Myrna Loy Read Online Free Page B

Cooper—David’s face was round and his build chunky—but in his youth he lived the rough-and-tumble outdoor life of a genuine cowpuncher. Later, in Helena, he sat on bank boards, but as an appraiser and seller of farmland he continued to spend time outdoors, often in the saddle. Della, too, rode a horse confidently, because a Montana woman simply had to. But in contrast to David, Della, after her father’s early death, inhabited a cultured world of women presided over by her mother, who sang at the piano, read books, put up jelly, baked ginger cookies, and cultivated the tiger lilies and pansies in her garden. 15
    The friction between Della and David rarely erupted into open warfare, but it remained a constant during Myrna’s girlhood. Myrna had no model of marital harmony. The screen’s future Perfect Wife came out of a less than perfect union in which Della’s role was neither consistently nor clearly defined. Della balked at being purely domestic yet lacked economic independence. Music-making showcased her skills, providing pleasure, an identity distinct from that of wife and mother, and activity, but no income. The compliant wife Myrna Loy sometimes played both in movies and in her real-life marriages was definitely not modeled on her mother.
    When Della Mae Johnson and David Franklin Williams got married in Helena in March of 1904, twenty-four-year-old Della had completed her musical training in Chicago, and David, one year older than his bride, had finished school at the Commercial Department of the State Agricultural College in Bozeman. At age twenty-three, just a few years after finishing college, he’d been the youngest man ever elected to serve a term in the Montana legislature, representing Broadwater County as a Republican in 1903. His particular interests as a representative were education, agriculture, irrigation, and water rights. Just prior to their wedding David and Della had been living as single young people in Helena, sharing a lively circle of friends, but they returned to the Williams ranch in Crow Creek Valley after tying the knot. David, whose prosperous parents both died within months of his marriage, abandoned politics and took over at the Williams ranch, working as a stockman and farmer. He was not its sole owner, however, but a part owner with his two brothers and two sisters. His father’s will had left the land in equal one-fifth shares to his five surviving children. Della, much happier in Helena, served reluctantly as a ranch wife, even though she was moving closer to her hometown. She knew how to cook but hated doing it. The ranch employed a Chinese cook. Holiday meals, according to Myrna, were always prepared by her father, who sometimes brought home from Chicago cracked crab on ice. 16
    The Williams ranch, called “The Home Place” in legal documents, had no electricity or outdoor plumbing. Water used for bathing, cooking, or laundry had to be pumped by hand and heated in a barrel. Ice that was needed to keep perishables fresh was stored in an icehouse and covered with sawdust to prevent it from thawing. Helena offered many more of the amusements, conveniences, and comforts that Della appreciated than did the remote Crow Creek Valley, about fourteen miles from the nearest train station. A photograph exists, too blurry to enable reproduction, that captures an idyllic moment of ranch life several years after Della and David settled there: Della, in trousers, white shirt, and sun hat, sits on a saddled dark-coated horse; Myrna, behind her (about five years old), rides a smaller white horse, and near both a dark filly with her colt grazes on sunlit grass. 17
    David and Della grew up on the raucous mining frontier after the gold rush had peaked. Big changes were afoot in the Montana Territory. When they were toddlers, in the early 1880s, herds of buffalo still blackened the plains, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which Colonel George Custer and 120-odd other members of the