Born today, in 1913, was film and television star Loretta Young. As a child, I adored this beautiful, versatile actress, and faithfully watched her program, “The Loretta Young Show” (1953 – 1961). Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, as Gretchen Young, Loretta (later named so by the studio for which she worked) was first a child extra at the age of four. By fourteen, she had a contract with what would later become Warner Bros., and a year later she made her first credited film, The Whip Woman.
Loretta made headlines when, in 1930 at age seventeen, she eloped with her co-star Grant Withers from The Second Floor Murder. Withers was nine years her senior, and the marriage was soon annulled. Apparently, some quick thinking moguls at the studio re-titled the starring pair’s soon-to-be-released film Too Young to Marry.
Overall, Loretta Young made something like 100 films, working with such Hollywood heavyweights as Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, and Orson Welles. She was a beloved leading lady who appeared with Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, Charles Boyer, Ronald Coleman, and Robert Taylor, to name some of the many popular actors of the day. Her Oscar nod came with a Best Actress win for 1947’s The Farmer’s Daughter, beating out favorite Rosalind Russell for the coveted award. I recounted this scene in the beginning chapters of CAPE SEDUCTION, as my characters dine at the Brown Derby and remark about Loretta’s shocking upset. Nothing like real-life drama to bring a sense of authenticity to a novel’s era!
Loretta went on to receive an Emmy (1953) for her dramatic television series, the first actress to earn both the Emmy and the Academy Award. All in all, she
won three Emmys, two Golden Globes and one Oscar, and snagged many nominations. Possibly one of the most interesting stories about her concerns daughter Judy Lewis, known to the public as adopted during Young’s marriage to second husband Thomas Lewis. In her 1994 autobiography, Lewis claimed that she was actually Young’s biological daughter with actor Clark Gable, Loretta’s co-star in 1935’s Call of the Wild. The claim was ultimately confirmed by Loretta herself in a biography published after her death in 2000 from ovarian cancer.
She is attributed to saying, on strategy: “The trick to life, I can say now in my advanced age, is to stop trying to make it so important.”