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The DC Comics Time Capsule: October 1963
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Re: The DC Comics Time Capsule: October 1963
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Commander Benson
O.K., Now I've Got to Tell My Myrna Loy Story
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Oct 12 13 4:58 AM
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My Recent Posts
Like most of us here, I fell in love with Myrna Loy after seeing her performances in the Thin Man films. Years later, though---after I married my wonderful wife---the Myrna Loy moment that resonates most with me (and the Good Mrs. Benson) is the scene in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, when her husband, Al (played by Fredric March), returns home from the war. Al hasn't sent word of his discharge or that he was coming home; he wants to surprise his family. He arrives at their apartment just as his family is getting ready to sit down to dinner. Milly (Myrna) is in the dining room, at the far side of the apartment, setting the table when the Al rings the door bell.
His son answers the door, and Al covers the boy's mouth before his excited cry can tip off his mother. Al enters the living room, still out of sight of the dining room. His daughter, Peggy, sees him when she comes out of the kitchen, but Al
shhh
's her, too.
The camera then shifts to the dining room. Milly, while she is in the midst of arranging the dinner plates on the table, calls out, "Who was that at the door, Peggy?" When no answer comes, she shouts, "Peggy! Rob! Who was----"
Suddenly, she looks up with an apprehensive gaze. She sets the stack of plates down on the table. Her body stiffens.
She knows!
There's no tangible reason why. She just
knows
.
She dashes out of the dining room; he runs toward her, and they embrace.
As many times as the Good Mrs. Benson and I were separated for months, and a couple of instances, for a year, by my Navy career, it's the one Myrna Loy scene that never fails to bring tears to our eyes.
But that's
not
my Myrna Loy story. That occurred several years earlier, long before I met the GMB.
I had just finished my second command tour and had been assigned as the executive officer of a large training facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. Even after I got back to the States, I had a two-day drive ahead of me, so I popped into the nearest book store to find something to occupy my evenings. Something that caught my eye was Myrna Loy's newly published autobiography,
Myrna Loy; Being and Becoming
. That, I had to have.
Even after I got to St. Paul and got busy in the two-week turnover with the outgoing XO, I still had dead time in the evenings, so I went through the book fairly quickly. While I had always been impressed with Myrna Loy the actress, I found myself being more impressed with Myrna Loy the person. She related her life in a plain, straightforward style, though with occasional wryness that evoked Nora Charles. She didn't dodge the warts in her life, but unlike many "warts and all" autobiographies, in which the writer almost takes pride in proclaiming his errors, Miss Loy simply presented them matter-of-factly, with no pride in committing them.
As with most Hollywood folk, her political views were at the other end of the spectrum from mine, but setting that aside, I found a great deal to respect in her attitudes. I was especially impressed at the way she deliberately put her career on hold, during World War II, to work with the Red Cross on behalf of the war effort. And not the glamour work of performing in U.S.O. shows, but the grunt work of raising funds and putting together care packages and serving food and drink at military canteens. She must have made a hundred visits to wounded servicemen in hospitals.
I found she approached her entire career, her entire life, with such practicality.
I was impressed. So impressed I got a totally wild idea.
In the case of someone as famous as Myrna Loy, it wasn't difficult---even in those pre-Internet, pre-autograph-seeking-network days---to find a mailing address for her. All it took was knowing where to look, and I knew where to look. An hour in the reference department of the main branch of the Minneapolis Public Library and I had a mailing address for Myrna Loy.
I wrote her a letter, describing my admiration not just of her performances as Nora Charles, but of the various incidents she described in her book and how she handled them. I was specific. And then I concluded with a request . . . .
Would she be kind enough to sign my copy of her book?
I bought a mailing envelope large enough to hold the book, self-addressed it, and plastered it with postage stamps. Then I got a bigger mailing envelope and put everything---my letter, my copy of her book, and the envelope I had addressed and stamped---into it and mailed it off.
Frankly, my biggest expectation was that some secretary or assistant of hers would open it up and then chunk it into the nearest dustbin. I mailed it in May, and after three months went by with no response, I was certain that it had met the dustbin fate I had anticipated. And then, I was so busy with my XO duties, I forgot the whole thing.
Until November that same year. I remember it was exactly a week until Thanksgiving. I got home to my apartment at the end of a long day, and found a package leaning against my door. It was the envelope that I had self-addressed and mailed! Inside was my copy of her book. I opened it up to the first page---you know, that blank page that always comes first in books---and there it was:
For Lt. Adam Benson,
With warm best wishes
Myrna Loy
I was ecstatic, naturally. I put it in a box, so it wouldn't get damaged accidentally. And the next day, I couldn't resist taking it to work and showing it off.
At lunch, I decided to browse through it and re-read some of the passages I enjoyed the most, and I discovered an odd thing. Whenever I leafed through the pages, the book always came to rest on the same page, toward the back. I took a closer look. The bottom corner of that page had been carefully dog-eared.
Now, you have to understand, I'm a huge reader and I have hundreds of books and I treat them reverently. I don't break the spines; I don't underline passages in pencil or make notes in the margins; and I
don't
dog-ear the pages. And I knew the dog-ear at the bottom of that page had been no accident; it was too precise, too even.
Someone else, for some reason, had marked the page that way.
So I took a closer look at that page. It was part of the section in which Miss Loy discussed her theatre work later in her career, when she wasn't as sought out in Hollywood as she had been. At the top of the dog-eared page she commented on how, no matter what city it was, no matter what production it was, at the end of the play, there was always a crowd of fans waiting for her.
And then I saw it. Three sentences that came at the end of her comments on how flattered she was to still have so many admirers:
"I always gave them autographs and whatever time I could spare. It's the least an actor can do. They are the ones who buy tickets and keep you up there."
It was a message to me from Miss Loy herself, and in a very real way, one more personal than the enscription she had written at the front.
You know that hypothetical game that people play once in a while, the one where you're asked "If your house was on fire and you could save only
one
thing you owned, what would it be?"
Now you know my answer to that question.
Last Edited By:
Commander Benson
Oct 12 13 9:35 AM. Edited 6 times.
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