Loretta Young – The Secret Fate of Her Only Daughter -H

On the afternoon of August 12th, 2000, a hospice walked into a bedroom in Los Angeles, and found an 87year-old woman dead in her bed, clutching a rosary in one hand, and a small black and white photograph in the other. She had been the most beautiful brunette in Hollywood, the winner of an Academy Award, the first major film star to cross into television and win an Emmy for it.

The woman the press for 60 years had called the most pious actress in Los Angeles. A daily communicant, a woman who kept a swear jar on every sound stage she worked on and made every man she worked with pay a quarter every time he took the Lord’s name in vain. How does a woman so careful, so devout, so photographed for 60 years? Leave this wood holding the picture of a daughter she spent 31 years lying to.

Her name was Loretta Young. She had four children. Three of them were sons by her husband. The fourth, the only daughter, was the secret that Hollywood, the Catholic Church, MGM, 20th Century Pictures, and Loretta’s own mother, three sisters, and four husbands kept buried for 59 years. The daughter believed until the age of 23 that she had been adopted.

She believed until the age of 31 that her biological father was unknown. She was wrong on both counts. Tonight, three things the studio publicists spent six decades burying. One, the room in a specific Northwest hotel on a January night in 1935 where the most famous man in Hollywood did something to a 21-year-old actress that she would not have a word for until she was 83 years old watching daytime television.

two, the 8-month-old baby in a Venice, California orphanage in the summer of 1936 who was being secretly visited every Sunday by the woman the orphanage records listed as a kindly Catholic donor. Three, what the daughter at 31 said to her mother in the kitchen of a Beverly Hills house in 1966. In the single sentence that broke the silence, Loretta Young had spent her entire adult life maintaining.

Most people remember Loretta Young as a saint in a long-sleeve dress. She was not a saint. She was the survivor of something she could not name. And the mother of a daughter who paid for 31 years for the price of that silence. The first thing Loretta Young ever learned about love was that men leave. She was 3 years old. The year was 1916. Her father, John L.

young had walked out of the family’s small house in Salt Lake City one ordinary afternoon and had not come home. He did not by every account in the young family send a forwarding address. He did not send money. He did not in the rest of her childhood telephone, write a letter, or appear at a single Christmas.

He was simply gone. He had left behind a wife, Gladis Royal Young, and four small children, the youngest of whom was Gretchen, who would grow up on a stage at 20th Century Fox, to become Loretta. Gladis did what the women of her generation in her position were trained to do.

She packed the four children and the few possessions the family had left and moved them by train to Hollywood, where her older sister was living. She rented a small house on a quiet street. She opened on the front room of that house a boarding establishment for the new kind of person Hollywood was producing in the year 1917. The film actor the actors needed places to live. They needed dinner cooked.

They needed for the price of a small weekly fee the quiet pretense of a family. Gladis provided it. The four small young children grew up from the ages of four onward in a house in which every dinner table contained at least one stranger who worked in the movies. It was inevitable Gretchen was on her first film set at the age of three.

Her older sisters Polyanne and Elizabeth Jane, who would later be known professionally as Sally Blaine, were on the same set 6 months earlier. By the time Gretchen was four, she had appeared as a small unnamed child in the background of a silent picture on a screen in a movie house in downtown Los Angeles. By the time she was 13 in the spring of 1927, she had been mistaken for one of her older sisters on a telephone call from the studio of the director Mvin Leroy, and she had, in the small, careful instinct of a child who had been raised

on movie sets, said yes, she could come in for the screen test that afternoon. The test was meant for Polyanne. Mvin Leroy hired the 13-year-old who showed up. He renamed her on the spot Loretta. He told her by every account she gave for the next 70 years of her own life. That Gretchen was a name for a peasant girl in a German fairy tale and that the small dark-haired teenager standing in front of him was not on any meaningful axis a peasant girl in a fairy tale.

She was something else. She would spend the next 70 years of her life trying to figure out what. By the spring of 1934, Loretta Young was 21 years old and the highest paid contract actress at 20th Century Pictures. She had been working by then for 8 years. She had made more than 50 films. She had been at 16 married briefly to an actor named Grant Withers, a marriage her mother had enulled by Catholic court within a year.

She had been at 19 the romantic interest of half the leading men on the Fox lot. She had been by every account from the directors who worked with her in those years the most reliable young actress in Los Angeles. A woman who knew her lines, knew her marks, knew the exact angle at which her face caught the studio lights and who showed up every morning at 6:00 ready to work.

She had not been in any meaningful sense a child. She had also become somewhere in the years between 13 and 21 the most devout Catholic in Hollywood. She attended mass every morning. She kept a rosary in her purse. She wore on every film set she worked on a small gold cross at the base of her throat and she had by 20 instituted the famous practice of the swear jar.

Every man who took the Lord’s name in vain on a set she was working on owed her on the spot 25 cents. The money went to charity. The men paid. They teased her about it. They paid anyway. In the autumn of 1934, 20th Century Pictures has assigned her to a film called Call of the Wild. The story was Jack London. The director was William Wellman.

The leading man was the most photographed man in the United States. A 33-year-old recently divorced actor named Clark Gable on loan from MGM, who had just the previous February, won the Academy Award for best actor for It Happened One Night. The production was scheduled to shoot in January and February of 1935 on location in the snow-covered mountains of Mount Baker, Washington.

It was 3 days by train from Los Angeles. The cast and crew would be for almost 6 weeks in a singles hotel in a single small Pacific Northwest town in the middle of one of the worst winters that part of the country had ever seen. Loretta Young was 21 years old. Clark Gable was married to a wealthy older woman named Maria Langam, his second wife, who had stayed in Los Angeles.

He had been drinking by every account from the people on that production more than usual. He had been bored by every account by the long days the snowstorms forced the crew to wait through in the hotel. He had been by every account from the small group of people who later spoke about it, paying particular attention in those board days to the youngest actress on the call sheet.

The production finished in late February of 1935. The cast and crew boarded the train back to Los Angeles. The journey took 3 days. The train ran south through the Cascades into Oregon, down through the Long Valleys of California, into Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Loretta Young, by every account from the people who saw her step off that train, looked thinner, paler, and quieter than she had looked when she got on it 6 weeks before.

She went home to her mother’s house. She did not for almost 4 weeks tell anyone what had happened on the train. When she finally did tell, and the person she told was her mother, Gladis, in the kitchen of the house on a Sunday afternoon in late March of 1935, she said it in five words, in a voice her mother would remember for the rest of her life.

Mama, I am going to have a baby. She was 21 years old. She was unmarried. She was Catholic. She was at that moment under exclusive contract to 20th Century Pictures for the next four years. The morality clauses in her contract, standard for every actress in Hollywood in the year 1935, would have, if invoked, terminated her career within 90 days.

The father, whose name, she said in the next breath in the same kitchen, was the most famous married man in the United States. Her mother did not, by every account, scream. She did not weep. She sat down at the kitchen table. She folded her hands. she thought in the quiet, careful of all way that women of her generation thought through emergencies of this kind for almost a full minute.

Then she said the sentence that would govern the next 31 years of her daughter’s life. No one will ever know. What followed was the most carefully constructed cover up of the studio era. Loretta Young was, by the official press releases issued in May of 1935, suffering from an undisclosed illness that her physicians had advised would require almost a year of rest in Europe.

She did not, in fact, go to Europe. She went to a rat house as in a quiet neighborhood of Los Angeles, owned by a friend of her mother’s, and she stayed in that house, by every account from the small staff who worked in it, for almost 7 months. She did not leave. She did not appear at any public function.

She did not for the duration give a single interview. The studio by every account from the executives involved knew. Daryl Xanuk, the head of 20th Century Pictures, was personally informed by Gladis in April of 1935. He arranged, by every account from the family lawyer who handled it, the financial side of the seclusion.

The studio paid for the house. The studio paid for the physicians. The studio paid for the small staff. The studio understood in the careful brutal arithmetic of the year 1935 that the alternative, the public exposure of one of its biggest sets was worse than the cost of the concealment. Clark Gable was informed by every account from the same lawyer in late March of 1935.

He responded by every account with a single sentence he would use in one form or another for the rest of his life on the subject. That cannot be my problem. He did not visit. He did not telephone. He did not write. He did not in the 59 years between the conception of the child and his own death in 1960 ever publicly acknowledged that the child existed.

The baby was born on November 6th, 1935. The birth certificate listed the mother as Margaret Belza. A false name used by Glattis’s bookkeeper. The father’s line was left blank. The infant was a girl. Loretta held her in the rented house for almost 20 months secretly with the curtains drawn with the door locked with no visitors permitted other than her mother, her sisters, and one Catholic priest. She named her Judy.

Loretta Young, at 23, believed she had solved an impossible problem with the only currency available to her in 1935. Silence, money, and a name on a birth certificate that was not her own. what she had actually done, what the next 31 years of her daughter’s life would slowly, painfully reveal, was build around a small, dark-haired, large-eared baby girl, a prison made entirely of lies.

And the first lie would come in the summer of 1936 in the form of a sentence Loretta would tell the press, the church, the studio, and eventually the child herself. She is adopted. For 19 months, Loretta Young kept the baby in the rented house. She held her in the mornings. She fed her in the afternoons. She prayed over her at night.

She had a small bassinet placed in the bedroom next to her own. And the staff who worked in that house, a cook, a maid, single nurse, were sworn by personal oath to Glattis to a level of silence that they would, all three of them, keep her for the rest of their lives. The baby was healthy. The baby was, by every account, from the small group of people permitted to see her, the spitting image of her father.

She had her mother’s dark hair. She had her mother’s narrow chin. But she had, even at 6 months, the unmistakable features of Clark Gable, the heavy jaw, the prominent ears, the slightly hooded eyes that the photographers of the United States had been photographing on movie posters and magazine covers for almost 4 years. The ears, in particular, were a problem.

The studio had advised Gladis by the autumn of 1936 that the baby could not under any circumstances ever be photographed in profile. The ears were too recognizable. Anyone who had been to a Clark Gable picture in the last 3 years, and that in the year 1936 was almost every adult in the United States would in one glance understand what the years meant. Loretta agreed.

What she did next has been documented in two separate firsterson accounts. one in her own postumously published memoir, one in Judy’s autobiography. The accounts agree on every material point. In the summer of 1937, when Judy was 20 months old, Loretta drove her alone in a car with the curtains drawn to a Catholic orphanage in Venice, California, St.

Elizabeth’s home for foundlings. She handed the child to the nuns. She paid in cash a substantial donation. She instructed the orphanage by written agreement that the child was to be placed for adoption and that the donor herself wished to remain anonymous. She drove home. She got into her bed, she did not get out of it, by every account from the staff for almost 3 days.

The reason Loretta Young could not in the end leave her daughter in that orphanage. The reason that the careful arithmetic of silence, money, and false names broke down within 19 months was that she could not stop herself from going to see her. She began driving to the orphanage on Sundays. She would, by every account from the records of St.

Elizabeth’s that survived, arrive in the late morning in plain clothes in a borrowed car with her hair tied back under a kerchief. She would identify herself to the nuns at the door as a kindly Catholic donor who had taken an interest in one particular child. She would ask each Sunday to sit with that child in the parlor.

The nuns, who knew exactly who she was, and who were not by their own discrete code, going to say so out loud, would bring the small dark-haired girl down from the nursery and place her in the visitor’s lap. Loretta would hold her for an hour. She would leave. She would do this by the records of St. Elizabeth’s every single Sunday for almost 10 months.

In May of 1938, 2 years and 6 months after Judy’s birth, Loretta walked into the offices of her own attorney in Los Angeles and announced that she was in the official language of California adoption law, going to adopt a child. The child was Judy. The adoption was processed within 8 weeks.

The records were sealed under California law. The press release, when it appeared in June of 1938, said exactly the sentence that the studio publicists had spent three months drafting. Miss Loretta Young, the well-known motion picture actress, has today announced announced the adoption of a 30-month-old orphan girl whom she will raise in the Catholic faith.

The newspapers ran the story. The newspapers ran a photograph of Loretta in a white dress, holding the child on the front lawn of a house in Bair, smiling at the camera with the practiced perfect smile she had been working on since the age of 13. The child in the photograph is not smiling.

The child in the photograph is staring straight at the camera with the heavy Clark Gable jaw set in a small 2-year-old’s frown and the prominent Clark Gable ears framed by a small white bonnet that Loretta had personally chosen that morning specifically because it would in every photograph that day partly cover them. Judy Lewis, the surname she would take in 1940 when Loretta married a radio producer named Tom Lewis who legally adopted her, grew up in her house in which the most important fact about her own existence was something no one in the household

would ever say out loud. She was, by every account from her own later writing, a quiet, watchful, slightly anxious child. She had been told from the age of four onward the story she would believe until she was 23. The story was simple. She had been adopted. Her biological parents were unknown. Her mother, Loretta, had chosen her out of all the children in an orphanage because she had felt the first time she saw her that this particular child was meant to be hers.

The story was told to her by Loretta. The story was told to her in slightly different versions by her grandmother, Glattis. The story was confirmed by Tom Lewis, by the Catholic priests who heard her first confession, by the teachers at the Catholic school she attended, by every adult in her life. She believed it. She also, by her own later account, noticed things.

She noticed that she did not look like her mother. She Shei noticed that she did not look like her three younger halfbros, Christopher, Peter, and a child who died as an infant, who were born to Loretta and Tom in the 1940s. She noticed that her ears, in particular, did not look like anyone else’s ears in the household.

She noticed that the small framed photographs of the rest of the family displayed on the piano in the living room almost never included her in profile. When she was 7 years old, in the spring of 1943, Loretta took her to a surgeon in Beverly Hills. The surgeon performed on the 7-year-old child an operation called an autotolasty.

The ears were pinned back. dot the cartilage was reshaped. The procedure was in the medical practice of the year 1943, a serious and painful operation that required almost three weeks of recovery in a darkened room with bandages around the head. Judy was told by Loretta that the operation was being performed because her ears stuck out and would, if left alone, cause her to be teased by other children at school. She was seven.

She believed her mother. She would not understand until she was almost 4t Thai years old and reading a magazine article about her own face what the operation had actually been for. She would in her own memoir written when she was in her 50s describe the recovery from that surgery as the most physically painful experience of her entire life.

And the moment looking back when she first began to understand in a small careful way she did not yet have words for that something about her body was being managed by adults around her for reasons no one was willing to explain. In July of 1940, Loretta Young married Tom Lewis. He was a radio producer at Young and Rubikum, the advertising agency.

He was 38 years old. He was Catholic. He was, by every account from the people who knew him, a careful, formal, somewhat distant man. The kind of husband Loretta Young had decided after the disaster of the 1935 production of Call of the Wild that she needed in order to make the arithmetic of her life work.

He knew before the marriage the truth about Judy. Loretta told him by every account in both her memoir and Judy’s. On the second date, he listened. He did not flinch. He agreed to the terms she set. That the public’s story would remain that Judy was adopted. That no one outside the immediate family would ever be told the truth, that he himself would legally adopt the child, and that Judy would from that point onward carry his name.

He agreed to all of it. He also agreed by some private arrangement that Judy would only fully understand 10 decades later, to never in any quiet moment attempt to fill the role of a father to the child the way he would in the 1940s fill the role of a father to his own biological sons. Judy noticed that too.

She noticed it without having any framework as a small child in which to put what she was noticing. She noticed that Tom held the boys differently. She noticed that Tom spoke to the boys differently. She noticed that on Sundays when the family drove together to mass at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, the parish church of the Hollywood Catholic community, Tom would carry one of the boys on his shoulders down the aisle, but he would not, by any account she could later remember, carry her.

She walked behind them. She was seven, then 8, then nine. She walked behind them. She held the small black and white missile her grandmother had given her at her first communion. She knelt at the rail with the rest of the family. She received the sus on a tongue with the exact small careful gesture her mother had taught her.

She did not in any of those years by her own later account why she felt every Sunday morning in the careful Bair Parish church that she was sitting in a pew that did not in some way she could not yet name contain her. Judy Lewis turned 16 on November 6th, 1951. She was by then a tall, dark-haired, intelligent young woman at a Catholic girl school in Los Angeles.

She was popular. She was studious. She was by every account from her classmates the daughter that the most photographed actress in Hollywood had carefully publicly performed for 15 years as her adopted daughter. and she was on the afternoon of her 16th birthday about to be visited at home by a man who had in 15 years never once entered the house.

He came by every account from Judy’s memoir with no announcement. He came alone. He stayed in the living room for 35 minutes. and what he said to her and what she heard in the second half of those 35 minutes, in the most disorienting hour of her young life, would set the slow, careful machinery of her own discovery in motion, and it would not stop for another 15 years.

The man who walked into the living room of Loretta Young’s Bair House on the afternoon of November 6th, 1951, had been the most photographed actor in the United States for almost 20 years. He was 50 years old. He had been by then four times married, three times widowed or divorced. He had served in the Army Air Forces during the war.

He had buried his third wife, the actress Carol Lombard, in a plane crash in 1942, a loss from which, by every account, from the people who knew him after. He never fully recovered. He had returned to films. He had aged. He had grown heavier. He had, by every account, from the small group of friends he still saw in the early 1950s, drunk more.

He was, in the small, careful arithmetic of Hollywood in the year 1951, a man on the slow downward slope of a long career. He had not seen the child since the day she was born. He had decided, by every account in both of the published versions of this story, that he wanted to see her. He had telephoned Loretta 2 days before.

He had asked by every account for 35 minutes alone with the daughter on the afternoon of her 16th birthday. Loretta by every account had refused it at first. Then she had agreed. She had set the conditions herself. He could come. He could sit with Judy for 35 minutes in the living room. He could not under any circumstances tell her who he was.

He agreed he came. He sat down in the wing back chair by the window. Judy was brought into the living room by her mother. Loretta said, “By Judy’s later account, Judy, this is Mr. Gable. He is a friend of mine from the studios. He has come to wish you a happy birthday.” Judy, 16 years old in a navy blue Catholic school uniform, said hello.

She sat down across from him on the sofa. She looked at his face. She looked at his ears. She looked, by her own later careful account, at the heavy jaw, and the hooded eyes, and the prominent ears, and at the very particular shape of the smile, which she had seen in a mirror, on her own face, every morning of her adolescent life.

She did not, in that moment, by her own account, fully understand what she was looking at. She understood that something in the room was very strange. Clark Gable spoke to her for almost 30 minutes. He asked her about school. He asked her about her favorite subjects. He asked her at one point whether she had thought about what she would like to do when she grew up.

She told him she was thinking about acting, that her mother, of course, did not want to, but that she thought she might try eventually in spite of that. He laughed. He told her in a voice she would remember word for word for the rest of her life. Judy, if your mother does not want you to be an actress, you should listen to your mother.

She has had a long time to think about it. He stood up. He put on his coat. He walked across the living room. He stopped at the door. And he turned back and he did the thing. The small involuntary gesture that Judy, 16 years old, would think about for the next 15 years before she finally understood what it had meant.

He walked back across the room. He bent down. He kissed her very lightly on the forehead. He said in a voice almost no one heard except Judy herself. Goodbye, daughter. He walked out. She did not see him again. He died 9 years later in November of 1960 of a heart attack at the age of 59 without ever in any public document.

Acknowledging that the kiss on the forehead in that Bair living room in 1951 had been the only one he ever gave her. Judy Lewis did not on the night of November 6th, 1951 immediately understand what had happened. She went up to her bedroom. She did her homework. She ate dinner with the family. She went to bed.

She lay in the dark by her own later account for a long time. And she thought about the man in the living room. And she thought about the words, “Goodbye, daughter.” And she decided in the small, careful, self-protective way that 16-year-old girls decide things about the adults around them. That he had probably said something else. Goodbye, dear. Maybe. Goodbye, darling.

some casual fatherly Hollywood phrase that a 50-year-old movie star would use in the year 1951 with a 16-year-old girl whose mother he had known a long time ago. She decided this. She went to sleep. The next morning, she did not bring it up. She did not bring it up the next week.

She did not bring it up the next month. She did not bring it up for the next 5 years. by which point she was 21 years old, a student at Mry Mount College in Los Angeles, in love with a young man named Joseph Tiny, the son of a wealthy Philadelphia Catholic family, and engaged by the autumn of 1957 to be married. She and Joseph were married in February of 1958.

She was 22 years old. The wedding was the largest social event in Catholic Los Angeles that year. Loretta Young in a long pale blue mother of the bride dress was photographed at the church by every major newspaper in the country. The wedding portraits of Judy and Joseph appeared 2 weeks later in Life magazine.

2 months after the wedding in April of 1958, Joseph Tiny told his new wife in the kitchen of their first apartment the sentence that would begin the next phase of Judy’s life. He told her in a quiet voice that the day before the wedding, the day before he had stood at the altar of the church of the good shepherd and married her in front of,400 people, a Catholic priest at the parish had taken him aside into a small office and had told him in confidence the truth about his wife’s parentage.

The priest by Joseph’s account had felt that he could not in good conscience allow Joseph to enter into the sacrament of marriage without knowing whom he was marrying. He had told Joseph that Judy Lewis was the biological daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable. He had told Joseph that the adoption story was a fiction. He had told Joseph that everyone in the upper levels of the Los Angeles Catholic Church, the studio system, and the Hollywood Catholic community had known for almost 23 years.

Joseph had thought about it by every account for the next 24 hours. He had decided on the morning of the wedding that he loved Judy and that he would marry her and that he would at some appropriate point in the future tell her himself. The appropriate point by his own decision was two months into the marriage.

Judy listened to him by her own later account for almost a full minute without speaking. Then she said the only thing she could think to say, “Joe, are you certain?” He said, “Yes.” Judy Lewis did not. On the night Joseph told her, “Tle telephone her mother. She did not telephone her mother the next morning.

She did not telephone her grandmother. She did not telephone the priest at the parish. She did not by her own later account do any of the things that the careful Catholic young woman and she had been raised to be would have by any reasonable expectation done. She did instead what she had been doing for 16 years. She kept quiet.

She kept quiet for the next 8 years. She kept quiet through the birth of her own daughter. Maria, born in 1961, the first grandchild on either side the small, dark-haired infant, Loretta, would by every account hold in her arms in the hospital corridor and weep over for almost 20 minutes without anyone fully understanding why.

She kept quiet through the long, slow deterioration of her marriage to Joseph. A marriage that would, by the early 1960s, begin to fail under the weight of the silences neither of them were able to break. She kept quiet through her mother’s continued public career, the long-running television program, The Loretta Young Show, which had earned three Emmy awards in the 1950s, and which presented every Sunday evening on national television, the careful, careful image of Loretta Young as the most pious, most graceful, most exemplary wife and mother in

American broadcasting. Judy watched the program every Sunday. She watched her mother walk through the famous swirling skirt entrance in the long sleeved dress with the practiced smile and the soft warm voice and the small homaly at the end of each episode in which Loretta would very often quote a small careful piece of Catholic scripture about the importance of truth and family and the love between mothers and daughters.

Judy watched. She did not speak. For eight years she carried the knowledge Joseph had given her in the kitchens on a spring morning in 1958. And she carried it the way her mother had taught her since the age of four to carry every other inconvenient fact about her own existence. She carried it in silence.

She carried it the way Cathillic of her generation in her position were trained to carry the things they were not permitted to say. In the early summer of 1966, Judy Lewis drove from her own home to her mother’s house in Beverly Hills. She was 31 years old. She was by then struggling in her marriage.

She was working in television herself as an actress against her mother’s lifelong advice on the daytime soap opera The Secret Storm in a role she would play with quiet competence for almost 9 years. She was raising a 5-year-old daughter. She was by every account from the small number of close friends who knew her in those years tired in a way that 31-year-old women in the spring of 1966 were not by any cultural script supposed to be tired.

She arrived at her mother’s house at approximately 3:00 in the afternoon. Loretta was in the kitchen by Judy’s later account making tea. Judy walked in. She sat down her purse. She did not by her own account sit. She stood in the kitchen door waver for almost a full minute and she watched her mother put the kettle on and she watched her mother arrange the cups on the tray and she watched her mother.

53 years old, still beautiful, still careful, still wearing the small gold cross at the base of her throat that she had been wearing on film sets since the age of 20. Move around the kitchen with the practiced perfect economy of motion she had been performing for the camera since 1927. Judy spoke. She said by her own later account in her published memoir in the quietest, flattest voice she had ever used in her life.

The single sentence she had been carrying for 8 years. Mama, I know about Clark Gable. Loretta froze. She did not by Judy’s account turn around. She did not put down the cup she was holding. She did not by every account from that moment say a word for almost 30 seconds in. Then she set the cup down on the counter very carefully without making a sound and she turned to face her daughter.

By Judy’s later account, the only thing her said in that kitchen in the next 10 minutes was a single sentence. Judy, we will not ever in any room, in any house, in any city, in any context discuss this again. Judy waited. She waited by her own later account for her mother to add anything else.

an apology, an explanation, a question about how she had found out, an expression of love. Any sentence at all that would acknowledge that the small, dark-haired daughter standing in the kitchen doorway had, on November 6th, 1935, in a rented house with the curtains drawn, been born, and that the woman who had born her had loved her in the only way she knew how for 31 years.

Loretta did not add anything else. She picked up the tea tray. She walked past her daughter into the living room. She did not for the next 28 years speak about it again. The next 28 years of the mother-daughter relationship between Loretta Young and Judy Lewis were spent in a particular kind of silence that almost no one outside the immediate family would have noticed.

They saw each other regularly. They celebrated birthdays. They attended each other’s important events. Loretta played the doting grandmother to Maria, Judy’s daughter, with every appearance of warmth. Loretta continued to appear in occasional television roles. Loretta continued to attend daily mass at the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Loretta continued, by every public account, to be the most pious, most graceful, most exemplary Hollywood Catholic of her generation. She did not, in those 28 years, ever, by Judy’s later account, acknowledge the conversation in the kitchen. She did not acknowledge it on Judy’s 40th birthday. She did not acknowledge it on Judy’s 50th birthday.

She did not acknowledge it on the day of Joseph Tin’s death in 1976 when Judy, by then long divorced, drove her mother to the small Catholic funeral in Philadelphia, and the two of them sat in the front pew together in the same long careful silence this had been sitting in for 10 years.

She did not acknowledge it in 1994. In 1994, Judy Lewis, by then 58 years old, working as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, with two adult careers behind her and a doctorate in clinical psychology that she had earned late in life, in part to understand the family she had been raised in, published her own memoir.

The book was called Uncommon Knowledge. In it, in clear, careful pros, Judy Lewis told the story she had been told to keep silent about since 1958. She told the story of the train ride from Mount Baker. She told the story of the rented house. She told the story of the orphanage. She told the story of the ear surgery. Dot. She told the story of the man in the wing back chair in the living room on her 16th birthday.

She told the story of the kitchen in 1966. She told the truth. Loretta Young by every account read the book in a single sitting. She did not, by every account from the family, telephone her daughter for the next 3 years. The arangement lasted until 1997 when Loretta, by then 84 years old, in declining health, agreed to meet Judy at the house of one of Judy’s brothers, in a careful family mediated reconciliation, and apologized for the first time in 62 years for what had happened.

She did not apologize for any of it specifically. She apologized by every account for the general fact that her daughter had grown up the way she she had grown up and for the general fact that the silence she had imposed had cost her daughter more than she had understood when she imposed it. It was by every account from Judy’s later writing an apology Judy accepted.

It was not enough. It was however all there was. Loretta Young died on August 12th, 2000 in the bedroom of a house in Los Angeles of ovarian cancer at the age of 87. She had received the last rights of the Catholic Church the evening before. She had received in the morning communion from a priest who had known her for 40 years.

She had asked in the last hours for two specific items to be brought to her bedside. her grandmother’s rosary, which she had been carrying in her purse since the age of 17, and a single small black and white photograph that she had kept in a drawer in her writing desk for 63 years. The photograph, by every account from the family member who later identified it, was the same photograph the studio publicists had attempted to suppress in the summer of 1938.

The photograph taken on the front lawn of the house in Belair in June of that year. On the day Loretta had officially announced the adoption, the photograph of the 30-month-old child she had spent the next 31 years lying to. The hospice nurse by her own later account found Loretta in the bed at approximately 3:00 in the afternoon.

She had been gone, by the nurse’s estimate, for perhaps 20 minutes. In her right hand, by the nurse’s account, she had been holding the rosary. In her left hand, by the same account, very loosely, with the small, careful grip of a person who had been falling asleep, she had been holding the photograph. The photograph was face up.

It was turned by the nurse’s account, so that if Loretta had opened her eyes, in the last moment, the small, dark-haired 30-month-old girl in the white bonnet would have been the last thing she saw. Judy Lewis was 58 years old when Uncommon Knowledge was published in the spring of 1994. She had been by then three different women in three different careers.

She had been in her 20s and 30s an actress, most notably as the long-running character Susan Ames Dunar on the daytime soap opera The Secret Storm, a role she played from 1966 to 1973. In the 7 and 1/2 years she would later describe as the single most stable working period of her early adult life.

She had been in her 40s, a daytime television producer, working behind the camera on the program Capital, learning the business side of an industry her mother had taught her never to enter. She had been in her 50s a clinical psychologist, earning late in life the doctorate from the California Graduate Institute that she had decided in her mid-4s was the only way she would ever understand the family she had been raised in.

She had been by every account from the small group of patients and colleagues who knew her in that last career a careful gentle except attentive therapist. She specialized by her own choice in the treatment of adult children of secretkeeping families. She told one interviewer in the late 1990s that she had decided to specialize in that area because she had spent the first 31 years of her own life inside the most carefully kept secret in the history of Hollywood.

and she had concluded after almost a deteive therapy of her own and another decade of clinical training that there were people walking around the city of Los Angeles in the year 1996 who were paying for similar secrets in their own families and that someone needed to sit across from them and say very quietly the sentence she had needed someone to say to her.

She did not specify in the interview what the sentence was. But the sentence, by every reasonable inference from her published writing, was something close to this. You are not crazy. The thing you have been noticing in the room is real. She practiced in a small office in a quiet building in West Los Angeles for almost 15 years.

She kept on the wall behind her desk two small framed items. One was the doctoral diploma from the California Graduate Institute. The other was the single black and white photograph from her first communion in 1944, taken in the garden of her grandmother Gladis’s house in Beverly Hills in a white dress and a white veil. At the age of 8, in the careful smile of a small Catholic girl, who had not yet, by any conscious measure of her own, begun to ask the questions she would spend the next 65 years asking.

Maria Tiny, Judy’s only child, born in 1961, was raised in a very different kind of household than her mother had been raised in. Judy had decided, by every account from her published writing and her interviews, that the chain of family silence she had been born into, would end with her. She would not, under any circumstances, lie to her own child about any large fact of family origin.

She would not under any circumstances allow her own child to discover at the age of 22 in a kitchen from her husband a piece of information that every adult in the family had known since before she was born. She told Maria the truth about her own paternity. When Maria was perhaps 10 or 11 years old, she told it carefully in language a child could understand in a quiet conversation in the living room of their small apartment.

She told it without bitterness. She told it without dramatics. She told it by every account from Maria’s later interviews, in the calm, clear voice of a mother who had decided that the small, dark-haired girl in front of her was going to grow up with one fewer wall around her than her mother had grown up with. Maria, in turn, grew up close to her grandmother.

Loretta, who had not in any honest reading of the record, fully known how to be a mother to Judy in the 1940s and 1950s, became in the 1960s and 1970s, a deeply attentive grandmother to Maria. She came to the school plays. She came to the birthday parties. She invited Maria to long, careful weekends at her house in Palm Springs.

she told her by Maria’s later account the small stories of old Hollywood, the films she had made, the directors she had worked with, the small careful tricks of the craft she had been practicing since she was 13 years old. She did not by Maria’s later account ever in any of those conversations mention Clark Gable. She did not mention the train ride.

She did not mention the rented house. She did not mention the orphanage. She did not mention the seven-year-old child in the darkened bedroom with bandages around her head. She told Muria, instead the version of her own life that she had been telling the press for 60 years. The version in which a young Catholic actress had simply one day in 1937 decided by the small inexplicable instinct of a generous heart to adopt an unrelated child from a Catholic orphanage and raise her as her own.

Maria, who had been told the truth by her mother at the age of 10, listened to her grandmother tell the false version, and did not, by her own later account, correct her. She had decided in her own quiet way that her grandmother had earned the right to die inside the story she had spent her life telling.

She let her have it. There is a piece of the story that almost no biographer has been able to write about with any clarity. It comes from the hospice nurse who was with Loretta Young in the final week of her life in August of 2000. A woman who has been identified in the family materials released after Loretta’s death only by her first name Carmen and who told the small careful version of what she had seen in the bedroom that afternoon to one of Loretta’s grandchildren who later mentioned it in an interview in 2003. It is the story of

what Loretta Young did in the last 72 hours of her life with the small black and white photograph she had kept in the drawer of her writing desk for 63 years. She had been bedridden by the first week of August for almost a month. The ovarian cancer had reached by the careful judgment of the oncologist on her case the point where there was nothing left to treat.

She had asked in the last full week of her life that the hospital bed be moved out of the bedroom and that her own bed, the carved walnut bed she had been sleeping in since the 1960s with the rosary draped over the headboard be moved back in. The family had done it. She had asked by Carmon’s account on the afternoon of August 9th, 3 days before she died for someone to open the writing desk in the corner of the bedroom and bring her a particular small framed photograph.

She described the location of the photograph by the drawer and the position in the drawer. The family member by Carmon’s account found it on the first try. It was the photograph from 1938. It was the photograph from the front lawn of the house in Belair. On the day the studio had announced the adoption, Loretta in a white dress holding a 30-month-old child in a white bonnet on the front lawn in the early afternoon light smiling at the camera.

The child in the photograph not smiling. The child in the photograph with the small two-year-old frown and the Clark Gable ears framed in the white bonnet. Loretta took the photograph from the family member’s hand. She held it. She looked at it by Carmen’s account for almost a full minute without speaking. Then she said very quietly the only sentence Carmen would remember from that afternoon. She was so small.

The family member nodded. Loretta did not say anything else. She placed the photograph on the pillow next to her head on her left side with the picture facing her. She closed her eyes. She slept for almost 4 hours. When she woke, the photograph was still on the pillow. It stayed there for the next 3 days. Through the visits of the priest, dot through the visits of her three sons through the final hours in the small careful Catholic vigil that the family kept around her bed.

It was in her left hand, very loosely, in the small, careful grip of a person who had been falling asleep at the moment Carmen walked into the room on the afternoon of August 12th, 2000, and found her gone. The rosary was in her right hand. The photograph was in her left. She had not, by any account, chosen the photograph of any of her three sons.

She had not chosen the photograph of any of her grandchildren. She had not chosen the publicity stills from her own career. She had not chosen the famous photograph of her Academy Award. She had chosen the photograph of the small, dark-haired girl in the white bonnet. She had spent her entire life, by every public measure, pretending that she had adopted that child.

She had spent the last hour of her life, by every private measure, holding the picture. Judy Lewis lived 11 more years after her mother. She continued her clinical practice. She continued to write. She continued, “By every account from the small number of patients and colleagues who knew her in that final decade to specialize in the slow, careful work of helping other adults find their way out of the family silences they had been born into.

” She gave one extended interview in 2008 to a small documentary film about her mother, the Turner Classic Movies documentary Loretta Young, a life well-lived. In that interview, she spoke about her mother with what every viewer who watched it would later describe as the strangest possible combination of clarity and grace.

She eyed not say Irvin had been cruel. She did not say her mother had been a liar. she said instead in the careful clinical voice of the woman she had become that her mother had been a person who had been given at the age of 21 a problem that the world she lived in had not in 1935 provided any honest solution to and that her mother had solved the problem in the only way the world had taught her to solve it which had been by burying it.

She said her mother had loved her. She said it without hedging. She said it with the calm certainty of a 65-year-old daughter who had spent 40 years thinking about it. She said that the love had not in itself been enough. That no amount of love can substitute for the simple act of telling a child the truth about who she is, but that the love had been real and that her mother had carried for 65 years the photograph of a 30-month-old child she had not been permitted by the world of 1937 to publicly call her own.

She said that the photograph itself found on the pillow was its honest sentence her mother had been able to say in the end about the seven decades of careful silence that had preceded it. She forgave her mother. She had by then been forgiving her mother for 46 years. She had been doing it by her own account in small daily increments.

The way the slow recovery from any large family wound is done. Not in a single sentence, not in a single afternoon, not in a single tearful reconciliation, but in the long quiet practice of a lifetime of choosing every morning, not to be destroyed by it. She died in 2011 at the age of 76 of cancer, sir. She had outlived her mother by 11 years.

She had outlived her father by 51. She had been for those 11 years the keeper of both versions of her own family story. the public version her mother had constructed in 1937 and the private version she herself had published in 1994 and she had carried in her own quiet way the small careful work of allowing both versions to coexist in the world.

She left behind one daughter Maria and three grandchildren. she left behind in the small filing cabinet in her West Los Angeles office, the records of 15 years of clinical practice, the names of which have never been published, and the contents of which have, by the ethical practice of her profession, gone with her into her grave.

The strangest fact about Loretta Young’s death in the bedroom of that Los Angeles house in August of 2000 is that she chose the photograph she chose. She had in her possession that afternoon photographs of her three sons. She had photographs of her late mother Gladis. She had photographs of her sisters, of her four husbands, of her grandchildren.

She had publicity stills from 60 years of her career, the Academy Award nights, the Loretta Young show portraits, the famous gowns in which she had performed the careful Catholic dignity of her public life. She chose none of them. She chose the 30-month-old child in the white bonnet on the front lawn of the house in Bair in June of 1938.

She chose the one photograph in which, by every honest reading of the small, careful history of her own life, she had been doing the thing she would send the next 62 years pretending she had not been doing. She had been holding her own daughter. She had been holding her in the open air in the afternoon light on the front lawn of a house she had decorated for the occasion.

for a camera that was photographing by the press release that ran the next morning the adoption of an unrelated child from a Catholic orphanage. She had held her anyway. She had smiled at the camera with the practiced perfect smile she had been working on since the age of 13. She had done what the world of 1938 demanded of her.

She had let the press release run, but she had, in the moment the shutter clicked, been holding her own child, and she had kept the photograph. She had kept it through four husbands. She had kept it through three more children. She had kept it through the long radiant decades of her own television career. She had kept it through the publication of her daughter’s memoir in 1994 and the three years of silence that followed.

She had kept it through the careful family mediated reconciliation in 1997. She had kept it, by every account, in the drawer of the writing desk in her bedroom, where almost no one in the family had ever known it was. She had asked for it on the afternoon of August 9th, 2000. She had held it on the pillow next to her head for the last 72 hours of her life.

She had not in any of the small daily speech of those three days said the sentence to her sons or to her grandchildren or to the priest at her bed’s side that the photograph itself had been saying for 63 years. But she had said it in the only currency she had left by the simple act of holding the picture. She had borne a daughter.

She had loved her. She had not in the world of 1935 been permitted to say so. She had said so at the very end in the only honest gesture of a life that had been arranged since the age of 13 around the careful concealment of every difficult truth about her own existence. She had said so by holding the picture.

It had taken her 87 years. It had been in the end enough. There is a pattern in this family and it does not begin in 1935 in a hotel room in the Cascade Mountains. It begins in 1916 on an ordinary afternoon in Salt Lake City when a three-year-old girl named Gretchen watched her father walk out the door and not come back.

The girl learned before she had the words for it that men leave. The girl learned by four that the most important things about a family, the broken parts, the absent parts, the parts no one in the house wanted to talk about, were the things her mother would very carefully in front of company pretend did not exist.

Gladis Royal Young taught her four small children the small useful skill that any abandoned wife in the year 1916 had to teach her children. She taught them to keep the family’s hardest facts inside the family. She taught them to smile at strangers, to say plight things at the dinner table, to never under any circumstances mention to the borders that there was no father in the upstairs bedroom and there had not been in any meaningful sense for several years.

The four children learned the lesson. Loretta learned it best of all. She would, by the age of 21, in a kitchen in late March of 1935, hear her mother say the sentence Gladis had been preparing in some private way for almost 20 years to say, “No one will ever know.” Getta repeated the lesson with her own daughter for the next 31 years.

The pattern stopped with Judy. Judy raised her own daughter, Maria, with one fewer wall than she herself had been raised behind. Maria, in turn, raised her own children, Loretta’s great-g grandandchildren, the fourth generation of the line, with one fewer wall again, the walls came down. In this family, one generation at a time, in the small, careful daily work of choosing not to repeat what one had been taught.

It is the slowest possible kind of repair. It is also by every honest measure of any family’s recovery from any large concealment, the only kind that works. The story of Loretta Young is usually told as a Hollywood scandal, a train ride, a married movie star, a rented house, a studio coverup, a child returned from an orphanage to be raised in plain sight as the adopted daughter of her own biological mother.

That is not the story. The story is the 70-year cost of the coverup. The story is a 7-year-old child in a darkened bedroom with bandages around her head, recovering from a surgery she had been told was to fix her ears, when in fact the ears had been the single feature of her face that her mother had been most afraid the public would recognize.

The story is a 16-year-old girl in a Catholic school uniform sitting across from a 50-year-old man in a wing back chair in a Bair living room, hearing the words, “Goodbye, daughter.” and not understanding for another 15 years what they had meant. The story is a 31-year-old woman standing in her mother’s kitchen on a summer afternoon in 1966 and saying in the quietest, flattest voice she had ever used, “Mama, I know about Clark Gable.

The story is the mother’s reply.” Judy, we will not ever in any room, in any house, in any city, in any context discuss this again. It is the story of what that sentence cost. It is not a story unique to Hollywood. The studios were unusual. The fame was unusual. The Catholic Church’s collusion in the silence was unusual.

The Academy Award, the swirling skirt television entrance, the swear jar on every soundstage, all of it was unusual. The silence in the kitchen was not. That silence lives today in millions of houses that have never had a movie star in them. It lives wherever a parent has decided at one moment in a long ago decade that the truth about a child’s origin is a thing the world cannot be permitted to know and that the child herself by extension is a thing the world cannot be permitted to know fully either. It lives where dotwaver a small

dark-haired girl in a kitchen in a school uniform in a soft lit bedroom in a Sunday morning pew has begun to notice in the way only children notice that the room she is sitting in does not in some way she cannot yet name contain her. The lesson of Loretta Young is the lesson available to every parent watching this story tonight.

Lessons in is that a secret about a child becomes in time a wall around the child and the wall holds the child in even more than it keeps the world out. Loretta Young learned this. She learned it in the only language her century allowed her by holding the photograph for the last 72 hours of her life.

At the beginning of this story, three things were promised. The room in a Pacific Northwest hotel on a January night in 1935 where the most famous man in Hollywood did something to a 21-year-old actress that she would not have a word for until she was 83 years old. Watching daytime television was the location shoot lodging of the Call of the Wild production at Mount Baker, Washington.

The man was Clark Gable. The woman was Loretta Young. The truth of what happened in that hotel was a thing Loretta herself in her last years in two private conversations with women wheat in her household. Finally described in language her own century had not in 1935 given her permission to use. She had been 21. She had been Catholic.

She had been until that production an unmarried daughter of her mother’s house. She had told in her ninth decade in her own slow careful sentences the truth she had not. in 1935 been permitted by any institution around her to tell the eight-month-old baby in a Venice, California orphanage in the summer of sound 1936 who being secretly visited every Sunday by the woman the orphanage records listed as a kindly Catholic donor was Judy. The donor was Loretta.

She drove to the orphanage every Sunday for almost 10 months in a borrowed car in plain clothes with her hair tied back and she held her own child in the parlor of St. Elizabeth’s home for foundlings for 1 hour at a time. The nuns knew who she was. Nuns kept the secret. Loretta walked into her own attorney’s office in May of 1938 and announced she was adopting the child she had been visiting.

The studio publicist wrote the press release. The newspapers ran it. The child grew up believing the press release. And the single sentence Judy said to her mother in the kitchen of a Beverly Hills house in 1966. Mama, I know about Clark Gable was the only direct sentence the two of them ever exchanged in 31 years about what had happened in 1935.

Loretta’s replies was the sentence that ended any further conversation on the subject for the next 28 years. Judy, we will not ever in any room, in any house, in any city, in any context discuss this again. Judy waited. She waited for her mother to add anything else. Her mother did not add anything else.

Her mother picked up the tea tray and walked past her into the living room. The walls between the two of them, which had been built one careful brick at a time since 1935, would not begin to come down, and even then only partly until 1997, in the small, careful family mediated reconciliation 3 years before Loretta’s death. It took 62 years.

It was, by every honest measure, decades too late to repair the early life of the child who had been the secret. It was not by every honest measure too late to mean something. That is the small painful gift of this story. It is never in any family too late to begin. The photograph is somewhere after Loretta’s death by the careful private decision of the family.

The small black and white picture she had been holding on the pillow was returned to Judy. Judy kept it by every account from Maria’s later interviews in the same way her mother had kept it privately in a drawer where no one outside the immediate family would see it. When Judy died in 2011, the photograph passed to Maria. Maria has not in the 14 years since ever displayed it publicly.

She has not in any interview she has given about her mother or her grandmother described it in detail. She has confirmed when asked that it exists. She has confirmed that it is the picture from the front lawn of the house in Bair in June of 1938. She has confirmed that it shows a 30-month-old girl in a white bonnet in her mother’s arms on a clear early summer afternoon in Los Angeles almost 90 years ago.

She has not, by any account, framed it for display. She has by every reasonable inference from the small careful life she has built decided that the photograph belongs to the family and not to the world. The world has by now had enough of it. The world ran the press release in 1938. The world ran the wedding photographs in 1958.

The world ran the magazine excerpts from uncommon knowledge in 1994. The world has in its own slow careful way been told the truth. What remains after the world has been told is the small private fact at the center of the entire 70-year story. A mother held her child on a lawn in 1938. A photographer took the picture.

The mother kept the picture in a drawer for 63 years. She asked for it in the last week of her life and she held it in her left hand in the small careful grip of a person who had been falling asleep. When she stopped putting on the afternoon of August 12th, 2000, she had loved her. She had not been able by the world she was born into to say so out loud.

She had said so in the end in the only language the world she was born into had ever given her. She had held the picture. There is a question this story does not answer. It is the question Loretta Young was asking in the bedroom in the bed with the rosary in her right hand and the photograph in her left. on the afternoon of August 12th, 2000.

The question was not, “What did I do wrong?” She knew by then what she had done wrong. She had spent 65 years performing motherhood as a public character on a national stage, while the small dark-haired daughter she had actually born sat in the audience watching her perform. And she had known from the kitchen in 1966 onward that her daughter had known.

She had carried that knowledge for 34 years before she died. The question in the last hour of her life was older and quieter. It was this. If I had been permitted, by the world I lived in to do it differently, would I have been able to? She did not know. No one in any of the small, careful Catholic families of her generation ever fully knew.

Gladis did not know it in 1916 when she packed the four children on a train to Hollywood and instructed them by the slow practice of two decades never to speak of their absent father. Loretta did not know it. in 1935 when her mother said in a kitchen, “No one will ever know.” Judy did not know it in 1958 when a priest told her new husband the truth in a small office at the parish.

But Maria, the granddaughter, has been raised by Judy’s deliberate decision made before Maria could speak to act as if the answer is yes. She has lived in her adult life in the small honest way her mother and her grandmother were not permitted to live. That decision made over thousands of small days in small careful sentences in the kitchens and living rooms of an ordinary family is the only redemption this story has.

It is also, if you are willing to take it, the only redemption any of us have. If this story moved you, there is a reason. You have somewhere in your own family a photograph like the one Loretta Young held on the last afternoon of her life. A small picture, a child, a lawn, a porch, a kitchen, a hospital corridor.

A moment in which someone in your family was holding someone they were not by the world they lived in. Permitted to fully acknowledge that they loved. That photograph is still somewhere in a drawer, in a shoe box, on a phone, in a folder no one in the house has opened in 15 years. Tonight, before you sleep, find it. Look at it for one full minute.

And then tomorrow, do the thing Loretta Young waited 87 years to do and did in the end only by holding a picture. Say the names out loud. Of the people in the photograph, of the people you were not, by the family you grew up up in, permitted to call by the true name of the relationship. The aunt who was actually your mother, the cousin who was actually your sister, the friend who found the family who was actually your father, the small dark-haired child in the white bonnet who was in the careful photograph from the lawn in Bair in June

of 1938, never adopted at all. Only finally on a clear summer afternoon, briefly in front of a camera held say their names while there is still time before the rosary is in one hand and the photograph is in the other and the room is quiet and the small careful you have you’ve been performing in your own particular Hollywood on your own particular sound stage in your own particular white dress with the long sleeves and the small gold cross at the base of your throat is at last over.

Loretta Young waited too long.