A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

  • • •

  Walda Mansfield read an announcement in the paper that Barbara and Fay were coming to Los Angeles and were to arrive in Pasadena. She had been living in Los Angeles for more than a year and working steadily in small parts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She found out when the train was due in and drove to the station to welcome her friends and take them to their hotel.

  Barbara and Walda hadn’t seen each other in more than a year. Walda saw Barbara on the platform. Frank was busy with the porters gathering together their luggage and said a quick “Hello, Wally,” and went on attending to the trunks. Walda was all set to throw her arms around her friend. Instead of the warm welcome she expected, Barbara’s hello was oddly cool. Barbara was usually so warm; Walda was surprised, but decided that Barbara was just distracted by the excitement of her arrival and the bustle of passengers getting off the train.

  Among those disembarking was the small young man from the Club Richman. It became clear to Barbara that while “in New York, he might have been another night-club guest,” he must have been “something pretty celestial out here. Two-thirds of Hollywood was there to meet him.”

  Walda told Barbara that she had come to pick them up and give them a ride to wherever they were staying. Barbara replied that they were staying at the Roosevelt Hotel and already had a ride.

  “I’ll call you there in a few days,” said Walda.

  “Do that,” said Barbara.

  Left to right: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Fay, Joe Schenck, and Irving Berlin, circa 1929.

  TWELVE

  Panic of Self-Doubt

  1929–1931

  Pictures have only scratched Barbara’s surface. If she ever lets go and gives herself to pictures as I know her, she’ll be the biggest star on the screen. Her personality is as dominant, as vital, as Mae West’s or Garbo’s. Oh, go and laugh but you don’t know her.

  —Mae Clarke

  The first day Barbara saw Los Angeles she hated it.

  She wanted to turn right around and take a train back to New York. Instead, she sent a Western Union to Maud, Bert, Mabel, and Gene telling them that she and Fay had arrived safely.

  She had no desire to be in Los Angeles. She was willing to stay for the duration of The Locked Door, but after that she planned to return to New York. Pictures were insane, she thought, and everyone connected to them “tetched.”

  Barbara had asked Fay to sign a contract for only one picture, and to oblige his wife, he signed a letter of agreement with Warner Bros. for So Long Letty.

  Fay was expected to report to work on May 5 to star with Charlotte Greenwood and was being paid $27,500 for seven weeks of work—what he was making in New York.

  A few days after Fay signed the agreement for So Long Letty, Warner Bros. decided they wanted him instead to appear in Under a Texas Moon, the studio’s first all-talking, singing picture, to be filmed outdoors on the Warner Bros. Ranch in the all-natural two-color process called Technicolor. It was one of forty all-color pictures for which the studio had contracted with the newly operating Hollywood plant of the Boston-based Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation. Warner Bros. was hoping this new enhanced effect would lure audiences away from radio.

  • • •

  Walda telephoned Barbara at the hotel. “She was very cool,” said Walda of Barbara’s response to hearing her friend’s voice on the phone. Walda didn’t know what to make of it, “whether Fay was there, or she didn’t want to see me. I didn’t think of her changing that much. But I certainly got the message that that’s the way it was going to be.”

  Walda didn’t phone Barbara again.

  Barbara and Fay continued their stay at the Roosevelt Hotel. It “looked the nearest thing to Broadway,” Barbara said.

  Fay was waiting to begin work for Warner Bros. and was happy to appear around town as the master of ceremonies at different hotels, including the Monday night celebrations of their hotel, and Sid Grauman’s midnight show. He performed next to closing for an actors’ club at the Warner Bros. Theatre in Los Angeles. The show started at midnight and let out at 3:45 in the morning. Barbara put on a gown, wore no makeup, and sat at a corner table while Fay performed onstage.

  Fay came home one day and said that he’d seen “the most attractive house” and had “leased it for a year.” Barbara was horrified. The idea of living in one place for a year, and in a house, was almost unimaginable.

  From the time Barbara and Frank were first married, neither had “wanted a home. Being installed in a house, weighed down by possessing household goods and a feeling of permanence was revolting to both of us,” Barbara said. “We wouldn’t consider even an apartment. We lived in hotel suites and lived in our trunks.” The attitude about going to Hollywood was “don’t buy anything you can’t put on the Chief”; everything was rented.

  The large, comfortable house Fay rented on Holly Mont Drive belonged to Harry Langdon, the comedian who, in less than a year, had become as famous and beloved as Chaplin and almost as rich. The Langdon character that won America’s heart was the baby-faced, moon-cheeked little man whose goodness triumphed over adversity. It had been created by Frank Capra, then a Mack Sennett gag writer, who figured out how to make use of Langdon’s winsome childlike personality. After Langdon made it big in a series of Sennett’s pictures, he left Sennett and signed a million-dollar contract with First National for three features, with an option for a fourth. Three of the four pictures were directed by Capra. Within two years Langdon became one of the most famous comedians in pictures. As soon as he insisted on directing his own movies, the critics dismissed them, audiences didn’t like them, and Warner Bros. let him go. The once famous comedian who’d been on top of the world was now broke and scrambling for work and was relieved to lease his house to Frank Fay and his wife.

  • • •

  Barbara was to share equal billing for The Locked Door with Rod La Rocque. La Rocque and his wife, Vilma Banky, one of the great stars of silent pictures, cut quite a figure as the Hollywood couple. La Rocque had come from the stage and, like Barbara, had worked as a child with Willard Mack. He had grown rich playing the romantic hero in more than fifty pictures and had starred as well in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments.

  La Rocque was an award-winning photographer and an inventor and was awaiting a patent from the U.S. Patent Office for one of his creations that he planned to manufacture: a self-answering telephone that automatically answered a call after a certain period of time. The Locked Door was the first picture in which La Rocque, as the seducer, was the heavy.

  Barbara was to be paid $1,500 a week, a good deal less than what she’d been making in New York.

  The director of The Locked Door was George Fitzmaurice, one of the three highest-paid directors in Hollywood.

  • • •

  Many of the studios had spent the previous two years converting their equipment to speaking likenesses, each studio setting up different recording equipment. Technical problems hampered the making of pictures. What had taken almost three decades of silent movie making to develop—the freedom of the camera, the richness of the lighting, and the unhampered ability of the director and actor to tell a story in delicate, moving nuance—was undone by the technical advancement of putting words to storytelling. George Fitzmaurice, and other directors, had had great freedom with silent pictures; they could just roll camera and didn’t have to worry about the dialogue fitting in to the scene, or the picture.

  Movies could now talk; silent pictures were dying out quickly, but it was the actors and directors who had to pay the price of the new technology.

  The camera now had to be fixed in place, its lens fitted through the booth’s glass panel, which flattened the image, despite the quality of the lens being used. It was locked in a soundproof, airless booth to avoid the microphone’s recording of the noise as it turned, with the cameraman wearing long black robes to prevent reflection from the inside glass of the booth. The camera crews came out of the booths in between takes, gasping
for air.

  Lighting on the set was affected as well. What was good for one camera angle didn’t necessarily work for another. The front lights of the sets were competing for space with the bulkiness of the camera booth. The microphones were unwieldy and difficult to move from actor to actor; they were heavy and clumsy and encased in bronze. Scenes were ruined when different camera setups didn’t correspond to the microphone’s proximity to the actor or when the microphone picked up the sound made by the klieg lights, which were soon replaced by silent incandescent lights. The problem with incandescent lights was the amount of heat they gave off. One technician said the lights were so hot “you could light a cigar a hundred yards away.”

  During the shooting of one scene in The Locked Door, the temperature on the soundstage reached 118 degrees. There was a heat spell in Los Angeles, and two hundred extras on a close set crowded together didn’t help. The thirty-four incandescent lamps beating down on Barbara and La Rocque and the others made the temperature unbearable.

  The Locked Door was a remake of Joe Schenck’s 1921 picture that had starred his wife, Norma Talmadge. The story involved blackmail, a shooting that isn’t accidental, and the virtue of a stepdaughter who becomes unknowingly involved with the blackmailer.

  Barbara “staggered through” the filming of the picture. Fitzmaurice had been making pictures since 1914, and had directed the biggest stars of silent pictures, Pola Negri, Betty Compson, Anna Q. Nilsson, Marie Prevost, and Colleen Moore among them. He’d directed Valentino’s final movie, The Son of the Sheik, and actors who were starting out, among them Gary Cooper and Ronald Colman.

  Circa 1929.

  George Fitzmaurice rehearsing with Vilma Banky for The Night of Love, 1927. (PHOTOFEST)

  Several of Fitzmaurice’s pictures had been accompanied by synchronized sound, but The Locked Door was his first talking picture. Fitzmaurice understood what was required of silent pictures, and though he said publicly that with the talkies “pictures had entered the second great stage of their development, socialization,” he, along with many others, was struggling to find a way to work with actors in this new realm and to tell a story as effectively and as simply as before.

  Fitzmaurice’s heavy French accent—he was born and raised in fin de siècle Paris—made it difficult to understand what he was saying. It was “all one big mystery,” said Barbara.

  Fitzmaurice was portly with a face so red that one of the technicians on the picture called it “a magnificent example of a bourbon blush.”

  “He was used to working with the beauties of the silents,” Barbara said. “Norma Talmadge, Vilma Banky, Billie Dove. He kept arranging all kinds of drapery and tapestries behind.” He had trained in Paris as a painter, and he was known as a director whose strong visual style and elaborate sets were his own production designs. For one set in The Locked Door he reproduced every detail of his Beverly Hills living room, from the oak paneling on the walls to the rugs on the floors, the furniture in the room, and the lamps on the tables. Finally, Fitzmaurice shook his head in despair about Barbara and screamed, “Dammit, I have tried everything! Look at the way you look! I can’t make you beautiful no matter what I do.”

  Barbara didn’t think of herself as a beauty. She saw herself “as an average-looking person.” Two of her teeth were crooked, and she wanted them left that way, despite the United Artists executives who insisted she straighten them.

  “Look,” Barbara said to Fitzmaurice, “they sent for me, I didn’t ask to come to Hollywood.”

  It wasn’t beauty that interested Barbara. She’d learned from working with Willard Mack and Arthur Hopkins, and from watching Fay onstage and off, that what mattered was being natural. What interested Barbara as an actress was being believable.

  Fitzmaurice was trying to get at the same freedom of movement and naturalness of the silent screen. It was United Artists’ new equipment that allowed the cast to be scattered over a wide area ten or fifteen feet apart and still shoot a scene. Its achievement was a selling point for the movie.

  Edward Bernds was one of the few men who understood the new equipment that made sound work, and he spent ten days working on the last third of The Locked Door as the head of the sound crew. Bernds saw Barbara as an unusual beauty, and he watched as Fitzmaurice became frustrated by the constraints of the new technology. “Fitzmaurice seemed at quite a loss with sound,” said Bernds. “He fussed and complained about the camera, about the fact that it was in the camera booth, and that the cameraman couldn’t give him what he wanted. Well, he had to cope with that, that’s what sound did.”

  • • •

  Barbara in The Locked Door was the young wife of a rich society man; the couple is on the verge of celebrating their first anniversary when her past invades and threatens to undo their marriage. Husband and wife are unwittingly drawn into a web of deception and betrayal, seemingly to protect his adored younger sister but in fact for self-sacrificing reasons to protect each other.

  Barbara was able to find the innocence of the character and play her with a simplicity and softness.

  “Fitzmaurice didn’t direct the way a director should,” said Bernds. “He didn’t let the actors do what seemed right to them.”

  Barbara’s frustration that Fitzmaurice was not helping was obvious; in addition, it was difficult for her to get used to acting out of sequence.

  La Rocque’s lumbering acting and slow singsongy way of speaking were offset by his commanding physicality. He was more than six feet tall and solidly built. Barbara’s husband in the picture, William Boyd, was known in Hollywood as William “Stage” Boyd, to distinguish him from William Boyd, the Pathé star and leading man of Cecil B. DeMille’s Volga Boatman.

  La Rocque and Boyd were both much larger and taller than Barbara, who was five feet three inches. On film her stature and presence equaled theirs.

  Betty Bronson, Boyd’s younger sister in the picture, was five feet tall and lithe. Bronson’s movements and facial expressions in The Locked Door didn’t need dialogue to carry her scenes. It was acting that suited the silent camera. Bronson, who was twenty-two, had been an extra in pictures until Herbert Brenon chose her to star at eighteen as Peter Pan. The following year, she appeared in the 1925 production of Ben-Hur and went on to act in more than twenty silent pictures.

  Barbara was comfortable relying on dialogue to carry the narrative; the naturalness of her body movements would have been lost in silent pictures. She was used to the constraints of the stage; the camera’s lack of mobility didn’t affect her. The simplicity of her acting worked well in sound pictures. Her deep and resonant voice recorded well.

  • • •

  Barbara completed work on The Locked Door as Fay began the first week of shooting Under a Texas Moon. The picture was set in the 1830s. Fay was playing the part of a whimsical, fast-riding Don Juan, a two-gun seducer who, with his guitar-strumming companions, travels the old Southwest promising devotion to every woman he meets, fighting hard, and capturing cattle rustlers.

  The picture’s director, Michael Curtiz, ordered Fay’s red hair dyed black. Curtiz was an experienced, urbane man who had directed pictures for almost two decades. As Mihály Kertész, he had made more than forty pictures in his native Budapest. Curtiz had worked in Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Copenhagen before coming to America to direct Dolores Costello in Warner Bros.’ The Third Degree. He’d been with the studio for three years and during that time had directed thirteen pictures. Under a Texas Moon was his seventy-fifth picture. He was jovial, friendly, but with a will of iron. Curtiz was a martinet on the set; Fay took an instant dislike to him.

  Fay’s leading woman was the Mexican actress Raquel Torres, just starring in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s newly released part-talking picture, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Torres, who was educated in a convent, made her debut as the lead in White Shadows in the South Seas. One of the other women seduced by Fay’s character was played by Myrna Loy, who was becoming an intermediary on the set between Fay and Curtiz and
would intervene when Curtiz got angry and stormed around the set shouting in Hungarian. Curtiz hated actors. Each day when they broke for lunch, he never ate; it cost him an hour’s shooting.

  Myrna Loy as Lolita Romero with Frank Fay as Don Carlos, Under a Texas Moon, 1930.

  Under a Texas Moon was being shot in the Mojave Desert in Technicolor; the picture should have been designed from the beginning with color in mind. The color lights had to be changed for Technicolor. The regular heavy makeup used for black-and-white film should have been replaced with less artificial-looking makeup. The company suffered from temperatures that were frequently above 120 degrees. Fay began to lose weight. There were windstorms; the whistling of the wind was picked up by the microphones, and scenes had to be reshot. The company was forced to work at odd hours due to the constant stream of airplanes, though aeronautics was a new industry.

  • • •

  Pictures that had been made in the previous twenty-five years were being re-released with sound, among them D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, even Edwin S. Porter’s Great Train Robbery. While Warner Bros. was making color pictures with sound, other movie studios, like Paramount, were still releasing large numbers of silent pictures.

  Stage actors were being wooed to Hollywood for the quality of their voices. Colleen Moore saw it as “the gold rush of ’49 all over again, only this time the gold lay in the mouths of silent movie actors who were looked down upon as a disgrace to the acting profession.”

  Actors who had been looked at by casting bureaus for their physical appearance and the color of their hair and eyes were now being considered in terms of their vocal abilities as well as vocal peculiarities. A man with a stutter could be lifted out of the ranks of extras to become a “character voice” and receive a raise in salary.