Screenland Plus TV-Land (Jul 1957 - May 1959)

The Gal Who Conquered Time continued from page 33 who now makes his home in New York. "Unlike most women, Loretta has always known what she's wanted, and she hasn't strayed from the goal in her life." Loretta had married Lewis, a top agency executive, in 1940. One evening in 1953 the two were watching television in their Holmby Hills living room. The set was one that Loretta had bought at an auction given for the benefit of her favorite charity, St. Anne's Maternity Hospital for Unmarried Mothers. Dreamily, Loretta said to her husband, "I'm going to be on television. I've made up my mind." "All right," said Lewis, "but it will take a little time to create the right series and produce a pilot film." WHEN months went by and nothing happened, Loretta wearied of the delay. She is a lady who likes action, not dawdling or talking. She drove to her agents' offices. "Let's go!" she said. "Get a script and let's get going." They did. The pilot was filmed and sold — or so it has been said — inside of four weeks. "The Loretta Young Show" went on the air in 1953, with Loretta's husband as the first producer ("I just wanted to get the series started," he has said), and it has been going ever since. It is NBC's top-rated show, the sole surviving anthology program; and whether Loretta is playing hostess, or such diverse roles as an Egyptian queen or a Japanese fisherman's wife, Loretta unquestionably gives the performance her all. "You know," said one of her staff with awe, "when Loretta did that Japanese girl, she rehearsed with a heavy rope bound round her knees, so she could really shuffle like an Oriental. Who else would do a thing like that?" Some critics, true enough, have murmured that Miss Young is not. and never w'as, a great actress, and that her shows are little more than a kind of "John's Other Wife" soap opera. "Well," says Loretta, "if it's soap opera, it's good soap opera." She is also willing to admit that many women tune in just to see what she is wearing in the opening prologue and introduction. But she is passionately sincere, loves sentiment, and believes, very rightly, that there are millions of other people who do too. "Just the same," said a man who works on her show, "she's got a practical streak, this airy sprite. When, comes the commercial, she tells you to pay attention to the man with the cheery advice about your soiled laundry, you pay attention." People have been paying attention to Loretta Young now for more than three decades. Her goal was in sight almost from the day she was born — not Loretta. but Gretchen Michaela Young, in Salt Lake City, January 6, 1913. (Her friends, and even Loretta herself, think of her as "Gretch."') It isn't quite true that Gret60 chen first opened those huge blue eyes on Hollywood Avenue, and so went from Hollywood Avenue to Hollywood Boulevard. "It makes a nice yarn, but there's nothing to it," says Miss Young today. "Matter of fact, I was born at 227 J Street. We left there when I was around four years old — Mother, my two older sisters, Polly Ann and Betty Jane, and my brother John." Little Gretchen's father, a "handsome but weak man," had vanished into the unknown, and her mother, a dauntless and remarkable woman, gathered together what must have been the prettiest covey of small girls and journeyed off to a place called Hollywood. Mrs. Young had no desire to become a movie mother. Instead, she opened up a boarding house. It was Gretchen's uncle, Ernest Traxler, who got the child her first movie job at the ripe age of four. Traxler knew some people in the studios and took Gretch by street car down to Paramount. There he suggested to George Melford that his niece might do for a kid part in "The Only Way," a new picture starring Fanny Ward and Theodore Roberts. "Well, she might do," said Melford, looking Gretchen over. "Bring her back tomorrow. And," he added, as an afterthought, "have her face washed, too." The future Loretta Young's first acting role called for her to lie on an operating table and weep. The little ham really put her heart into it; she shrieked and carried on so, recalled one crew man, "that people came running from all parts of the studio, certain that disaster had struck." But she had made an impression, and other jobs came along for her. The rest of the Young family, delighted by the development, soon began working in pictures, too. Yet there were weeks when the family was so beset by poverty that little Gretch had to go to school without socks. If this hurt her, she showed no signs of it. Eventually, Mrs. Young's boarding house prospered, and the girls were removed from camera range and enrolled in the Sacred Heart Convent School in Alhambra. A few years later, Polly Ann and Betty Jane (Betty had changed her name to Sally Blane) got back into the movies, but Gretchen had to be content with studying history and geography and arithmetic a little while longer. IT WAS Director Mervyn LeRoy who put Gretchen in front of the cameras again when she was around 13. LeRoy, then making a picture for First National, phoned the Young boarding house to ask sister Polly Ann to report for work the following day. Polly Ann, at that moment, happened to be off somewhere on location, but this did not daunt Miss Gretchen when she answered the phone. Said Gretch, in her most dulcet tones, "My sister isn't in, but how about me? Won't I do?" Her brashness must have hypnotized LeRoy, because Gretchen was hired for a role in "Naughty, But Nice," with the great silent star, Colleen Moore. (What Polly Ann thought about this is not on record.) Miss Moore, at any rate, was delighted with the big-eyed 13-year-old, gave her a new film name, Loretta ("Gretchen" was too "Dutchy"), and walked hand in hand with her into First National's front office. There she announced, in the throbbing Colleen Moore way, "You must place this beautiful child under contract at once!" First National did, at $50 a week. AND yet it was not until Loretta was 15 that she got her first big and truly showy role in "Laugh, Clown, Laugh." For Loretta, it was to be a milestone in more ways than one. Her director was Herbert Brenon, one of the great and feared megaphonists of his day. Loretta was* to portray a tight rope walker, in a ballet skirt. Brenon made it clear that the girl he had in mind had to have beautiful legs. When he told Miss Young this alarming piece of news, Loretta started for the door. "Goodbye," she said, "my legs are like sticks." Brenon stopped her. "Your legs can be padded," he growled. "Likewise your body. It's those eyes of yours I need: they're irreplaceable." Even so, Loretta was cowed by the irascible Brenon all through the picture. Once Brenon, carried away by a scene, let Loretta run out on the tightrope instead of using a double. Hoping to intensify her fright, the director yelled, "Come on, hurry across that rope. Don't stop, don't stop!" Panic-stricken, the 15-year-old obeyed, and then at the end of the take, she jumped, to keep from falling. In jumping, she bruised herself badly. Brenon, so the story goes, gathered her in his arms, crying, "My poor baby! What have 1 done to you?" That night Loretta's sisters got some gilt paper and cut out a huge star, then pinned it to her bedroom door. Underneath they lettered the words: "The Star's Room — Silence." But most important, Loretta really grew up working with Brenon. As implacable a perfectionist as Loretta herself, all too often he would scream in front of everybody. "You are a terrible actress!" and reduce her to tears. She was woefully sitting on the floor in a corner of the set one day when Lon Chaney came over to comfort her. "Nothing like this is worth breaking your heart," Chaney said. "If they kick your heart around like a football, pick it up and brush it off. You're going places — if you keep your head. You've got something and Brenon knows it. So you must forgive him if he expects too much." She stopped crying, and, she says, "I've never cried over my work since." Yet hers was an impetuous youth, as she confesses. "I always hated the word