Robert Fulford reviews a new biography of Myrna Loy:
The making of The Thin Man forms the centrepiece of Emily W. Leider’s well-researched and shrewdly conceived biography, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood (University of California Press), out at the end of this month.
MGM produced The Thin Man on a B-movie budget but made a fortune and then turned out five sequels. (At the moment a remake is said to be in preparation, with Johnny Depp as Nick.)
That first film was the great event of Loy’s career. During half a century in movies she co-starred with Cary Grant, Clark Gable and many others, but she made her reputation in the part of Nora Charles, opposite Powell.
[. . .]
The Thin Man began as a novel by Dashiell Hammett, himself a private eye in his pre-literary life. He based the characters on his own decades-long affair with Lillian Hellman, the eminent playwright. Hellman was renowned as a fire-breathing dragon when angry and Hammett was notoriously a morose drunk. We are to understand that Nick and Nora were not precisely modelled on Dash and Lillian.
[. . .]
Loy and Powell got along well as professionals but, despite their fans’ wishes, were romantic only on the set. Powell went for blonds, notably Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. Loy had four marriages, each of them ending in divorce, none of them lasting as long as the 13 years Nick and Nora kept turning up on the movie screens.
A line attributed to the great John Ford, who directed Loy in The Black Watch and Arrowsmith, provides Leider with the subtitle of her book. Ford called Loy “the only good girl in Hollywood.” In the argot of the day, Ford had “a yen for her.” He may have been teasing her as a response to rejection. Leider says he meant she was not a habitual bed-hopper, like other girls. Apparently she boasted that she never ran off with her leading man, though with both Leslie Howard and Tyrone Power she was tempted.
Hammett’s book came out just after Prohibition ended (in Roosevelt’s first year, 1933), when to drink liquor was to strike a blow for liberty. Many blows are struck in The Thin Man. Nick and Nora are major martini drinkers and proud of it. Nora keeps up with Nick; when she meets him in a bar and he confesses to having five martinis already, she tells the bartender to set up a row of five for her. At one point she complains about Nick “sneaking off, getting drunk … without me.”
The Thin Man movies are among my all-time favourites.
