Stage directors were reconsidering working in moving pictures in the belief that the technical advancement of sound would result in a new school of writers and artists.
Willard Mack was in Los Angeles to make a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture of Bayard Veiller’s play The Trial of Mary Dugan. The new world of sound to Mack had “no precedents, no rules laid down, no experts to bow to.” He believed that talking film produced “a greater range of expression than had been previously possible.”
• • •
Mae Clarke was at Fox Studios making her first picture, Big Time, with Lee Tracy, directed by Kenneth Hawks. For the few musical numbers in the film, she was being coached by Sidney Lanfield, the film’s dialogue director. While Mae was at the studio working, her husband, who’d made several two-reel comedies in Hollywood before he and Mae were married, was trying to find work. In between, Brice spent his days gambling and drinking. “It killed the time,” said Mae, “but it also killed his heart.” Lew (who was twice Mae’s age) said to her, “I guess you’re going to find somebody new soon.” She couldn’t convince him that their age difference didn’t matter.
During the making of Big Time, the studio promised Mae that great things were going to happen to her.
Mae and Barbara met for lunch. Mae talked about Big Time. John Ford was in it as himself, a Hollywood director.
During the lunch, Mae felt an inexplicable tension from Barbara, that she couldn’t reach her. Mae sat there “with the dearest friend I’ve ever had,” she said. “There was a constraint between us as though we were strangers.” In New York, Mae and Barbara had been inseparable; they’d shared the same bed, eaten together, worked together. Mae couldn’t understand what was wrong. She felt that if she could “just bridge those silences everything would be all right.” There was nothing else to talk about, so Mae talked about the plans the studio had for her. “The picture didn’t mean half as much to me as getting close to Barbara again. But she didn’t understand.
“Barbara thought I was getting ‘high-hat.’ And all I could think of was that now that Frank Fay was going to be a big success out here, Barbara didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I’m a link that binds her to the past. In New York we were harum scarum kids, madcaps, who did crazy things.”
With Mae Clarke, New York, circa 1927.
Mae was upset by the lunch. She experienced emotions in extremes. She was either high with happiness or “floundering in the depths.” She called them “spells,” and they usually lasted a couple of weeks. “I’m just not good for anything when I’m in the throes of one,” she said. “My mother has them. So does my father. I worry over every word I utter for fear of not expressing myself clearly. I think I must educate myself. I start reading a history. There are allusions to something that preceded the era I’m studying. I get another history to look up those references and find that alludes to something else. And before I know it, I’m in a hopeless muddle. So I throw down the books and wonder what in the world I can ever make of myself.”
Mae made another lunch date with Barbara, and they spoke occasionally on the phone. After that, Barbara told Mae she was busy, that life had taken them in different directions. “This is my direction and that is yours,” Barbara said.
Mae talked to Walda about what had happened with Barbara and went over and over it in her mind in an effort to try to make some sense of it.
“Forget it,” said Walda. “If that’s the way Barbara feels, maybe her husband has gone to her head.”
Mae felt that it “was an entire new game for Barbara, a game she took very seriously. Barbara Stanwyck Fay didn’t want any part of the old Ruby Stevens.”
• • •
In August the movie of the Arthur Hopkins play Burlesque opened under the title The Dance of Life. The original title had been changed to avoid confusing the moviegoer who might think he or she was going to see a burlesque show. The Dance of Life was a title taken from the Havelock Ellis book, published six years before, and was also owned by Paramount Pictures.
The Dance of Life was a talking picture with Technicolor sequences, directed by the theater director John Cromwell and the movie director Eddie Sutherland, both of whom appeared in small parts. Cromwell called the concerns about sound that “old devil dialogue.”
The picture was to have been shot on Paramount’s brand-new stage. The night before shooting was to begin, the interior of the newly built stage went up in flames. Cromwell had to shoot the picture at night with the dance numbers choreographed by Barbara’s former producer Earl Lindsay.
Hal Skelly repeated his role from the stage version. Nancy Carroll was Bonny. The young actress was being groomed by Paramount to be a star. The studio wanted vehicles for her that were “on the emotional side with a little comedy of the precious type.” David O. Selznick, acting as assistant producer to Hunt Stromberg, thought that the actress was best in “dramatic and wistful moments” and had assigned her leading roles in Manhattan Cocktail, with Richard Arlen, directed by Dorothy Arzner; The Shopworn Angel, with Gary Cooper; the studio’s first all-talking picture, Close Harmony, with Buddy Rogers; and The Wolf of Wall Street.
• • •
Barbara was having a hard time living in Los Angeles; she was scared. No studio was interested in her. And Frank didn’t want her to work, just as he had his two previous wives, each of whom retired from the stage after becoming Mrs. Frank Fay. Frank wanted Barbara to stay at home; he would support her. Barbara was in love, and Fay’s thinking sounded reasonable.
Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures saw Barbara dancing at a Celebrity Night at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and offered her a part in a movie. Frank told Barbara not to take it; she turned down the role.
She tried to pretend that she was happy being idle and was gallant about it; being idle was not her natural state, and she felt trapped. Work was essential to her. She’d worked since she was thirteen: dancing on the stage for seven years from the time she was fifteen; starring on Broadway when she was twenty; and playing the Palace Theatre in New York City with the biggest draw in vaudeville, her husband. And now here she was clear across the country, in a place she didn’t want to be, married to a man she loved and who loved her but who wanted her to give up what she needed most, work.
• • •
Fay continued to appear around Los Angeles at various theaters as master of ceremonies. Barbara sat “in a corner attracting no more attention than the furniture,” she said, “listening to all the bright and easy sophisticated conversation, while Frank sprinkled his magic over everything; watching other women glow under the spell of his charm.”
She felt the way she had all those years ago when she was in Brooklyn watching the neighborhood kids playing games and not letting her be a part of it. “I was still the child who cringed when not being accepted,” still “in a panic of self-doubt.”
After the completion of Under a Texas Moon, which cost $486,000 to make, Frank was offered an exclusive contract by Jack Warner, vice president of Warner Bros., for three Vitaphone talking and singing pictures. Each was to be made within a year, beginning in March 1930; each was to take no more than eight weeks to make, with the studio having the option to make a fourth or fifth picture within the same year. Fay was to receive $35,000 a picture and first billing.
Eventually Frank realized his arrangement with Barbara wasn’t going to work. She tried to pretend she was content to be at home and to “feel cherished and sheltered and protected,” but “it was too late”; the life of the homemaker was not for her.
Fay went to see Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures and told him that if he offered Barbara a part in a picture, “with some opportunity in it,” Fay would pay half of the picture’s production costs and all of Barbara’s salary plus the cost of her costumes.
Columbia Pictures Corporation was a minor studio with run-down facilities that produced eighteen pictures a year to Fox’s or Universal’s annual release of fifty films or more.
“Barbara i
s unhappy,” Fay told Cohn. “And it is worth that much money to cheer her up a little.”
Harry Cohn didn’t take Fay up on his offer, but early in October Cohn called Barbara on his own to offer her a part, this time the lead role in a picture called The Gamblers. Margaret Livingston, originally signed to the picture, had become ill. Livingston was a beauty who became popular as a vamp in silent pictures, reaching her apotheosis as the siren in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, and had won a whole new audience in talking pictures.
In the previous two years she’d starred in more than twenty pictures. That spring she’d been the voice double for Louise Brooks in Paramount’s picture of the S. S. Van Dine novel The Canary Murder Case.
Cohn couldn’t hold up production for Livingston. Did Barbara want the part? Production was to start the next day.
Barbara’s agent, Arthur Lyons, thought she should take it; he insisted that any footage was good for a new actress. Barbara wasn’t as sure. She wanted to work, but she thought the script was terrible, and she wouldn’t accept the part without Frank’s consent. Fay wanted Barbara to be happy, and he knew she would be happiest doing something. He agreed that she should take the role.
Cohn gave Barbara a contract for The Gamblers with an option for Columbia Pictures to use her again.
Columbia Pictures, at North Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, was a studio that had started up only five years before, in 1924, located on land that a decade earlier had been lined with corrals for the horses used in western pictures. In the intervening years the strip became known as Gower Gulch, the gathering place for cowboys looking for work as extras. The studio had emerged from a production company called CBC, headed by Jack Cohn, his brother Harry, and Joe Brandt.
Harry Cohn still operated the way he had when he first went from two-reelers to producing features. As a fly-by-nighter, the producer often acted as writer, creating a story around whatever sets had just been used by the larger studios that could be borrowed. The pictures were shot in short takes using discarded unexposed negative strips from the ends of film reels thrown away by the bigger studios. Cameras and equipment were rented; the cameraman set up his own lights; one assistant loaded the film and took the still photographs. There were no wardrobe men or women; the leading actors came with their own makeup. While the large studios were investing millions in sound equipment, Cohn continued to rent sound cameras and the facilities to process the new technology.
Harry Cohn was crude and rough, argumentative, brassy. He could be a gambler who played long shots. Sam Bischoff, who lost his studio to Cohn, called him “the wandering Jew without a soul.” The agent Louis Shurr described Cohn as “a great friend and a great enemy.”
Cohn’s credo for Columbia was “Just plain common sense, determination and concentration.” Cohn learned that the big circuit bookers looked at a reel or two of a picture, and if they weren’t won over by the early footage, they wouldn’t finish watching the picture. As a result, Cohn put a punch in the first reel of each picture in order to win immediate attention. “Our scenarios run about two hundred and seventy five scenes,” he said. “The big studios use five hundred scenes in their scripts. We never waste time and money filming scenes we don’t really need.”
Cohn could be tyrannical and petulant, but he had taste, and he bet on people. He said of the actors he employed, “We get ’Em on the way up and the way down.” Columbia’s big stars were men and women whose careers were on the wane, actors and actresses who’d been released from their contracts by the big studios and who could be had for not much money. Many of the studio’s supporting actors were borrowed from the same large studios, actors whose careers were not yet established and could be had for even less money.
Barbara began filming The Gamblers, now called Mexicali Rose, at the end of the first week of October.
“It was Margaret Livingston’s picture,” Barbara said, “but I inherited the red, red ‘Rose.’ ” She described the character Rose as a woman who “poisons everyone in sight and those I don’t poison, I knife.”
Sam Hardy, a former stage actor and twice Barbara’s age, was the lead in the picture. Hardy was a graduate of Yale, a Belasco discovery, and the perennial heavy in Columbia’s pictures.
Erle Kenton, another former actor, was directing the picture. Kenton had directed for Mack Sennett and, like George Fitzmaurice, had worked in silent film and wasn’t interested in dialogue or how it was spoken. To Kenton, the spoken word merely replaced the title cards used in silent pictures.
Ed Bernds, sound technician on Barbara’s first picture, had left United Artists for Columbia and had just finished Song of Love, also directed by Kenton, starring Belle Baker.
Bernds thought Kenton was patronizing and pompous. During the filming of Song of Love, “he seemed overbearing and arrogant and seemed to talk down to everybody.” In addition to George Fitzmaurice, Bernds had worked with directors such as Herbert Brenon and D. W. Griffith; “the manner—of all of them—was far less pompous than Kenton’s.” Kenton addressed Bernds during Song of Love like a “landowner talking to a peon.”
Bernds reminded Barbara that they had worked together on The Locked Door at United Artists. She made a face at the thought of how awful the picture was and said she had “added little or nothing to it.”
Here she was, in another bad picture, with an even weaker script. Barbara had learned about constructing a character on the stage, but in Mexicali Rose there wasn’t much to be done with Rose. Barbara said that as an actress she “didn’t even know how to make an entrance and exit,” let alone work from within to find a way to make Rose real. Barbara sauntered about, hands on the back of her hips, dressed in light chiffon, seducing any man who would have her, and then being kicked about.
The script in its own way was daring. Rose, a seductive, sexual, faithless woman, marries and is soon found out to be cheating on her husband, who throws her out. She seeks her revenge by marrying his young ward. The young man is unaware of his new wife’s conjugal relation to his guardian, the man he worships. Since the men are not biologically related, the element of father and son sleeping with the same woman is skirted, though the young man falls in love with Rose because she reminds him of his guardian.
Kenton’s seeming condescension toward Barbara made working on the picture even more difficult for her. Bernds said, “She knew she was a good actress, she tried to do her best with poor material, but to have Kenton talk down to her hurt her and made it a painful ordeal.”
Barbara struggled to make something out of nothing. One moment stands out in the film and shows her, in an instant, as an actress. Rose, now married to the young man, has been found back at the casino/bar in a tryst with another man and has been called up to the room she once lived in with her first husband, owner of the casino. He tells her that he is sending her home, that she is going to live a decent life with his ward. Hardy’s swaggering voice drones on, as does Barbara’s, as she says to him, “Who do you think you are, to tell me what to do? I’m going to do exactly what I want.” She brings a beat of humanity to a clichéd portrait of the Evil Woman, in a world of men who care only about themselves, just as she does, and who don’t take kindly to being two-timed by their women.
Barbara’s hard, grinding voice turns soft; her body is quiet. Rose is not redeemed, but the moment shows that the young actress has something that can touch an audience.
Bernds had trouble with Sam Hardy’s voice. “But Stanwyck’s voice was good, as always. It always recorded well.”
• • •
On Monday of the final week of shooting on Mexicali Rose, the papers were full of the news that the stock market had fallen sharply as the result of a massive $5 billion sell-off; one stock declined ninety-six points. People were nervous, but the market rallied by the end of the day, and the economy was pronounced by experts “fundamentally sound.” By midweek, stocks were still falling; Tel and Tel lost fifteen points; General Electric, twenty. More than two million shares changed hands. Re
ports came back that speculators were told to post more collateral; thousands of margin calls were sent out.
During the final day of shooting on Mexicali Rose, October 24, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was in chaos; more than twelve million stock shares changed hands. The word was out that eleven speculators had committed suicide. Stock exchanges were closing in Chicago and Buffalo.
On Sunday, thousands of Wall Street bankers and brokers went to work to try to cope with what had happened the previous week. The following day, the stock market did not recover. Losses in quote values exceeded $10 billion. On Tuesday, October 29, the drop in prices was almost as great as on Monday. At the end of the day sixteen million sales had been recorded on the exchange, more than three times the number of a strong day. Stock prices virtually collapsed, swept downward with gigantic losses in the most disastrous trading day in the stock market’s history.
Fourteen billion dollars was lost on all of the exchanges; the New York Stock Exchange declined $10 billion.
So many stocks were traded during the week that New York State stood to gain more than $1 million in stock transfer tax, with two cents per $100 of par value.
• • •
At first, the major motion picture studios seemed untouched by the market collapse. Paramount Pictures was particularly strong, with no outstanding loans against the studio; it was set to post a profit in the last quarter of the year. Fox’s stock was equally strong, with the company making a profit of $4 million for the year. During the market collapse the Loew directors had raised their dividend from $2 to $3 and threw in an additional seventy-five cents. As a result, Fox, which owned more than 700,000 shares of Loew stock, was to receive $1 million during the final quarter of the year. In addition, Warner Bros. had just paid Fox $10 million for the sale of its minority interest in First National Pictures. A merger that was to take place between Warner Bros. and Paramount was postponed indefinitely.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 17
