Free Hollywood Madonna by Bernard F. Dick

raise eyebrows and revenues. It did both.
    The film was a triumph not only for Loretta but also for the other Warner loan outs, William Wellman and James Van Trees, who photographed Loretta so strikingly in Life Begins , They Call It Sin , Taxi! , and Heroes for Sale (not to mention Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face ). Although Mary was Loretta’s most mature characterization to date, the film ultimately became Wellman’s. Wellman worked out the flashbacks so that when the camera panned the dates on the court records, left to right, theaction would return to the present by complementary horizontal wipes, proceeding from right to left—with the present emerging, as the past recedes. Usually, in a wipe, one is aware of a line moving horizontally, vertically, or diagonally across the screen, with one shot ending as the other begins. But here, it is as if the past exits to the left, as the present enters from the right. It is still a horizontal wipe, but done so artfully that it seems that past and present were once conjoined like Siamese twins and have now been separated. Although Loretta gave a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, she did not get one. That year, the nominees were May Robson ( Lady for a Day ), Diana Wynyard ( Cavalcade ), and the eventual winner, Katharine Hepburn ( Morning Glory ).
    Twenty-year-old actresses were rarely given such fulfilling roles as Trina and Mary. During the studio years, even the icons were stuck with parts they knew were beneath them, but which they were contractually obliged to accept. Warner’s was perhaps the least sensitive to the entitlements of stardom, dismissing the idea that if one good turn deserves another, so should one good film lead to another. Bette Davis, for one, languished in a limbo of unmemorable films in the early 1930s, until out of desperation she moved over to RKO to give an indelible performance as the self-destructive waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934). Warner’s punished Davis by ignoring her when Oscar nomination time came around. It was only a groundswell of support that resulted in her name being placed on the ballot. Many thought Davis would win, but dark horses have been known to reach the finish line before the odds-on favorite, and Claudette Colbert won that year for It Happened One Night . Davis had to fight for better roles, even though the Academy gave her a consolation prize for her performance in the potboiler, Dangerous , the following year. Then more of the same, until other leading roles resulted, but she never experienced one artistic triumph after another. Garbo fared better, but she was at MGM, where she was revered, with her films sufficiently spaced so that audiences were not given a surfeit of Garbo. Davis, by comparison, was at the Warner factory, where the merchandise varied from Jezebel (1938), for which Davis received a second Oscar, to the disastrous Beyond the Forest (1949), a transmogrification of Davis’s art that reduced her to a gargoyle. Freelancing was the solution, as it later became for Loretta.

CHAPTER 6
Last Days at Warner’s
    After Platinum Blonde , Man’s Castle , and Midnight Mary , which together required her to play three different types of women at two other studios, Loretta felt more secure about her art. The reviews bolstered her confidence, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she would be moving on. But where?
    In November 1932, Jesse Lasky announced his intention to become an independent producer at the Fox Film Corporation, with Zoo in Budapest and Berkeley Square as his first productions. Loretta was well aware of Famous Players-Lasky, the studio resulting from the Famous Players-Lasky Feature Plays merger in 1916, with Adolph Zukor as president, and Lasky as vice president for production. It was there that Loretta’s film career was launched in 1917. The company underwent various name changes, the most significant being the addition of “Paramount” in 1927. Paramount-Famous