FOR LORETTA YOUNG, IT’S A YULE GIFT

If you count the appearances as an extra when she was still a toddler, Loretta Young has been in front of the cameras for nearly 70 years. If you count her first featured role, with Colleen Moore in “Naughty but Nice” in 1927, it is the better part of 60 years. She is now 73.

After she retired from the movies in 1953, she became one of the premiere stars of television, and her patented entrance, twirling through a door, superbly gowned, to introduce the week’s story on “The Loretta Young Show,” became a legendary piece of business in its own time, beloved of comedy writers who paid it the flattery of imitation.

The durability of the Young career has been phenomenal in an industry in which longevity is the most elusive gift of all. But, by her own choice, she hadn’t worked for 23 years, preferring retirement to what she saw as indifferent material.

Now she has gone back to work, starring in a movie for television, “Christmas Eve,” which will air on NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies” on Dec. 22. She plays an eccentric millionairess who with the help of her manservant (Trevor Howard) and to the distress of her Scroogean son (Arthur Hill) dispenses cash (no checks, no receipts for the government?) to the homeless. The plot has her rounding up Hill’s estranged children, her grandchildren, for a last family reunion. The hint is that there will not be a dry TV set in the house.

She continues to look remarkably less than her years, lithe and lineless and very beautiful as in the days when she was occasionally known as the Iron Butterfly for the firmness of her will in matters of taste and decorum. There was said to have been a collection cup on the TV stage, cuss words going to charity at a quarter each.

The retirement wasn’t meant to be irrevocable, she said at her home in Beverly Hills the other afternoon; it was just that nothing pleased. There was a considerable press stir when she was announced for “Dark Mansions,” an upmarket television soap, but the deal fell apart at the last minute, over changes the network countermanded.

“If this happens now when you’re wooing me,” she told the producer, “what happens later? I can’t go into rehearsal and argue as vehemently against the changes, and act, and create.” She begged off, regretfully. “It sounded like such fun.”

After that there were negotiations over “Flight of Angels” (“excellent story but the dialogue bothered me”) and the Dominick Dunne book, “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,” which again came to naught over script problems. (“If David Selznick had been producing, I wouldn’t have hesitated.”)

“I’d begun to think who cares? This is silly. If He had wanted me to do something, He’d have thrown it in my lap. And I thought if something came along that He would like, I’d do it.”

With impeccable timing, her longtime agent, Norman Brokaw, called about the NBC Christmas project. It seemed, how else to say it, heaven-sent.

“I know the scuttlebutt last year was, ‘Loretta doesn’t really want to work; she just wants to read things so she can say no. I was so glad this one came along.

“The scripts that used to come! I’d be asked to play the high priestess of a cult of Satan. I would say, ‘Norman, why do you send these things to me?’ He’d say, ‘You should see the stuff we don’t send you.’ ”

She says, “God knows what’s right for me in the long run. I know how pouty and nasty I can be, particularly when I have a choice. My contract with Darryl Zanuck went 2 1/2 years longer than it was supposed to because of the suspensions I took over things I didn’t want to do.”

She went cheerfully off to Toronto, where “Christmas Eve” was shot, with Stuart Cooper directing.

“I was shocked at working a 12-hour day, instead of eight. And sometimes there were 16- and 18-hour days. I did a photo session for Time magazine at 12:30 at night.”

But Cooper and the producers, Michael Filerman and Karen Moore, surrounded her with congenial aides and she brought a woman friend from Los Angeles as her companion. (“I didn’t want to face strangers alone, and I wanted to avoid that awful business of coming back to a dark and empty hotel room.”)

She had thought for some years that she didn’t really want to work anymore. She was busy with her charities, about which she says little. (“The less you talk, the more credit later.”) And as a hobby she made caftans for her friends, as she still does (most recently, for Irene Dunne).

“Then I must have begun to be bored. And I may just then have been seeing Katharine Hepburn in ‘Love Among the Ruins.’ ” She had lunch with agent Brokaw and told him if anything came along for her, she’d like to read it. About electing to work again, she says, “I’m glad I did.”

She adds, “I’ve never had to go back to work. But I’d rather take a job doing anything else than to throw away the standards I’ve fought for all my life. There was a time when the experts told me there was no room in the industry as it is now for someone like me; my standards were too high. But if I have any fans left, they’d be horrified if I changed. . . .

“Such gravy the Lord has given me. It’s marvelous. I retired at 50 and I’ve had time for traveling, socializing. Now at this point to be working again, it’s pleasant. Yes, I think that’s the word: it’s pleasant.”