Back when the 20th century was still in its teens, prepubescent pretty Myrna Loy’s family took the impressionable youngster on a theater outing to see Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1910), the heroine replete in blue-silk dress and matching feather fan. Myrna immediately gave up the notion of becoming a nun or a nurse and set her sights on the entertainment stage, and the world is a far richer place unto the twenty-first century for that decision. Starting as an eighteen-year-old dancer at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, leggy, lovely, placidly perfect Myrna Loy rose to 1936 Queen of the Movies, as selected in a vote of twenty million Americans. Her more than sixty early film appearances made from 1925 to 1931 portrayed the porcelain dollface as an exotic, a vamp, a mistress, or a bad girl. Subsequently, Myrna adopted a sophistication and aplomb that, when teamed with the urbane flair of William Powell, resulted in The Thin Man (1934) and Nick and Nora Charles, a pair of boozing metropolitan marrieds whom audiences could not get enough of, as proven by five Thin Man sequels. Any leading man in search of a hit wanted Myrna Loy as a wife; the rest of the country would have been satisfied just to mess around with her for a while.
