Authors: Bernard F. Dick
By the time Judy set the record straight about her parentage, other movie stars’ children had had their say. None of their memoirs was flattering. However, if
Mommie Dearest
(1976), Christina Crawford’s devastating account of her life as Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter, were juxtaposed with Crawford’s films, there would not have been much difference between the actress’s screen image and her real self. The same was true of
My Mother’s Keeper
(1985), by Bette Davis’s daughter, B.D. Hyman, christened Barbara Davis Sherry, whom Bette used to call “B.D.” If Crawford was the mother from hell, Davis came from some other infernal region. Neither Crawford nor Davis was meant for motherhood; they were too preoccupied with their careers. But they were meant for
the screen, which they honored with some extraordinary films: Crawford’s
Grand Hotel, The Women, Mildred Pierce
; Davis’s
Of Human Bondage, Dark Victory, Jezebel, Now, Voyager, All About Eve
. Once they discovered that they were mere subjects in a patriarchy, they learned to hide their insecurities by imitating the moguls, thereby acquiring reputations for being demanding and difficult. Another “d” word is also applicable: “driven.”
So was Judy, but in a different way. Judy was driven by a need to tell the truth. To her credit, she did not engage in venom spewing. In fact,
Uncommon Knowledge
is temperate compared to Crawford’s and Hyman’s feeding frenzies. Judy’s memoir is a deconstruction of the Celestial Loretta myth that exposes, at its core, a frightened woman, who in 1935 was faced with two choices: to arrange for an abortion through Dr. Holleran (who could have given her a referral, as he
supposedly did for other actresses
in similar situations), or become a mythmaker with herself at the heart of the myth. Naturally, she chose myth. In July 1936, Judy was placed in a San Francisco orphanage, where she remained for five months. Until Loretta decided upon the next plot point, Judy stayed then with her grandmother. Finally, in June 1937, the next scene was ready: Loretta would adopt Judy. The script conformed to fact, but the facts were founded on myth. The magnanimous Loretta had found fulfillment as a single parent.
As for the circumstances of Judy’s birth, it was a matter of expediency. Disclosure of Judy’s parentage would have damaged Loretta’s career—perhaps irreparably—and tainted Judy’s name. Unless she were willing to pull up stakes and head to Broadway, which was more liberal than Hollywood (and where her liaison with Gable would have been dismissed with a shrug), Loretta had no choice but to mythologize. Otherwise, her image would have been shattered so thoroughly as to be beyond restoration. If Loretta had sinned, as she believed she had, she would atone a hundredfold for an act that other actresses would have considered casual sex. And if it led to pregnancy, they knew the route to take. But they also knew how to take precautions. Artificial birth control was alien to Loretta. She probably knew little, if anything, about contraception, especially devices women used to avoid a pregnancy. Contraception was Gable’s department, not hers. Unfortunately, Gable assumed she had been around the block and knew the score. At twenty-two, Loretta was still the dewy-eyed romantic. But Gable’s potent masculinity was not the stuff of adolescent fantasy; it was fantasy in the flesh, the closest Loretta had come to the carnal. If it was God’s will that she continue in her career, so be it. Since there were no repercussions, apparently it was.
Loretta belonged to old Hollywood, where an actress can have five husbands but no illegitimate children, as the Countess (Hildegarde Knef) explains to producer Barry Detweiler (William Holden) in Billy Wilder’s
Fedora
(1979). In the New Hollywood, she could have had five illegitimate children and no husband.
The double standard was in full force in 1935. Errol Flynn could engage in his “wicked, wicked ways” (as he entitled his autobiography), even being acquitted of a double rape charge. However, when Clara Bow’s personal secretary
revealed the names
of her employer’s multitudinous lovers, the disclosure spelled the end of Bow’s career. Gable, who that year was awarded an Oscar for his performance in
It Happened One Night
(1934), was a full-fledged star, bigger than Loretta. He would be protected. He was also a male. In Hollywood, men covered for each other. MGM made sure that the general public remained ignorant of George Cukor’s homosexuality; Cukor was the studio’s premier director (
Camille
,
The Women
,
The Philadelphia Story
, the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn films). All that mattered was box office. The days of embroidering an “A” on the dress had passed, but Loretta would have been stigmatized nonetheless. Gable, on the other hand, would just be another male sowing his wild oats.
It was not that different for women fifteen years later. In 1949, Ingrid Bergman—whose image only partly derived from
The Bells of St. Mary’s
(1945) and
Joan of Arc
(1948), in which she played a nun and a saint, respectively (she had also played hookers in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
[1941] and
Arch of Triumph
[1948])—went off to Italy to make
Stromboli
(1949) for Roberto Rossellini. When she became pregnant with his child, Louella Parsons broke the news.
The headline
of her 12 December 1949 column caused a sensation: “Ingrid Bergman Expecting Baby.” The following year, Colorado senator Edwin Johnson excoriated the actress on the floor of the senate and called for a resolution forbidding Bergman to return to the States. Bergman played a nun and a saint; therefore, she should behave accordingly. It was specious logic, but characteristic of postwar America. Loretta was blessed; Parsons remained silent about her, but not Bergman. If Loretta had not been a fellow Catholic, one doubts that Parsons would have passed up one of the biggest scoops of her career. The resolution was never passed; Bergman lived abroad, returning to Hollywood in 1955 to make
Anastasia
(1956), for which she deservedly won an Oscar.
Loretta’s carefully plotted myth was one of the biggest open secrets in Hollywood. But the knowledgeable realized that it was not just Loretta’s
reputation that was at stake; it was also Judy’s. All one had to do is look at Judy with her prominent ears, Gable’s ears. Children giggled about her “
elephant ears
,” calling Judy “Dumbo.” Suspecting that others would make the connection between Gable and Judy, Loretta arranged for plastic surgery, even though she had been warned that the procedure was extremely painful. What did it matter if the operation made Judy’s ears less prominent and aroused less suspicion? Surgery was not the solution. Judy was bound to learn eventually.
Meanwhile, Judy pursued her dream of becoming a stage actress. She began studying with the well-known stage, screen, and soon television star, Agnes Moorehead, a 1929 graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and best remembered as Endora in the television series
Bewitched.
Judy knew she was not destined for the movies, just as Loretta knew that while she could play stage actresses, she could never be one. And until Broadway beckoned to Judy, there was always television. Loretta tried to discourage Judy, emphasizing the dark side of a profession that exploits rather than nourishes and forces women to play the irresistible force-meets-immovable-object game with executives: bargaining and negotiating, conceding on some points and remaining adamant on others, but determined to leave the honcho’s office with dignity intact, even at the risk of ulcers or colitis (or worse, ulcerative colitis). But as Charley says at the end of Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
, “It comes with the territory.”
Judy’s territory turned out to be primarily television, starting in 1958 with NBC’s daytime soap,
Kitty Foyle
, based on Christopher Morley’s bestseller and the 1940 film for which Ginger Rogers won an Oscar. The poor girl-rich boy drama was also a popular radio soap that aired from 1942 to 1944. In the television version, Kathleen Murray starred as Kitty, with Judy in the supporting role of Molly Scharf, which she played for the two seasons the show was on the air. Like other actresses who alternated between television and theatre, Judy became bicoastal, even though she preferred Los Angeles to New York and eventually made it her permanent residence. The prospect of being a regular on NBC’s
The Outlaws
brought her back to Los Angeles for the second and last season (1961–62) as Connie Masters, a Wells Fargo employee. Judy preferred live television, but she went where the work was. For the most part, it was filmed television, such as ABC’s highly successful
711 Sunset Strip
(1958–64), shot at Loretta’s old studio, Warner Bros. in Burbank. Judy was not a regular on the show and only appeared in a few episodes, such as “Eyes of Love” in 1961. Finally, there was an opportunity to replace
Betsy von Furstenberg in Jean Kerr’s long running (1961–64) comedy,
Mary, Mary
during the last year of the run. That was the extent of her Broadway career. Judy was meant for the soaps; her life was the stuff of melodrama. Significantly, it was a soap that gave Judy her longest run: CBS’s
The Secret Storm
, on which she played Susan Dunbar for seven years, 1965–72, until her character was written out of the plot. In the long run, it didn’t matter;
The Secret Storm
went off the air in 1973.
Judy had not given up on television. She approached NBC with the idea for an hour-long soap,
Texas
, which would be the network’s daytime equivalent of CBS’s nighttime
Dallas
. But there was only one
Dallas. Texas
had the misfortune of occupying the same 3:00–4:00 p.m. time slot as ABC’s
General Hospital.
Longevity tells the story:
General Hospital
lasted from 1963 to 1981.
Texas
premiered in August 1980. Discouraged by the ratings, NBC moved it to 11:00 a.m. When that didn’t work, the network cancelled the series at the end of 1982. At least Judy received a producer’s credit. The swift demise of
Texas
forced Judy, then forty-seven, to think more seriously about the future now that her television career seemed to be over. In 1985, Judy made a dramatic career change: She enrolled at Antioch University, where she could receive life experience credit enabling her to complete a B.A. in a year and an M.A. in clinical psychology in two.
Like her grandmother and mother, Judy was not meant for marriage—at least not to Joseph Tinney Jr., a television director. Judy’s marriage lasted for thirteen years, 1958–71, three years short of Loretta’s to Lewis, which really ended in 1956, even though they were not officially divorced until 1969. But Judy’s marriage lasted longer than either of her grandmother’s marriages: Gladys was married ten years to John Earle Young, eleven to George Beltzer.
In 1966, Judy decided to wrest the truth from Loretta about her parentage. The celluloid wall of silence had shielded Loretta, but the wall had fissures with conduits for whispered revelations that even reached the ears of Judy’s husband, who nonchalantly informed her that he knew she was Clark Gable’s daughter. Joe Tinney knew, but Judy didn’t. But then, she wondered, how many others did? Judy’s divorce from Tinney made her a single parent with a daughter, Maria—a situation Loretta would, or should, have understood. Judy may have hoped that their common bond would bring them closer at a time when neither she nor Loretta had any marital prospects. Loretta is called “Mom” throughout
Uncommon Knowledge
, but on one occasion, Judy called her “Mama,” using the childhood vernacular to suggest someone more than a mother:
a source of comfort, assuaging fears, humming lullabies, and bandaging wounds, visible and otherwise. It was “Mama” that Judy needed; it was “Mom” that she usually got.
As she entered her mid forties, Judy was eager to repair the rift in their relationship that occurred when she announced her intention to become an actress. In 1981, Loretta learned that a portrait that Sir Simon Elwes had painted of her was featured in a New York gallery’s catalog. Since Judy was then living in New York, Loretta asked her to stop at the gallery and see if it was as good as she remembered it. Judy was practically an expert on the portrait, since she was a frequent visitor at Elwes’s studio when he was executing it. The portrait was indeed as Judy remembered. She decided to buy it for Loretta, who was thrilled, convinced that Elwes had captured her essence: eyes coated with a film of tears and a mouth not drooping in defeat but taut with determination—in short, a woman who was neither a stranger to suffering nor a lost lamb in need of a shepherd. Judy agreed with Loretta; it was indeed “
the essence of Mama
.”
The admission that Judy was seeking came during the 1966 Labor Day weekend when Loretta revealed the truth about Gable and the adoption conspiracy. But the story was not intended for public consumption. Loretta had no intention of repudiating the myth. Her mortal sin could not be divulged, or her image defiled. Knowing her mother’s obsession with her persona, Judy conceded. But that was 1966. Twenty years later, it was a different scenario. It was also a different Judy. Judy had undergone therapy, and her studies in psychology convinced her that the only way she could exorcise the demons of the past—the “Dumbo” taunts; the cosmetic surgery that was not completely successful and required a hair style that concealed her ears; Tom Lewis’s indifference to her after his sons were born; a marriage that began with a church wedding and a Hawaii honeymoon and ended in a Connecticut divorce court—was to write about them. Memoir-as-therapy was the solution.
Uncommon Knowledge
has little in common with the classic autobiography, in which the subject investigating becomes the object investigated. Here the object investigated is not so much Judy as her mother, and, indirectly, her father.
There is a difference between making peace with the past and understanding how it impinges on the present. In
Timebends
(1987), Arthur Miller disentangled a knot of memories—people, events, family members, rooms, clothes, shoes, a piano, a first stage performance in a Harlem theater—that were seemingly insignificant details, except to Miller who, by excavating the past, organized the shards of time remembered into
the mosaic of his life and work.
Uncommon Knowledge
is not so ambitious. Judy does not approach the past as a picture puzzle, whose pieces must interlock. Her purpose was simple: to have herself acknowledged, once and for all, as the daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, not the adopted daughter of Loretta Young and an unknown father.