THIRTEEN
A Test in Technicolor
Barbara was certain that she and Hollywood “had nothing in common.” She was playing with the notion of returning to New York and the stage. Fay spoke to Jack Warner about her. Out of deference to him, Warner arranged for Fay’s wife to make a test. And as a gesture to her husband, Barbara agreed to make it.
Barbara was to arrive at Warner Bros. in the evening. The test was for Song of the Flame. Warner was considering Barbara for the part of a dancer. She was told it was ever so much more important than the prima donna. “They didn’t fool me with that one,” said Barbara. “I have been on Broadway a few years. No dancer is better than any prima donna.”
The test, Barbara said, “was stuck off on some stuffy little sound stage down the alley.”
When she arrived, there was no director, no makeup man.
Finally, a man came in and introduced himself to her as Alexander Korda and told Barbara he had “been asked to do a test” and could she “suggest something”?
Barbara was furious. There was no script to read. But she didn’t want to get angry with him; he was clearly in a spot as well.
“I can do a scene from The Noose without a script,” she said.
Barbara thought the test was going to be wasted motion but said, “What the hell,” and decided to give it her best.
The Warner front office called the set of King of Jazz and told the production manager that they needed a cameraman to shoot a test for a foreign director and a young girl from New York. The test was to be in all-natural Technicolor to see if there was any motion picture potential.
Ray Rennahan, the cameraman on King of Jazz had worked with the Technicolor lab for eight years, shooting the first Technicolor sequences in 1923 for Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments and five years later for Love at First Flight and The Swim Princess. Rennahan went over to the stage to shoot the test.
Korda had just finished directing Myrna Loy in a silent, also for First National, called The Squall.
He set the lights and gave Barbara a few suggestions. She performed the scene from The Noose. When she finished, Korda seemed to be searching for words. At last, he spoke. “I want to apologize for the way this studio has treated you tonight. It doesn’t mean anything coming from me. I’m leaving Hollywood.”
Korda was a Hungarian who’d directed pictures in his country for more than a decade and who had been in Hollywood for two years with a contract at First National Pictures. In Hollywood, Korda had directed his wife, the European stage actress and film star María Corda, in two pictures and Billie Dove in three silent pictures.
“I want you to know,” said Korda, “that it’s been a privilege to make this test with a real actress—a privilege I won’t forget.”
He kissed Barbara’s hand as if she were “Sarah Bernhardt,” she said. Barbara and Korda talked about the “injustice of it all,” about how someday “Hollywood would come to terms with [them] on its palmy, balmy knees.”
A few days later, Ray Rennahan asked the production manager how the test had come out. “The front office group ran the test,” the production manager said. “Neither the director nor the girl had anything to offer for motion pictures.”
• • •
The stock market crash was all anyone was talking about. Investors who, two weeks before, had bought blocks of stock of Radio-Keith-Orpheum in five-thousand-share lots and paid $34–$36 a share, with the expectation that the stock would reach $50, were looking at a stock that was now worth $20.
Some of the country’s leading industrial and political leaders who’d been out of the market for months began buying railroad and industrial stocks in huge quantities at bargain prices. People were reassured that the effects of the collapse would last only two or three months.
• • •
A week or so after the completion of Mexicali Rose, Barbara got a call from Columbia Pictures. A young director wanted her to come into the studio to talk about a part in a picture called Ladies of the Evening, based on a 1924 play by Milton Herbert Gropper. Harry Cohn wanted Frank Capra to interview Barbara about the leading part; the rest of the cast was already set. Capra had another actress in mind, but Cohn had yet to sign her for the role.
Barbara went over to Columbia Studios angry that she was there.
Frank Capra’s office was on the ground floor and looked out on a waterless fountain filled with cigarette butts.
Barbara didn’t want to meet with the director. She was fed up with interviews and tests, with Hollywood in general. She’d already been tested eleven times. She didn’t like the people she’d met since she and Fay had arrived in Hollywood. And she sensed that they didn’t like people from the East.
She went to the meeting looking as plain as she could and wore no makeup. She sat on the edge of her chair and looked sullen. The director thought this chorus girl was not the actress he wanted. To the usual questions he asked, “What plays have you been in?” “What movies have you made?” Barbara’s answers were curt.
The director was annoyed that he was interviewing her at all and thought Barbara was a “drip.” Finally, he told her what he thought of the two pictures she had made and of her performances in them. Barbara listened and took the criticism “without a flicker.” He was impressed when she “frankly admitted her failure, offered no alibis or excuses.”
The director said he would need to make a test with her. It was as if he had “waved a red flag before a sore bull.”
“Either I’m qualified to play the role or I’m not,” she said. “I’d like to play it, but I won’t make a test if I never do another picture. I’ve already made tests, and, with one exception, they were a complete waste of everybody’s time, including mine.”
Capra said, “No test . . . no picture.”
Screw it, she thought, she wasn’t going to make it in pictures; she was going back to New York, back to where she had made it.
Barbara got up and said, “Oh, hell, you don’t want any part of me,” and left Capra’s office.
The director called Cohn. “Forget it, Harry,” said Capra. “She’s not an actress, she’s a porcupine.”
When Barbara got home, she told Fay what had happened. She was going back to Broadway or go home and just sit.
Fay telephoned Capra to find out what had gone so wrong that his wife had come home upset and in tears. “Nobody can do that to my wife,” Fay said.
“Listen, funny man,” said Capra, “I don’t want any part of your wife, or of you. She came in here with a chip on her shoulder, and went out with an ax on it.”
Fay explained that Barbara was “young and shy” and that she’d “been kicked around out here.” He told Capra about the three-minute test Barbara had made for Warner Bros. Capra was surprised to hear of it. “You gotta see it before you turn her down,” Fay said. “I’m coming right down with it.”
The test that Korda directed was the scene from The Noose in which Barbara, as the nightclub dancer, pleads with the governor for the body of the man she secretly loves and believes to have been executed. Capra watched Barbara on the screen.
Playing this each night at the Hudson Theatre, for 197 performances, Barbara had brought audiences to a pitch of emotion as the frightened, hopeless young woman learns from the governor that the man she thought was dead is still alive. Out of relief she breaks down and weeps, confessing her love for the condemned man, who is unaware of her feelings.
As Capra watched Barbara on the screen, he was stunned by the raw power of her emotion and by the burst of feeling stirring in him. Capra saw that “underneath her sullen shyness smoldered the emotional fires of a young Duse or a Bernhardt.”
He sent for Barbara a few days later and offered her the part of Kay Arnold. Capra described Barbara’s reaction as “the most surprised girl” he’d ever seen. “If I’m against a girl and she can still reach me,” Capra said, “she’s got the power I want.”
Fay’s intervention worked. Barbara wou
ldn’t be leaving for New York, at least for a while. She was being paid $2,000 a week as the lead in Ladies of the Evening.
• • •
Fay took the train to New York for the premiere of Warner Bros.’ Show of Shows, opening at the Winter Garden with Fay as master of ceremonies, as he was in the film.
• • •
Barbara’s first picture, The Locked Door, was released in mid-November, heralded by United Artists as “all-talking.”
“A better bilge you never saw,” is how Barbara described it.
Reviewers called the picture “tense and dramatic”; the Detroit Daily called it “thrilling”; Variety praised the picture’s “fine taste and elegance in handling and settings” but saw the film as “a straight transcription from stage to screen of a formal play” with “no great story distinction.” Chief among the film’s assets, Variety said, was “Barbara Stanwyck, an actress of much character” who “saved the picture from dullness.”
Barbara’s sisters and nephew went to see The Locked Door in Times Square at the Rialto. The theater was crowded. The lights dimmed. The credits rolled by. She appeared on the screen. Gene, then twelve, said, “Oh, boy, there’s Aunt Barbara.” Mabel at thirty-nine was watching her baby sister, now twenty-two, starring in a moving picture. At the end of the film, Mabel was teary-eyed and left the theater saying, “That was just wonderful.”
FOURTEEN
Trying to Make a Living
1930
Frank Fay’s first picture premiered days later and was set to open across the country in December. The Show of Shows was a musical revue with hundreds of dancers and elaborate costumes and sets. Warner Bros. was re-creating for moviegoers an extravagant Broadway musical revue, with segments filmed in Technicolor.
The picture was framed by a grand stage with curtains. It featured Warner Bros.’ stars and starlets under contract—among them Dolores Costello, Sally Blane, Loretta Young, Rin Tin Tin, Chester Morris, Myrna Loy, Richard Barthelmess, Patsy Ruth Miller, Viola Dana, Noah Beery, Louise Fazenda—appearing in a series of lavishly produced musical numbers.
Fay as master of ceremonies is the one constant in the picture.
He first sidles around the proscenium dressed in a WWI doughboy’s uniform, with crushed cap slightly lopsided, holding a gun that seems too large for him to handle. He is unsure, unassuming (Fay to audience in a halting delivery with bent wrists and hands punctuating the air: “I was supposed to appear as a sad soldier, but after the Warners heard me, they said, ‘He’s about as sad as you can get.’ I could probably sing a sad song for you now, but I’ve forgotten the lyrics”).
After one number, Fay comes back out from the curtain, now dressed in white tie and tails. He loves “old-fashioned songs. In fact,” he says, “I tried to prevail upon the Warners to let me sing an old-fashioned melody. I don’t suppose they’d object to my pushing in a little ol’ number now.” He pauses and looks down at the orchestra pit, then back at the camera. “They have all left.”
His gestures are hardly noticeable, his voice is low, resonant, and smooth.
“Still that won’t stop Fay,” he says softly. He pronounces his words slowly. He turns to the curtain to find the right key and turns back, ready.
Fay begins to sing, without an accompaniment. In an exaggerated, loud voice, he sings: “She was only a bird in a gilded cage, but she loved a man.”
His delivery is a combination of female intonation and controlled masculine anger. His body is perfectly still; the movement and fluidity are in his voice.
In between routines the running gag throughout the picture is Fay’s attempt to perform between acts and his being thwarted every time.
One of the musical routines features eight pairs of sister acts (among them the Costello sisters, Dolores and Helene; Sally Blane and Loretta Young; Peanuts Torres and sister Renee), each dressed in the clothes of a different nationality. They come onstage singing a verse (“Here’s me, Raquel Torres, and Sister from Spain/We’re proud of our old Spanish name/Remember it’s Torres, not Toro—that’s bull!/To think it was that would be a shame”). Myrna Loy follows, in full Technicolor, with flaming red hair and green eyes, in a Chinese fantasy, dressed in Oriental garb singing “Li-Po-Li.” John Barrymore as the Duke of Gloucester is in a scene from Shakespeare’s Henry VI. (“And yet I know not how to get the crown,/For many lives stand between me and home: And I,—like one lost in a thorny wood,/That rends the thorns and is rent with thorns, Seeking a way and straying from the way,/Not knowing how to find the open air . . .).
Fay on-screen isn’t simply a comedian, or matinee idol, or singer. The controlled, pent-up feelings, the soft, beautiful, commanding voice, the hint of feminine gesture and underlying male assurance, create a presence that is slightly odd, though winning, charming, unsettling. In the end, his hold over the stage and his uncanny timing are irresistible, and the edgy reaction to his work gives way: he seduces his audience. Onstage, the immediacy of watching him and the power of his presence could obscure much of the oddness about him; on-screen, the camera hints at his low-lying anger and reveals a murky sexuality.
• • •
At the premiere, Fay introduced many from the film, including Rin Tin Tin and Ted Lewis.
Jim Cagney, a much-admired young actor and song-and-dance man in New York, often saw Fay at the Palace and thought he was an “utter revelation.” Cagney had had a small part in the run of Broadway. He had choreographed the large numbers of the Neighborhood Playhouse’s annual satiric revue The Grand Street Follies and was teaching acting and dance with his wife in New Jersey.
Cagney had seen monologuists before—Julius Tannen, Walter C. Kelly, James J. Morton—“and they were great.” To Cagney, “monologuists were the bravest vaudevillians . . . they went out there all alone—no gimmicks, no costume, no funny makeup—and they didn’t sing, dance, or do cartwheels. They just talked . . . in such a whimsical way they made you roar . . . But they couldn’t touch Frank.”
Of all the great vaudevillians, Cagney admired Fay the most. Fay “was the funniest, and . . . he had the most control.” Through watching vaudevillians, Cagney came to understand their true command over the audience. Fay “never made an unnecessary move or facial grimace. He didn’t need to wave a cigar around as a prop . . . [He] let us see only himself . . . I tried to keep in mind that constant composure he maintained. A dynamic composure, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. That was his secret. I tried to learn that.”
• • •
Fay returned to Los Angeles by train with his parents, who were planning to spend the winter with their son and daughter-in-law.
After renting a house for a year, Barbara was still surprised that she could live in any one place for that long and that she wasn’t living out of hotel rooms. She and Fay began to talk about owning their own house and soon bought one outside Los Angeles on the beach at Malibu Lake. She sent a photograph of it back east to show her family, Millie and Art, the Merkents, Mabel and Gene.
Barbara found her lack of home feeling curious since she thought frequently about having a baby. Her thoughts about having a child were always present; in fact, she described their constancy as “a complex, a phobia.”
And while she told reporters that there was “no medical reason why Frank and I can’t have a child,” Barbara had been left sterile by the brutal abortion she’d had at fifteen.
“When I dream,” she said, “I dream that I have a baby in my arms—I can see its little face and feel it.”
• • •
In the first week of December, President Hoover gave his annual message to Congress. He was convinced confidence had been reestablished and declared business sound. He promised an overall $160 million cut in income taxes but believed “wages should remain stable.” He told Congress, “A very large degree of industrial unemployment and suffering has been prevented.”
• • •
Christmastime in Los Angeles was strange. It was hot, but on Hollywood Bo
ulevard people were lined up on the sidewalks watching a parade led by four stuffed reindeer on floats, followed by another float with Santa Claus, followed by another float with a wind machine and a man throwing confetti into it.
The Locked Door was being shown at theaters around the country but was not doing well. In Boston’s State Theatre, the picture brought in $15,700 during the week of Thanksgiving, compared with $24,000 in earned receipts from MGM’s The Kiss, which had opened the same day in November. It was difficult to top the lure of Greta Garbo.
Fay was on to his next picture for First National, Bright Lights, about a hula dancer from the African Kohinoor who performs in a waterfront café in the Congo and rises to become a hula queen on Broadway. The story involved murder, the underworld, the law, and the press. Fay played the protector and secret lover to Dorothy Mackaill’s hula star. Once again Fay was given the role of master of ceremonies but wasn’t being cast as the Latin lover.
For the third time, Fay’s director was Michael Curtiz.
Warner was selling Bright Lights as “500 horsepower entertainment . . . the strangest and most entertaining picture the talking screen has brought.” The picture was again made in all Technicolor (the studio even painting the feathers of the tropical birds—parrots, peacocks, and canaries—to heighten the intensity of their color on film).
Mexicali Rose premiered the day after Christmas. The picture was to be officially released at the end of January 1930. Columbia sold the picture as “A drama that will stir your soul . . . Life and love on the Mexican border portrayed with artistry by a cast of capable favorites.”
“The main flaw in the picture, among others,” said Barbara, “was that somebody didn’t knife me before I began.”
• • •
The Locked Door was “a terrible flop,” said Barbara. After the premiere of Mexicali Rose, she felt “the true pulse of Hollywood.”
She was honest about her feelings for the town. She hated it. She hated the pretense of the people; they were “so starry” and “so self important.” She and Fay avoided Hollywood socializing as much as possible.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 18
