In addition to working with severe pain from her spine, Barbara, along with the rest of the company, had to cope with a director too ill to direct.
Barrymore was fifty-two. As an actor, he was inspired. He could turn himself into any character he played. John Barrymore once said of his older brother, whose artistry he so admired, “[Lionel] seems to check his personality like an overcoat whenever he goes into a part.” Ethel Barrymore said that of the three Barrymores, “Lionel was the real one. He has none of those tricks of the theatre. His acting comes out of his head. If he had to be a dwarf, he would make you think he was one.”
At heart, Barrymore had never wanted to act. “The theatre was not in my blood,” he said. “I was related to [it] by marriage only; it was merely a kind of in-law of mine which I had to live with.”
As a director of more than ten pictures, Barrymore was only workmanlike. He would “labor for months ahead of his picture, casting, approving costumes, approving scenery, and conferring with the producer.” He worked “early in the morning, before anybody else start[ed], getting scenes ready for the day’s shooting, and stayed late at night examining his rushes, deciding which scenes he [would] have to retake.” But Barrymore, from boyhood, had wanted only to paint and draw and ended up in the theater and in motion pictures simply because, as he said, he “had nothing else to do.” He knew that directing pictures “was totally unsuited to a man like me, whose admiration for mañana is only exceeded by his yearning for more mañana.” The morphine Barrymore was taking to offset the debilitating pain from arthritis made him even more interested in mañana and less capable of focusing on the work at hand—overseeing the actors and having a feel for the tempo of the scenes being shot and the overall shape of the picture.
“The poor man was in so much pain,” said Barbara. “I couldn’t warm up to him. It was a very impersonal relationship. I don’t think he ever objected to anything I did. He tried his best. As a performer, you just had to try harder.”
Cortez said that Barrymore was charming, but making Ten Cents a Dance was “very trying. You’d start a scene and look around and find [Barrymore] asleep.”
Barbara’s frustration with Barrymore’s lack of direction only intensified as she worked with Cortez.
Cortez admired Barbara “for her dignity. She was a perfect lady at all times. Perfect.”
Barbara was not as admiring of her co-star, whom she privately referred to as “old fish eyes.”
“He gave me nothing to work with,” she said of Cortez. “I was on my own in every scene.” And without a director to help her out, playing against nothing was even more frustrating.
Once again, Barbara found her way. Despite the flatness of the picture, in part due to Barrymore’s lack of control over the scenes, Barbara has a radiance about her and a strength that comes through between both of the weak, unseeing men her character chooses to love. She found a rhythm to Barbara O’Neill and is by turns prickly and soft, hopeful and pure, funny and wise. And once again, she conveys emotion, large and small, and creates a dimensional woman trying to make her way in a tough world.
• • •
In the midst of shooting Ten Cents a Dance for Columbia Pictures, Barbara signed a letter of agreement with Warner Bros. detailing the terms of her new contract.
The contract was for $100,000 for three pictures, at a time when more than one thousand banks had failed and almost $900 million had been lost in deposits.
Barbara’s name was now to appear above the title of any Warner picture she made. The script, story, or play the studio proposed for each picture was to be mutually agreed on within a thirty-day period. If Barbara refused a script or idea, the studio could then submit two additional ideas or stories. If all three were rejected, the studio had the right to submit three additional ideas or stories. If all six were rejected, the studio would pick one of the six ideas already submitted, and Barbara would appear as the star.
The contract went on to state: “It is further agreed that any delay or additional time consumed, caused by your failure to approve of one of the subjects, plays or stories submitted to you in excess of sixty day period herein fore mentioned, shall be added to the yearly period of employment hereunder which may be then in force, and such period shall be deemed extended to such extent.”
The contract was to go into effect on August 1, 1931, when Barbara’s contract with Columbia was to run out, or begin earlier, if her contract with Columbia expired before and she was available to work.
Under the terms of the Warner agreement, Barbara was to be paid $33,333.33 per picture, payment to be made in seven weekly installments of $4,761.90 for each picture.
The studio had the option to renew the contract for four successive years. If the studio picked up the option, Barbara was to be paid $150,000 for the first year; $175,000 for the second; $225,000 for the third; and $275,000 for the fourth.
• • •
Fay’s three-picture contract with Warner Bros. was due to expire, with one picture still to be made. After the reception of his latest picture, The Matrimonial Bed, the studio had decided not to renew his contract and to hold off making his last picture until the following spring. If Fay needed money, the studio would give him an advance against his salary.
Zanuck insisted, however, that Fay be given a new three-picture contract, each to be made within a year with an option for another year for three additional pictures. Fay was to be paid $35,000 per picture, with first billing. No name in the cast was to be as large as Fay’s. The contract specified that first billing was not star billing. Unlike Barbara’s arrangement with the studio, there was no mention of Fay’s name appearing before the title of the picture.
In an interoffice memo, Zanuck wrote that Fay’s new contract was to start “on exactly the same date as the Barbara Stanwyck (Mrs. Fay) contract.” The contract department was told not to make the connection in drawing up the contract but to merely refer to the date.
• • •
Ten Cents a Dance was completed late in October 1930. It took another six weeks for Barbara’s spine to heal. The straps were removed, and she was finally able to walk without limping.
“I couldn’t believe that this injury would be permanent,” she said. “Whether it was or not, I would have gone on anyway. There are other things in my life that bring me happiness. I’m not afraid. I am not afraid of anything that life can do to me.”
PART TWO
Undertow
I hate whiners. You have to fight life and make it work for you.
—Barbara Stanwyck
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Fay, September 1932. (CULVER PICTURES)
ONE
“Hot Speel in the Blood”
When she wasn’t in front of the camera, she was almost mousy . . . But when the camera rolled, she turned into a huge person.
—Frank Capra
In 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had four hundred members. The academy’s nominations and Awards of Merit were no longer voted on by a small panel of judges; each branch of the academy (producers, actors, writers, directors, technicians) selected five nominees for an award, and members of the academy voted on each of the categories. The academy kept secret the selection of the five members from each of its branches until its awards dinner.
The awards for the year ending July 31, 1930, were announced at the academy’s meeting at the Ambassador Hotel on November 7. For the first time the academy combined its awards dinner with its annual business meeting to elect officers for the coming year.
Despite Capra’s prediction, Barbara’s name for Ladies of Leisure was not among those actresses singled out for their work for 1930. Nominated were Nancy Carroll (The Devil’s Holiday), Ruth Chatterton (Sarah and Son), Greta Garbo (Anna Christie), Norma Shearer (The Divorcee), and Gloria Swanson (The Trespasser). Shearer received the award for Best Actress. It was rumored that Metro had asked its employees in a memo to vote for Norma Shearer, Mrs. Irving Thalberg since 1927. Joan Cra
wford, Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., was quoted as saying, “What chance have I got? She sleeps with the boss.”
Capra’s name was also not among those nominated for Direction, nor was Jo Swerling’s for Writing. Capra was “galled. The major studios had the votes,” he said. “I had my freedom” in working at Columbia Pictures, “but the ‘honors’ went to those who worked for the Establishment,” not those who worked on Poverty Row.
Irving Thalberg with his wife, Norma Shearer, on Nick Schenck’s yacht off Catalina Island, July 1936.
Columbia didn’t have a large roster of popular stars, but the success of Ladies of Leisure, despite its not being singled out by the academy, put Barbara at the top of the list of Columbia’s big female leads, followed by Dorothy Revier, femme fatale veteran of some sixty silent and talking pictures, and the sultry, beautiful Evelyn Brent, former WAMPAS Baby Star of 1923, von Sternberg’s original exotic smoldering-eyed, feather-drenched Queen of the Underworld.
Barbara’s fourth picture, Illicit, was about to be released; for the first time, her name was to appear over the title.
• • •
When Barbara and Fay weren’t working, they spent time together at home, with their Irish terrier, Shanty, and their Boston terrier, Punky. Barbara turned over her money to Frank as it came in, and together they’d bought four cars—two Fords, one open and one closed, a Lincoln, and a Cadillac.
Fay’s new picture, The Devil Was Sick, was intended to help make him into a kind of tongue-in-cheek romantic lead and to put across his onstage presence: his personality, mannerisms, expressions, and seductive humor. The picture was based on Jane Hinton’s unproduced play of the same name. The script was another whirlwind Continental farce that centers on a notorious rich young man-about-Paris in love with every woman he meets, and with several in particular, who squabble and misbehave as they try to win his affections. The women in the cast who see him as God’s gift to women included Laura La Plante, Joan Blondell, Louise Brooks, and Margaret Livingston.
Fay began filming in the first week of January 1931. Once again Michael Curtiz directed, terrorizing the cast and demanding endless retakes for tempo, tempo, tempo. In one scene in which Fay follows a woman from room to room on his knees, Curtiz asked for so many retakes that Fay’s patellas were damaged and a doctor was called in to attend to him.
Louise Brooks was amused by Curtiz’s Hungarian accent. He addressed one of the actors in the company, the jovial stage actor and comedian Charles Winninger, as “Mr. Vinegar. Mr. Vinegar, get outdt where ve can see you und vatch the cue! Go aheadt, Frank.”
Before Illicit could be released, censors around the country wanted all references to premarital sex taken out and any mention of an adulterous marriage. Censorship statutes existed in many states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Kansas, and Florida. Zanuck refused to make the changes or to alter the picture’s title.
The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, beginning eight years earlier, in 1922, had managed to keep control of the content of motion pictures in the hands of the Hollywood studios rather than in the hands of censor-minded religious groups, local politicians, and civic organizations. Five years later, the Association and its president, Will Hays, who sold the studio heads on “self-control and self-censorship” as something “manly and democratic,” had devised a set of guidelines, a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” that were optional but were to be used in the writing of scripts, all in an effort to avoid a storm of censorship from the public. Hays’s “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” opposed the use of profanity “either by title or by lip,” including the use of words such as “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Christ,” “hell,” and “damn.” It opposed any licentious or suggestive nudity; any inference of sexual perversion; white slavery; miscegenation; sex hygiene and venereal diseases; children’s sex organs; and ridiculing the clergy.
To the studio heads, desperate to thwart all outside efforts of censorship, Will Hays was the perfect choice to head the self-regulating MPPDA. Hays had served as postmaster general under President Harding and headed the National Republican Committee for three years. Hays was a Hoosier, an Indiana lawyer, a member of the Masonic Order, as well as the Shriners and the Elks. His “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” came from his own Christian upbringing. He was taught by his father “to drink no kind of intoxicating liquors, and never speak evil of anyone.” Hays was a man who had “faith in God, in folks, in the nation and in the Republican party,” in that order.
William Harrison Hays, called by Variety the “Czar of all the Rushes,” circa 1926. (PHOTOFEST)
The studio heads reasoned that Hays would know how to enlist the confidence of the public and help the industry to work with women’s clubs and churches and civic organizations instead of battling them. His national political experience would give him the authority to galvanize producers, actors, directors, and technicians in an effort to improve motion pictures and ward off legal censorship. Soon Hays, through the MPPDA, put together a force of 600,000 volunteers who were engaged in an organized campaign to help improve motion pictures that in Hays’s eyes had to be held to a stricter standard of taste, morality, and merit than other forms of entertainment. Eighty million people went to the movies; to Hays, motion pictures represented the American way of life. He saw moving pictures as a force for good, but to Hays, pictures could “easily become a corrupting influence on future generations.” The “licentious mood of books and stage plays was bound to work its way into movie scripts.” The MPPDA’s fight was not simply to make the industry self-governing and help distributors “overcome fraud and loss”; its fight had to be “against filth” and to improve the quality of pictures, and quickly.
To create “accepted standards of morality and good taste,” Hays put his system of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” to work in 1927. But Hays had something else in mind, a production ethic “capable of uniform interpretation, based not on arbitrary ‘do’s’ and ‘donts’ but on principles,” something he called “a corpus of philosophy” of right and wrong.
Hays wanted a code to “govern the making of talking, synchronized and silent motion pictures,” and he knew he would need the right time to put it forward; preaching “morality” in the panic of 1929 was like a voice “crying in the wilderness.” In early January 1930, Hays felt the moment had come. Talking pictures had made the industry “as cosmopolitan as international diplomacy.” Hays thought the industry was ready to accept “a philosophy as opposed to more prudent rules.” He came up with a nineteen-page booklet written by his friend the magazine publisher Martin Quigley and the Reverend Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest of Saint Louis University. Quigley and Lord’s document was based on, as Quigley said, “the rules on which all moral laws are based: the Ten Commandments, and the Natural Law written into the heart of every human being of sound reason and morals.”
Hays met with a committee of the MPPDA to review the contents of a draft of the code. The committee was made up of the heads of studios, including Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle Jr., B. P. Schulberg, J. L. Warner, and Joseph M. Schenck. They argued about the definition of words such as “vulgarity” (they defined it as the “treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant though not necessarily evil, subjects”); they differentiated “vulgarity” from “obscenity” and forbade both in motion pictures, along with scenes of carnal passion, immodest costumes, and improper dances. The code was presented to the West Coast branch of the MPPDA; it was applauded and quickly adopted. Even Pope Pius in Rome heard about the code and exhorted its observance.
• • •
Despite the one-year existence of the code, the censors in New York state had problems with Illicit and made cuts throughout.
The picture’s world premiere was in San Francisco at the Embassy, a new Warner theater. Barbara traveled north with Jack Warner and Mervyn LeRoy, the thirty-year-old triumphant director of the moment whose latest picture, Little Caesar, had opened in New York weeks before and whose
first weekend grosses broke the all-time record for Warner Bros.’ Strand Theatre, bringing in $50,000 in only eleven performances. The picture was being hailed as a new kind of movie and LeRoy as a “masterly” director. Little Caesar was based on a novel by W. R. Burnett and dared to portray the relentless brutality of a Chicago gangster crime lord, Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello, “a little punk trying to be big,” a self-exile, a man without family, romantic attachment, and church, who kills without remorse and dies unrepentant.
Will Hays’s newly approved MPPDA code prohibited the use of the word “God” in pictures. As a result, the last moment of Little Caesar had to be changed. Caesar’s final words in the picture, “Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?” had to be changed to “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”
• • •
Illicit was criticized by reviewers who called attention to the “bad cuts” made by the censors in New York, who “deleted many subtle touches which would have done much to give the film a sophisticated flair,” particularly “the deadly first reel.” They commented on Barbara’s clothes as well. Cecelia Ager wrote in Variety that Barbara Stanwyck “belongs in subdued, conventional clothes but weathers as furiously striking a series of costumes as pictures can produce [including] a black velvet suit with cocoa ermine flared sleeves and collar tied with an ermine bow . . . Miss Stanwyck would never wear one long black glove and one long white one, just because her dress is black and white printed chiffon. That’s going a bit too far, even for picture representation of a ‘society woman.’ ”
Illicit opened in Los Angeles at both the Warner Bros. Downtown Theatre and Warner’s Hollywood, where Frank Fay acted as the evening’s master of ceremonies and introduced the picture’s supporting cast as well as his wife; it was Barbara’s first local stage appearance.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 24
