppo to the fourth annual Christmas Stakes at the Santa Anita racetrack on the old Lucky Baldwin ranch. Dion stayed at home with Nanny, as he usually did. Santa Anita was the place to be on Christmas: Spencer Tracy, Jeanette MacDonald, Gene Raymond, Anthony Quinn and his new bride, Katherine DeMille, were there, as were Edward Arnold and his son; Virginia Bruce and her husband, the writer and director J. Walter Ruben; George Raft and Virginia Pine. -"A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel True (1907-1940)" by Victoria Wilson

Myrna Loy - Christmas Morning (with William Powell)

Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man- Christmas Morning: It's Christmas morning. Detective Nick Charles is lying on the couch in his bathrobe, shooting ornaments off the tree with his brand-new air gun, using the bottoms of his slippers to aim. "This is the nicest present I ever got," he tells his wife, Nora, who's sitting in a nearby chair, wearing a fur coat. Then, trying to aim using a mirror, he misses an ornament and shoots out a window, at which point he curls up into a ball and pretends to be asleep. He opens one eye to glance over at his wife. She just looks bemused and goes back to stroking her new coat. Instead of talking about property damage, they reminisce about the criminal who almost killed them the night before. And then they have another drink. While Loy herself was divorced four times, she had a pretty great life (1905-1993), and an incredible career. A pre-feminist feminist who has yet to be rediscovered by the third wave, Loy demanded the studio pay her as much as William Powell. She fought for civil rights. She and F.D.R. had an extended, unconsummated romance. Spencer Tracy, Clark Cable and John Barrymore all pursued her.

No actress of today radiates the sheer sexual wisdom of Myrna. No actor ever achieves the quirky lust she brought out in William Powell. As Nick and Nora, they bring something rare and precious to bear on marriage: a sense of humor. He makes her swoon with the wise figure he cuts, and makes her laugh with wry lines like, "This case is putting me way behind on my drinking." One time at a New Year's Eve party, the lights go out and when they come back up, Nick is kissing someone else. "Ahem," Nora says. Nick tips his hat to the other woman and apologizes for his mistake, then resumes kissing his wife. Every time they run into an old friend of Nick's, the friend assumes the beautiful Nora is his mistress and Nora, amused, doesn't correct him. I remember reading an Anna Quindlen column many years ago about the difference between boyfriends and husbands. She says she's always liked boyfriends better, so when she married, she picked a boyfriend type. It's the difference between security and freedom. And '30s screwball comedies like The Thin Man are all about the latter. Nora understood that it's important to be the wife and the mistress at the same time. Nick understood that it's important to be both the husband and the boyfriend.

Oh, there were times when Bill had a crush on me and times when I had a crush on Bill, but we never made anything of it. We worked around it and stayed pals. In this world today, nobody seems to understand how you can just be terribly close and love somebody a whole lot and not sleep with him. If Bill and I had been lovers, then we would have had fights. And if we’d been married, it would have been even worse. —Myrna Loy

Jean Harlow and William Powell in "Reckless" (1935) directed by Victor Fleming

Myrna complained in her autobiography about the way Harlow was distorted beyond recognition and maligned in the press, as well as in sensationalized biographies and biopics. Just as she would jump to Joan Crawford’s defense after Christina Crawford’s tattle-tale book Mommie Dearest came out, she stood up for Harlow, who was indeed subjected to tabloid-style smears too many times. But Myrna’s defense went overboard. She sanitized Harlow, overlooking the frank sexuality that had catapulted her to stardom and the questions that Paul Bern’s probable suicide raised. She characterized her friend as the good-girl victim of exploiters and gossipmongers bent on tarnishing an idol. Myrna’s cleansed Harlow is intelligent, well-mannered,joyful and easy to be with, “a sensitive woman with a great deal of selfrespect”, not the cheap sexpot she’d often been taken for. But in her zeal to protect her friend, Myrna denied Harlow’s zesty essence.

What happened to the free spirit notorious for going without underwear, the secret drinker, or the promiscuous blonde who’d dallied with the married Max Baer and Howard Hawks? Harlow grew up a lot during her last few years and evolved into a brilliant screwball comedienne, but she was never prim. If Myrna found Harlow’s death hard to bear, Bill Powell found it totally devastating. Behind dark glasses, and leaning on his mother’s arm, he sobbed without stint at her Forest Lawn funeral, an MGM production at which Jeanette MacDonald broke down while trying to perform “Indian Love Call” and Nelson Eddy sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” L. B. Mayer sent a heart of red roses five feet tall pierced by a golden arrow. Bill Powell strode up to the coffin to place a single gardenia on her breast. Carole Lombard muttered that she hoped there would be no such superproduction when her turn came. "Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood" (2011) by Emilie W. Leider