Loretta Young (1913–2000) was an Academy Award-winning actress known for devout Catholicism and her performances in The Farmer’s Daughter, The Bishop’s Wife, and Come to the Stable, and for her long-running and tremendously popular television series. But that was not the whole story.
Hollywood Madonna explores the full saga of Loretta Young’s professional and personal life. She made her film debut at age four, became a star at fifteen, and many awards and accolades later, made her final television movie at age seventy-six. This biography withholds none of the details of her affair with Clark Gable and the daughter that powerful love produced. Bernard F. Dick places Young’s affair in the proper context of the time and the choices available to women in 1935, especially a noted Catholic like Young, whose career would have been in ruins if the public knew of her tryst. With the birth of a daughter, who would have been branded a love child, Loretta Young reached the crossroads of disclosure and deception, choosing the latter path. That choice resulted in an illustrious career for her and a tortured childhood for her daughter.
Bernard F. Dick is professor of communication and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University and is author of many books, including The Golden Age Musicals of Darryl F. Zanuck: The Gentleman Preferred Blondes; That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical; The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War; The President’s Ladies: Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis; Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young; Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell; and Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
