Edward Z. Epstein

My opinion:

This biography of Loretta is divided into three parts:

1. His birth and his ascent to Hollywood.

2. His religious works

3. TV.



If the first part is passable, the other two are consecrated with doubtful points like those of his pure and hard Catholic devotion.

We know that she had a religious reputation in Hollywood, it was she who had invented a system during its passages on the set; she had installed a Cursor Box. If someone said a curse; he had to put 25 cents in the piggy bank, until the person on the board no longer swears. One day, a filmmaker, I think it was William Wellman that he kept saying profanity on the set, and the box filled with a hundred, then a dollar, because the more heinous the dirty word gives increased. We nicknamed her The Saint where the Madonna. She was verbally abusive, even accusing, moralizing, she frequented the two Hollywood gossips of her time Louala Parson and Heda Hopper (which does not surprise me), these two women had the reputation of destroying the gratin of 'Hollywood and couples to alert the American people of the evil of the interior of the Dream Factory; many stars like Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Myrna Loy, Paulette Goddard, Ava Gardner, Linda Darnell, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland… Have seen their lives for some because of them broken.

According to the words of the two authors, she would have frequented James Stewart in the early thirties, that, I did not know, since Jimmy does not talk about his relationship with her. On the other hand, she was very in love with Spencer Tracy (truthful); when she fell in love with him, Tracy would have hidden that he was married, that he and his wife had two children. That’s why she had broken off with him. During the filming of the Call of the Wild in 1935, she had met Clark Gable who, according to her, said that she testified years later, after the death of the actor, that he raped him during the shooting, of which Gable would have made him pregnant. This biography was published in 1986, this anecdote of rape is not in this bio, but in other biographers, because when this book was released; Loretta Young had not yet died (she died in the year two thousand).



Loretta Young was not only an actress, but a businesswoman. In the fifties, she was the first legend to use her image on the small screen. She used with her husband Tom Lewis (Frank Capra did not like this man very much), a religious producer and rather firm according to him the image of the woman must take example from Loretta Young; Lewis and Young divorced in 1969.



In this book, biographers Morella and Epstein often focused on her religious devotion, how the actress made money using her religious show on the backs of her fans, for 8 years. She made more money on the small screen than on the big one.



I'm going to stop there, because often the actors of old Hollywood carried on them, on a film set, what they lived in their own life. Loretta Young, her three sisters (all actresses), and her two brothers were raised by a Catholic mother whose religious devotion can be seen on the bright and smooth face of Loretta Young, when she played characters representing holiness as in Les Crusades of DeMille, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, or Call of the Wild. Loretta always made this choice to keep this label, so that the filmmakers and producers could not give her more serious roles like Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Blondell: The Queens of the Pre-Code, to which, their immorality never scared them : Loretta Young it was the opposite, the filmmakers and the actors with whom were immoral; she made them pay dearly for the bill by accusing them in her show LORETTA YOUNG SHOW (1950-1958).