• • •
The first of Barbara’s three pictures for Columbia, Roseland, was to be directed by Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore’s work in silent pictures had been waning, but talking pictures helped to resurrect his career. Of his early work in Hollywood, Barrymore said, “In the years between 1912 and 1917 I made an enormous number of motion pictures. I am, it suddenly occurs to me, a pioneer and possibly a kind of landmark in the industry. I was in Hollywood before a number of people, including Douglas Fairbanks, came and had their careers and finished, and I’m still here.”
Barrymore’s voice was rich, theater trained. He had no fear of the microphone, nor of talking pictures. His first talking picture, The Lion and the Mouse, was made on loan to Warner Bros. and was a big hit. Barrymore’s studio, Metro, was one of the last to incorporate sound.
Louis B. Mayer saw how confident Barrymore was about his voice and the new technology and asked him to direct a picture rather than act in it. Barrymore said that Mayer and Thalberg probably reasoned, “Well, this fellow ran with that theatrical crowd in New York. Maybe he knows a thing or two. We will make him a director.”
The first picture Barrymore directed was a remake of the French melodrama Madame X. The picture was a success. Barrymore was nominated for the academy’s Award of Merit for his direction, and Ruth Chatterton was nominated for her performance as Jacqueline Floriot.
Next, Mayer assigned Barrymore to direct the great matinee idol John Gilbert in his second talking picture, His Glorious Night. Gilbert was one of the biggest stars on the Metro lot. But Mayer and Gilbert had had a terrible row on Gilbert’s wedding day when his bride-to-be, Greta Garbo, stood him up.
Gilbert and Garbo were to have been married in a double wedding at the Beverly Hills home of Marion Davies. The director King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman were neighbors of Gilbert’s and had long planned to be married. Two weeks before the wedding, both couples were having dinner together. Gilbert, who frequently proposed to Garbo in public, did so again. This time Garbo had said yes. She’d said yes once before but had got as far as the steps of city hall before she’d changed her mind. This time she’d consented in front of witnesses and suggested that the double wedding be kept a secret from the press.
On the morning of the wedding, Gilbert saw Garbo pulling out of the driveway. Later in the day, when it was time to leave for Marion Davies’s, Garbo had not yet returned from her morning outing. Gilbert drove to Davies’s Spanish hacienda hoping Garbo would have driven directly there. Garbo had not yet arrived.
While the wedding guests stood around talking, waiting for Garbo, Vidor stalled and made phone calls for as long as he could. Eleanor Boardman asked the photographer to take pictures, but finally she quietly told Gilbert they would have to go ahead with the ceremony. Gilbert was beside himself. Mayer, who’d been in the guest bathroom, came out and walked over to Gilbert, slapped him on the back, and said, “What’s the matter with you, Gilbert? What do you have to marry her for? Why don’t you just fuck her and forget about it.”
Mayer’s remark gave Gilbert the perfect outlet for his fury. Gilbert went for Mayer, who fell backward through the door of the bathroom, knocking his head on the wall and losing his glasses. Gilbert was hitting Mayer’s head against the tile wall as Eddie Mannix, a New Jersey Irish tough and former bouncer and Mayer’s general manager, second in command, and keeper of the peace at Metro, quickly pushed his way into the room and separated the men. Mannix, who had the seemingly jovial manners of a police chief but could just as easily put a bullet in one, picked up Mayer’s glasses and wiped his face with a towel.
“You’re finished, Gilbert,” Mayer shouted. “I’ll destroy you if it costs me a million dollars.”
Mayer was a great hater, and the full force of his hatred would now be focused on John Gilbert and destroying the studio’s romantic idol.
Mayer wanted Barrymore to direct Gilbert’s first full-length talking picture, Redemption. Barrymore was in constant debt to Mayer. He frequently borrowed money against his salary and relied on Mayer to bail him out of tight financial circumstances. Midway through the filming of Redemption, Barrymore was replaced by Fred Niblo. When Gilbert saw the finished product, he tried to buy the prints and negatives with the intention of destroying them in the waters off Catalina Island. The studio refused to scrap the picture but agreed to postpone its release.
Mayer asked Barrymore to direct Gilbert in the movie that the studio now planned to be Gilbert’s first talking picture.
His Glorious Night was based on Olympia, a light comedy by Ferenc Molnár, about Viennese society, in which Gilbert was to play an elegant, romantic cavalry officer, a dashing figure equally adept with women and horses. The screenplay, which was largely Molnár’s script, was written by Willard Mack.
His Glorious Night received positive reviews from the critics, who said Gilbert “was to be congratulated on the manner in which he handles his speaking voice”; that Gilbert “could not have found a more entertaining vehicle for his talking debut than this delightful comedy”; and that “Mr. Gilbert . . . can speak the English language and speak it beautifully.”
But women in moving picture audiences weren’t as accepting of Gilbert’s performance. Instead of inspiring women to fantasize as they watched Gilbert on-screen, “the love scenes are so intense,” one critic wrote, that “they make the women let out nervous giggles.”
Gilbert was being laughed at by female audiences across the country. In silent pictures he had been looked upon as the essence of male virility. Now, in his first sound picture, he was provoking laughter and discomfort. In addition, some thought his voice didn’t sound masculine; this was ruining his image as the world’s greatest lover.
Those who worked with Gilbert knew his demise began with the aborted Vidor-Gilbert double wedding and continued with Louis B. Mayer’s choice of Lionel Barrymore as the director of Gilbert’s first two talking pictures.
Hedda Hopper, an actress in His Glorious Night, said, “I watched John Gilbert being destroyed on the sound stage by one man, Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore had plenty of experience on the stage; Gilbert had none.
“During the picture, Lionel was in physical misery. He had a bad hip and took drugs to ease the pain. Around four p.m. when he’d inch himself out of his chair, it took a good minute before he could start the locomotion of his legs.”
Gilbert’s opening speech in the second reel began with “Oh, beauteous maiden, my arms are waiting to enfold you. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
By then in pictures, said Hopper, “love was a comedy word. Use it too freely,” Hopper said, “and you get a belly laugh. Whether by diabolical intent or accident, Jack’s speech was ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ Jack was young and virile. He was handsome but his face didn’t fit those words. When sound came on the screen from his lips, a strange meeting took place between his nose and mouth and made him look more like a parrot than a lover. In silent pictures you never noticed.”
Of his supposedly high voice, Colleen Moore, a good friend of Gilbert’s, said, “Jack’s voice was not a deep one, but neither was it a high pitched one. His voice was in the middle register—the same register as that of Douglas Fairbanks and many other male stars. What ruined Jack Gilbert were three little words.”
To Colleen Moore, it was the discomfort of the women in the audience actually hearing John Gilbert say, “ ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ right out loud for all the world to hear, [that] disconcerted and embarrassed [them]; those most ordinary but still most profound words that can be spoken between a man and a woman. In their embarrassment they giggled.”
Louise Brooks said of Lionel Barrymore, he “was taking heavy doses of morphine . . . and was hardly responsible for what went on. Anyone could have manipulated [Barrymore] and someone did. It was common talk at the studio before the picture came out. Everyone knew it but Jack.” In the picture Gilbert’s speech was stiff; the pronunciation of his words, exaggerated.
> Leatrice Joy, Gilbert’s former wife, saw His Glorious Night and said, “I don’t know whether Barrymore deliberately did Jack in, but he couldn’t have done much worse if he tried. Jack’s scenes with Catherine Dale Owen were dreadful. All that kissing and saying ‘I love you’ looked all the more ridiculous with her because she was such a cold fish . . . She made Jack look ridiculous and Barrymore allowed it.”
Douglas Shearer, the sound engineer for His Glorious Night, told the director Clarence Brown that the engineers “never turned up the bass when Gilbert spoke; all you heard was treble. Of course it was a mistake.” A mistake ordered by Mayer?
After the Gilbert picture, there were to be no more love scenes in Metro’s pictures; movies had to show a man or a woman in love without saying “I love you.”
• • •
Barrymore directed two pictures in 1929: Confession and The Rogue Song, a musical made in color with a script by Frances Marion and John Colton from a Franz Lehár, A. M. Willner, and Robert Bodansky 1911 play called Gypsy Love.
The Rogue Song was released in May 1930, and Harry Cohn thought Lionel Barrymore would be just the right person to direct Ten Cents a Dance, originally called Roseland.
Metro temporarily released Barrymore from his contract.
• • •
Ten Cents a Dance began shooting in mid-September 1930. The picture’s title was taken from a song from the musical comedy Simple Simon, written by Ed Wynn and Guy Bolton. Lorenz Hart had written the lyrics for the show; Richard Rodgers, the music.
The song “Ten Cents a Dance” had been created for a number designed by Ed Wynn and was first performed when Simple Simon was still in tryouts in Boston.
For the number in the play, Ed Wynn mounted a piano on wheels to be ridden like a bicycle. The idea was for him to ride the bicycle-piano while a singer sat atop it and sang. A new song was needed for the number, and Rodgers and Hart quickly wrote one about a beleaguered dance-hall hostess.
Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me
Gosh, how they weigh me down
Lee Morse, a featured singer in the show, was to introduce the song on the final night of the Boston tryout. Morse went onstage sitting on top of Ed Wynn’s bicycle-piano but was so drunk she couldn’t remember the song’s words or music and was fired that night. The show went on to New York, and Morse was replaced by a thin blond singer called Ruth Etting. Etting sang “Ten Cents a Dance” for the first time when the show opened in New York.
As Barbara O’Neill at the Palais de Dance (“I’m here because my brains are in my feet”) with Victor Potel and James Ford (far right). From Ten Cents a Dance, shot in September and early October of 1930. (PHOTOFEST)
Harry Cohn had Jo Swerling write the picture’s story and dialogue. Swerling used the idea of the song’s dance-hall hostess and created the character of a smart, tough girl, Barbara O’Neill, who, like Kay Arnold in Ladies of Leisure, has seen nothing of the world but who’s seen it all. She’s the most popular dancer at the Palais de Dance. “When you dance with them as long as I have, they all sort of blend into one,” says Barbara O’Neill.
Swerling wrote a Jazz Age fairy tale. He took the idea of the fine innocent young woman living in a lonely metropolis who is forced by circumstances into a tough, white-knuckle world where wisecracking and street smarts are the only way to get by and is taught a lesson in love.
(“What’s a guy gotta do to dance with you gals?” asks a loutish sailor through a wad of chewing tobacco tucked up into his cheek. “All you need is a ticket and some courage,” Barbara O’Neill tosses off as they move to the dance floor.)
She quietly dreams of a sweet marriage but nightly earns a living by dancing with any man who “mauls you around and steps on your toes and tears your dresses and breathes into your face. He’s got a pocketful of dimes and only one idea in his head.”
The matron of the Palais de Dance “keeps the place hot enough to avoid bankruptcy and cold enough to avoid raids.” Barbara O’Neill is the most frequently picked dancer in the place (“If I get any more rhythm, I’ll dislocate a hip,” she says to the dance-hall matron, who complains about her recent lackluster work).
Barbara O’Neill knows how to keep her dancing partners at a distance and knows how to take care of herself. Her dream of romantic love prompts her to embrace the man who has no money or job but who appears to love her without conditions and to turn away from the man with money who is more than willing to openly buy her love.
Jo Swerling’s ideas about money came to the fore: that the rich were of weak character and deserved everything bad that befell them. Swerling differentiated between those who were old moneyed and those whose money was new and had been made fast and furious.
Class was once again at the heart of Swerling’s story. Barbara leaves her job and takes up her life as a loving, steadfast housewife who doesn’t want or need more than a few dollars to make their patched-together household feel like a palace, at least to her.
One evening, her husband is on his way home from the office. He runs into an old college chum and his sister, who are about to get into their limousine to go off for a night of high-stakes bridge. Eddie flirts with his friend’s sister, whom he’s always liked. When invited to come along for the evening, he admits neither that he can’t afford to gamble nor that he is married and is on his way home to the dinner his wife has prepared for him. Instead, he appears to be carefree, a man on his way up, and agrees to join his friends for the evening.
It is the first of many such evenings for Eddie. As he is seduced into the world of his rich friends, he is drawn deeper and deeper into debt, first from bridge and then from playing the market on margin. When he finally admits to Barbara that he has taken $5,000 from the office owned by the other man who loves her and that the books are to be examined within the next two days, she has no choice but to go to the man from whom she has asked nothing for herself to ask for the money for her husband.
At first he praises Barbara because she never asks for anything of him (“You’re the only woman I know who doesn’t want something”), but when he finds out what she needs and why (she offers to pay him back every penny; “Ten cents a dance,” he says to her. “That’s fifty thousand dances”), he gives her the money and realizes how unselfish her love is for her husband.
Eddie takes the money without a thank-you, returns it to the office, doesn’t go to jail, and then accuses his wife of being unfaithful.
Finally she realizes who and what Eddie is.
“I’ve listened to you and now you’re going to listen to me,” the Stanwyck character says in the explosive moment in the picture where she shows she’s no patsy and where Stanwyck shows she can electrify an audience. “You’re a coward, Eddie. You were running away from something the first time I met you, and you’re a thief. You stole money from your employer. You’re a liar . . .
“You’re not a man. You’re not even a good sample.”
She leaves Eddie and goes back to the Palais de Dance where she meets the newly married man again and realizes that he loves her and she loves him. He asks her to go with him to Paris, where she can get divorced and be free to begin a whole new life together.
Monroe Owsley was the mousy, nondescript Eddie Miller. Owsley, who’d graduated from Yale and worked on a newspaper until he left it for the stage, had appeared in productions that called for a young man of his breeding. He’d appeared in The Great Gatsby and in Philip Barry’s 1928 stage production of Holiday, in which he played the alcoholic Seton brother, Ned, the same sort of weak character he was playing in Ten Cents a Dance. Owsley had just finished re-creating the role of Seton in the film version of Holiday that starred Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, and Hedda Hopper.
Ricardo Cortez was Bradley Carlton in Ten Cents a Dance. Cortez had worked with Barbara in Illicit as her former admirer and beau. Cortez, whose real name was Jacob Krantz, had been spotted by Adolph Zukor seven years before, dancing with a society girl in a h
otel ballroom. Zukor was so impressed by Krantz’s looks and demeanor that he gave him a five-year contract. The young actor went from being Jacob Kranze, Viennese émigré and New Yorker, to Jacob Krantz to Ricardo Cortez, Latin lover, supposed successor to Rudolph Valentino. Cortez, who was to make love to Barbara in the picture—his thirty-ninth—had appeared opposite Garbo in her first American film, Torrent, with Cortez’s name above Garbo’s.
• • •
Two weeks into the filming of Ten Cents a Dance, Barbara slipped from a parallel and fell ten feet. She was backing away from Monroe Owsley. “In my desire to be vehement,” she said, “overacting, I think people would call it,” she fell down the stairs and fainted. One of the men working on the production picked her up and was carrying her when he tripped and fell. Barbara landed on her head and was taken to the hospital.
The newspapers reported the incident but were told there was no serious injury from the fall. But the base of Barbara’s spine had been dislocated, and as a result her right leg was three inches shorter than her left. It was agony for her to walk, to stand, to sit. The doctor prescribed rest for the next few weeks; work was out of the question.
John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore, circa 1932.
The company faced a big loss without her, and she was determined not to hold up production.
Barbara defined her days by work, study, and long hours with Fay. She didn’t drink, rarely smoked or attended parties, and so despite doctor’s orders of rest to heal from the fall, she went back to work.
She kept quiet about the injury and went to the set each day, whether she was working or not, with her spine strapped and braced. Specially designed shoes were made by the studio to compensate for the three-inch difference in her legs. The hours between scenes were punctuated by intense pain, but when Barrymore said, “Okay, we’ll shoot the scene,” Barbara came alive.
With the help of physicians and studio technicians and mostly Barbara’s will, the effects of the injury were hidden on-screen. As they shot the picture, Barbara unobtrusively leaned on furniture, sat whenever she could, and wasn’t seen walking for long stretches in front of the camera.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 23