Loretta Young - A Tribute

She was born Gretchen Young on Jan. 6, 1913, in Salt Lake City, where her father was a railroad auditor. She had a younger brother, Jack, and two older sisters, Polly Ann and Elizabeth, who had her own movie career as Sally Blane.

When Young was 3, her father abandoned the family. Her mother moved the children to Los Angeles and opened a boarding house. She later married and had a fourth daughter, Georgiana.

An uncle in the movie business found work for the girls as extras, and Young started when she was 5. Eight years later, director Mervyn Leroy called the Young house with a role for Polly Ann in "Naughty but Nice." As Polly Ann was not available Young stepped in and made her acting debut in the comedy, and the star, Colleen Moore, changed the 13-year-old's name to Loretta.

A shapely beauty with large blue-gray eyes and high cheekbones, Young starred at age 15 with Chaney in the 1928 film "Laugh, Clown, Laugh." She was never less than a star afterward.

Between 1929 and 1930 she appeared in 15 movies, including "Broken Dishes" with the hard-drinking actor Grant Withers. Just 17, she eloped with Withers, and they lived together for eight months before she filed for divorce, claiming she paid most of the bills. Young never spoke of the marriage, and it never appeared in her official biography.

She appeared in 88 movies dating from 1927 to 1953. During her Hollywood heyday, Young appeared opposite most of the top male stars of her time, including Lon Chaney, John Barrymore, Clark Gable, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum.

In Call of the Wild, with Gable, the Young-Gable chemistry was heady both on and off the screen. The director Wellman recalls that the romance was so intense it interferes with his production schedule.

It was after Call of the Wild, that Young announced the she would retire from the screen for a full year. Then in 1937 Young managed to adopt a certain little girl despite California ruling prohibiting the adoption of a child by a single person. Judy Lewis as the daughter was called after Young wed Thomas Lewis in 1940.

To the end, Young would never discuss her daughter's connection to Gable. However, in a 1994 book, Uncommon Knowledge, Lewis claimed she was the result of an affair between a married Gable and Young. According to Judy Lewis, Young had her baby in secret in late 1935, then eventually adopted the child when she was 2.

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