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

by Victoria Wilson

  Louella Parsons in the Los Angeles Examiner called Illicit “as smart as next year’s frock, as modern as television and as sophisticated as a Parisian hotel clerk.” She said that Barbara “proves herself every inch a star in her portrayal of the modern ‘Anne Vincent.’ [She is] delightful in her gay moments and very telling, indeed, in her emotional ones.” And she went on to praise Barbara’s “naturalness . . . beauty, and poignant sincerity.”

  Illicit was opening around the country, as was Fay’s Bright Lights. Although many of the reviews commented on the tired genre of Technicolor backstage pictures, Bright Lights, which cost Warner Bros. $385,000 to make, was doing well at the box office.

  • • •

  Ten Cents a Dance, Barbara’s fifth picture, was set to open with almost a year to go on her Columbia contract. She was to star in Lover, Come Back to Me, the second film of her three-picture contract with the studio. At the last minute, instead of making Lover, Come Back to Me, Barbara was to work with Frank Capra in his next picture, The Miracle Woman. Her salary: $16,000.

  Following The Miracle Woman, Barbara was to be lent to Warner Bros. for a picture called Night Nurse. Warner had considered using Constance Bennett but hired Barbara instead. Night Nurse was to be directed by William Wellman, the thirty-five-year-old who made the daring spectacle Wings, the first major picture to show the epic role of the airplane in the Great War, and also Beggars of Life. Wellman had just finished shooting The Public Enemy weeks before.

  “What is the real truth about this modern generation’s attitude toward the once sacred convention of marriage?”

  The supporting cast of Night Nurse was to include Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell, with whom Barbara had worked in Illicit, Charles “Vinegar” Winninger, James Cagney, and Mildred Harris, the former child bride of Charlie Chaplin. Cagney was to play the small part of an intern, but after The Public Enemy he was replaced by Allan Lane. The former Mrs. Chaplin, Mildred Harris, was out of the picture as the society mother, and Charlotte Merriam was in, although Warner had considered Louise Brooks, Evelyn Brent, and Virginia Valli for the part.

  Once Night Nurse was completed, Barbara’s contract at Columbia would be fulfilled, and she could begin her five-year contract with Warner. Harry Cohn let Barbara make Night Nurse only if she agreed to make one extra picture for Columbia, in addition to the optional picture the studio already had. Jack Warner drew up a letter freeing Barbara to make the additional picture for Columbia without being in violation of her new Warner contract. Despite all this, Columbia still had the option of recalling Barbara to make two pictures during the first year of her Warner contract.

  • • •

  Before Barbara was to start work on The Miracle Woman, she and Fay, along with others, were asked to appear in a two-reel comedy to help the National Variety Artists in their fund-raising drive for their tuberculosis sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York. The picture was being produced by the Hollywood Masquers Club, a charitable organization for which actors and actresses volunteered their services.

  The film’s premise: Norma Shearer’s pearls are stolen (hence the title, The Stolen Jools, or The Slippery Pearls) at a picture ball. The detective Eddie Kane is sent by the station sergeant (Wallace Beery) to unravel the mystery of the missing pearls; to do so, Kane interrogates the guests who attended the ball.

  More than forty actors agreed to be in the fund-raiser. Each scene was shot with different actors on a different studio lot and directed by a different director. All services were donated, from those of the actors and directors and the various studios involved, to the theaters projecting the picture, even the film company supplying the celluloid—Eastman.

  Detective Kane begins his search for the “stolen jools” with Norma Shearer herself, who tells the story of what happened to her (“Well, let me see, I was with Billy Haines, Jack Gilbert, Joan Crawford . . .”) as she is consoled by fellow actress Hedda Hopper.

  Detective Kane goes off to question those who were at the fete: Joan Crawford (Kane overhears her describing something she’s taken, something she wanted, something she couldn’t resist: a Pekingese puppy), Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Loretta Young, and Maurice “Chandelier,” who, when told about the mystery of the missing jewels and asked what he thinks, sings, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” Irene Dunne is stopped by Kane about the “stolen jools.”

  She asks him, “Were they wrapped in a purple box?”

  “Yes,” says Kane.

  “With a silver padlock?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a gold ribbon wrapped around them?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Well, I never saw them,” says Miss Dunne.

  Kane is next seen in a living room where Frank Fay is seated, leisurely reading a newspaper. Barbara appears, in dark suit, white open-necked silk blouse, and white cloche. She stands between Fay and Detective Kane. Kane introduces her to Fay, who assures Kane that they know each other; they are married.

  Kane is about to interrogate them when Barbara looks lovingly into Fay’s eyes and announces she’s just written “the most beautiful piece of poetry.” With the promise of a poem about to be read, Kane announces he must be going. “Really, just a second,” says Fay. “Let’s hear it.”

  Barbara reads the first stanza, then announces, “There’s more.” She reads on:

  In a year or so the girl returned

  And mighty proud was she

  She told how she’d done her duty

  In the great war o’er the sea

  She told how she’d picked up the wounded

  And held each one to her breast

  So the woodworkers got together

  And made her a cedar chest.

  Fay shakes Barbara’s hand and says, “I’ll see you around sometime, I guess.”

  Detective Kane to Barbara, “Kindly come in the garden please,” and escorts her out.

  Fay tucks his newspaper under his arm as he puts his fingers to his ears. The sound of a gunshot is heard off camera. Fay winces.

  It was the only peculiar segment in the picture.

  Liggett & Myers’s Chesterfield cigarettes absorbed $200,000 of the picture’s cost in exchange for being mentioned three times and twice having a pack of Chesterfields shown on the screen during the twenty-two-minute film to raise money for a tuberculosis sanitarium.

  • • •

  Ten Cents a Dance opened in New York at Warner Bros.’ Strand days before Barbara was to begin filming The Miracle Woman. The reviews were mostly tepid. The New York Times described Barbara as “out of place in the Palais de Dance” and criticized the film for its “too leisurely” pace. Variety said that “Columbia should be grateful to Barbara Stanwyck for breathing life” in the picture; that she “strikes to the heart of a simple story . . . her acting is compellingly simple and direct.” But the reviewer went on to say, “Her figure should receive more careful consideration than it appears to be getting from camera and costume departments. Avoidance of long camera shots in profile would soften defects.” No doubt referring to her long waist and low flat rear that widened and jutted out.

  The Miracle Woman was based on a 1927 farce by John Meehan and Robert Riskin called Bless You, Sister, inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s satire Elmer Gantry about the church and sectarian religion and a Baptist-Methodist preacher. Lewis’s novel was published to much fanfare in March 1927. Gantry had followed Lewis’s Babbitt and Arrowsmith, novels that portrayed America’s vulgarity and grotesqueness. Gantry was described by one critic as “a sort of cathedral in which every stone is a gargoyle”; other reviewers were less taken with Lewis’s vision of America’s organized religion and commercial preachers.

  Meehan and Riskin’s play was influenced as well by the popular evangelist preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, who was denounced as a “twentieth-century Jezebel,” and hailed as a “miracle woman” faith healer who brought the message to millions and whose Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles had been saving sinners who
had experienced the electric shock of her power for more than a decade. McPherson, a farmer’s daughter, served God by becoming “a winner of souls” and nightly spread the Gospel of Christ (“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever”), praying for forgiveness, speaking in tongues, first building up a ministry in a “canvas cathedral,” crisscrossing the United States and Canada, and then establishing the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Angelus Temple—a five-thousand-seat facility—in Los Angeles, next to Echo Park.

  “We all know what hell is,” preached McPherson. “We’ve heard about it all our lives . . . the less we hear about hell the better . . . Let’s forget about hell. Lift up your hearts. What we are interested in, yes, Lord, is heaven, and how to get there!”

  • • •

  Capra considered Meehan and Riskin’s play about the big business of religion and fakery “the most controversial idea” he could think of, a movie that could win him an Oscar. Cohn thought Capra was “nuts.” “You can’t kid religion,” Cohn said to Capra. “The Christers’ll murder you.”

  Robert Riskin loved the theater and as a boy, one of five children of Russian immigrants, used to sneak into shows in Brooklyn and try unsuccessfully to memorize the jokes he heard onstage. Once he’d saved enough money to buy Isaac Pitman’s shorthand book, he learned the system of dots and hooks and was able to copy down every joke he heard.

  Riskin, like Barbara, went to school up to the age of thirteen. At fifteen, he bought a typewriter, taught himself to type, and went to work as an office boy in a textile mill. The mill owner had invested money in a few short comedies to be released by Famous Players–Lasky and asked Riskin, always a joke teller, to look at the two-reelers before he showed them to Famous Players. Riskin told his boss that “a moron could write better, a blind man could direct better,” and that even he, Riskin, a non-actor, “could be funnier.” Famous Players–Lasky shared Riskin’s opinion and declined to distribute the pictures.

  Riskin’s boss was determined to make short comedies one way or another and formed a new company to do so. At seventeen, Riskin became executive producer of a company in Jacksonville, Florida, making two-reel comedies without the use of scripts, “off the cuff, progressing as circumstances and light allowed.” Riskin did “everything, not only producing the picture, but taking care of business details and worrying how the darned thing would do in Waukegan.” In two years, he wrote and produced more than a hundred Klever Komedies.

  After a stint in the navy in the Great War, Riskin made a series of shorts about muscle building, called Facts and Follies, in which “the guy with the biggest muscles got the girl.” A year into it Riskin realized his films were getting him nowhere, and he went to work in a series of jobs, first in the linoleum business, then in the spark plug business, and then the teething ring industry. Finally, he decided to work for himself and, with his brother Everett, opened an office at 220 West Forty-Second Street, and together they became moderately accomplished theatrical producers.

  • • •

  Frank Capra’s recent successes allowed him to prevail with Bless You, Sister; Harry Cohn bought the rights to Meehan and Riskin’s play, which had opened in New York four years earlier, in December 1927.

  The Broadway production of Bless You, Sister was directed by Riskin’s co-writer, John Meehan, as well as George Abbott. Alice Brady was the loving daughter of a small-town minister who turns Gospel merchandiser after her father is kicked out of his pulpit by vestrymen who see his religious fervor as dull and “out of step.” Charles Bickford was the tough salesman who enlists the young woman into the fold of the Bible business, telling her that “if she can sell the Book as well as she can roast it,” they’ll “clean up a cool million.” Together they go on the road, playing religion across the board; he as the organization’s racketeer business manager overseeing the tents and props and hiring the false cripples who, town after town, are converted and saved; she becoming a national figure as an evangelist healer, performing miracle after miracle, saving souls by the score in the name of the Lord, knowing she is a fake, a swindler of souls, and that her miracles are nothing more than a moneymaking dodge.

  With Columbia Pictures owning the rights to Bless You, Sister, Riskin was asked to come to the studio for a story conference. He entered Harry Cohn’s office with a meeting already in progress; the room was filled with writers and executives. Capra was telling a story. Riskin thought Capra looked like “a mug” and that he was telling the story “badly.” Riskin soon “recognized” the story Capra was telling as Riskin and Meehan’s own Bless You, Sister. “The recognition was painful,” Riskin said.

  Harry Cohn said, “Since this was Riskin’s play, we’ll call on him first for suggestions. Mr. Riskin.” Riskin stood and said, “I wrote that play. My brother and I were stupid enough to produce it on Broadway. It cost us almost every cent we had. If you intend to make a picture of it, it proves only one thing: You’re even more stupid than we were.” The room was silent.

  Left to right: Harry Cohn, Grace Moore, and Robert Riskin, 1936. (PHOTOFEST)

  Capra said he thought the picture’s subject matter was “dynamite,” that it had worked like gangbusters with a play on a similar subject (religion and fakery) by George M. Cohan called The Miracle Man, produced on the stage in 1914 and then made into a successful picture five years later with Lon Chaney and Betty Compson.

  The Miracle Man involved a gang of crooks on the run from the law who hide out in a small town, encounter a faith healer, and use him to con his parishioners, until they witness a real healing and find their own souls transformed. Capra was so inspired by the success of The Miracle Man that he changed the title of Bless You, Sister to The Miracle Woman.

  Riskin argued that Bless You, Sister had failed on the New York stage because sophisticated Broadway audiences were offended by the subject matter of religion and that surely less knowing moviegoers would be more offended by it. He was adamant about not writing the script; he knew in advance the picture would be a failure at the box office. Capra was impressed by Riskin’s honesty and integrity, but if Riskin wouldn’t write the script, Capra would hire Jo Swerling to write it.

  The play Bless You, Sister flopped, as Riskin described it, because its subject matter was offensive to theatergoers. But it may have been the writers’ own discomfort with the subject that lay at the heart of the play’s failure. Some opening night critics had described the play’s two central characters as turning soft, saying that the playwrights had been unwilling to go the distance with them. The critics were frustrated by the waning element of satire, which, they said, was replaced by melodrama.

  Jo Swerling took up Riskin’s concern with middle-class hypocrisy, God, faith, innocence, about what’s real and what’s fake, what’s pious and what’s not. In the script Swerling was tough on merchandising and the shills and come-ons, and rather than put down those who believe in the exploiters and swindlers, he and Capra showed a respect for ordinary people.

  Swerling changed the young evangelist’s name from Mary MacDonald to Florence Fallon, a name seemingly inspired by another preacher, Sharon Falconer, Sinclair Lewis’s preacher in Elmer Gantry. In adapting the Riskin-Meehan script, Swerling kept Riskin’s natural ways of speech, but Riskin’s toughness is muted by the poetic incantation of Swerling’s dialogue. In Swerling’s script for Capra, the large turns of the play are born of sentiment instead of cynicism. Capra believed audiences liked sentiment (“always have, always will,” he said).

  In the play, the young man who is the romantic interest comes from Sister’s hometown. In Swerling’s script, the young man is a struggling composer down on his luck, an aviator blinded in the war who is now alone in the world. John Carson is well-heeled, Harvard educated, and at the end of his dreams. Much like Sister Fallon before she joins up with the swindler, he is a lost soul who has run out of hope and belief in himself.

  John Carson is contemplating jumping to his death (he’s written a suicide note to his elderly
landlady, who watches out for him), when he hears the strident voice of a woman on the radio talking to anyone within hearing distance: “I bring you the promise and pledge that God is in heaven and all’s well with the world. Oh, my dear ones, I can’t see you, but I can feel you all around me.” Carson shuts the window to keep out the insistent noise coming from across the air shaft, where a mother is seen rocking her baby and listening in on station “G-O-D, GOD.”

  Carson opens the window again to look down at the courtyard, in preparation for the jump that will end his life. The woman on the radio is still talking. “The trouble with most people,” she is saying, “is that they’re quitters. They’re yellow. The moment they go through any sort of test, they cave in. The difference between a man and a jellyfish is the fact that a man has backbone. What did God give him a backbone for? To stand up on his feet. That’s what real men do.” Carson is caught off guard by the power of the words, by the beauty and strength of their sounds. “Beethoven wrote his greatest symphony when he was deaf; Oscar Wilde wrote his greatest poem in jail; and Milton, a blind man, gave us Paradise Lost. It’s easy to forgive sinners, but it’s hard to forgive quitters.”

  When Carson turns to his landlady to ask the name of that “coon shouter that broadcasts over the radio every day,” he learns she is Sister Florence Fallon of the Temple of Happiness Tabernacle.

  Carson’s love for Sister Fallon—a love and faith as blind as his eyes—and his self-sacrifice for that love bring Sister Fallon back to herself and cause her rebirth. And for each soul, lost but now found, once blind but now able to see, the message is that love will lead us home.

  To avoid the fate of the Riskin-Meehan play, Capra wanted to make clear that The Miracle Woman was in no way poking fun at religion. The credits were followed by a quotation that read: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing.” Another title read, “ ‘The Miracle Woman’ is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of Religion, seeks to sell for gold, God’s choicest gift to Humanity—faith.”