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Loretta Young was born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1913. Those of you who remember her as the super-elegant, proper, sweet and saintly well-dressed beauty from her 1950s TV show may well be surprised to learn of her earlier life! Her parents separated when she was three, and her mother moved her and her two older sisters to Los Angeles. She had some minor film roles as a child, and then went to parochial school, but when she was 14 she returned to acting. At 15 she got a huge break, in Laugh, Clown, Laugh, where she played the role of the orphan adopted as a child by circus clown Lon Chaney Sr., and when she becomes a teen Chaney decides he is in love with her and wants to marry her! Between 1928 and 1933 she appeared in an amazing 44 movies, most for First National, often in very sexy roles, in movies like They Call It Sin, Life Begins (when she played a female convict who gives birth in prison), Play-Girl, and Too Young to Marry. Audiences loved this young, sexy child-like actress with giant eyes and couldn't get enough of her! In 1933 Loretta, who had just turned 20, but had already been in 50 movies, left First National for Fox (soon to merge with Twentieth Century Pictures and become 20th Century Fox) and at first she played some similar roles to what she had played earlier (like the starring role in Born to Be Bad), but she soon was getting a variety of more substantial roles. In 1930, Loretta had married co-star Grant Withers, but the marriage was annulled less than a year later. In 1935 she co-starred in The Call of the Wild with Clark Gable, and she had an affair with Gable (though she later claimed he raped her) that resulted in Young getting pregnant. Since Gable was married, the resulting scandal might well have ruined both their careers, so Young took a long "vacation"! She returned to Hollywood with not one, but two babies, and made the bizarre announcement that this single 22 year old was "adopting" two babies! Apparently she knew that the public would catch on if she returned with just one baby, so she found another baby to adopt, and then pretended to adopt both babies, and somehow she pulled it off (maybe the public really knew, but liked her so much they forgave her!). Only late in her life would she admit that her daughter was actually her and Gable's baby, but photos of their child made that obvious, for she looked like a perfect merge of Young and Gable! Young resumed being a leading lady and was active in movies through the rest of the 1930s, and 1940s. In 1940 she married Tom Lewis, with whom she had two more children. In 1947, Young (who was still quite beautiful, in spite of having starred in movies for 20 years) had one of her best years ever, starring in The Bishop's Wife, The Farmer's Daughter (winner of the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and The Perfect Marriage, all in the same year! In 1949 she was in Come To The Stable (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and in 1953 she moved to TV, starring in what is today called "The Loretta Young Show", but which was actually called "Letter to Loretta", and it had a different drama each week, all of which starred Loretta. It was one of the most popular shows of the 1950s In 1963 she retired from TV, and in 1969 she divorced Lewis, and from 1963 to 1986, she did not appear in any TV or movie role until she re-surfaced in a TV movie in 1986 and another in 1989, looking wonderful! She passed away in 2000 at the age of 87, after being married to famous designer Jean Louis from 1993 until he passed away in 1997.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a negative that was in the camera when the photographer shot the photo (see below for more on this). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to a photo of the negative image, so you can better see its condition). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). We scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is. What are camera original negatives? These often (but not always) have retouching on the emulsion side, and negative numbers written in India ink on the front. Depending on the studio some 8x10 negatives may be trimmed or have numbers or information embedded into the sides of the negative. Obviously, camera original negatives are far more rare (and far more desirable) than studio-issued ones, but both are very high quality, and both can be used to make extremely high resolution positive prints of the image.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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