“When you’re a failure,” said Barbara, “you’re just so much scum.”
“In the eyes of the Hollywood crowd, I was nothing,” said Barbara. “They couldn’t see me for dust.”
FIFTEEN
A Primitive Emotional
Columbia Pictures’ newly released Flight was its most ambitious film yet, an adventure story about Marine Corps fliers sent to Central America to destroy Nicaraguan guerrilla rebels. The picture, using U.S. government fighter bombers and top marine fliers, showed spectacular flying sequences.
It opened in New York in September 1929, six months before Ladies of the Evening was set to be filmed.
Flight was a major success for the struggling studio, as well as for the picture’s young director, Frank Capra. It was Capra’s second big success for the studio in ten months, the follow-up to Submarine, his, and Columbia’s, first big success and the studio’s most expensive picture to date, filmed with a budget of $150,000, five times the cost of most Columbia pictures.
Capra was thirty-one years old. He’d worked for Jack Cohn at CBC Film Sales Company on Screen Snapshots when the company was jokingly known as “Corned Beef and Cabbage.” Before that, he had drifted for a couple of years, knocking on doors as a salesman when he needed money, selling books, appearing as a “naive, . . . shy, scared little guy,” then selling phony mining stocks to unsuspecting farmers and their wives. He’d traveled across the country and “got a real sense of small towns . . . of America.”
He taught ballistics mathematics as an army instructor during the Great War, and worked in a film lab for a year and a half, developing, printing, drying, and splicing as he “ate, slept, and dreamed celluloid.”
• • •
Capra had worked as a gag writer and comedy director. He’d worked for a few weeks as a writer for the Hal Roach Studios inventing plots for the Our Gang series, using his own background from the Los Angeles streets, and watching other directors like Leo McCarey work.
Fired by Roach, Capra went to Mack Sennett studios. Sennett was a disciple of D. W. Griffith’s.
Frank Capra, circa 1930. (PHOTOFEST)
During the year and a half that Capra stayed with Sennett, he wrote twenty-five pictures and learned everything he could about comedy: “timing, construction, the building of a gag, the surprise heaping of ‘business on business’ until you top it all off with the big one—the ‘topper.’ ” He wrote gags for every type of Sennett picture: the chase, the romantic melodrama, the mock adventure story, the romantic comedy.
Harry Cohn had heard about Capra from the former Sennett leading man Ralph Graves, then directing pictures at Columbia. Graves had starred in five adventure comedies written or co-written by Capra and thought him “a delightful guy” and “a wonderful director” and let Cohn know. But Capra was told that Cohn found him on a list of unemployed directors when he came upon Capra’s name, beginning with C, near the top.
• • •
Capra saw from the outset that Columbia was “not a place for the weak or the meek.” It was a place that “measured you not by what you could do,” Capra said, “but by how you did it under Cohn’s bullying.”
Cohn was a new type of moviemaker Capra hadn’t met before: “tough, brassy, [an] untutored buccaneer.” Cohn may have been a boor whose “faults were legion,” Capra said, but “he was not stupid.”
During the two years Capra and Cohn worked together, they were constantly at odds with each other. Capra never let Cohn win “one single argument,” knowing that if Cohn got the better of a person, “[Cohn] would throw you out . . . It was a crude way to run a studio but it got results . . . on the simple theory that an artist with courage and guts should know more about what he’s doing than the sensitive ones who are unsure. Cohn didn’t want any unsure people around him.”
In the months that Capra was at Columbia before Submarine, he’d directed six inexpensive quickies, as well as a picture starring Ben Lyon for First National, For the Love of Mike, that lost most of the money invested in it, and two successful Harry Langdon pictures, The Strong Man and Long Pants. In the quickies for Columbia, Capra pulled away from comedy and “experimented with heavy drama” in an effort to learn how to convey on film “the delicate nuances [and] moods of dramatic conflict.”
Cohn’s crudeness and gambler’s instincts and Capra’s cockiness, storytelling know-how, understanding of people, and determination to “master the new, universal language of film” combined to turn around the fortunes of Columbia Pictures.
When Capra took over the shooting of Submarine, he hadn’t had much experience directing feature-length dramas or adventures. He’d put together short films for amateurs—cutting film, teaching himself how to tell a story. He’d worked as a propman, a “magician who grabs things out of the air . . . producing the impossible now.” He trusted that D. W. Griffith’s advice to Erich von Stroheim—“Take the job but don’t do it the way they tell you. Do what you want”—was the way for him to go.
On his first day as director of Submarine, Capra insisted on a realism actors were hardly used to. The studio’s pasty makeup was removed from the actors’ faces. Jack Holt’s hairpiece was taken off; the pristine uniforms of “musical comedy actors” were replaced with what looked like the real thing. Right away Capra brought a natural look to the picture that the camera intensified.
• • •
Ladies of the Evening was Capra’s eleventh picture for the studio within two years.
Harry Cohn was worried about how Barbara would photograph. He thought she wasn’t pretty enough, and certainly not at all glamorous. Cohn had Joseph Walker, Columbia’s head cameraman and the cameraman on Ladies of the Evening, make an “all-out” test of Barbara and do everything he could to glamorize her. “Glamour was a key word with [Cohn],” Walker said. “And little wonder. He found it paid off handsomely at the box office.”
Walker had been with Columbia for two years, since 1927. He expected the worst from Cohn. When he was first brought to the studio by the director George Seitz to replace Columbia’s cameraman, J. O. Taylor, on The Warning, Walker was told by Taylor in Harry Cohn’s office, “Regardless of how fast you work, this guy [Cohn] wants you to work faster. He sees the rushes, takes every scene to pieces, an’ gives you hell. Believe me, when I finish this picture I’ll never set foot in this studio again. If you can work for this son-of-a-bitch, more power to you.”
Walker was impressed with Cohn and agreed to take the job. Six pictures later he told Capra what Cohn had in mind with Barbara’s test. Capra asked Walker to make the test using a sequence from Ladies of the Evening.
Barbara “had everything in her favor,” said Walker. “High cheek bones, a face that responded to light, and she was young.” Walker made the test, “shooting several tight close-ups, and made her look beautiful.” He thought Barbara looked “gorgeous” and ran the test for Capra.
The director was silent.
“I thought she looked great,” Walker said. “What’s wrong?”
“Joe, she looks marvelous. But I’ve an idea we’re losing something.” Capra went on. “With the right handling, she could come forth with a lot of fire and talent. I’m afraid we’re hiding it under all that beauty. Let’s throw out the test and make another—one without the glamour; show her as she really is and I think she will be great.”
Walker was concerned that when Cohn saw the test of a simple, unadorned Barbara Stanwyck, he would be “right out on Gower Street looking for a job.”
“If that happens,” Capra assured him, “I’ll be right out there with you.”
Walker went ahead and made the test. In it Barbara looked natural and beautiful and much more dramatic than she did with all of the makeup.
Capra had written the script for Flight and adapted Gropper’s Ladies of the Evening. He sent out copies to the studio’s staff writers hoping that the responses to the script would offer “little ‘hints’ . . . offhand first impressions” about consistency and char
acter that would be more useful to him “than ten-page critiques.”
A meeting was called in Cohn’s office.
Harry Cohn resembled Mussolini. In fact, he was an admirer of the Fascist leader and modeled his large office after the dictator’s. On one side of Cohn’s desk was a screen that led to a door of a steam room. On the other side was a screen that went to various dressing rooms where Cohn could visit with his stars.
During the meeting in Cohn’s office, someone started to read aloud Capra’s script in a singsong voice; no one appeared to be listening. Cohn was telephoning, looking out the window, writing on a pad. At the end of the reading, Cohn asked for reactions. Everyone thought the script was great. Capra was sitting next to Cohn and was clearly pleased. One of the newly hired writers, a newspaperman and playwright from New York who hadn’t yet been introduced to Capra, said he thought the script was “terrible; [that] it was the worst piece of drivel he had ever heard in his life.”
Jo Swerling, 1939. Columbia brought him to Hollywood with three other writers, Paul Harvey Cox; Elmer Harris; and Herbert Ashton, Jr., none of whom knew what they “were in for. The money looked good and [they] figured it was a reasonably promising gamble.” (PHOTOFEST)
“The piece stunk when Belasco produced it as [a play],” the writer said. “And it will stink [as a movie]. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable—and dull.”
Capra looked at the writer and saw “a squat, heavy-set, seething young man, furiously chain-smoking strong White Owl cigars . . . His thick glasses so enlarged his watery blue eyes he looked like a mad white owl himself.” Jo Swerling had been brought out from New York by Columbia Pictures under a six-week contract and had been at the studio for only a couple of weeks. Swerling read aloud from the fifty notes he’d made about Capra’s script. Silence followed. After the meeting, Cohn called out Swerling’s name; he was sure he would be fired.
Swerling looked at the man who had been sitting next to Cohn. “Meet Mr. Capra,” Cohn said. “It was his script you were criticizing.”
Cohn asked Swerling if he thought he could improve Capra’s script.
Swerling, a playwright, said he could. He’d been a reporter, editorial writer, columnist, and critic working for Hearst newspapers for twelve years. He started at the Chicago Herald and Examiner, sitting at a desk which adjoined that of Charles MacArthur, both on rewrite battery. At the Herald and Examiner, Swerling wrote a popular comic strip, Gallagher and Shean, based on the famous vaudeville stars.
Once Swerling was in Hollywood and got to the studio, he was “ignored as completely as the forgotten man.”
• • •
Swerling took Capra’s script and went to his hotel, locked himself in his room, and “pounded out a rewrite story of the plot he heard” as he would “a newspaper yarn with a longer deadline than usual.” He interrupted his writing “long enough for [only] black coffee, sandwiches and brief snatches of sleep.” Five days later Swerling brought his revised pages to the studio. Capra thought they were “magnificent—human, witty, poignant.”
Swerling knew how to take a story and tell it.
• • •
The premise of Milton Herbert Gropper’s 1924 play takes its cue from Pygmalion: a rich sculptor and idealist makes a bet with his fellow club members that he can transform the ways of a prostitute through kindness. The artist believes that a prostitute is only a victim of circumstances and environment and can be saved if treated with love and care; his colleagues scoff at the idea. To win the bet, he hires a streetwalker as a model, brings her to his studio, and sets out to prove his theory by ignoring her as a sexual being. The artist’s best friend, with the artist’s consent and with no break in their friendship, tries to lure the model back into her old life. The model instead falls in love with the sculptor and becomes spiritually uplifted; eventually, her love is returned. She finds out she is the subject of a wager and goes back to prostitution, until the fourth act, when the two lovers are reunited.
The play, staged and produced by David Belasco, was regarded as a “curry of sensationalism” but one that gave audiences what they wanted. It followed the trend that began two years before with Rain, which starred Jeanne Eagels, and continued with Robert Edmond Jones’s production of Desire Under the Elms, starring Walter Huston and Mary Morris.
Ladies of the Evening “went the limit as far as vocabulary, characterizations and story are concerned.” Some thought the play was a “violation of the canon of propriety,” written in “the language of the gutter; tawdry, cheap, sensational.” One critic wrote, “Things were said and done in Ladies of the Evening that should not be said and done in private, much less in public”; another called it a “shrewd frame-up calculated to hook the sex-tourist.”
The play was about sex and redemption. Capra was drawn to its idea of hope and change.
Swerling kept the basic idea of the rich artist as idealist, got rid of the girl as prostitute, and made her a “party girl” (“Brother, that’s my racket. I’m the one you call if you need a filler-in. That’s how I make my living”). He took out the notion of the wager and framed the script in more straightforward human terms.
The two main characters in the script are transformed by each other: she wishing she “could be born all over again so I could wait for you to come along”; he finding the inspiration in her to break out of his rigid society with its ideas and expectations of right and wrong and follow his heart and dreams.
Swerling knew how to write dialogue and make it human and poetic and, at the same time, sound real.
He saw the Ladies of the Evening script as “the old Camille story [that needed] a new twist.” He has the railroad magnate father demand of his son that he give up the girl (“I’ve gone to the trouble of looking you up,” the father says to her. “You’re not a model at all”) and has the young man’s mother go, unbeknownst to her son, to the girl’s apartment (“I must fight for him. That’s what mothers are for”) and implore the girl to consider what will happen once people know the truth about her past (“I’m not here to judge you . . . I understand that you love him . . . but people won’t. His friends will all slip away. He won’t blame you but you’ll think it’s your fault”).
Swerling, like Capra, used class and hypocrisy to show what they could do to people. Capra had grown up in a Sicilian ghetto in Los Angeles and hawked newspapers as a boy; he’d come to this country with his parents by boat when he was six. He saw his way out of the ghetto through education: he finished grammar school, earned his way through Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles by playing the banjo, and studied chemical engineering at Throop College of Technology, which “changed his whole viewpoint on life, from [that] of an alley rat . . . to that of a cultured person.”
Jo Swerling was an immigrant like Capra who came to America when he was four years old. Swerling’s Russian-born family had barely escaped a religious massacre and had been forced to flee their village of Berdichev. Like Capra’s, his family in America was poor. Swerling also sold newspapers as a boy: New York’s dailies in the old Tenderloin district, on Broadway and Forty-Sixth Street.
Capra thought himself “a rebel against conformity” who saw “the individual as the hope of the world”; his “goal as a youth was to leap across the tracks—to rise above the muck and meanness of peasant poverty” and to achieve “freedom from established caste systems.”
Swerling saw hope and goodness in the individual and despised what the rich did to their own and to others. He saw them as a closed society that imprisoned and stultified those in it, that allowed little chance for the individual to get at what was honest and real and good in himself and others.
In the script for Ladies of the Evening, Swerling played up the element of the rich and powerful who allow their boundaries to be threatened for only so long and then, in the name of love, swoop down to crush those individuals, even their own, who dare to upset the rules.
The young model, after telling the artist’s
mother that her son is the only man she has ever loved and being told in response that her love for him will ruin him, agrees to give him up. “You win,” the girl tells his mother. “You always win. You won a long time before I met Jerry. Long before any of us were born, you won.”
Kay Arnold is the party girl, the lady of the evening, a tart. To Jerry Strong’s idealism and dreaminess, Kay Arnold’s view of the world is grounded, hard, literal.
The painter is drawn to the openness he sees on her face as she sleeps against his shoulder early one morning driving back from Long Island and is inspired to “see if he can put it on canvas.” (“She was a strange sort of girl,” he tells his mother. “She had a mask on like everybody else but underneath she had hope.”)
When Kay is posing, Jerry asks her to “look up, higher and higher, [to] imagine the stars” in order to capture the look he saw on her face the night she slept against his shoulder. Kay can’t imagine the stars; she only sees the ceiling.
“Look through the ceiling,” he tells her. “And visualize the sky, the universe, stardust.”
Kay can’t afford to imagine. She has to make money to eat and have a roof over her head.
Jerry Strong is an idealist who follows his own instincts, isn’t at all taken with the goings-on of his set, but understands it, has grown up with it, and plans to marry inside it. His apartment is a perfect blend of both worlds: a modest painter’s space and a Fifth Avenue penthouse with an expansive terrace garden and a full wall of skylight windows for the best northern light.
Capra was drawn to the individuality of the young man, his impulse to dream, his romanticism, his refusal to embrace the pragmatic route, business, power, and influence, for what appears to be the half-baked notion of earning a living as an artist.
He was drawn to the toughness of the girl, her spirit, her streetwise grit that allows her to see right through the high-hat ways of Jerry Strong’s world, her tenderness and purity of feeling that come through full throttle once allowed to be seen. Capra saw Barbara in Kay Arnold. He saw her as “a natural actress” and “a primitive emotional” and “let her play herself, no one else.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 19
