Myrna Loy by Emily W. Leider Read Free Book Online Page A

with a man who didn’t know the state of my feelings,” a truth that remained with her throughout her life. 14
    Despite her silent pining, and the tensions in the household, there were still many joys to savor in Helena: dancing class, horseback riding with her father, frolicking in the snow with her brother, and holiday dinners with many guests and tables piled high with puddings and roasts. Her father’s largesse and hospitality made Christmas a bountiful time. Myrna called him “a Santa Claus type of man” ( BB , 14).
    Going to the movies on Saturday afternoons became an eagerly anticipated treat. The habit got started in Ocean Park, California, where she and Lou attended Saturday matinees and serials like The Perils of Pauline . But movies were available in Helena, too. When the Williams family first moved there from Crow Creek Valley, moving picture shows had been confined to rowdy theaters in the saloon district, and the proper Williams clan had kept its distance. Not any more, now that the respectable Helena Theatre on North Jackson, which seated eight hundred, was offering “photo spectacles” appropriate to young viewers. After 1918, films could also be watched at the gleaming new Marlow. Myrna had favorite actresses. A fan of Marie Doro in Oliver Twist , she was also completely smitten with the image of Annette Kellerman as a mermaid who detaches her body from a fish tail to marry the hero in Neptune’s Daughter . 15
    Because of her parents’ interest in politics, Myrna from an early age developed an awareness of the wider world. The outbreak of the Great War heightened that interest. Her father, a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” had been inclined to vote for prointerventionist Charles Evans Hughes against Woodrow Wilson in the presidential election of 1916. Wilson’s reelection campaign slogan had been, “He kept us out of the war.” Myrna, precociously siding with her Democrat, proneutrality mother, helped talk him into voting for Wilson, who ended up winning Montana. She, Della, and David senior also backed Wilson’s campaign to establish the League of Nations. 16
    By April of 1917, when the United States entered the war, breaking from its earlier neutral stance and joining the Allied effort to defeat Germany, fanatical patriotism took hold in Montana as it did elsewhere in the nation. Neighbor turned on neighbor in Helena as it became a crime to speak German or to say anything “disloyal, profane, violent, contemptuous or abusive” about government, soldiers, or the American flag. Of Montana’s adult male population, 10 percent, nearly forty thousand men, enlisted in the military, the highest percentage in the country. Flags waved and trumpets blared as the 2nd Montana 163rd Infantry paraded down Helena’s Main Street. 17
    David senior, at age thirty-nine, felt moved to enlist in the fall of 1918, not solely out of a sense of duty and genuine love of his country. Conflicts with Della fueled his desire to flee into the battlefield. Looking back, Myrna saw him at this juncture as agitated, unhappy, and close to a breakdown. She sensed her father’s precariousness, without knowing exactly what caused it. The truth is that, though she had no inkling of this, David senior had more than the war, more than marital disharmony on his mind. He had plunged himself into financial hot water. To fund land-buying deals in various locations, he had borrowed money from banks and from friends (including Della’s father’s former business partner from Sweden, A. W. Sederburg) and from relatives, including his sister Emma Stone-house and brother-in-law Fred Johnson. He had secured one promissory note “by chattel mortgage on 8 head horses, 4 sets harness, 2 drills, 2 red cows (1 dead), 1 drag harrow, 1 fourteen inch breaking plow.” In 1918 he had fallen behind on his monthly payments for the family home in Helena and was facing possible foreclosure. Della’s expenditures for travel to California in past