Volume 35, Number 11 · June 30, 1988
Screen Gems
By James Harvey
Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming
by James Kotsilibas-Davis, by Myrna Loy
Knopf, 372 pp., $22.95
Pin-Up: The Tragedy of Betty Grable
by Spero Pastos
Berkley, 183 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Cary Grant: A Touch of Elegance
by Warren G. Harris
Doubleday, 296 pp., $17.95
The Making of The African Queen
by Katharine Hepburn
Knopf, 131 pp., $15.95
Movie stars in the 1930s and early 1940s had a place in the American consciousness that has never been equaled since. So that even a photograph of Myrna Loy, for example, could evoke much of the wit and romance of 1930s comedy; just as later on Betty Grable, the most popular woman star of the 1940s, seemed to incarnate all that decade's banality. Now Myrna Loy tells us, in her autobiography, how the two of them actually met—early in the war, when Loy's popularity was somewhat waning (she had temporarily retired from the screen to do war work) and Grable's was at its height. Loy had prevailed on Grable—whom she found she liked ('a game gal, direct and unaffected')—to do an impromptu show for the wounded at a Staten Island military hospital. But when she came to pick her up the next morning, Grable was complaining of a hangover: 'Harry James and I were out on the town last night.' Loy told their driver to stop at 'a little road-house' where she made Grable 'take some beer to appease the gremlins,' and they went on. It's almost like a scene from one of her movies with Jean Harlow—Libeled Lady, for example—with Loy dealing generously and warmly with this other, very different sort of woman. They arrived at the hospital, and Grable, Loy tells us, was 'a sensation':
Review, 4446 words
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