The glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age glitters in Adriana Trigiani's All the Stars in the Heavens, a novelization of the life of Loretta Young. But behind the scenes every star had a supporting cast, and Alda Ducci, Loretta's secretary, confidante and friend, shares Loretta's story.
The decades-long saga opens with Alda's dismissal from a San Francisco convent. Loretta's family, devout Catholics, needed a secretary and hired Alda, whisking her to Sunset House, their swank Bel Air home. The kind, fun-loving and down-to-earth family embraced Alda, who soon accompanied Loretta to the MGM studio.
At 21, Loretta was already a star. She worked hard, resisting Hollywood's temptations, mindful of the industry's code of ethics. In 1934, "good taste was in style, so were the traditional values of home and hearth." It was not a good time for her to fall for Spencer Tracy, Loretta's married co-star of Man's Castle.
Loretta and Spencer settled for friendship, but the next year Clark Gable and Loretta were alone on Mount Baker, Wash., while filming Call of the Wild, and the allure of the iconic Mr. Gable was too much. True love blossomed. Alda, too, lost her heart on location, and both women returned to Los Angeles forever changed.
As in her Big Stone Gap novels, Trigiani captures setting and time in descriptive prose and true-to-life characters. Classic movie figures come to life: Gable, Tracy, Niven, Harlow and more move through All the Stars in the Heavens, but Loretta and Alda steal the scenes. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco