With Frank at home in the Malibu Colony, June 1932.
During the shooting of The Miracle Woman, Barbara and Frank had attended the opening of Capra’s new action-adventure picture, Dirigible, starring Jack Holt and Ralph Graves. It was Columbia’s most expensive picture, costing $650,000, and the studio’s first picture to have its world premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the fulfillment of a seven-year dream for Harry Cohn. Capra called an opening at Grauman’s “the zenith of recognition in Filmland. The searchlights lit up Hollywood’s sky,” he said.
Circa 1931. (CULVER PICTURES)
Barbara and Frank had come home late from the studio and were so tired they decided not to put on evening clothes for the premiere. They arrived at the theater in street clothes to the disapproval of the other guests in full dress, who were put off by the impropriety of the Fays’ casual attire and assumed they were drunk, partially from the stories around town about Frank’s drinking binges.
Barbara was furious. The pomp and pretense of the evening only intensified her dislike of Hollywood. “I saw many there in evening clothes who really were drunk,” Barbara said. The evening “soured [them both] on Hollywood night-life” and made Barbara all the more bound to Fay in her determination that husband and wife would stand together—authentic and true—against Hollywood and its hypocritical standards and righteous gossipmongers.
• • •
Production ended on The Miracle Woman in early April. For the final explosive scene in the movie, the tabernacle goes up in flames as in Elmer Gantry, whose scathing portrait of the Bible Belt ministry had sold more than half a million copies in its first few months. The book was banned in Boston as “obscene and indecent literature,” as had been An American Tragedy and, four decades before that, Leaves of Grass.
The day after completing The Miracle Woman, Barbara began work at Warner Bros. on a picture called Night Nurse, to be directed by the thirty-five-year-old flinty William A. Wellman, who, two months before, had finished making The Public Enemy for Warner.
TWO
Idealism and Fight
William Wellman admitted he was “a son of a bitch” and could be hard on actors. “I like to keep them guessing. Never tell them anything,” he said. He was known for being tough. “Wild Bill,” he was called.
Wellman was under a two-year contract with Warner Bros.–First National—a contract he’d signed in 1930—getting paid $2,500 a week and, for directing The Public Enemy, $2,750.
Wellman was boyish, lean, wiry, quick-tempered. He was rugged, hard drinking, often in fights. At twenty-one, he’d run off to France to join the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, then the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Flying Corps formed by William Vanderbilt, an offshoot of the Lafayette Escadrille.
Wellman was a fighter pilot in the Black Cat Squadron, crashing five of his own planes (the Nieuports he flew were equipped with only four instruments, “none of which worked, and no parachutes,” said Wellman. “It was wonderful”). He christened each of the five planes Celia, after his mother. During General Pershing’s historic first over-the-top attack on the “Huns,” Wellman was the only American serving in the air guard while the famous Rainbow Division of Yankee troops received its baptism by fire on the ground.
During Wellman’s months fighting, he shot down seven German planes in air battles over enemy lines before he himself was shot down over the forest of Parroy by anti-aircraft guns (Wellman called them “the most useless [guns] in the entire war”). When Wellman left the Flying Corps a year later, he was awarded a Croix de Guerre with two palms by the French army.
“Wild Bill” Wellman and Warner’s Darryl Zanuck were kindred spirits. Zanuck admired Wellman’s recklessness and daring. The young director was equally admiring of Zanuck and his way “of grabbing a headline and generating the speed and enthusiasm . . . to make a good picture quickly.” Wellman said, “Whatever you say about Zanuck, he would back you up. He’d give you your head. If he decided you could do something, he’d be right behind you.” Wellman thought Zanuck was “the hardest-working little guy . . . When you wanted an answer, you got it right then and there; if [Zanuck] shook hands on a deal, it was a deal, period.”
William Wellman, circa 1932. He couldn’t stand being an actor and became a director instead. As a boy—“a crazy bastard”—he was kicked out of high school for throwing “a stink bomb on the principal’s bald head. A direct hit,” he said, and had to report to the Newton, Massachusetts, probation officer—his mother—for six months.
Zanuck’s early years in Los Angeles, to which he came from the sand hills of Wahoo, Nebraska, began with a series of jobs, first as a rivet catcher in a shipyard earning seventy-five cents an hour. “Miss one of those rivets,” Zanuck said, “and it could burn a hole right through you. Even when I bought the heavy reinforced apron and gauntlets, I was in a constant muck sweat thinking I was going to fumble a red-hot rivet and get my balls burned off.” Zanuck worked as a dishwasher, car polisher, and barbershop sweeper. He became a publicity man for a laundry and a press agent for Yuccatone Hair Restorer (Zanuck’s tagline for the yucca-based, alcohol-enhanced tonic—“You’ve never seen a bald-headed Indian”—worked; the tonic sold).
Wellman and Zanuck drank together. They loved each other one day and the next were fighting and knocking each other down.
• • •
Wellman had promised Zanuck, who had been hesitant to make The Public Enemy, believing that gangster pictures had had their run, that if he were given the chance to direct Beer and Blood, he would make it “the toughest goddamn [gangster picture] of them all.”
The Public Enemy was taken from an unpublished novel called Beer and Blood by Kubec Glasmon and John Bright: one a Chicago druggist and bootlegger whose drugstore was a hangout for gangsters; the other, his nineteen-year-old protégé, who delivered the store’s diluted prescription whiskey.
Beer and Blood was a portrait of the Chicago underworld—“Italians, Irish, Jewish, Polish,” said John Bright, “with each group’s particular methods and interests specified.” Zanuck bought the book and had the story streamlined. The script was about two young boys, street pals, who grow up to be thugs controlling the beer racket for the Chicago speakeasies. The picture came in the wake of the violence from Prohibition and the bootleg wars that were in the headlines every day and followed two other Warner Bros. gangster pictures, The Doorway to Hell and Little Caesar.
The country was still shaken from Al Capone’s attempted murder of the mobster and beer baron Bugs Moran in Chicago on Valentine’s Day while Moran’s men were in a warehouse about to drive two empty trucks to Detroit to pick up Canadian whiskey smuggled into the country. Moran’s men were lined up against the rear wall of a garage and sprayed with machine gun bullets.
Moviegoing audiences flocked to see gangster pictures. Bertolt Brecht was fascinated by them, seeing in them the mechanism of capitalist enterprise. Zanuck had first assigned The Public Enemy to Archie Mayo, who directed The Doorway to Hell, but Mayo wanted to get away from gangster pictures. He wanted to make a woman’s picture, to which Zanuck said, “You do what you’re told, you toad.”
Zanuck was drawn to Wellman’s toughness and ultimately agreed to reassign the picture to him.
• • •
James Cagney was under contract to Warner Bros. for $400 a week. In The Public Enemy, Edward Woods was originally cast in the leading role of Tom Powers, and Cagney was to be his quiet boyhood pal. Woods was engaged to Louella Parsons’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, Harriet, and Zanuck liked the proximity to Hearst. But as the picture’s childhood scenes were shot, the script’s writers, Glasmon and Bright, realized that the roles had been given to the wrong actors, and both writers pushed Wellman to give Cagney the lead.
Cagney was a street-smart, raw spirit and could easily project what he himself described as a “gutter quality” more powerfully than Woods. He had the spitfire energy and strut that were right for the vici
ous underworld gangster. After three days of shooting, Wellman went to Zanuck and told him, “We got the wrong man playing the wrong part. This Cagney is the guy.”
Zanuck sent out an executive summons saying he’d had a great idea and was changing the casting; the role of Tom Powers would be played by Jimmy Cagney. Wellman had already shot the picture’s childhood sequences of Matt Doyle and Tom Powers as young street kids drinking beer and stealing. The Powers character was Woods as a boy—tall and gangly with dark hair. His quiet pal, Matt Doyle, was a young Cagney—light-haired, short, and stocky. Wellman kept the footage as it was, despite the switch in actors and the stark differences in appearance.
The part of Powers’s girlfriend, Gwen Allen, was first offered to Louise Brooks (Wellman had directed her three years before in Beggars of Life), who turned it down to go to New York. Wellman then offered the part to Jean Harlow, who accepted it.
In the cast as well was Mae Clarke. Mae had just finished appearing as Molly Malloy in Lewis Milestone’s Front Page, a picture produced by Howard Hughes. When Mae’s agent called to say he had another Molly Malloy for her, “that’s all [she] had to hear.” She and Joan Blondell were to play a “couple of whores . . . on the town.”
Blondell had just finished working with Cagney in a picture called Other Men’s Women, also directed by Wellman. In it, Blondell, a former Miss Dallas, played a smart-talking waitress who, when a customer says to her, “Gimme a slice of you on toast and some french-fried potatoes on the side,” replies, “Listen, baby, I’m APO. Ain’t puttin’ out.”
Mae was concerned about playing a “night-on-the-town whore [who] enjoys it.” She wanted to play a woman who “fell into it, couldn’t help it, couldn’t get out and hated it.” She thought the role of Tom Powers’s girl in The Public Enemy “didn’t sound right.” She wanted to “advance in her career and play ladies—nice people, exciting people. Versatility was my goal.” But if she had to “sacrifice a little bit in motive,” she could still try to “get something in there,” and so she accepted the offer to play Kitty. It was her first picture for Warner Bros., and it was a way to get work in other Warner pictures.
Mae’s was a small part, just the scene with Tom Powers in a nightclub, first with Blondell sitting at a table with their two gentlemen escorts, both of whom are passed out, and then a breakfast scene the morning after with Cagney’s Tom Powers character.
Mae had a sense that the director “might be difficult. Wellman didn’t seem very sympathetic or kind,” Mae said. “He’d have a joke at anybody’s expense, which was funny and amused most people,” but Mae “didn’t want to be on the receiving end of Wellman’s wit.” Wellman thought this was the way to keep his crew lively. “Anyone working in one of my pictures knows what they’re going to get before they even start!”
Wellman was making The Public Enemy with the same “quiet sadism” in front of the camera that Louise Brooks described him practicing “behind the camera” when he directed her in Beggars of Life. He had been fired from Paramount for goosing a female extra and ruining a camera.
Zanuck told Wellman that the characters in the picture had to be “tough, tough, tough. People are going to say the characters are immoral, but they’re not . . . they don’t have any morals. They steal, they kill, they lie, they hump each other because that’s the way they’re made and if you allow a decent human feeling or a pang of conscience to come into their makeup, you’ve lost ’Em and changed the kind of movie we’re making.”
With Cagney’s jangled taut energy and the feel about him of violence about to explode, Wellman was aiming for an assault on the nerves, a gritty realistic portrait of a vicious, sadistic man. Wellman thought Cagney “as tough as they come, but he knew ballet and all the rest of it. He was a wonderful dancer.” Wellman used that quality of Cagney’s in the picture. He allowed the actor to bring a dimensionality to Powers without using sentimentality.
Robert Sherwood wrote about Cagney’s portrait of Powers, “I doubt there is an actor extant who could have done what James Cagney does . . . He does not hesitate to represent Tom Powers as a complete rat—with a rat’s sense of honor, a rat’s capacity for human love, and when cornered, a rat’s fighting courage . . . Although his role is consistently unsympathetic, Mr. Cagney manages to earn for Tom Powers the audience’s affection and esteem.”
• • •
Wellman shot Mae’s breakfast scene at the end of the day.
She’d had little to do with Cagney during their two scenes together. She could “hear him [and] smell him—he was a man who knew his business and his business [didn’t] stop within himself. He was interested in the whole picture,” Mae said. He gave time in rehearsal and took Mae aside “when the director didn’t do it.”
Mae “felt an empathy with Jimmy” that she didn’t feel with Wellman. “It didn’t matter that I wasn’t getting anything from the director. I didn’t need anything from him. I had it within myself” and, with Cagney’s help, was all right.
The scene with Tom Powers and Kitty was to take place in the bedroom. Powers was to say to her, “Shut your mouth and open your legs, for God’s sake.” Zanuck and Wellman knew the line couldn’t be used and instead set the scene the next morning at a breakfast table.
In the rewritten scene, Powers sits down and asks for a drink. Kitty was to say, “Not before breakfast, Tom.” His response: “I didn’t ask for any lip, I asked for a drink.” Kitty says, out of a longing for a gentler response, “I wish . . .” Powers cuts her off by saying, “You’re always wishin’. You got the gimmes for fair! I’m going to get you a bag of peanuts.”
Cagney changed the line and said instead, “I wish you was a wishing well so I could tie a bucket to you and sink you.”
“That was enough,” Mae said. “It showed [Powers’s] hatred of me” and his violence.
In the Glasmon and Bright novel, the scene ends with Mae Clarke’s character throwing a glass of water at Tom Powers.
After they finished shooting the scene, Mae went back to her dressing room to change into her street clothes. Cagney appeared in the doorway and asked if he could come in. “Bill [Wellman] and I have been talking,” Cagney said. “We thought of a heck of an idea. We’d like to do [the scene] again to give the guys a kick. This is really something you won’t forget.”
Cagney told Mae that he’d heard of a gangster in Chicago, Hymie Weiss, who, listening to his girlfriend “endlessly yakking away at breakfast one morning,” took an omelet she had just prepared and shoved it in her face. Cagney said the omelet would be too messy, so they were thinking of using a grapefruit.
“Wouldn’t it be fun?” Cagney asked. “Would you mind if we tried it?”
Mae “couldn’t believe [her] ears.” She asked Cagney if he was kidding.
“No, come on back,” he said. “We’ll do the scene again, just like we forgot something and we want to improve it. They haven’t broken the set yet. The lights are still there. And then I’ll pick up this grapefruit and push it in your face and the guys will go crazy.”
Mae had struggled to get this far as an actress—working at Warner and with Wellman. If she refused Cagney, she feared all her work would “be out the window.” She thought of calling her agent, but she couldn’t get to a phone. “Jimmy was sitting right there and being persuasive.”
“I’ll do it. Once,” she said. “I’ll trust you not to hurt me and that’s all. Just for the guys. Okay.”
Wellman was ready to reshoot the scene. Mae and Jimmy sat down at the breakfast table again, she in a negligee, he in striped pajamas. Cagney asks her for a drink. Once again Kitty says, “I wish . . .” and is cut off by Powers: “I wish you was a wishing well so I could tie a bucket to you and sink you.”
Cagney picked up the half grapefruit on Mae’s plate and pushed it into the side of her face. Mae knew what was coming, but she was still shocked by it. The men yelled at Cagney. “They thought he had lost his mind,” said Mae.
Cagney kept his promise and d
idn’t hurt Mae, but she instantly regretted doing the retake. She assumed “that was the end of it” until she was told the scene was going to be shown in the projection room the following day.
Mae Clarke and James Cagney pose for a still photograph from Wellman’s Public Enemy, 1931. “I was a good sport,” said Mae about shooting the scene. “I could have sued [the studio] and won.”
Mae drove home that evening. She got to her house and felt she “was no longer Mae, the actress.” Her mother opened the door and told Mae what they were having for dinner. “I put my head on her shoulder and broke down crying. ‘Mother, something happened today that I will never, ever, get over.’ I told her I felt so used, I wished to God I’d never done it, and she sat me down to a good meal and got me to stop crying. My father . . . went quietly to the piano and consoled me by playing. That was the way he talked to me. [The studio] had no right to put that in the picture without my permission. I gave no permission. I signed no release.”
“We needed something big right there in the picture,” Wellman said. “Well, that grapefruit on the table looked inviting—and I didn’t like the dame much anyhow. So I told Jimmy to try socking her with it—but hard. He did.”
• • •
Wellman went to work directing Night Nurse, which was planned as a big picture for Warner Bros., based on the novel by Dora Macy and purchased by the studio the year before for $4,000. Dora Macy (Grace Perkins Oursler) was the author as well of Ex-mistress.
Bill Wellman had worked his way up from being a messenger at the Goldwyn studios, watching contract directors like Maurice Tourneur and Frank Lloyd (he “stole scripts, new ones, old ones and pored over them, always from a director’s point-of view”), to a position of assistant propman, then assistant director, working first for Goldwyn’s Alfred Green and others. He then moved on to Fox, where he worked for directors like Bernard J. Durning, who taught Wellman “more than anybody in the business—action, pacing, stunts.” When Durning got drunk during The Eleventh Hour, Wellman took over and was made a full director. He made a series of low-budget Buck Jones melodramas and at Metro was given a slapstick comedy with Joan Crawford, I’ll Tell the World, which was released as The Boob.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 27
