Happy Birthday, Myrna Loy!
I’m so sorry — the fresh Indiana air I’m inhaling this week must be going to my head — but yesterday I forgot to celebrate the 106th birthday of Myrna Loy. Myrna, born in Montana, is a byword for class. Her Nora Charles in “The Thin Man” movies set a standard for sophistication that will never be surpassed. Myrna wrote an autobiography whose Sartrean title, “Being and Becoming,” shouldn’t put you off purchasing it. (Available via ABE Books.) In this tome, she regrets her phase as a faux-Asian. She writes, with characteristic wit, that after a movie called “Love Me Tonight,” the studio ‘dropped me right back into the vamp mold, loaning me to RKO for “Thirteen Women.” As a Javanese-Indian half-caste, I methodically murder all the white schoolmates who’ve patronized me. I recall little about that racist concoction, but it came up recently when the National Board of Review honored me with its first Career Achievement Award. Betty Furness, a charming mistress of ceremonies, who had started at RKO doubling for my hands in closeups when I was busy elsewhere, said that she’d been dropped from “Thirteen Women.” (Despite its title, there were only ten in the final print.) ‘You were lucky,’ I told her, ‘because I just would have killed you, too. The only one who escaped me in that picture was Irene Dunne, and I regretted it every time she got the parts I wanted.'” If there is a heaven, Miss Loy is certainly presiding over it, martini in hand.
