Myrna Loy Read Online Free PDF

revelers feared that the roads were too dangerous to travel in the dark. 20
    During the school year Della participated in a literary society, led by the schoolteacher, which offered drama programs, too. On Saturday nights recitations of poetry took place, and pageants and tableaus were presented. Come spring there would be Sunday afternoon horseback riding parties after church. On the Fourth of July everyone flocked to a big picnic, where Old Glory would be unfurled and the Declaration of Independence declaimed. Della, who lived in town, participated enthusiastically in the community goings-on, but David, ensconced in the Valley on the Williams ranch, could join the fun less often. He liked parties, but he was needed for chores when he wasn’t at school. 21
    The outdoor events Della enjoyed had to take place in spring or summer because the long, frigid winters could be, and often were, deadly. Cowboys had to put on “two suits of heavy underwear, two pairs of wool socks, wool pants, two woolen shirts, overalls, leather chaps, wool gloves under leather mittens, blanket-lined overcoats and fur caps.” During the infamous winter of 1886–87, when the temperature plummeted to sixty-three degrees below zero, hundreds of thousands of Montana Territory cattle and sheep perished trying to find forage in the snow and ice. A similar freeze when Myrna was a year old made railroad tracks snap and sent starving cattle into the towns in search of grass. Humans died too. David’s older sister Hattie succumbed in the brutal winter of 1887. Of David’s ten siblings, only five—the five who would eventually inherit the ranch—survived into adulthood. According to Myrna ( BB , 6) scarlet fever took several of them. 22
    Recollections of the severe Montana winters didn’t taint Myrna’s rosy picture of her early years at the Williams ranch. In her autobiography she speaks lovingly of the fragrant roses spilling over the split-log fence in front of the ranch house; her grandmother’s apple trees in the back, which yielded bushels of apples in summer; and her grandfather’s cotton-woods, whose leaves she tried to taste. She recalls playing with the baby lambs and the dobbin Dolly she was first taught to ride with no saddle, only a bridle ( BB , 13). It’s always spring or summer in her recollections.
    Myrna would always regret that she never got to portray a frontier woman onscreen in a Gary Cooper western. Cooper, whose British parents settled in Helena, grew up playing cowboys-and-Indians and collecting arrowheads—activities that apparently escaped young Myrna, though in her Hollywood days she could still throw a lasso. She did play a Salinas Valley ranch wife in the 1949 film based on Steinbeck’s The Red Pony . To most film lovers, though, news of Myrna Loy’s Montana ranch background comes as a shock. Who pictures Nora Charles wearing cowboy boots, denim, buckskin, or calico frocks? In her screen heyday Myrna Loy embodied city-bred, martini-quaffing, chiffon-gowned elegance and sophistication. 23
    Myrna’s earliest memory was of the endless acres of wheat fields where she wandered off on her own, losing her way, not to be found by anxious searchers until late at night. That trauma didn’t curb her fondness for plunking herself down in the midst of a field of swaying brown-gold grain, looking up at scudding clouds and the expansive, mountain-framed sky, which might shift its color from blue to darkest gray in a matter of seconds. “I used to be alone most of the time—that’s great for the imagination.” The only other child around was her cousin Laura Belle Wilder, daughter of Della’s sister Lu, but although Myrna loved her cousin, a five-year age gap separated them. From the start, Myrna tended to be a solitary dreamer, busy with her own thoughts and quite self-sufficient. Those traits would linger. Don Bachardy, who sketched her when she was close to seventy, refers to her “charming wistful vagueness” and