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

by Victoria Wilson

  Kay stares ahead, waiting, still.

  The scene fades. It opens up again on Kay, awake in the dark.

  The sound of the clock chiming is heard three times against the stillness of the night.

  Kay hears a sound. She turns her eyes toward the bedroom door; the heat behind her eyes is palpable. The doorknob to Jerry’s bedroom is turning. She is lying still, as if her stillness will ward off his making a move toward her. The camera follows Kay’s vantage point from the couch. Jerry in slippers, robe, and pajamas walks toward her.

  The camera is on Kay’s face. She closes her eyes, pretending to be asleep, almost holding her breath. Jerry walks over to the couch lit against the window. He takes a satin throw and places it over her and gently touches her.

  He walks back to his room. Barbara’s face fills the screen. Her eyes are shimmering. Jerry closes the door behind him. She turns her head slightly toward the window, burying the edge of the throw against her mouth. Jerry is on his bed, leaning against the wooden carved headboard. Barbara’s face barely moves, but her eyes are full of happiness and wonder—and hope.

  The scene is five minutes long and silent except for the sounds of the rain and the fire and the chime of a clock, each of which Capra used for mood.

  Capra used rain in a love scene as “an exciting stimulant, an aphrodisiac.” The rain enfolds Kay Arnold and Jerry Strong and washes away the sins of her past.

  Capra had his leading characters reveal their fears, their longings, and the discovery of their love for each other without a word of dialogue. Barbara conveyed it all with hardly a trace of movement. This is the beginning of the love scene, a turning point that is completed two fraught scenes later when Jerry takes her in his arms.

  Shooting was completed on February 15, 1933. The picture was renamed Ladies of Leisure.

  SIXTEEN

  Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Love

  Fay and Michael Curtiz had stopped speaking during the production of Under a Texas Moon.

  Curtiz was smart and fast and known for his wicked tongue. Jack Warner said of him, “Curtiz is a director, not a man; when he goes out the [studio] gate, he’s nothing.” But on a picture Curtiz had a sense of rhythm and pace and knew how to get things done. He had an enormous flair for cinematic values, and Fay agreed to be directed by him again. He was getting ready to make Broadway Playboy.

  He was under contract as well to produce six song and monologue recordings a year for Brunswick Records, a Warner subsidiary.

  Fay was busy at the studio but was not among those like Al Jolson, Rin Tin Tin, George Arliss, and John Barrymore who ranked as Warner stars. His name was last in a listing of Warner featured players that began with Conrad Nagel and included H. B. Warner, Noah Beery, and Chester Morris.

  Barbara’s work in Ladies of Leisure was so strong that Capra was sure she would receive an Award of Merit from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy was three years old, the notion of Louis B. Mayer, production head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Conrad Nagel, the actor; Fred Niblo, the director; and Fred Beetson, the producer, who, while dining at Mayer’s Santa Monica beach house one Sunday night, began to talk about forming a group that could represent the motion picture industry. The idea was to create an organization that would help solve problems affecting the entire industry: technological problems, labor disputes, and the coming of censorship from outside forces. A week later, at a dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, thirty-six leaders of the film industry listened as the plan was put forward for a new organization to represent all branches of the industry. The idea was wholeheartedly embraced. The guests included Richard Barthelmess, George Cohan, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Joseph Schenck, Irving Thalberg, Raoul Walsh, and Jack Warner.

  The organization was incorporated two months later. By May the State of California granted the group its nonprofit charter. To celebrate, a banquet was held at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles that three hundred guests attended. Two hundred and thirty of them joined the academy, each writing out a check for $100. The following year, 1928, the academy asked Cedric Gibbons, art director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to design an award that would be given annually by the academy to each of the main branches of the industry in recognition of outstanding work in a motion picture. Gibbons designed an art deco statuette of a sleek, perfectly proportioned figure, thirteen and a half inches tall, weighing eight and a half pounds.

  In 1929 the academy presented an evening of awards at a dinner held at the Roosevelt Hotel. The nominees and the winners were voted on by a handful of judges; the recipients had been told three months before who would be receiving the statuettes.

  For the 1930 awards ceremony, Capra was sure Ladies of Leisure would receive an award for Best Picture and that he would be the recipient of an Award of Merit for Best Director.

  • • •

  At the beginning of April, Harry Cohn offered Barbara a three-year contract at Columbia with a starting salary of $2,000 a week that would increase to $4,000 a week by the third year.

  Despite the collapse of the stock market in November, people across the country were paying to go to the movies, in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Seattle, to see box-office successes like Romance of the Rio Grande, Untamed, So This Is College, Applause, Gold Diggers of Broadway, The Taming of the Shrew, The Virginian, Sunnyside Up, and Rio Rita. The weekly box-office receipts for most theaters were down from their high, but business was steady.

  As a result of the crash, several million jobs had been lost. From the spring of 1929 to December, the Ford Motor Company reduced the size of its staff by twenty-eight thousand. By March 1930, businesses had folded, construction had stopped, and banks had tightened up on credit.

  “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” was a song heard around the country:

  I don’t want your Rolls-Royce, mister

  I don’t want your pleasure yacht.

  All I want is food for my babies;

  Give to me my old job back.

  In the spring of 1930, Columbia was proceeding with its next roster of pictures. Harry Cohn and the board had agreed on a $10 million budget for its next twenty features and shorts that included the cartoon series Disney’s Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse, as well as Krazy Kat.

  Among the feature pictures to go into production was Rain or Shine, a Broadway musical-comedy hit that Capra wanted Cohn to buy for him. Cohn had balked at the cost of the “blowsy acrobatic musical comedy,” as Charles Brackett described it in his review in The New Yorker, but Capra wanted to work with the play’s star, Joe Cook. Cook had been described by Brooks Atkinson as “one of the great comic spirits . . . practiced and letter perfect”; Capra thought Cook was “mad, unique.”

  Capra’s plan was to drop the show’s musical numbers, have Jo Swerling write the script with Dorothy Howell, and make the picture for “peanuts” using “only one set, a small two-ring circus tent.” Cohn relented and purchased the film rights to the play.

  The studio had also bought the rights to a play called Bless You, Sister by the playwright John Meehan and the theater producer Robert Riskin, as well as an original story by Lynn Root called “Lover, Come Back to Me,” whose title was taken from a hit song from the Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II 1928 musical hit, The New Moon.

  • • •

  With the signing of Barbara’s new contract, she advanced from Columbia “featured player” to “star.”

  Columbia’s roster of stars and players, in addition to Jack Holt and Ralph Graves, included Evelyn Brent, Margaret Livingston, Sally O’Neil, Molly O’Day, Sam Hardy, Aileen Pringle, George Sidney, and Marie Prevost.

  • • •

  Fay’s second picture, Under a Texas Moon, opened to the public in Los Angeles on April 1 at the Warner Bros. Downtown Theater. Louella Parsons called the picture “a delicious bit of satire” and wrote, “In all the years the prolific and debonair Fay has been acting,
including those 10 consecutive Sunday night concerts which Fay presented alone at the Cort theatre in New York, I doubt whether Broadway’s playboy ever thought of playing a Mexican! Not only does Fay play an adventurous Mexicano in appearance, but with an accent—and what’s more, he does it well. The subtle Fay plays his character with his tongue in his cheek and does so cleverly.”

  Fay traveled to Texas to open the picture with Myrna Loy and Raquel Torres.

  His next picture for Warner was to have been Captain Applejack; instead, the studio hired John Halliday as its star. Warner was considering having Fay star in The Gay Caballero, a sequel to Under a Texas Moon, but decided against it.

  Fay, in preparation for whatever picture the studio decided would be next, had his teeth recapped.

  • • •

  Ladies of Leisure opened in Los Angeles on April 2, 1930, at the Orpheum Theatre and in New York on April 23 at the Capitol Theatre on Broadway. Variety saw the picture as “great box office.” The headline of the review in the New York American read: “Stanwyck Scores in Movie of Ladies of Leisure”; in the New York Times review, “Miss Stanwyck Triumphs.”

  The censors gave the picture a pink slip (“adults only”). The New Yorker described it as having been made “with a good deal of taste . . . excellent . . . funny, touching, always alive.” The New York Evening Journal thought the censors so toned down the picture from the play “that the screen version [could] best be described as a . . . conventional modern-clothes ‘Camille’ with a happy ending.” But Louella Parsons, in the Los Angeles Examiner, thought the “talkie version of David Belasco’s flaming play very much better than the original stage version . . . with enough punch to make it exceptionally good entertainment.” And she said that Barbara’s performance was “remarkable . . . and you understand that underneath all that hardened exterior there is a real soul. Miss Stanwyck, I prophesy, will be one of the most sought after actresses on the screen after producers see her performance.”

  The New York Herald Tribune ran an article about the Fays with a headline that read: “Barbara Stanwyck’s Career Matches That of Husband; Indeed Friends Believe She Will Surpass Frank Fay.”

  Barbara was devoted to Fay. “Frank is a big actor with a following and I’m just nobody. He deserves top billing.”

  In Los Angeles, the Fays were about town, attending parties and dining at the Mayfair, as were the most fashionable couples in Hollywood: Norma Shearer and her husband, Irving Thalberg; the Hunt Strombergs; Mr. and Mrs. Jack Warner; the Harry Cohns; the Darryl Zanucks; Lady Peel, Corinne Griffith, Constance Bennett, and Harry Rapf. Barbara and Frank attended a party given by Howard Hughes for two hundred people, following the premiere of his picture Hell’s Angels and the debut of Jean Harlow.

  Barbara was spending her days in Malibu, furnishing their cottage and spending long afternoons swimming in the ocean and walking on the beach. She had gained weight and had a glow of health from being in the sun. Those who knew her from New York said she never looked better.

  Barbara read two books that she wanted to make into movies: Theodore Dreiser’s Gallery of Women, published the year before by Horace Liveright; and Helen Grace Carlisle’s new novel just out by Harper & Brothers.

  Dreiser’s two-volume book was a series of portraits—or studies, as Dreiser called them—of modern women in and around his life caught in the grip of painful love affairs.

  Carlisle’s Mothers Cry was written in a colloquial, stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative. It portrayed the life of a simple, good, uneducated woman, from girlhood at the time of the Spanish-American War; her courtship with the man who works at the counter next to hers at a department store; their happy marriage; the births of their two boys and two girls; her years as devoted wife, mother, and widow after her husband dies in a trolley accident (like Barbara’s own mother), when the woman is left with four children to raise (as was Barbara’s father) and no means of earning a living. The novel opens out as she struggles, against all odds, to prevail on behalf of her children.

  One son grows up to be an acclaimed architect; one daughter, like her mother, marries and settles down; the other, a modern woman with modern ideas about sex and marriage, becomes a Bolshevik, determined to be a writer, who has an affair with a married man, travels alone to Europe, and returns to America to write the great American novel. The older son, always in trouble with the law, becomes involved with gangsters, shoots his sister in a quarrel, and is put to death in the electric chair.

  “Full to the brim with life,” said The New York Times. “[It] leaves an unbroken spell out of which the reader comes away feeling that he has penetrated beneath the surface of something rich and beautiful.”

  Barbara loved the book and its vitality and thought it would make a strong picture. First National bought it for $15,000. Lenore Jackson Coffee, who’d written almost forty pictures beginning in 1919, when she was twenty-three and sold her first story to the movies, adapted Helen Carlisle’s novel.

  Barbara didn’t get to play the devoted, hardworking mother. The part went to a thirty-three-year-old stage actress, Dorothy Peterson, making her debut in pictures. David Manners was the sensitive, talented architect son; Edward Woods, the troubled boy who becomes a killer.

  • • •

  During the spring of 1930, Barbara mostly enjoyed being apart from Hollywood’s social life and refused most invitations to go into town. She saw herself as not fitting in with Hollywood, a place she called “the papier-mâché town.” She was “used to having a good time” alone with Fay “or with a few close friends and, after encountering Hollywood society, preferred it that way.”

  She and Fay spent time on the beach and would wander over to Budd Schulberg’s tennis court and watch him play and make jokes. They attended a party because they were told “it was good business policy to be seen out socially.” It was given at the home of “a big executive,” said Barbara. “The cream of Hollywood society was there.

  “Almost immediately after our arrival, the men went into the card room.” Barbara was left with a group of executives’ wives and some famous stars who went into a gossip huddle and “left me sitting by myself.”

  Barbara sat there “thinking the evening would never end” and that she’d “never been treated so rudely.” The following week, she and Fay were invited back. This time Barbara brought a book.

  “I never demanded anything from anyone,” she said. But “I do expect courtesy and honesty. Every day was a struggle, but when people entered our home, they were our guests. We had little to offer but we made them welcome. Our people were terribly poor, but they had better manners than those in Hollywood. I’ve never seen people so artificial and insincere.”

  • • •

  Barbara’s work was being hailed in the press as superb, miraculous. She was being mentioned in glowing terms in the same newspapers and magazines that had previously ignored her. One magazine described her performance in Ladies of Leisure as “astonishing . . . she has the spirit of a great artist.”

  She was described in Photoplay as “a new sensation in the world of pictures . . . A star’s been born . . . a real, beautiful, thrilling wonder. Only a few years ago, Barbara Stanwyck was just one of Texas Guinan’s pretty children. Into her lap tumbled the leading role in Burlesque and she caught New York’s heart and fancy . . . So good luck Barbara. You’re in a fair way to be one of the truly greats. Keep your head!”

  During Barbara and Fay’s first months in Hollywood, “we felt our unimportance and were pretty much out of it. Every place we would turn there would be stars, Rolls Royces and all that goes with it. Frank and I [have] never found all this necessary for our happiness.”

  With Barbara’s success in Ladies of Leisure, the J. Walter Thompson Company renewed her contract for Lux soap through December 31, 1932.

  The advertisement’s tagline read: “A stage star’s charm depends so much on the beauty of her skin. She never lets anything interfere with regular care of it. Lux Toile
t Soap is certainly wonderful for keeping the skin smooth. And when you do a ‘talkie,’ the glaring lights of the close-up would show up even the tiniest flaw.”

  • • •

  In the early spring of 1930, in cities across America, the unemployed held demonstrations. Daily breadlines in New York’s Bowery were made up of two thousand people.

  On the outskirts of Detroit, three thousand unemployed workers set out for the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn and were met at the city limits by the Dearborn police, who ordered the crowd to turn back. The marchers continued to move forward up the road toward the Ford employment office building. Shots were fired into the crowd from behind a gate and from a submachine gun on an overpass. Four marchers were killed, and more than fifty were injured. Hundreds of “radicals, communists and suspected communists” were rounded up. To honor the men who’d been shot to death during the riot, six thousand people marched through the streets of Detroit in a funeral procession.

  • • •

  Fay’s studio, Warner Bros., wanted Barbara for a picture from a recently written, as yet unproduced play by Edith Fitzgerald and her companion, Robert Riskin; the studio had not yet purchased the script. The plan was to produce it as a play in New York after the film was released in key cities.

  Barbara was under contract to Columbia for three pictures. During the contract negotiations, she had made it clear to Columbia that she didn’t want to make more than three pictures a year.

  Fox Film Corporation approached Barbara to make a picture. Columbia’s Sam Briskin, assistant general manager, reminded Barbara that she was under contract to the studio and legally had no right to be in negotiation with another company. As long as production plans didn’t interfere with Columbia’s plans, Barbara thought it would be financially beneficial for her to work for another studio. Briskin discussed it with Cohn, and the studio agreed to let her make a picture with Fox.

  Warner Bros.–First National called Columbia to ask if Barbara could appear in one of its pictures. Darryl Zanuck of Warner Bros. wanted Barbara for the role of Anne Vincent in Illicit. Zanuck at twenty-eight was fierce and wily, with an unbeatable eye for a good story that could get to an audience and make them react. Barbara had read the script months before she was offered the movie and knew it was a “natural.”