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

by Victoria Wilson

  She told Briskin to tell Warner Bros. she would do the picture for $50,000, $30,000 more than she was getting from Columbia. Briskin negotiated, and Zanuck agreed to pay Columbia $35,000 for Barbara’s services in the picture, $7,000 a week from mid-July through mid-August; Columbia agreed to pass on the $35,000 in its entirety to Barbara.

  Zanuck, in addition to writing scripts, supervised many of the early Warner pictures and acted as a talent scout, bringing actors and directors to the studio—among them Michael Curtiz and Ernst Lubitsch along with Lubitsch’s assistant, Henry Blanke.

  Illicit was a twist on boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.

  The movie begins with the young romantic lead imploring his girl to marry him; she loves him, but she refuses his offer; she isn’t the marrying kind (“I know we’re very much in love,” she tells him. “It’s marriage I want to be sure of”).

  She’s a Park Avenue society girl, an unconventional, free-spirited modern young woman, the daughter of divorced parents, with her own theories about love and the institution of marriage. (“It’s disastrous to love,” she pronounces. “There’s too much about it that’s all wrong. The awful possessions people exert over each other—the intimacy—duties. Love can’t stand the strain.”) “Illicit” means illegal and unlicensed. But to Anne Vincent, it is “merely being modern.”

  Barbara saw Anne Vincent as someone who “believes in the new declaration of women’s sex independence—Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Love.” She wants freedom and love but not a husband. She wants to be a playmate of love, not a prisoner of marriage. “Anne Vincent is a girl deeply in love. She is the girl who thinks the wedding ring will kill love.”

  “Her drama,” said Barbara, “is that of the ‘advanced or new woman’ who has made her position in society more secure through the freedom women had abrogated to themselves during the war.”

  Anne Vincent’s beau, Dick, is as in love with her as she is with him. He, though, is ruled by convention and wants desperately to get married. Dick’s father begs Anne to do as society demands. “You can’t lick the marriage institution,” he says to her. “You’ve been within the gates [of the good opinion of society], so you don’t know what it is to be on the outside. The moment you desecrate those sacred marriage laws, you’ll find out. They’ll pounce, Anne. They’ve already pounced.”

  Anne reluctantly agrees to marry Dick after being blissfully with him in sin and freedom for six months. She sends away her former suitor; Dick reassures his former girlfriend that she will find “someone to love—much more than you did me”; and Anne and Dick’s wedding is the “social event of the season.”

  The picture begins with the couple living happily ever after. They winter in New York in their East Sixties town house and summer at the family estate in Glen Cove, Long Island. They no longer spend their evenings alone; instead, they give formal dinners in their perfectly appointed dining room or attend the theater with friends.

  After two years, everything Anne feared has come to pass: she is bored; Dick has wearied of marital ties. She chafes under his simultaneous husbandly devotion and neglect; he begins to have an affair. She feigns indifference to his constant late-night, early-morning “business dinners,” his lies about his dinner companions, until she catches him in a lie and hates herself more that she has deliberately caught him. (“It’s all come true, Dick, just as I said it would. It’s living together in the same house, going to the same places, doing the same things, the intimacy that makes you helpless and dependent on one another.”)

  Rather than live in a burned-out marriage, Anne decides to take back her maiden name, move out, reopen her apartment, become an individual again, and win back her husband as her lover.

  • • •

  Columbia’s agreement with Warner Bros. stipulated that Barbara’s name was to be two-thirds the size of the film’s title; no name was to precede hers in the billing or be larger than hers.

  Illicit was to be directed by the talented Archie Mayo, who had overseen musicals, dramas, and comedies and who’d been at Warner Bros. for three years. Mayo before that had worked as a gagman and an extra in films and as a director of shorts.

  Barbara was to start work on Illicit a week after the agreement between Columbia and Warner was signed. A telegram came from her sister Maud telling her that their sister Mabel had been taken to Hackensack hospital due to an intestinal blockage.

  Barbara followed Mabel’s progress. The surgery was a success, but an infection developed. Gene stayed close to his mother’s bed. Mabel hoped to be going home soon, but the infection lingered. Peritonitis set in.

  Barbara came home from her first day of shooting to a telegram from Maud saying that Mabel had died earlier in the day.

  Fay wired back to Gene and Mabel’s husband, “Barbara’s heart is broken.”

  Because she had just started shooting Illicit she wouldn’t be able to go to the funeral service.

  Barbara’s grief over the loss of her sister went deep. Mabel was gentle and the quietest of the Stevens family. Barbara was convinced that her sister had been “butchered in [the] operation,” that the doctors had perforated her gastrointestinal tract. “[Mabel] was young. She had so much to live for,” Barbara said.

  Mabel had died at forty. Their mother, Catherine Stevens, had died at the age of forty-one, when Mabel was twenty-one years old and Barbara was four. Their father had left home when Barbara was five. Barbara was now twenty-three. Her parents were dead, and the youngest of her three older sisters was gone.

  Barbara somehow got around her deep feelings of grief and showed a new ease and confidence in her work in Illicit.

  She arrived at the studio each morning at seven o’clock to go through her lines with a script girl. Whenever Barbara thought the dialogue was slow and in need of a “good place for a wise-crack,” she added one. Mayo didn’t object, and much of Barbara’s witty dialogue in the picture was written in those early morning sessions.

  To help the actors record their voices, Mayo used a pitch pipe during the shooting to test the note at which the words recorded at their best. He had shot sixteen pictures for the studio (many of them silents; Zanuck thought Mayo was one of the best titlers in the business) and directed such actresses as Belle Bennett, Pauline Frederick, Betty Bronson, Dolores Costello, Irene Rich, and Myrna Loy.

  Before shooting a scene, Mayo blew the correct pitch for each actor, who used the note as the starting-off place to begin to speak.

  The stage actor James Rennie, then married to Dorothy Gish, played Barbara’s husband, Dick Ives.

  Adding a comedic element to Illicit was Joan Blondell as Anne’s roughneck playgirl pal, Dukie. (“[Joan’s] career was pre-determined,” said Barbara. “She was born to the stage; her father was Eddie Blondell, the Katzenjammer Kid. Her mother, brother and sister helped her father in what constituted the family act and as soon as Joan was able to toddle, she too was initiated.”)

  Joan was blond and blue-eyed with a big smile and played a blowsy, knowing, good-hearted party girl who’s seen it all.

  Like Barbara, Joan, at seventeen, had made her debut in New York in the Ziegfeld Follies. Joan had seen Barbara in Burlesque. “I was never so overcome in my life,” she said of Barbara and Hal Skelly. “Never again have I experienced anything like it. [She] made me cry, laugh, want to hug her.”

  During the shooting of Illicit, Joan and Barbara became friends.

  When Jack Warner first began to consult with Zanuck about the kinds of movies the studio should make and who should star in them, Raymond Schrock, then Warner’s head of production, told the Warners that they needed to choose between himself and Zanuck. They chose Zanuck, offering him in 1925 the position of supervisor of pictures and meeting his demand for a salary of $260,000 a year. In addition, Zanuck wanted to be given screen credit on all Warner Bros. productions. The credit was to read: “Warner Bros. Presents A Darryl F. Zanuck Production.” Warner agreed and, given the new title, advised the twenty-thr
ee-year-old Zanuck: “Even if you don’t need glasses, get some window panes and grow a mustache. It’ll give you a little age.”

  Virginia and Darryl Zanuck, 1925. He left his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, a discharged soldier of sixteen who’d survived the Great War with dreams of being a writer. By the age of twenty-five, he was made head of production of the four-year-old Warner Bros. (PHOTOFEST)

  Mayo kept his crew amused on Illicit and was able to get a lighthearted quality in the work. He was appealing, clever at gags, with a light touch, and loved to make people laugh. He was round with thick glasses, a graduate of Columbia University, who’d worked on the stage, trying his hand at jazz songs and melodies and writing the book and lyrics for a Broadway musical revue, Hello, Paris.

  He relied on the actor to know his or her job, just as he relied on the cameramen and the engineers to know theirs.

  Barbara had little direction, but Mayo knew how to time a line and a scene, and Barbara responded well. His sense of light sophisticated comedy came through in her work and in the picture, and Barbara puts across a playfulness in the simplest manner. Joan Blondell said of Barbara’s work, “What she did, she did on her own.” She takes her time, and a strength from deep down comes through. The self-assurance of the character is clear, as is her wit and belief in her own ideas.

  Barbara was able to draw upon herself and what she’d learned from Bill Mack, Arthur Hopkins, Fay, and Capra to achieve simplicity on the screen. In its own quiet way, Illicit was a defining picture of Barbara’s style. The work was stripped down, but it had feeling, humor, and depth.

  Several weeks into production, Warner purchased the rights to Fitzgerald and Riskin’s play, Illicit, for $30,000. The picture cost the studio $249,000 to make.

  • • •

  During the weeks that Barbara shot Illicit at Warner Bros., the studio embarked on a massive $4 million renovation. The Warner plant on Sunset Boulevard was being consolidated with its new acquisition from Fox West Coast Theatres, First National, whose stars included Colleen Moore, Richard Barthelmess, Loretta Young (first discovered by Colleen Moore), Billie Dove, Kay Francis, and Conrad Nagel.

  The Warner studio was not being dismantled, but $400,000 of its electrical equipment was being moved to Burbank. In the future, Warner’s original stages were to be used for filming shorts, recording on Warner’s Brunswick label, and rehearsing ensembles.

  Eleven new stages were being built at First National Studios in Burbank in addition to the studio’s ten, Warner’s five, and Vitagraph’s six (two of them outdoors). Warner was building what would be the biggest electrical plant in the industry. It was putting up a building for additional dressing rooms, as well as buildings for pre-duping, a two-story scene dock, a staff shop, a foundry, and a paint shop. A new restaurant was being built on the First National lot to accommodate more than eleven hundred people and would be catered by Herb Sanborn, owner of the Brown Derby.

  A bridge was designed to connect the First National lot of 85 acres to the Warner Bros. Ranch (formerly, the Lasky Ranch) of 116 acres, along with the Warner studio, which sat on 12 acres of land.

  The new Warner Bros.–First National Studio would be made up of more than 130 buildings—with thirty-two soundstages—on 231 acres of land. Warner Bros. in 1932, formally incorporated seven years earlier, would be the biggest of all the studios in stage space and acreage, with a value of $30 million.

  SEVENTEEN

  On Her Own

  During the early weeks of shooting Illicit, Warner released Frank Fay’s third picture, The Matrimonial Bed. Michael Curtiz directed Seymour Hicks’s screen adaptation of Yves Mirande and André Mouëzy-Éon’s French farce. In it were also Lilyan Tashman, Florence Eldridge, and James Gleason.

  Fay played a French gentleman about town who five years before was believed to have died in a train wreck and now, as a hairdresser, is the double of a Parisian widow’s former husband. At a dinner party at her house, one of the guests, a doctor, hypnotizes the hairdresser, who, when he is brought out of his trance, it is revealed, is indeed the first husband. He recognizes his wife, is unaware of his present life as a hairdresser, and is equally unaware that he is the lover of both servant girls in his first wife’s house.

  A series of whirlwind triangles unfold as the picture races to its “uproarious, rollicking” conclusion. Warner Bros. tried to sell The Matrimonial Bed as a bedroom romp for adult and sophisticated moviegoers: a gay French farce set in Paris, “the city of beautiful nonsense, where only the river is Seine.”

  For the most part, the critics thought the picture “missed fire.” The New Yorker described The Matrimonial Bed as “preposterous and grotesque and disappointing.”

  • • •

  Barbara was worried about her nephew now that Mabel was gone. Gene was motherless. Barbara knew what it felt like to be motherless, and she kept up with Gene’s comings and goings. He was staying with his stepfather in an apartment in Flatbush, and enrolled in Erasmus Hall High School.

  Barbara was living life in Hollywood her own way, trying to block out as much of it as she could, and Hollywood didn’t know what to make of her. She was being talked about as “the coming big star, another Norma Talmadge,” with her work being embraced by the town. In her own way, she made it clear she didn’t want to belong; she’d never felt she belonged anywhere and was uncomfortable around most people except when she was working.

  She quietly tried to evade most of the town’s customs. She wasn’t interested in a large social life and stayed away from parties, where she felt for the most part like a “frozen rabbit.” Whatever trappings of Hollywood life she was expected to take on she tried to minimize. She didn’t glamorize herself and wasn’t interested in getting into evening gowns. She wore no makeup, only lipstick. The flaunting of money and the Hollywood custom of excluding people of a seemingly lesser class—those who worked on her pictures as assistants and hairstylists and technicians—frustrated her. The expectation that she would adhere to this caste system made her all the more defiant. In truth, Barbara saw herself as part of the working class, who were more often than not, to her, free from pretension and social affect.

  “The two best friends I have in this town are a young married couple who haven’t a dime,” she said. “They probably never will have. Their names will never twinkle in electric lights. But they’re real. I’d rather spend an evening with them than go to the best Mayfair party ever given.”

  Barbara had no illusions about the art of moving pictures; to her it was “a racket,” and she had every intention of getting to the top of it. And she wanted Fay to be part of it with her.

  She and Fay were well matched. They kept to themselves and were even more tightly bound to each other by what they saw as Hollywood’s “exclusive” ways.

  Frank was an erratic but heavy drinker. And Barbara’s flashes of temper and moodiness could be just as erratic as his drinking.

  Barbara felt a deep gratitude for Fay’s love and guidance and for the way in which she believed he’d educated her. “Everything I know of etiquette, of books and art and people and the world around me,” she said. “I was nothing until Fay came along and I would have been nothing a great deal longer if he had never come along.”

  Fay had appeared on the same vaudeville bill with Fred and Adele Astaire, Judith Anderson, Ethel Barrymore, Lahr and Mercedes, Señor Angel Cansino performing with Helen Dobbin and Rita Mayon, as well as Johnny Dooley, Bobby Dale, and Barbara’s champion Buck Mack from her days traveling with her sister Millie. Hal Skelly had appeared on the same bill with Fay at the Palace in 1926, the year before he began to work with Barbara in Burlesque. Fay had appeared on the stages of most New York theaters—the Winter Garden, the Shubert, the Alvin, the Cort—and in theatrical productions from The Passing Show of 1918 and Oh, What a Girl! to Jim Jam Jems and The Smart Alec.

  Barbara loved to read. It had always been both a great escape for her and the way to educate herself. She read a book a day, and now that
they had the money, she and Frank began to collect first editions.

  • • •

  Fay agreed at the last minute to return to New York to appear at the Palace Theatre for two weeks. Included in the RKO contract was an agreement to appear free of charge on its Friday night NBC radio broadcast. Fay failed to show up for rehearsal at 10:30 a.m. RKO threatened to cancel his contract, but Frank was able to talk the studio out of it, claiming laryngitis.

  Fay’s last movie, The Matrimonial Bed, had not been a success. The picture cost $208,000 to make and grossed just more than $241,000 in box-office sales.

  Fay phoned Barbara from New York each night. He could afford the large telephone bill; he was being paid $4,000 a week for the two-week booking, but the effects of the stock market crash were beginning to be seen around New York.

  Playhouses along Forty-Second Street had been forced to convert to movie theaters. The legitimate theaters were empty. Five thousand Broadway theater actors were out of work. The Shubert brothers, seemingly untouched by the fall of the stock market, were coming to the rescue of producers such as Al Woods, Charles Dillingham, and the Selwyns, each of whom was losing vast amounts of money.

  The Shubert brothers were putting on more than twenty new productions for the season, but the number of unemployed was growing.

  To help those out of work, the International Apple Shippers Association came up with the idea of selling apples on credit for $1.75 a crate. The apples were to be sold individually on the street at a nickel apiece; if all of the apples in a crate were sold, the hawker could make $1.85. Soon six thousand people were on New York’s streets selling apples.