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

by Victoria Wilson

  “Well,” said Barbara, “do you suppose Wall Street can prevent me from sitting right here looking at the waves?”

  Barbara’s attorney maintained that she had fulfilled her three-picture contract with Columbia, that Illicit, the picture she’d made for Warner Bros. on loan-out, was Columbia’s third picture. Columbia notified Warner Bros. of the injunction; Warner sent a perfunctory letter to Charles Cradick informing Barbara of Columbia’s stance.

  Warner was awaiting the outcome of the case and gave a copy of the script of Safe in Hell to the English actress Dorothy Mackaill to take over Barbara’s part of Gilda Karlson. The twenty-eight-year-old blond-haired Mackaill, a former London Hippodrome and Ziegfeld Follies beauty, was under a one-year renewed contract to First National to make four pictures at $42,500 per picture. Mackaill appeared with John Barrymore in The Lotus Eaters, became a star in silent pictures—her first starring picture, Bits of Life, was made in 1921—and successfully made the transition to talkies. Mackaill the previous year had starred with Fay in Bright Lights.

  She was slim and an accomplished athlete who loved to play tennis, particularly at San Simeon; William Randolph Hearst was taken with her. She had a sense of humor and was full of fun. Mackaill’s face and the slope of her hazel eyes resembled Barbara’s, though Mackaill didn’t have Barbara’s combination of gutsiness and softness, a look that made Barbara on-screen all the more touching and resonant.

  Barbara was determined to make Safe in Hell and let the studio know she was ready to work.

  In court before Judge Douglas Edmonds, Barbara testified that her contract with Columbia had expired three weeks before, that she’d made three pictures under the terms of her contract, pictures that were to be made within a certain period of time and that the time limit had expired on August 14.

  When the court finally granted Columbia its injunction, Barbara and Mackaill were both in production as Gilda Karlson for Safe in Hell. Barbara was working with Wellman; Mackaill as backup was in wardrobe fittings. The court found that Barbara contractually owed Columbia Pictures one more film and that either she fulfill the obligation or she would be barred by court action from appearing in any other picture.

  Harry Cohn had won his victory and called Barbara to ask her to come in to meet with him. “We’ll see what we can do about giving you more money so you will feel better about things,” he said. Barbara said, “Nuts,” and hung up the receiver. Frank made Barbara call and apologize. Barbara went to see Cohn.

  She agreed to make three additional pictures for Columbia, alternating with those she was to make for Warner. Barbara fought for a salary of $35,000 for the first picture and $50,000 for the remaining two but agreed to Cohn’s offer to pay her $25,000 per picture instead of the contractually agreed-upon $20,000 for the first and $25,000 for each additional picture.

  “Everything was very nice. He didn’t have to do a thing for me,” said Barbara. “He’d won the suit.”

  Barbara was set to make Forbidden. Warner tried to work out an arrangement with Columbia for her to continue with Safe in Hell, but negotiations fell apart.

  Barbara was back at Columbia Pictures.

  FOUR

  “Theoretically Dangerous Overload”

  Fannie Hurst’s Back Street, originally called Grand Passion, was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine during the fall and winter of 1930–1931.

  It was said of Hurst that “no other living American woman has gone so far in fiction in so short a time.” Her work was “overwhelmingly prodigal of both feeling and language . . . a succession of shocks, sparks and purple fireworks. [Hurst] mixes naked, realistic detail with simple unrestrained emotion,” wrote Robert Littell in 1928, “[and] the result is lurid, magnificently lurid.”

  Cosmopolitan began publishing Hurst in 1914. By 1930, the magazine had published forty of her stories. Cosmopolitan paid $40,000 for the rights to Back Street. The book rights were bought by Hearst’s newly formed Cosmopolitan Book Corporation for an advance of $16,500, more than double the money the author had received from her previous publishers, Harper & Brothers and Alfred A. Knopf.

  Back Street, Hurst’s seventh novel, was published in January 1931 and was described by The New York Times as “the most ambitious and carefully wrought novel Fannie Hurst has produced in years.” The book was on the best-seller list, where it stayed until more than forty thousand copies had sold.

  Soon after the publication of Back Street, Universal Pictures bought the film rights and Frank Capra, who was hell-bent on beating Universal to the screen, took the basic plot of Hurst’s best seller and many of the details and wrote his own story, Forbidden, which Jo Swerling adapted.

  At the novel’s center is Ray Schmidt of Cincinnati, a girl who runs wild, living amid the solid German merchants of “Munich-on-the-Ohio,” a stunning up-to-the-minute-looking girl, working in her father’s concern (Schmidt’s Trimmings and Findings). She entertains the traveling salesmen who come to the store to sell their goods (“she’s a girl with a nest egg in her sack; never mind where she got it”). She’s acquired a reputation for being “fly” without being “out-and-out fast.”

  At twenty years old, Ray is mourning the sudden death of her father. The store is being taken over by a St. Louis button factory, and Ray is feeling dispossessed from the world she’s known forever. She is considering marrying Kurt Shendler, of Shendler’s Bicycle Repair Shop (he may be crude, but he has a future and he’s of her own kind). Ray’s life is solidly, if passionlessly, falling into place until she meets Walter Saxel, a young Jewish man from a good family, and suddenly for Ray nothing else matters except Walter.

  Her days are punctuated by their being together, planning their meetings, and being inconspicuous about being seen together. Walter worries about his mother finding out he is seeing a shiksa. An introduction between Mrs. Saxel and Ray is arranged, but Ray’s sister, always so proper around boys, finds herself “in trouble,” and Ray is there to help. The long-awaited meeting with Walter’s mother is postponed and never takes place. As a result, Ray’s life is changed forever.

  Walter marries someone of his own “race”; Ray leaves Cincinnati for New York. And when they meet accidentally, six years later, Walter is a junior partner in the midst of a brilliant banking career and married with two children. Ray is rooming on West Twenty-Third Street at a boardinghouse and working at a firm on Greene Street buying dressmaker’s findings, ribbons, veilings, and the like. They come together again (Walter to Ray: “My feeling for you and my feeling for my wife and children are things separate and apart. I can be loyal to both these feelings because they are so different”).

  Soon Walter takes an apartment for Ray, and she gives up her promising job. Ray turns away from friends and family and lives in a corner of Walter’s life, her isolation becoming more complete as their affair becomes more clandestine. As the days and months turn into years, Ray is barely getting by on the meager amounts of money that Walter gives her (he sees her sparse existence as an emblem of the purity of their love). He relies on Ray’s counsel for his own ever-growing success and spends money lavishly on his own flourishing family. As the novel moves to its final moments in Aix-les-Bains, Ray’s life of love and sacrifice is tragically portrayed in Hurst’s “courageous,” ambitious novel.

  Hurst’s melodramatic writing lent itself to motion pictures. In Hurst’s worlds, Vanity Fair said, “shop girls appear as heroines.” The combination of character and large incident made the books successfully adaptable to a dramatic visual medium.

  Hurst wrote about working men and women determined to rise out of their class. At the heart of her writing was the experience of the Jewish immigrant in American society. Hurst was herself a Jewish girl from the Midwest. F. Scott Fitzgerald proclaimed her and Edna Ferber “the Yiddish descendants of O. Henry.” Hurst’s writing had more of the feel of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis than of O. Henry, in the people Hurst wrote about, in the airless circumstances of their lives, in the flatness and consta
ncy of their struggle.

  By the time Back Street was published in 1931, the studios had made sixteen pictures from Hurst’s stories, plays, and novels. Famous Players–Lasky bought the rights to Humoresque in 1920, a year after the novel was published. United Artists distributed Lummox in 1930, based on Hurst’s novel, directed by Herbert Brenon. The same year Warner Bros. made The Painted Angel from a Hurst story, “Give This Little Girl a Hand,” inspired by Texas Guinan; the studio’s counterpart, First National, remade Back Pay (originally made eight years earlier). Jack Warner, vice president in charge of production for Warner Bros., saw Hurst as someone who “knew how to reach human hearts and bring life’s joys and sorrows to countless millions of readers.”

  Capra was familiar with Fannie Hurst’s rich sensibility and subject matter. The Younger Generation, a picture he’d made in 1929 from It Is to Laugh, Hurst’s play based on her story “The Gold in Fish,” followed Capra’s big success with Submarine.

  The Younger Generation was a picture about assimilation, something Capra had experienced firsthand. It centers on the son of a junk dealer, a Jewish immigrant, who grows up in New York’s Lower East Side ashamed of what he is and where he comes from—his past, his family, his Jewishness—and is determined to get a piece of the American dream. He changes his name from Goldfish to Fish, becomes a successful antiques dealer, and soon is traveling in a moneyed fast (non-Jewish) crowd. He bestows upon his old-world parents what he sees as the gift of freedom—a life away from their Delancey Street ghetto—and moves them into his new Fifth Avenue apartment. He cannot escape his shame and, in a terrible moment, introduces his parents to his friends as his servants. Rather than finding freedom living on Fifth Avenue, the father longs for the old neighborhood whose ways he cherishes and, out of his profound sense of loss for their former life, becomes ill. The family, once so close and rooted in their origins and traditions, begins to fracture as both generations become stranded between two worlds.

  Capra’s Younger Generation starred Jean Hersholt, Rosa Rosanova, Ricardo Cortez, and Lina Basquette. Capra originally shot it as a silent picture but reshot sequences to make use of the new technology on a soundstage located on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  As an immigrant, Capra understood the impulse to turn away from the past—and his differentness—and become Americanized and successful.

  With Hurst’s Back Street, Capra understood the dilemma of falling in love with someone who was married (as was Barbara) and unwilling to leave her husband (as she was with Fay) and, despite himself, being helpless to end the affair. Capra was inspired by his deep feelings for Barbara and was free with an adaptation to take the basic plot of Back Street and project his own intimate feelings and fantasies onto his characters and story. It was in the borrowed nature of the piece that Capra was able to show his emotions about Barbara, himself, and Frank Fay.

  • • •

  In the character Lulu in Forbidden, Capra created the woman of his dreams: loyal and ready to sacrifice everything for love. She is a small-town librarian who sees that life is passing her by and one day breaks out of her dreary routinized existence to go off on a cruise to Havana, the city of romance, fall in love with a married man, and stay with him for a lifetime. Capra went one step further with the character: he has her sacrifice her love to her ideal and then admit that she was wrong to do so. That the woman loves the married man is the first of Capra’s big wish fulfillments; the second is her fidelity to true love and to the lover.

  Bob Grover, with Lulu’s selfless and wise counsel, has worked his way from successful lawyer to district attorney to gubernatorial candidate. Years into their secret life together, he is about to win the victory he’s worked decades to achieve, but realizes he no longer cares about appearances, about his career, about what his wife—or the voters—will think; his pursuit has become meaningless to him. Of single value to him now is his love for Lulu. He wants to be with her openly.

  Lulu had willingly sacrificed their illegitimate child to help Grover’s political climb, allowing Grover and his wife to adopt the little girl. Even with her daughter grown and engaged, when Grover begs Lulu to go off with him just before the start of the gubernatorial campaign, Lulu is still hell-bent on noble self-sacrifice; she cares about appearances for his sake, even if Grover no longer does, and refuses his offer. Later, as Grover lies dying, Capra has Lulu say that she was wrong not to have allowed them an open life together and risk the consequences.

  Capra created a woman who, throughout years of secrecy and shame—giving up her child for the man she loves, marrying a man she doesn’t care about to protect the man she does, committing an act of murder to defend her lover’s career—remains utterly faithful to her lover, and to their forbidden love, and finally, too late for both of them, sees the mistake of her willful self-sacrifice.

  The book jacket for the picture’s novelization. (GROSSET & DUNLAP)

  Capra added a third element to the story: another man who is in pursuit of the truth of Grover’s secret life and also in love with Lulu. Holland is a star investigative reporter on the newspaper where Lulu works and is determined to get the goods on Grover. He’s smitten with Lulu from the moment he sees her. She isn’t at all flustered by his attention, by his flirting; Holland never goes beyond the acceptable with her, but it’s clear she wouldn’t care if he did; she is in control of their (to her) meaningless flirtation. Holland remains devoted despite Lulu’s jokey, loving indifference. He doesn’t press her, but he doesn’t give up, and oddly he doesn’t settle for less—he doesn’t marry anyone else.

  The years pass; Grover rises in political life, and he and Lulu are still together. Holland begins to close in on the secret of Grover’s life, and Lulu, to throw Holland off the trail, agrees to marry him. When Holland realizes it is his wife who is at the center of Grover’s life, his rage at the betrayal, and his wrath, set in motion Lulu’s final sacrifice for the man she loves and her ultimate rejection of the man she doesn’t.

  Capra projected onto both men aspects of Frank Fay and divided his own impulses—parceling out his own complex feelings—between Grover and Holland. Bob Grover, the conventional husband who is also the lover, is both terrible and great. He is first seen drunk and passed out on Lulu’s bed. He is introduced as dangerous, misbehaving, similar to Frank Fay. But Grover is given other qualities: he is refined, sensitive, elegant, loving, faithful, an idealized Capra.

  Capra made Grover the opposite of the male stereotype who’s got it all—the sexy woman on the side and a public wife with the appearance of respectability. Lulu sees that Grover isn’t going to leave his wife. He wants his wife’s money, and he wants the career. So far, Grover is in type as the cad. But his reversal of character—his second, after being introduced as a drunk and turning out to be charming—is revealed when he tracks down Lulu at her apartment. When they are together on the stairs of her building, it’s clear that he loves her. When he is told that the little girl at the top of the stairs calling to Lulu is his own child as well, he’s delighted and full of love for both mother and daughter.

  Holland, the courtier who becomes the husband, is vigorous, vulgar, ruddy, also like Fay. His pursuit of Lulu over the years is appealing but becomes ruthless when he discovers her betrayal. Lulu refuses to allow her “husband” to bring ruin to her lover. Holland reminds her that she is married to him, and his rage and brutality lead to his own death as Lulu shoots him again and again to protect Grover, Capra getting his wish and doing in Fay.

  Holland also has aspects of Capra in him: he’s the popular, savvy media guy, the man of the people out to expose the cover-up.

  Capra portrays Grover and Lulu’s forbidden affair as being one of true love, unlike either of the marriages, which he makes villainous.

  He also incorporates scenes that are totally modern, that have the sting of real life, and that jump out as not belonging to the formula of the genre. When Lulu and Grover attempt to break up in the park, she leaves him in the midst of a hea
vy rain—Capra’s signature element in his love scenes to make them a “bit offbeat so people don’t laugh at it”—only to turn around and come back to him, still sitting on the bench, wet and oblivious to it and stunned by his feelings of emptiness at the loss of Lulu; she finds herself incapable of leaving him because she loves him so much. In another scene, Lulu refuses to open the door to her apartment when Grover comes to find her after a year of trying to track her down, a year in which Lulu has given birth to their child. Lulu runs away from Grover on the stairs but comes back to him.

  Adolphe Menjou was Grover. Menjou had already made a profession out of playing a cad, beginning in 1923 with Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris, in which he played the dapper boulevardier who seduces, keeps, and discards a woman who ends up being a prostitute. Menjou went on to star in the first French all-talking movie and then worked in Italian, Spanish, and German talking pictures before returning to Hollywood. He had just had a big success as Walter Burns in the picture of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Front Page, directed by Lewis Milestone. Bill Wellman referred to Menjou as “the debonair Frenchman from Pittsburgh.”

  The newspaperman Al Holland was originally to have been played by Paul Muni, but Ralph Bellamy, a leading man in stock who was brought to Hollywood in 1930 and who’d appeared in three pictures since, was borrowed from Fox for the role of the reporter.

  Shooting on Forbidden began at the end of September 1931, two weeks after Barbara’s dispute with Cohn was settled and a month after Capra finished shooting Gallagher.