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"Let Me Have a Crack at It": Myrna Loy's Road to Fame
From: Columbia University
| By:
Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Hollywood star Myrna Loy (1905-93), called the "Queen of the Movies," had a film career that spanned more than half a century. When she was 20 years old, she signed a contract with Warner Bros. and began playing a series of roles as the "exotic vamp." But her breakthrough came when she played Nora in the 1934 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's thriller The Thin Man. In a 1959 interview conducted by Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Myrna Loy talks about how she got her start in Hollywood. |
Question: I thought perhaps you went out [to Hollywood] to get into movies? |
Myrna Loy: No. I was very young, you see. I taught dancing--that was what I had intended to do. I wanted to be a dancer and I was very serious about this. I had no intention of being in the movies; I was very serious about becoming a dancer. As a matter of fact, when I was 15 I had a class of small children to teach in what, in those days, they called a school of expression. Then, in the summer, as I had a great friend who was a musician, Hazel Schurtsinger, sister of Victor Schurtsinger, a director and composer, I worked during the summer. He would give me extra parts and things to do. |
Then, when I was about 17, we ran out of money, which happens sometimes, so I had to go to work. I was very fortunate to be able to use my dancing. I went to work at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre, where they had prologues in those days. (There is a Grauman's Chinese now, but there was also the Egyptian Theatre, which was the first of its type that he built in those days, and they had prologues of dancing and that sort of thing for the films that were shown. They would take a scene out of a film and develop a singing-and-dancing sequence.) |
From there, I got work in films, in a DeMille picture or something, as a dancer. While I was there, a photographer came one night by the name of Henry Waxland, who was then (and still is) considered a very fine artist, and he wanted to photograph three girls. He had seen three girls that he wanted to photograph. So they allowed us to go to the studio, and he photographed the three of us. Then he became very much excited about me, because he thought I was very photogenic, and it was in his studio that Rudolph Valentino saw this photograph of me. He had come for a sitting, and he saw the photograph and asked Henry about me, and Henry told him. I had done nothing; I'd had no experience. I was a dancer. |
So he asked, would Henry bring me to the studio to meet Mrs. Valentino, who was then working with him. This of course was late in his career, about the time he was making Cobra. They made a test of me. He'd wanted to give me the lead in the picture, but I was not up to it, I had not had enough experience. Nevertheless, she used me in a film that she made later on, a little fantasy that she did much later than that. |
The end of the silent era
When talkies came in, I think I did one straight part, but it wasn't anything very important, a picture I did with Conrad Nagle. Of course, that's where the talkies were born, at Warner Bros. I remember the first time I ever had to speak on a microphone. Jack Warner took me and Conrad Nagle back to the back of his stage, and they had this room blocked off with a lot of black curtains hanging all around, and there was this thing hanging in the middle of the room, this microphone--a most terrifying object, you know! |
He said, "Say something. Just say something." |
We did, and of course Conrad has a beautiful voice. Fortunately, my voice recorded very well. I was one of the lucky ones. I didn't have a high, squeaky voice or something. There wasn't too much wrong with it. But for some reason or other they were so convinced that I was a character actress that they never gave me an opportunity. They said, "We just haven't enough of these parts around, so you can find yourself another job." |
Q: You must have had some exciting times when sound came in. |
Loy: Oh, terrifying. Yes, really terrifying, because, as a matter of fact, when I did The Desert Song, Darryl Zanuck said to me when he saw the tests--it was quite a difficult role, because I had to dance in it, and I had a wild denunciation scene, a scene where I threw coins around and chewed up everything, and it was not too easy--when he saw the tests, he said it looked pretty good, but I was terribly nervous. Of course, everyone was in those days. He said, "Well, I don't know. I don't know whether you'll make it or not." I'll never forget that moment in the projection room when I decided. I said, "All right, how about letting me try it, anyway?" |
I knew if I didn't cross that bridge then and there, I was dead, because it was happening to so many stars. There were people on the lot who were just not going to make it--they absolutely were not going to. Either because of some voice problem, which they could probably have worked on and done something about, or something else. |
I said, "If it doesn't work out, take me out." |
He said, "That would be terrible for you. It would hurt you if we did that." |
I said, "Oh, it doesn't make any difference, one way or the other. Let me have a crack at it." |
So I did. I made it. This is how bad it was, at that time. It was a matter of survival to a lot of people. |
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| Myrna Loy discusses her early experiences with talkies. | |
As a matter of fact, he said to me at that time, "You are the only person in the cast who has not been in the theater." They were thinking in terms of theater people at the time. Of course, this was a musical, so they had John Boles, Carlotta King, people who had been in musical comedy, and of course Louise Fazenda, who had been in the theater. So I was actually the only one who had just grown up in the movies. I had never been in the theater. |
They then set me, in talkies as well, in this exotic role, because I spoke with a wild accent of some kind that I just picked up. Things were happening so fast. They hadn't yet brought the voice teachers out, and I was imitating someone I'd heard in the theater version of it. It was kind of a French-Moroccan patois of some kind, some awful thing. I made it up, really. I used to make up all kinds of accents, because I have a pretty good ear, and for a long time I did that--until they brought the people out who taught me a real Mexican accent, or something that was real. |
But later in the talkies, it took me an awful while to break away from that--to speak pure English--because I was set in this thing. |
It's not as true anymore. I think now people are accepted in more of a variety of roles. After that, you see, I discovered comedy and began to do that. It was kind of a gradual metamorphosis. Then I started playing perfect wives, and that stuck--and still has, to a great extent. I had a dramatic role in Lonelyhearts. But it's quite interesting, how these things happen. |
The Hollywood experience
It's not an easy life, believe me. You have to work. Especially for women, because they have to get up so early. I used to get up at 5:30 every morning of my life, because I lived half an hour away from the studio, and I happen to be the kind of person who likes to take her time. I don't like to rush in the morning. You have to be in the studio at seven, you know--you check in at seven. You're supposed to start work at nine, but you check in at seven, and have your hair done, and sit under the dryer--every day, sometimes twice a day. If your hair gets bad, you have to have it redone. This is all part of the routine. You work on your script while you're sitting under the dryer. And it takes a good two hours, you see, to do this, to be made up--to get yourself all set and ready to go. |
Then you work until twelve o'clock. Then you have an hour for lunch, which isn't very long, really, to get out of all this stuff and then sort of get re-good, re-made-up and everything, back again at one o'clock. This goes on. It's really something. |
Q: On top of this, you're expected to give a top performance on the spur of the moment in front of the camera? |
Loy: Well, you rehearse your scenes. Now, they maybe take two weeks ahead of time and kind of run through the whole thing. We did that in Lonelyhearts, which I liked very much doing. But it used to be that you'd just come on the set--and you may not start at the beginning, you know. You have to know your script well enough to know where you are, because you may jump into a sequence that isn't the opening but a little way ahead. You may even do the end of the picture. You hope not. You hope you won't get to that until some time later, but you may do something that's close to that. This is very difficult. |
A real hodgepodge seldom results from this, in a well-made picture. Actually, they don't do this as much as they did in the old days, but it used to be necessary in the old days. Therefore a director had to know where he was going, and where he wanted to go--and you did, too, if you were capable of it. |
Q: How much time did you have to work up the role? |
Loy: Well, it would depend on how long you had your script, which was certainly a good two weeks ahead of time, anyway. It took two weeks at least to get wardrobe, in most pictures that I made, anyway. |
Q: Did you have conferences during that time? |
Loy: Very often you would have, with your director. But you would never work with the actors until the day you stepped on the set, unless you had worked with them before. You wouldn't know them. |
Q: Some actresses in Hollywood feel they've "never had a chance to act." |
Loy: I don't agree with that at all. Didn't have a chance to act? Oh no, I don't think so. |
Q: That it was just little bits and pieces-- |
Loy: Oh well, that's very difficult. I mean, that's one of the things that I think makes motion picture technique the most difficult of all, frankly. I think it's the most difficult, and I know quite a few people who agree with me, as far as that goes. Some people say it's easy, because you don't have to do anything continuously, but this is not true, because it's much easier to do something continuously, because you can build and build and build, as you do on a television show. To me, that part of television is pleasant--that's nice--provided you've memorized your lines enough that you know everything, and have had enough rehearsal that you know what you're doing. |
The difficult thing, in films, is to do short pieces of a scene--and match them--keep the same emotional pitch, hit the same emotional pitch, come back in and do another piece of the scene and hit it right then. You have very little chance to build up to it. I mean, you may build up to it before they say, "Camera"; they may give you a chance to build until you match it. But this is not easy, and this probably can be very disturbing to actors who are accustomed to going from the beginning and continuing on through. |
I find it wonderful, because you can perfect something. There's a great refining process that goes on in films. There's a great need to be very true in films. You have to be true. If you're not, it shows. That camera's right there, looking right into your eyes, and you can't get away with anything. |
Also, there's the fact that you do have another opportunity, you might have another chance to add something, to make it a little bit better. Some people will say, "Isn't this boring, to do it over and over again?" No. You don't do it over and over again all that many times. It isn't boring. It isn't any more boring than it would be for a writer to take a piece of paper and write and say, "No that isn't what I want," and throw it away and do it again. |
Sometimes it's terribly frustrating, if you do something that you really like. You think it's pretty good-- it's probably not really as good as the one the director has picked beforehand--and then a light blows. You see, it isn't always for the actor that things are reshot. It's done for camera, for the lighting man up on top, or some little fellow gets hot up there and falls asleep and drops one of the scrims on the web or something. This seldom happens, because crews are the most marvelous people in the whole world--the greatest audience, and the most critical, too. They're very tough. |
So there are many reasons: you have to please the soundman, you have to please the cameraman--the whole thing has to fit together. In the theater, if you just please yourself (and the director), that's about it. You don't have any of those mechanical things to deal with, any of that problem. So that can be frustrating. But it's not all that bad. |
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