Barbara’s initial prickly interview with Capra, and her powerful emotional screen test, showed the director how much of the Kay Arnold character was in the young actress.
• • •
Capra had what he thought was a fine cast for his picture. Ralph Graves, Capra’s romantic six-foot-tall leading man from Submarine and Flight, was to play the young artist. Graves was the strong, silent, sensitive hero. “A renegade who got on a freight train from New York and high-tailed it to Chicago,” is how he described himself. There he met Louella Parsons, a Chicago newspaperwoman who helped Graves get a contract with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. Graves, like Capra, trained as an engineer, turned actor, director, and writer. He’d become famous as an actor when he appeared in D. W. Griffith’s Dream Street and starred in Capra’s first picture for Columbia, That Certain Thing. It was Graves’s story about Marine Corps fliers that was used as the basis for Flight.
Also in the cast of Ladies of the Evening from Capra’s Sennett days was the comedienne Marie Prevost as Kay Arnold’s roommate and party pal, just one piker after another (“In our flat, we ain’t got much of a library: the phone book and Bradstreet”). Prevost was a former Follies girl who went from the New York theater to Mack Sennett two-reelers as a Sennett bathing beauty along with Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels. Marie Prevost made her mark a year later in 1924 in dramatic features such as Daughters of Pleasure, Cornered, and George Fitzmaurice’s Tarnish. She was first noticed as a comedienne when Ernst Lubitsch directed her in a feature-length sophisticated comedy, the first of its kind ever filmed, called The Marriage Circle, and then in Kiss Me Again. Marie Prevost had appeared in more than seventy pictures before Ladies of the Evening.
The urbane, polished Lowell Sherman had a leading role in Ladies of the Evening: the hero’s best friend, ever inebriated and out for a high time, usually still in white tie and tails at nine in the morning from the night before. Lowell’s character was to lure Kay Arnold back to her party girl days and then maybe on a sojourn to Havana.
From Ladies of Leisure, 1930. Left to right: Ralph Graves, Barbara, Lowell Sherman. The handwriting on the photograph is Barbara’s. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Sherman was one of the most sought-after feature actors around and as a result was one of the highest paid. He came from generations of theater people, his father having arranged stage effects for David Belasco. Sherman had been on the stage from the time he was a child and made his debut in pictures in 1914 in James Kirkwood’s Behind the Scenes, which starred Mary Pickford.
• • •
Joe Walker used diffusion and tricks of lighting. Most of the stars who went to Columbia were “asked to play roles much younger than their own age,” Walker said, and “soft lighting and a light diffusion [could] work wonders.”
Capra and Walker had made three silent and two talking pictures together before Ladies of the Evening. On their first picture, a comedy called That Certain Thing, Capra wanted “clear, sharp lighting, clear all the way to the corners,” but once Walker explained his reasons for the “arty effects,” Capra came to trust the cameraman. “It was the first time I met a cameraman who understood his camera,” Capra said. “He understood how it worked and he understood why it worked . . . I’d say a couple of words and he knew what the hell I wanted. He knew what I was thinking.”
Walker was much more free to move his camera about and had been since Flight. Cameras were out of their booths, housed in padded “blimps,” and were set on wooden frames and rollers, although film was still shot through glass plates. The cameras themselves had been quieted, and for exterior shots only padded camera covers were used to reduce noise.
For his work at Columbia, Walker had had to be inventive; the diffusion and tricks of lighting he used may have looked affected, but his reasons for using them were practical: the studio’s sets were “cheap and phony [and] photography had to make them look like something.”
The difference for Capra between making silent and sound pictures was enormous, and not just because of the use of dialogue.
“Suddenly [with talking pictures] we had to work in the silence of a tomb,” said Capra. “No one, while a silent picture was being shot, was quiet. Shooting of silent scenes had gone on with hammering and sawing on an adjacent set, the director yelling at actors through a megaphone, cameramen shouting, while everybody howled if the scene was funny.
“With sound, when the red light went on, everyone froze in his position—a cough or a belch would wreck the scene. To the nervous snit of the non-stage silent actors—over having to memorize lines for the first time—the funereal hush added the willies. They shook with stage fright.”
One silent-picture star said, “The silence from the studio was unbearable. There wasn’t that help from the director saying, ‘You’re doing fine, now a little faster.’ Nothing.”
• • •
Shooting on Ladies of the Evening began in mid-January 1930.
Barbara loved the role of Kay Arnold “from the start. It was so human and real,” she said.
The first time she heard her own voice on the screen she said, “My God! Who is that?”
Barbara had a great range of loudness and softness in her voice, which was a challenge to the soundman. Ed Bernds, the sound mixer on The Locked Door and Mexicali Rose, took over for Harry Blanchard as Capra’s sound mixer on Ladies of the Evening.
Barbara “was perfectly accustomed to sound, and used it,” said Bernds. “When she had a very loud scene, she would distance herself from the mike a little bit. Of course my mike man had instructions to pull the mike away from her.”
On the second day of shooting, someone asked Barbara if she was going to the rushes. She didn’t know what “rushes” meant.
“Well, you see yesterday’s work.”
Barbara thought that sounded wonderful and went off to see them. Once she saw what had been shot the day before, she looked at herself on the screen and “didn’t see anybody else, I just looked at me. I don’t know what the hell the other actors were doing, but I was fascinated with me. It was a dramatic scene.” But the cords in her neck were standing out; her hands looked odd. She thought, “Jesus, that’s an ugly thing.
“I was sick. My gestures seemed abrupt. My hands looked awkward. And I pulled my mouth to one side when I talked fast.
“The next day I waved my hands around in elaborate gestures and delivered my lines carefully.”
She was “absolutely gorgeous. There were no veins standing up, my hands were lovely and my mouth was just so.”
Capra was quiet. He didn’t make any comment. Finally, he asked Barbara if she’d been to see the rushes.
“Oh, yes. And I’ve corrected all those faults—”
“Don’t you ever dare look at yourself again. I forbid you right now to go in to see yourself. Only go later, when the thing is done. We’re going to do this morning’s work all over again.”
Capra was confident on the set. He acted as if “it was fun to make motion pictures,” Joe Walker said. “His attitude was contagious”; “in his lighthearted ‘lets-get-with-it’ manner, he knew what he wanted . . . Capra kept us hustling; he remained alert and fired with energy.” Walker was impressed with “Frank’s enthusiasm . . . his confidence in himself, the ease with which he was able to tell people what he wanted.”
When Walker and Capra began working together on their first picture, two years before Ladies of the Evening, Capra had made three feature-length pictures to Walker’s thirty-six. Capra was “different from any other director” Walker had worked with. He didn’t tell Walker what to do. But “he understood what the lens would do and what the angle was.” Capra wouldn’t tell Walker what lens to use; “he’d just say, ‘I want a couple of big heads,’ and he knew what it would look like . . . Capra wanted [the camera] to keep close on people . . . He left it to me.”
Capra was different from the two directors with whom Barbara had worked. Where George Fitzmauric
e and Erle Kenton were interested in making their actresses beautiful rather than what they did in front of the camera, Capra wanted his actors and actresses to be real, “to let a person play himself or herself,” he said. Capra talked to them about the scene and let them do what felt natural. For Barbara it was like working again with Willard Mack and Arthur Hopkins.
Where Fitzmaurice and Kenton used the camera as a recorder of a set piece, Capra saw the camera as a “ubiquitous phantom eavesdropper” on what was to seem as real as the real world. Capra used the camera to help tell his story and to punctuate it with heightened moments, just as he used sound as a critical part of the narrative.
Barbara “left her best scene the first time she did it, even in rehearsal.” What she did “was just wonderful,” Capra said. “But then she could never reproduce that scene again.” The more times Capra shot the scene, the further away Barbara got from it. “She just left it,” he said. “She was just drained. She gave it all in that one scene.”
Capra sensed that “Barbara was rehearsing mentally [and] she threw it all out at once . . . Most people get better in rehearsal,” Capra said. “She got worse.” He was amazed by this; he’d never seen it before. “Fires were bursting out of her, but they burned too fast.”
For Barbara, it was the result of hundreds of performances given before a theater audience.
“The curtain [goes] up at 8:30 and you better be good,” she said. “You don’t get a retake. You shoot for the first time. If you have an emotional scene you only have so much water in you to come out!” About the third or fourth take she was “drying up,” not because she wanted to; “it’s a physical thing that happens.”
Capra liked to rehearse his cast and crew. But to help Barbara give her best performance, he went about shooting the picture differently. Instead of a full rehearsal with cast, cameras, and sound moves worked out, the scenes with Barbara were to be rehearsed at a low level of intensity. Capra had her go through the motions with the other actors so the camera could follow their moves, but she was not “to utter one word of the scene until the cameras were rolling.”
This presented a problem for the soundmen, who didn’t get a chance to rehearse the scene for sound; somehow they managed.
Capra had Barbara’s hairdresser, Helen, give her the cues from the other actors. He went to Barbara’s dressing room before each scene to talk with her about its meaning, “the points of emphasis, the pauses.”
He talked to her about the character. “ ‘You would speak out?’ ‘No, I don’t think she would.’ ‘Well, why don’t you?’ ”
If he agreed with Barbara, he said, “ ‘Yes, that’s good, that’s the way we’ll do it.’ It was always ‘We.’ It was never ‘I, I, I,’ ” Barbara said. “It was never ‘I don’t want you to do this.’ ”
“Barbara was silent, somber,” said Capra. “She act[ed] like she [wasn’t] listening, but she hear[d] every word.”
Capra talked softly in order not to “fan the smoldering fires that lurked beneath that somber silence.” He stressed honesty; he didn’t want any emotional tricks.
Barbara felt how much Capra liked actors. She’d worked with two directors who didn’t. “You can almost smell it,” she said. She sensed that Capra liked women as well, “not in a lecherous way . . . and he didn’t demean them. If you were a hooker [in the picture], you were a hooker, but you better be a good one. That’s how you made your living.”
Barbara appreciated that when Capra came to discuss the scene, he didn’t say, “Psychologically, do you think she would—?” That was much too analytical for Barbara. “It has to be from the gut. His role was not to probe people but to watch them.”
From the quiet rehearsal sessions between Capra and Barbara, Bernds “could see a performance coming to life. A lot of times Capra didn’t even include Ralph Graves. He didn’t slight Graves, but he really worked with [Barbara].”
Capra saw in Barbara’s original test from The Noose an honesty, a power, a force, that had reached down inside and deeply stirred him. He wanted to do whatever he could to help her get to that again, and he wanted his cameras to capture it on film, to use the camera to feel the glow of her emotion as if from the inside.
Capra “attempted only one thing,” said Barbara. “To preserve the intense honesty” he saw in her test.
• • •
Ed Bernds said that Capra could make a scene better than it was written. He encouraged Barbara “to show how really deeply she felt things” and to “develop a dramatic personality which, if it hadn’t been real, might have been melodramatic. But it was real.”
As they shot, Bernds saw that “something was happening. The scenes as they were played really came to life.”
• • •
Barbara was “so happy” in her work that she “began to be reconciled to Hollywood” and to the reviews she was receiving for The Locked Door and Mexicali Rose.
As Capra went along, he shot a silent version of the picture with slight variations of a number of scenes.
Two weeks into the shooting of Ladies of the Evening, they were to film the opening scene, where Jerry Strong stops along a Long Island shore road because of a flat tire and meets Kay Arnold after she has fled a shipboard party. The shooting was to take place at night.
It was a long drive to Malibu Lake near Barbara and Fay’s where the scene was to be shot.
Capra didn’t say much to Barbara that night, but he communicated what he wanted. “Somehow,” said Ed Bernds, “he was really giving her her character.”
It was a cold February night. The scene called for a long shot of Barbara rowing ashore.
Barbara was to call out to Ralph Graves onshore. She was wearing only an evening gown. (“I blew that cattle boat in such a hurry,” says Kay Arnold, “I left my wrap.”)
The crew was bundled up. The wardrobe lady covered Barbara’s shoulders with blankets.
When Barbara was needed, “she exposed her arms and shoulders and never complained,” said Ed Bernds. “When it was over, the wardrobe lady was ready with blankets that had been warmed by the spotlights to put over Barbara.”
They shot throughout the long night until four in the morning.
Instead of telling Barbara what to feel in a scene, Capra taught her that “if you can think it,” she said, “you can make the audience know it. You can make them know what you are going to do.”
The centerpiece of Ladies of the Evening follows a scene in which Kay has posed for Jerry until the early hours of the morning. After days of his not seeing her as a woman, in fact “looking right through her” as if she were just part “of his routine like his paints and brushes,” she gets angry and says to him, “Miss Arnold, Miss Arnold, can’t you call me Kay? What am I, a statue, or a hunk of furniture? I’m a human being,” and he lovingly wipes away her tears of frustration. Once she feels his attention, her face is infused with happiness, and he sees the look he’s been longing to capture since the night they met. The first day at his studio, he tells Kay, “I can’t paint you unless I can see you. And I can’t see you with all this camouflage.”
As he takes off her makeup and peels off her eyelashes, she asks, “You want me to be homely?”
“I want you to be yourself.”
Jerry has been painting her for hours. The sound of the rain on the roof and the fire in the fireplace make the room seem warmer, safe.
It is early in the morning. Jerry suggests to Kay that she spend the night in his studio rather than go out at this late hour. Barbara is standing in front of the fire, the silhouette of her small lithe body against the light of the flames. “Oh no, I don’t want to put you out.” Her face is still, serious. Without her moving, a shadow crosses her face. She is on guard, about to bolt, but perfectly still. Jerry is carrying the sheets to make up the couch. The only sound is that of the rain. It washes down the full wall of glass of the studio.
With Frank Capra on chaise longue; Joseph Walker on camera, during production, Ladies o
f Leisure, 1930. (PHOTOFEST)
Jerry makes up the bed.
“We can get to work first thing in the morning,” he says. “But I’m glad we got started.”
Kay, in her tough way, “Yeah, we got started.”
He ignores the comment. “You’re the first young lady to spend the night in this studio.”
Kay says, “Yeah, now tell me the one about the traveling salesman; that sure would get a laugh out of me.”
The camera sees Jerry and Kay from the outside of the studio, two silhouettes seen through the rain. Then from the inside. Jerry goes to his bedroom and comes back with a pair of pajamas for her. He puts another log on the fire as he leaves and says good night. The camera is on the bedroom door as it closes.
Kay is seen against the white moonlight and the rain-washed window. Barbara betrays nothing on her face. It is still, but her manner has changed. For Kay, it’s business. She slowly walks to the light and turns it off and begins to undress against the window. She removes her skirt.
On the other side of the living room wall, Jerry has taken off first his shirt, then his pants.
Kay is seen almost in darkness in profile against the light from the window. Viewed from the outside of the studio, her figure is blurred by the rain against the windows. She removes her sweater and is in her slip.
Jerry is in his room, pacing. He walks to the door, gets a book from the shelf, and turns off the overhead light.
Kay is putting on the pajama top Jerry has given her and is getting in between the white sheets on the couch. The white light from the window bathes her, and her childlike body is made even smaller by the size of his pajama top.
Jerry is in bed and tosses aside the book; the only sound that of the wood burning in the fireplace.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 20
