Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1941)

LuJg UixwniaM These are the things Myrna Loy might have told you about her breakup with Arthur Hornblow Jr. They are things that make you wonder if romance is, after all, the right basis for marriage WHEN it was announced a few weeks ago that Myrna Loy was to go to court and file her action for divorce against Arthur Hornblow Jr., even Hollywood, bitterly accustomed to separations and partings, was hurt in its secret heart. The marriages of Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Carole Landis — this year's crop of swift unions and swift dissolves — were all obviously madcap from start to fierce finish. Hollywood positively hoped that the Norma ShearerGeorge Raft romance would not last — and it didn't. Everybody knew, almost from the moment of the wedding, that Crawford and Tone would eventually part. But Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow Jr.! That was really a marriage, not just a flaming romance that had been solemnized with a ceremony. Myrna announced that she would get the divorce because of incompatibility of temperament. She let it go at that and, perforce, Hollywood had to let it go at that, too, for incompatibility is the cause of every divorce, if you want to put a fine point on it, and constitutes legal grounds in the state of California. There were, however, a lot of things that Myrna might have told if she were not the kind of person she is. They were things that would have stirred people's hearts with tender sympathy. They were the things that make you wonder, sometimes, if romance is the right basis for marriage after all; that make you consider if perhaps it isn't smarter to base a marriage on practical reasons and to more or less count love out of it. For Myrna could have told a story of a woman's love, if she had been willing to. She could, for instance, have started back on the exciting, sundrenched, exquisite day four years ago when she and Arthur Hornblow were wed. She could have told how they were so giddy and happy about the whole event that they completely FEBRUARY, 1941 BY ELIZABETH OWENS forgot about ordering her a bouquet. They had gone just across the Mexican border to Tia Juana for the ceremony and in the moment before the binding words were to be read by a sleepy Mexican justice, Arthur climbed over the fence into a field of wild flowers they saw growing there and gathered Myrna a colorful bunch of them. The gesture delighted Myrna. That wild, sweetly foolish bouquet was like a symbol of the marriage she wanted for herself and Arthur. She wanted their entire life together to be like that, uncalculated, never stuffy, always charming. THE start of their romance had not been too happy. Arthur had been married then, married to Julie Hornblow, though long estranged from her. Juliette Crosby Hornblow had been an actress, too. Myrna could have told that Arthur wasn't the first man she had loved, but that he was so surely, so wonderfully, the first man she had wanted to marry and to live with forever after. Almost from the moment of their introduction, she was in love with him, stimulated by his colorful intelligence, fascinated by his ambitions, touched by his loneliness. She wavered, in fact, between ecstasy and anguish for a couple of years, the ecstasy of her love and the anguished fear that he might never attain his freedom. So it was not alone because of her love but also because he had already known one marriage, and that an unhappy one, that made her determine on that day in Mexico, when he was finally free and they were able to wed, that she would be a perfect wife. She would create a perfect marriage. She and Arthur, she swore, would be no average man and wife. They would be sweethearts forever, playmates and partners in love forever. Theirs would be a romance that would never be allowed to die. That, of course, would have been a wonderful start on Myrna Loy's love story. She could have made the story most thrilling if she had gone into how she and Arthur built their dream of a house. Its setting was a hollow hidden in the hills, an untamed spot that Myrna had discovered when she first arrived from Billings, Montana, and which she had loved ever since. The house they built was a white, rambling country affair. They put plain wire fences around it and surrounded themselves not with swimming pools and tennis courts and such show-off things but with the permanent natural things, fruit trees and massed flowers and tangled wildwoods where birds could safely sing. It would have been sweet to have heard, too, about their first three years when they lived in that honeymoon house. They were rich, of course, rich with their combined salaries, rich in friendships, rich enough in every way to go in for a lot of things which are definitely chichi, but which are equally colorful and fun; wines at the right room temperature, exotic imported foods, flowers chosen to match the colors of Myrna's gowns and guests picked to match the mood of the host. ARTHUR glowed over being lord of the manor and Myrna glowed over him in that role. Arthur was always a magnificent host and their parties were always correctly done, in terms of menu, wines and the like. They never gave big jamborees; they weren't apt to be formal, either, in the sense of everyone's dressing for dinner and all that. But the Hornblow parties were perfect in the aesthetic and gustatory sense. As a result, about a year ago, Myrna was distinctly overweight. The studio murmured about it. Myrna smiled about (Continued on page 71) 53