Wellman had tried acting; he was in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo, a part given to him through Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and he’d appeared in Raoul Walsh’s Evangeline. Acting for Wellman was not a self-respecting job, and he didn’t like the way he looked in front of a camera. At the premiere of The Knickerbocker Buckaroo, Wellman “stayed for half the picture and went out and vomited for no reason at all.”
Wellman told Fairbanks, “I don’t mean any disrespect, but I’m no actor.” Fairbanks asked him what he wanted to be. Wellman pointed to a director and asked how much he made. Fairbanks told him, and Wellman said, “That’s what I want to be.”
Wellman was becoming known as a fast, efficient director; he’d shot When Husbands Flirt from a Dorothy Arzner script in four days and was capable of bringing in a picture days in advance of its schedule—and under budget. The Public Enemy was shot in twenty-six days at a cost of $151,000.
In Night Nurse, Barbara was an idealistic young woman, Lora Hart, who makes her way to a big city hospital, is trained as a nurse, and in the process learns about life, death, and the workings of love and power.
She is hired by a society doctor of impeccable reputation to be the private-duty night nurse for two rich children suffering from malnutrition and anemia. She soon realizes that the children are being starved to death by their boozed-up mother and her chauffeur, who keeps his employer plied with bootlegged liquor. The sadistic chauffeur also oversees the children’s “care.”
The night nurse pieces together that the doctor is in league with mother and chauffeur. At stake are the children’s lives; for mother, chauffeur, and doctor, what matters is the children’s trust fund left them by their father. In proving malpractice, Lora Hart comes up against the medical establishment and the power of the rich and helps to shatter the facade of the seemingly perfect American family.
Wellman had twenty-four days to shoot the picture. Barbara was on loan from Columbia, or, as Sam Briskin wrote in an agreement letter to Warner Bros., “we are renting her to you” for three and a half weeks, for which the studio was being paid $35,000. Columbia threw in an additional half week’s time. Jim Cagney was to play the young intern at the hospital who flirts with Lora Hart. A month later Cagney was replaced by Eddy Nugent. Wellman began shooting on April 4, 1931.
Most of the scenes were shot fast. Wellman knew exactly what he wanted. “I had a script and I worked like hell at home. I never slept—four hours of sleep was a big night—so I did a lot of the work then.”
In Night Nurse, Wellman continued the pace and toughness of The Public Enemy. It was almost the Tom Powers story, showed from the flip side of his world: those who buy Powers’s “dirty liquor” and the havoc it can wreak in their lives. Night Nurse has the same menacing threat of violence as The Public Enemy. Lora Hart’s idealism and fight have the same tough raw spirit as Cagney’s character in The Public Enemy.
The Public Enemy was Wellman’s portrait of American madness, of a society out of control through greed, power, and booze. Night Nurse’s party scenes with the children’s mother are a grim portrait of Prohibition and the manic fever it spread. The mother, in a low-cut white evening dress, is seen passed out on a bear rug, her slippers dangling upside down on the chandelier; across the hall in her penthouse duplex her two daughters are dying from lack of food. The scene is as shocking as the one in The Public Enemy when Cagney is shot and falls facedown into the rain-soaked street, his blood spilling out onto the wet gutter as he mumbles to himself, “I ain’t so tough.”
In The Public Enemy, the shooting of Nails Nathan’s prize horse (off camera) at the bucolic equestrian stables is comparable in shock value in Night Nurse to the society doctor’s refusal to call the police or change the children’s feeding orders when he’s told by Lora Hart that his young patients are being starved and won’t last another month.
Wellman’s portrait of a medical profession bound by stringent rules and etiquette, even at the cost of a patient’s life, is summed up when Lora Hart says, “Ethics, ethics, ethics. That’s all I’ve heard since I got into this business. Isn’t there any humanity?”
The part of Nick, the chauffeur, was played by Clark Gable, a young freelance actor, who was paid $750 a week for the part. Mervyn LeRoy had pursued the actor for the part of the racketeer in Little Caesar, but Jack Warner wanted Douglas Fairbanks Jr. LeRoy had seen Gable onstage in a production of The Last Mile put on by a touring company at the old Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles. LeRoy wanted “a real tough guy, not somebody who looked as though he’d just stepped out of some elegant drawing room,” as Fairbanks did.
With Clark Gable, Night Nurse, 1931. He was from Cadiz, Ohio, born in 1901, the son of an oil-field contractor from Pennsylvania Dutch stock who worked on the Oklahoma derricks until he rode blind baggage west in a freight car. It was Pauline Frederick’s personal dentist—Gable played a small part in one of her companies—who fixed his teeth. His ears stuck out even more until he had them pulled back.
When Clark Gable came onstage in The Last Mile, as a convict, stripped to the waist, LeRoy saw the tough guy he was looking for. “He was powerful, brutal, animal-like,” said LeRoy, who arranged to test the actor at Warner. Gable did scenes from The Last Mile and read some lines from Little Caesar. LeRoy thought the actor had “the same quality on screen that he had on stage, only magnified.” Zanuck didn’t see Gable’s power. “Do you know what you’ve done,” Zanuck told LeRoy. “You’ve just thrown away five hundred bucks on a test. Didn’t you see the size of that guy’s ears?”
Wellman said, “They [the powers that be at Warner Bros.] forgot to look at [Gable’s] dimples and listen to his voice and see his smile.”
Bill Wellman saw the power in Gable’s presence and wanted him for the part of “Nick, the black-clothed chauffeur.” Gable, listed as “Gables” in the production reports, was “one of the most despicable heavies imaginable,” said Wellman. “The instant Clark walked onto that set,” Barbara said, “I knew, we all knew, that here was a striking personality. He commanded attention.”
Marjorie Crawford, Wellman’s fourth wife and a member of the Ninety-Nines whose first president was Amelia Earhart, circa 1930.
In one scene Wellman has Gable (Nick) slug Barbara (Lora Hart) in the chin and in another push her so hard she is slammed against a door and falls to the floor. The scene was originally written for the chauffeur to push the doctor (Charles Winninger) into the door as he is about to perform a transfusion to save the children. Wellman shot the scene with Nick first punching the doctor almost into the camera and then throwing Lora Hart across the room.
Gable pushed Barbara with such force that she went through the door. “That was okay,” said Barbara. “That was how great Clark was.”
Despite the violence aimed at women in The Public Enemy, Wellman saw women as capable of the same kind of two-fistedness, fearlessness, and passionate idealism as men—able to hold their own—and showed that in Barbara’s character in Night Nurse.
Louise Brooks said that Bill Wellman was “shy in conversation” with women; he “resembled an actor [with women] . . . uncertain of his part, more than he did a director.”
Wellman was married to a “beautiful polo-playing aviatrix,” a kind of Tommy Hitchcock, Wellman’s good pal, with whom he had flown in the Lafayette Flying Corps. “Tommy Hitchcock was the roughest, toughest, most fearless and best [polo player] in the world,” said Wellman. “A 10-goal player—that’s as high as you can get. Marjorie Crawford [Wellman’s wife] wasn’t in Tom’s class but [she] was awfully good for a woman. As graceful on horseback as [she was] in the air,” said Wellman. She was “rough and tough. With the face of an angel, a beautiful blonde angel. And a figure, amen.”
With Betty Jane Graham as Desney Ritchey and Marcia Mae Jones as Nanny. Night Nurse, 1931. (PHOTOFEST)
Wellman married Marjorie Crawford twice, the first time when he was not yet legally divorced from his third wife, Margery Chapin. The silent-film star Helene Chadwick, Wellman
’s second wife, great-granddaughter of Lord Chadwick, was described in the 1920s as “intelligent; womanly, and, at the same time, a good comrade; the best-fellow-in-the-world.”
In one of Wellman’s silent pictures, Beggars of Life, he shows a young girl (Louise Brooks) on the run from the law (she kills her father when he tries to rape her) who joins up with a young tramp. Together they ride the rails and sleep in haystacks, she disguised as a boy, wearing shirt, jacket, pants, boots, and cap to hide her girlish bob.
In Night Nurse, Wellman makes Barbara the kind of woman he delights in. She is almost as “rough and tough” as Nick, the chauffeur, and, like Wellman’s own wife, had “the face of an angel,” with passion and idealism as well.
The psychic assault of Night Nurse continues when Barbara’s character slams the mother’s leering, hopped-up boyfriend in the neck with the full force of her arm. He falls over backward and crawls away. When he peers out at Barbara from behind the bar, she throws an ice bucket at him from across the room, just missing his head but shattering bottles of champagne. The children for whom the night nurse is caring are near death, and she finds their mother, Mrs. Ritchey, draped over the bar, dead drunk, almost passed out.
Barbara yells at Mrs. Ritchey, “You’re a cruel, inhuman mother. You’re a rotten parasite. Don’t blame it on the booze. It’s you. You’re going up to that nursery with me if I have to drag you by the hair of your head.” Mrs. Ritchey drops off the bar stool. Barbara drags her by the neck until Mrs. Ritchey falls at Barbara’s feet. Lora Hart stands there, hands on her hips, looking down at Mrs. Ritchey passed out on the floor. With all of the steeliness and street grit of The Public Enemy’s Tom Powers, Barbara speaks the ultimate indictment, “You mother,” steps over Mrs. Ritchey, grabs a champagne bucket full of ice water, and dumps it on her face.
Barbara next squares off against Nick. “You think just because you can strong-arm a couple of women,” she says, “you have the brains to put over a racket like this. I had you numbered the minute I stepped into this house. They use the electric chair for the kinds of things you’re responsible for.”
At the end of each day’s shooting, Barbara asked the assistant director how many pages had been shot. “I was happy when we had covered more than scheduled and unhappy if we fell short,” she said. The crew kidded her, asking if she had money in the production.
Wellman finished Night Nurse on May 6, two days earlier than scheduled. The picture was budgeted at just over $260,000. Wellman brought it in at just over $139,000 and was paid $27,000 to do the job.
• • •
Fay’s picture God’s Gift to Women opened in Los Angeles at the Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre and in New York at the Strand on Broadway. Warner was heralding Fay as the “It Man”; “the 1931 Model Lover—built for Speed, Style, Endurance.” He went east for the opening and stayed for the picture’s first week, appearing at the Strand doing four shows a day, performing twenty minutes of gags, songs, and imitations (among them his uncanny imitation of John Barrymore), and chatting onstage about Hollywood and his wife.
The reviews for God’s Gift to Women were poor. Variety said, simply, “It’s no gift to audiences,” but the reviewers commented on how Fay’s presence carried the picture. The New York Times called Fay “the whole show. He softens the banality of dialogue that would be better left unspoken and . . . tricks his audiences into believing that the stock farce situations are both amusing and fresh, which they are not.”
The lure of “the Great Fay,” “Broadway’s Favorite Son,” and the studio’s promise of beautiful women, sexual sophistication, hilarity, and high jinks failed to be enough of a draw for an audience struggling to keep the Depression at bay. More than two million men crisscrossed the countryside in search of jobs that weren’t to be found. In New York City families were being supported by tens of millions of government relief dollars. Despite that, 60 percent of Americans still faithfully paid the few cents it cost to escape their troubles and go to the movies.
After a six-day run, God’s Gift to Women, which cost $220,000 to make, had brought in $12,000. The following week, The Public Enemy grossed $60,000 without the appearances of its cast members or Cagney, its new star.
Fay was obligated to make one more picture for the studio. In early June, Warner Bros. decided to buy out the last remaining months of his contract for $27,500 and let it be known in the press. The Broadway sensation seemed unaffected by the studio’s decision and bought a new car and hired a driver. Fay wasn’t the only actor dropped by the studio: within a two-week period Warner had let go more than forty actors, writers, and directors. Barbara was reshooting the end of The Miracle Woman. She was not happy about the way Warner had treated Fay and was just as publicly letting it be known how much she disliked Hollywood and “the Hollywood attitude.”
She was keenly aware of how in Hollywood “you were loved for success and success alone.” When the Fays first came to Hollywood two years earlier, Barbara was known as “the girl Frank Fay married” and was barely tolerated by the Hollywood royals, even though she’d experienced the thrill of her name in electric lights on Broadway. After the critical and financial failure of God’s Gift to Women, the town began to refer to Frank as “Barbara Stanwyck’s husband.”
Barbara put no faith in fame. “When you are up in Hollywood, you are accepted; when you are down, it is as though you do not exist.”
She told the press she was in it for the money, even though of course she was happy when she made a good picture. And, unlike most of the other “poor women in the octopus-like grip of the studios,” Barbara had made sure that she was free from studio control.
She wanted to remain outside studio life and Hollywood society. Fame and work were not her gods, she said. What Barbara had was Frank Fay. And when they’d made enough money, they planned, she said, to live in Europe as they pleased, have a couple of children, and possibly do a play in London and bring it into New York. Life would be rich and full for them, and, she told the press, if she never saw Hollywood again, that would be fine with her.
THREE
On Being “Barbaric”
Barbara was obligated to make one more picture—her third—for Columbia and agreed to star in Forbidden with Frank Capra directing. She also approved a story by Houston Branch to be the basis of her first picture under her new Warner contract. Safe in Hell was a dark, twisted story about a New Orleans prostitute who believes she’s killed a former trick, her first, in a fire she accidentally starts. She flees the city and is stowed away by her seaman fiancé (Donald Cook), who loves her no matter whom she’s been with or what she’s done. The ship is bound for Tortuga in the Caribbean, the only island in the world without an extradition law. The plan is to lie low until the hunt for her quiets down and the law gives up its search.
Tortuga—hot, close, infested with insects and disease, separated by weeks of travel from the nearest body of land—is full of desperate, violent characters who long ago sought refuge there. The newly arrived Gilda Karlson, now Erickson, is the only “white woman” to be found on the island.
Gilda can hardly believe her sailor fiancé has married her. When he goes off on months-long voyages, Gilda keeps her promise to him and rebuffs each crazed man who behaves like a starved dog trying to devour her. The desperate men of Tortuga come to respect Gilda and leave her alone, except for the island’s jailer-executioner, who wants her and will do anything to get her, including stealing the adoring letters her husband writes to her from every port and setting her up to kill the man she thought she’d already murdered. On Tortuga the laws are strict. The executioner tells Gilda, “As long as you behave yourself here, you are safe from jail and gallows.” And adds under his breath, “Safe in hell.”
The Houston Branch story was as daring as the law allowed. The story combined elements of Bill Wellman’s Beggars of Life: a girl on the run from the law who escapes its wrath only to find her way into a parallel society, a dark underworld, governed by the dispossess
ed, beggars and thieves whose own twisted laws and conventions, and desire for her, eventually seal her fate.
Barbara’s sister, Laura Mildred Stevens Smith. She was buried in Brooklyn in Green-Wood Cemetery near her mother, Catherine; her younger sister, Mabel; and Byron Stevens’s wife, Elizabeth. (COURTESY JUNE D. MERKENT)
Gilda keeps her vow to be faithful to her husband to the end and chooses hanging by the executioner rather than be at his mercy for the six months she is to serve in his prison camp.
In the picture were elements of Maugham’s Sadie Thompson, in its sexual combustion and repression and in its story of redemption and purity. In the script were Darryl Zanuck’s hard-edged notions about story, drama, and character—the requisite fall from grace and the spiritual rebirth—fed by Zanuck’s boyhood love of dime novels and tabloid journalism. Safe in Hell for Warner was to go into production in mid-September after the completion of Barbara’s next picture for Columbia.
• • •
Barbara’s sister Millie died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. Millie was Barbara’s “tall, beautiful” sister who had taken care of her, brought her to New York City, given her the world of theaters and performers, and been the closest thing to a mother to her. “She was gorgeous,” said Barbara.
The funeral was in Flatbush at Moadinger’s, where Mabel’s funeral had been held almost a year earlier. Laura Mildred Stevens Smith was buried in Brooklyn in Green-Wood Cemetery near her mother, Catherine, her younger sister Mabel Stevens Vaslett Munier, and By’s wife, Elizabeth Stevens. Barbara and Fay were unable to go east for the service.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 28
