For a lot of people, it might be difficult to fathom the level of popularity that Loretta Young enjoyed in the late-1940s. She was one of the top ten box office stars in the United States in 1946 and 1947 and managed to pull off a surprise Best Actress win for her performance in The Farmer’s Daughter. At the time, she was viewed as one of the Hollywood’s greatest beauties and was admired for her ability tough it out in an industry that regularly chewed actresses up and spit them out. Press coverage of her work was generally favorable and her image as a conservative Catholic allowed her to avoid facing some of the damning charges that were being thrown at more openly promiscuous stars. She churned out hit after hit and wasn’t known to be ‘uncooperative’ when it came to studio heads and the projects that they assigned her to work on. Unlike some of her peers, she maintained a stable career that didn’t go through too many dramatic ups and downs. When you consider the fact that she reached such great heights, it is impossible not to wonder why she has slipped out of the public consciousness so quickly.
I don’t think that it is easy to pin down the reasons for Young’s precipitous fall from grace. Delving into the history of her career and her complicated personal life, I did come to understand that her public image and relationship with the film industry was slightly more complicated than it seemed to be. It is fair to say that she was a devout Catholic who valued her faith above all else but it is also fair to say that she was guilty of committing a few sins as a young woman. In 1933, she conducted an affair with the still-married Spencer Tracy, on the set of Man’s Castle. He and his wife were separated, and he would go on to have a long-term partnership with Katharine Hepburn, but the press disapproved of this illicit affair and the two eventually broke up in 1934.
Following this scandalous affair, she found herself wrapped up in yet another clandestine relationship with a married co-star. Clark Gable, everybody’s favorite loveable rogue, played her on-screen love interest in Call of the Wild. The two displayed the sort of explosive chemistry that invites audience speculation and, unbeknownst to the public, Gable impregnated Young during their brief relationship. Young was only 22 years old when she became pregnant and did not want this scandal to negatively impact her career. As a devout Catholic, she was unwilling to get an abortion and tried to fool everybody into believing that she had ‘adopted’ a child from an orphanage. In reality, she gave birth to her daughter, Judy Lewis, in Venice, California and placed her into an orphanage, shortly after her birth. She failed to pull wool over the eyes of her Hollywood friends and it became common for people to chatter about Lewis’s true parentage. Young refused to acknowledge the fact that Lewis was her biological daughter for most of her childhood and only agreed to publicly acknowledge her affair in Joan Wester Anderson’s biography, ‘Forever Young: The Life, Loves, and Enduring Faith of a Hollywood Legend: The Authorized Biography of Loretta Young.’ In private, she did acknowledge the affair, but hurt Lewis’s feelings by referring to her as a “walking mortal sin.”
As she grew up and came of age, Lewis’s relationship with her mother became increasingly strained. Those who were in the know about Young’s affair, felt that she had mistreated her daughter and was taking out her anger on a young woman who just wanted the love of her mother. Actor Frank Langella encountered her in the early 1980s and occasionally socialized with her at parties held by director Ronald Neame. He wrote of her relationship with Lewis, “Her daughter passed away just this year and the sad story of her mother refusing to admit to the world that she’d actually birthed her and Judy’s pain and suffering over it, stands as a testament to a woman who, it would seem, valued artifice and religion far more than the love and comfort of her own child.” This quote seems to concisely express the way that most outsiders viewed Young’s relationship with her child and efforts to keep her skeletons in the closet. As knowledge of the scandal became increasingly widespread, she was met with criticism and condemnation.
Part of the anger towards Young seems to stem from the fact that she was also seen as a pious puritan who loved to lecture others. Her infamous habit of having a swear jar on set did end up irritating many of her co-stars. She allegedly charged people 25 cents for cursing an incurred the wrath of Robert Mitchum for attempting to police the set. After they finished shooting Rachel and the Stranger together, he dropped a $20 bill into her swear jar and stated “This should just about cover everything I’ve been wanting to say to Loretta.” He wasn’t the only co-star who had his feathers ruffled by her behavior and her sanctimoniousness caused many to feel as though they had a free pass to mock her. The dichotomy between the saintly, pure image that she tried to project and the dirty laundry that she desperately tried to keep hidden, was rather amusing to some.
It is easy to see Young’s scandal being viewed in a completely different light if she had simply owned up to the affair and made a big show of being a loving, happy mother. After all, stars like Ingrid Bergman and Marlene Dietrich are viewed in a favorable light today, even though they have both been accused of being neglectful mothers and serial philanderers. Bergman was able to take on the image of a martyr after having a passionate affair with Roberto Rossellini and being cast out of Hollywood for seven years. She was pilloried by the press and called a “powerful force for evil” by Senator Edwin C. Johnson but it didn’t take too long for the tabloids that had attacked her to make a dramatic turnaround. They went from slut-shaming her and comparing her to the devil, to turning her into a sexier version of Joan of Arc who would be welcomed back into Hollywood with open arms. When she did return to Hollywood in 1956, she won an Academy Award from industry professionals who wanted to apologize for casting her out of Hollywood in 1949.
The scandal became an essential facet of her image and she has been forever immortalized as a brave, courageous spirit who was a victim of media coverage. Film critic Richard Brody referred to her affair with Rossellini as a “great sacrifice for cinematic art”, rather than viewing her as a woman who might have just been attracted to an Italian man who wasn’t her husband. Bergman’s abandonment of Pia Lindstrom, the daughter that she shared with her first husband, is viewed as a tragic consequence of her affair. She isn’t castigated for devoting so much of her time to her career and enjoys a reputation as an elegant, saintly ice queen who blessed Hollywood with her antiseptic presence.
Young’s scandal could be viewed in a completely different light if she had found a way to draw more positive publicity towards it. Instead of weaponizing it and weaving it into the myths and legends that would define her legacy, she kept running away from it and hoping that it would just go away. It was a strange approach to dealing with the rumors as her refusal to talk about it arguably encouraged even more speculation. If she had come out and publicly addressed it, there would have been a media firestorm for a brief period, but people would have derived less excitement out of gossiping about Young’s past behind her back. If the information had been out in the open, all of the rumors would have lost their mystique and people would have moved on to a new story. Young would have had to bear the cross of conceiving a child out of wedlock until the end of her days, but she would not have been treated like a monster by other Hollywood stars.
She could have also tried to spin the scandal in a way that actually benefitted her public image. Many stars have managed to bounce back from scandals by playing into the idea that they are slightly villainous or sinister. When Lana Turner’s personal life was splashed across the headlines in the wake of her fourteen-year-old daughter Cheryl Crane stabbing her abusive boyfriend to death, she made her comeback by appearing in Imitation of Life as a troubled mother who shares a ‘complicated’ relationship with her daughter. She seemed to be directly addressing the scandal through her selection of certain roles and her tabloid persona became thoroughly enmeshed with her on-screen persona. Imitation of Life became a massive box office hit and she went on to play quite a few bad mothers in the future. When she wrote her tell-all autobiography in the 1980s and appeared on the Joan Rivers Show to promote it, she was able to make jokes about her many unsuccessful marriages and slyly reference the scandals that came close to destroying her public image. The audience laughed along as she dropped a couple of self deprecating jokes and appeared to be thoroughly in on the joke. Young could have gotten away with her scandal if she had rebranded and given up on her holier than thou attitude. By letting her naysayers know that she understood why she was a subject of mockery, she could have taken back some control over her public persona.
It sounds like I’m being a sanctimonious know-it-all as I sit here and lecture Young about the way that she handled a scandal that really shouldn’t have defined her career. I find myself discussing her handling of it because her scandal had a different impact on her career than most other stars. She wasn’t destroyed by it but it did create ill will towards her and she was never enshrined as a tragic survivor who had to fight back against the sexism of the time period. Those who know about it condemn Young for her actions, but it isn’t well known enough to draw a lot of attention to her.
Beyond her public image and the scandals that tarnished her reputation, she also suffers from the fact that she doesn’t have one iconic role that people associate her with. The Stranger is often acclaimed as one of the great masterpieces of the 1940s, but people don’t really talk about Young’s performance when they bring up the film’s virtues. She is outshone by the cinematography and art direction in every scene. That leaves you with the two hits that she made in 1947. The Bishop’s Wife is a cute Christmas comedy that falls into the second tier of Christmas classics. It doesn’t have the iconic status of It’s a Wonderful Life and Love, Actually but people might reach for it if they happen to be David Niven aficionados. In the film, she plays a perfect wife and mother who happens to catch the eye of a horny angel. She gets to show off her exceptional beauty and surprisingly deep voice but it isn’t one of those roles that allows an actor to give a commanding, bravura turn. The same could be said of The Farmer’s Daughter. Even though she won an Academy Award for her performance, she doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot in the film. None of these performances resonate with modern audiences and nobody can point to an iconic quote or catchphrase that she uttered in The Stranger. Appreciating her oeuvre takes slightly more effort because most people haven’t heard of Love Is News or The Unguarded Hour.
Even her Academy Award win, which sent shockwaves through Hollywood at the time, doesn’t get talked about today. It was more notable at the time for the role that Rosalind Russell, the presumed winner, played in the controversy. Russell was one of Tinseltown’s most beloved comediennes and roles in The Women and His Girl Friday had elevated her into the top rank of stars. She was highly ambitious and strongly desired approval from her peers. Seemingly aware of the fact that the Academy rarely rewarded comedic performances, she chose to appear in dramatic prestige vehicles to increase her chances of getting nominated. After losing out to Olivia de Havilland in 1946, she took on the leading role in a film adaption of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. This was a meaty role that allowed her to deliver the sort of overly dramatic, intense monologues that were considered to be ‘respectable’ back in the 1940s. She gave the sort of manic performance that garners attention from voters and all media coverage seemed to point towards the idea of Russell easily winning Best Actress. She also employed the services of a press agent who had helped Joan Crawford and de Havilland to secure the award in the past two years. He drenched the media with suggestions that Russell would steamroll her way to a win and there are reports that people had begun to leave the theatre when the Best Actress winner was being announced. Everybody assumed that Russell would easily take it and so they were shocked when Young’s name was announced. Russell, who had already been rising from her chair, quickly sat back down and began cheering for her longtime friend.
Young’s win was shocking because, on top of Russell being the widely tipped favorite, she had appeared in the sort of light fluff that didn’t typically receive awards attention. The Farmer’s Daughter didn’t succeed in winning any other awards and Young hadn’t received a great deal of precursor attention. Many have speculated that she ended up winning because Mourning Becomes Electra was a giant flop and received mixed reviews from critics. The film’s financial failure was a disaster for RKO Radio Pictures and caused a shake-up in leadership at the studio. Dore Schary was appointed as the new studio head and he wasn’t all that interested in promoting Mourning Becomes Electra. He had nothing to do with its production and viewed it as a millstone around his neck. He had inherited all of the financial issues that the film had created and had to figure out how to dig the studio out of the hole that it had created. Films like The Farmer’s Daughter, a relatively safe financial investment, were helping RKO to recover from setbacks and stars like Young, who didn’t take too many risks, were seen as the way of the future. It is still difficult to explain why such an unusual performance won, but the subtle behind the scenes reasons for Russell’s loss, make Young’s storyline less compelling. You can see why this tale isn’t nearly as juicy as the story behind Crawford’s efforts to upstage Bette Davis at the 35th Academy Awards.
All of this helps to explain why Young’s name isn’t on everybody’s lips. It’s easy to see why something like Kentucky hasn’t been affectionately embraced by the under-twenty set and Young’s sanitized, sweet image doesn’t make her ideally suited to audiences who aren’t used to accepting the social mores of the 1940s. In watching a lot of her films, We don’t really focus on her best performances. I was reminded of the fact that she was a presence in pre-Code cinema and did play the bad girl on a couple of occasions. Her appearance in Midnight Mary, in which she plays a gangster’s moll who uses her sex appeal to get ahead, was revelatory. Young’s delicate features make her look like an innocent and her husky voice has real strength behind it. She illustrates the fact that her character is conniving and manipulative, without ever pushing her cruelty too far. She’s a con woman and a criminal who would love to be a housewife with a couple of children. It was the most accomplished performance of hers that I had seen and it made me imagine her going down an entirely different career path. She once complained that Bette Davis took all of the roles that she should have played and whilst I don’t necessarily think that Young should have been cast as Julie Marsden or Charlotte Vale, I could see her playing Judith Traherne. If she had been given parts that gave her more room to grow and experiment as an actress, she could have revealed hidden depths.
While this might feel like a lengthy hit piece that rips Young limb from limb, I want to emphasize the fact that it wasn’t my intention to perform a character assassination. I was fascinated by the fact that such a big star could lose most of her cultural cachet and I wondered why Young has been a victim of times changing, whilst some of her peers have remained iconic. If there is a reappraisal of Young’s legacy, It should start with an increased appreciation of her pre-Code work. She was at her best when she was walking on the wild side.
image courtesy of Turner Classic Movies
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I am passionate about screwball comedies from the 1930s and certain actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood. I’ll aim to review new Netflix releases and write features, so expect a lot of romantic comedies and cult favourites.
