As Forbidden started shooting, Fay went to New York to appear as the headline at RKO’s Palace, his first appearance there in a year. He was to replace Edward G. Robinson and Kate Smith for $4,000 for the week. Fay, known as the King of Vaudeville Gulch, was coming into the Palace after Kate Smith’s eleventh consecutive week there, breaking his own ten-week record in 1927, which Barbara had commemorated by giving Frank a cigarette case with a royal crown of jewels. Now, after the disaster of God’s Gift to Women and the poor showing of Fay’s appearance at the Strand, his drinking had progressed. He was getting drunk more frequently and staying drunk for longer periods of time. Barbara refused to give up on him; she was determined to make the marriage work.
• • •
Barbara and Menjou were shooting a scene on horseback at Laguna Beach that was to take place during their two-week idyll in Havana. They were to ride their horses on the windswept beach along the water’s edge of what was to be Emerald Bay. The cameras were set up on a cliff high above the water in order to shoot them riding below and, said Joe Walker, Capra’s cameraman, to capture “the morning light shimmering in a path on the ocean.”
For the long shot Capra used a double. “I have always been afraid of horses,” said Barbara. Capra wanted a closer shot, and Barbara, still wearing a brace from her last fall, agreed to get on the horse if Capra shot the scene quickly. Barbara shut her eyes tight and climbed on the horse. “He sensed, as horses do,” said Barbara, “that I was afraid.”
They were set to go. “The grips turned reflectors to catch the morning sun,” said Walker. “The horse was high-strung. Barbara began to ride the horse at a canter through the heavy wet sands. The sudden flash of light directed toward the horse, startled [the animal],” said Walker. It reared, lost its footing in the loose sand, and fell backward, falling on Barbara and rolling over on her. The sand absorbed most of the force of the fall and the weight of the horse. Barbara said, “While [the horse] was trying frantically to rise, his hoofs kept striking my back.”
Menjou and the crew pulled Barbara free. She was unconscious for fifteen minutes. When she finally came to, she felt the muscles in her legs tightening. Capra wanted her to go to the hospital. “Hurry,” she said. “We’ll have to finish this scene, my legs are stiffening.”
Menjou and Barbara walked into the water as called for, swam fifty yards offshore, and returned to the beach. As Barbara walked out of the water, she lost consciousness and was taken to the Laguna Beach hospital. No bones were broken, but she suffered two sprained ankles and a dislocated coccyx.
After Barbara’s fall, some of Fay’s New York friends doubted he would stay in New York and open at the Palace, despite a signed contract. They took bets that Frank would cancel the engagement, which he did and returned to Los Angeles by train two days after Barbara’s accident. The press, ready to describe Fay as difficult, called the circumstances surrounding his decision to cancel “strange” since Columbia’s press department had minimized Barbara’s accident by calling it “almost a slide off the horse” and said that she was “unhurt.” In truth, the doctors told Barbara that she might not walk again and that if she did, she would have to use crutches.
Barbara refused to miss a day’s work. At the end of each day’s shooting, she went to the hospital to spend the night in traction. Capra had a slant board built for her to lean against between takes.
One of the camera assistants, Al Keller, who’d been with Capra for two years, said of Barbara, “Her courage, to me, was inspirational. This gal had that much integrity that she wouldn’t leave the film.” He thought she was “something else.”
Barbara recovered slowly and continued to work, even attending the premiere of George Arliss’s Alexander Hamilton at Warner’s new theater on Wilshire Boulevard along with others, including James Cagney, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, and Joan Crawford.
Capra rehearsed Barbara with the rest of the actors and crew of Forbidden in a walk-through to go over the moves so the camera could follow her. The rehearsals were sketchy; Barbara spoke her lines, but they were barely audible. Ed Bernds, the head of the sound crew on the picture, who’d worked with Capra on three other pictures, described his rehearsals with Barbara as done at “half speed.” Bernds knew the pace would be faster for camera and sound and the dialogue louder. “We were not given a sound rehearsal,” he said. “When Western Electric designed the sound system, they put the mixers in a monitor booth, and you couldn’t see the set. It was a glass-fronted case, hung on the wall of the stage, or maybe, in the case of Stage 1 at Columbia, pierced through the wall.”
During the making of Forbidden, the mixers, in the upstairs monitor room, often recorded a scene they couldn’t see. “We were supposed to be able to look down from our monitor room and see the set,” said Bernds. “But that would have been wasteful of stage space, and often we’d be looking at the back wall of a set. When it came time to shoot the scene, camera and sound were put at great pressure to get the scene right. We were the best that Columbia had, and we coped pretty well.”
“Everyone was trying to do his best,” said Al Keller. “Capra inspired 110 percent from his crew. We felt that working for him, we were the elite. But he wouldn’t tolerate anyone who couldn’t cut it. Boy, you did it the first time or you weren’t there.”
“Menjou and Bellamy performed dutifully in the strange, subdued rehearsals,” Bernds said. “When the cameras turned and [Barbara] responded with searing, emotional performances, [Menjou and Bellamy] responded brilliantly.” Capra was a director who wanted his audiences to forget they were watching a picture. He wanted “interesting characterizations” and wanted his cast to “ad-lib, to build up little personal traits in character and story to create vitality and warmth.”
Capra might shoot a scene many times over without stopping the camera. The camera was kept rolling while the actors would be called back again and again to redo the scene. This was to get around Harry Cohn’s ironclad rule that, as Capra said, “no director could order more than one ‘take’ printed of any scene, regardless of how many takes the director had shot.” Cohn even told his directors to turn off the lights in the men’s room. “Why are you wasting my electricity?” he’d say. Cohn was not fooled by Capra’s ruse, but it saved time and money, so Cohn went along with it.
Capra found that shooting this way not only allowed him to get as many takes as he wanted. By the second or third take, without time to be coiffed and polished by makeup people and to lose the mood, the actors, Capra said, “lost their superficial aplomb . . . they began sweating, mussing their hair, rumpling their clothes.” The perfect looks were gone, “forgotten were the minutiae of cues, position tapes on the floor . . . they became real human beings playing scenes—and believing it.”
In the picture, Lulu goes from being a young girl to an elderly woman. The makeup man, Monte Westmore, made sketches, experimented, and then spent two hours working with Barbara each morning to age her for her scenes as an older woman.
Barbara said, “I just ask the cameraman, in great humility, to please make me look human. You know, just make me look human, that’s all.”
In the early days of sound, three cameras were used to help in the difficult process of cutting sound track. By the time Forbidden was in production, sound track was easy to cut.
“Capra wanted to keep [the shot] just long enough to hold the two actors,” said Bernds. “And we followed Barbara as it became a two-shot when she was close to Bellamy.”
With Capra and Adolphe Menjou during Forbidden, 1931. “What those two [Capra and Willard Mack] saw in me,” said Barbara, “I still don’t know.” (PHOTOFEST)
Capra liked to shoot a lot of angles; they gave him flexibility in cutting.
“The scene where Barbara shoots Bellamy is dynamite acting at a high intensity, very high intensity,” Bernds said. “[Barbara’s] voice was tough on sound because at times when she screamed, the Western Electric sound system went into a state of theoretically dangerous overl
oad.”
• • •
Bernds watched Capra with Barbara. He was aware that the director was interested in her more than just as an actress. “It showed in subtle ways,” said Bernds. “In the way he looked at her, the way he talked to her. It was unmistakable.”
“It is true,” said Capra, “that directors often fall in love with their leading ladies—at least while making a film together. They come to know each other so intimately—more so than some married couples—and their relationship is so close emotionally, so charged creatively, it can easily drift into a Pygmalion and Galatea affinity; or, as true in some cases, it can slip into a hypnotic Svengali and Trilby association.”
Bernds, as the head mixer, could hear “an awful lot of stuff through the microphone,” he said, “that nobody else heard.” It was clear to Bernds that Barbara admired Capra, that she “revered him as a director. But I’m not sure that she welcomed his love,” said Bernds. “He seemed more smitten with her than she was with him.”
Between scenes Bernds heard Menjou talk to Capra about the upcoming 1932 election and about Menjou’s concerns that the “communists—the Democrats—would win the election, raise taxes, destroy the value of the dollar,” and deprive Menjou of some of his wealth. In response to a rumor that the country, with Hoover out of office and a new, Democratic administration in power, might abandon the gold standard, as had Europe and England, Bernds heard Menjou tell Capra, “I’ve got gold stashed in safety deposit boxes all over town—they’ll never get an ounce from me.”
Menjou and Capra railed against the governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, whom they hated and who was in the running as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States. Capra was a Republican, as was Frank Fay. Each man reinforced Barbara’s Republican Party beliefs; her family had been longtime Republicans. Capra, Fay, and Stanwyck believed that if they had risen up from extreme poverty and made something of themselves, why shouldn’t everyone be able to do the same. The government had no business meddling in their financial affairs. The country’s going off the gold standard would create havoc; money would be devalued; recession and more unemployment would result. The Hoover administration denied federal responsibility for relief of the unemployed. Governor Roosevelt in a speech before the New York State Legislature in which he asked, “What is the State?” put forth the idea that “modern society, acting through its Government, owe[d] the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot . . . [A]id must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty.”
• • •
Mae Clarke was at Columbia making The Final Edition and trying to make some sense of the split in her friendship with Barbara. “I wish we could get together and straighten things out,” Mae said. Barbara told Mae she didn’t have time to see her.
During production on Forbidden, Frank Fay was aware that something was happening between his wife and Capra. His drinking grew worse as his angry rages intensified.
• • •
The last day of shooting of Forbidden was November 3. That evening Barbara and Fay went to a party in Los Angeles. Frank’s father was staying with his son and daughter-in-law and called, frantic: their house was on fire. By the time Fay and Barbara got to Malibu, the house was a smoldering pile of ashes and debris. The fire was still going, being fanned by a strong sea wind; houses nearby were burning. A bucket brigade of more than twenty members of the Malibu colony had struggled to overcome the blaze before the fire departments of Malibu, Santa Monica, Las Flores, and Topanga Canyon arrived and fought to control the fire for the next hour.
Nothing of the Fays’ house was left. It was in a state of blackened rubble. The fire had mysteriously started next door at the then-unoccupied home of their neighbor, F. Nash Carton, a banker, and went unchecked, destroying three houses, including the Fays’.
The damage to Barbara and Frank’s house amounted to $35,000. Most of Barbara’s valuables were destroyed. They were of little importance to her. “I’m not proud about possessions,” she said. After the fire, two of Barbara’s diamond bracelets were found. “Diamonds don’t burn,” she said. But the diamond bracelet given to her by Willard Mack for her opening in The Noose was lost.
“I’m not crying about the house. That’s gone and it’s not worth crying over.” What upset Barbara more than the loss of the house and all of her valuables was losing a photograph of her sister Millie, “my sister who died—and—I’m not sure I can get another one like it.”
• • •
Capra finished filming Forbidden and left for Europe for eight weeks, his first long holiday in four years since going to work for Harry Cohn.
Capra had been “steadily dating” a widow, Lucille Warner Reyburn, “a smallish, attractive young lady with short, dark hair and perky bangs.” Lu Reyburn was the daughter of a California fig rancher, had attended two years of college at Berkeley, and, as Capra said, had “read every book ever written.”
Capra met Lu when she’d come to San Diego to visit a friend on the set of Flight, his fourth picture for Harry Cohn. He had driven Lu back to the Hotel del Coronado and walked her to the door of her room and kissed her good night. “I knew,” Capra said. “She knew.”
They saw each other regularly during the next two years. Lu never brought up the subject of marriage, but “what the hell,” Capra said. “You don’t have to spell it out. She wanted to marry me.”
Capra had been married before, to Helen Howell, an actress, as he’d begun writing gags for the Our Gang comedies at Mack Sennett. The marriage ran into trouble as Capra worked longer hours at the Sennett studio writing Harry Langdon pictures and spent less time at home with his wife. Helen felt that her husband was “more married to work than to her . . . [She] wanted a full-time companion,” Capra said. “Not a part-time successful one.” The marriage took a turn for the worse when Helen was told by her doctors that she was unable to have children. “Nothing can depress an Italian more,” said Capra, “than finding out he can’t have children.”
Lu Reyburn wasn’t in show business. Before she met Capra, she’d worked as a stenographer and secretary. Capra said, “She liked movies [and] was a good audience.” She championed Capra and wasn’t jealous of his work. But after the failure of his first marriage, he was wary about remarrying.
Lu wanted Frank and a home and children. Capra wanted Barbara. Barbara didn’t want to leave Fay. Capra’s shifting moods were almost as intense as Fay’s. “The Irish go through their black depressions too,” said Barbara. “I know. I’m an Irisher. And you can ask that Irish person why and he can’t tell you, it’s just a black cloud that comes over us. Well, the Italians are a very emotional race,” she said. “You can say hello to an Italian and they might go into an explosion. But that’s part of their charm. Mr. Capra was not afraid to show emotion. He understood it.”
As a director, Capra was there for Barbara in a way other directors weren’t. “He was my ‘angel,’ ” she said. “He babied me and pampered me.” No one worked with Barbara as a director the way Capra did. But could she support him, the way he did her, as a man and a woman rather than as director and actress, working separately? She knew she couldn’t be a housewife; she’d tried to be that for Fay, and it hadn’t worked. Despite Fay’s possessiveness, his worsening alcoholism, and his explosive rages, he’d known from the beginning that Barbara couldn’t have children of her own. He accepted that—in fact, he didn’t want children—and adored Barbara anyway.
Capra went off to Europe without Lu, or Barbara, and instead took his friend Al Roscoe. Lu saw both men off on the train for New York. During his travels, Capra wired her from London and Paris telling her how much he missed her.
Before Capra left on his holiday, Lu had been unaware of his feelings for Barbara. She was equally unaware that while Capra was telling Lu he was nervous about getting remarried, he was trying to persuade Barba
ra to leave Fay and marry him. Somehow Lu found out. Capra received an angry telegram from her. She was hurt and felt betrayed. Capra begged her to forgive him. Lu refused to respond to his wires. Finally, Lu wired him that she was going to be married to someone else. Capra became frantic. He wired back, pleading with her to reconsider, even suggesting they marry upon his return to New York. Lu wired back accepting Capra’s proposal. Capra cut his holiday short and returned to New York. It was reported in the New York press that Frank Capra “likes actresses and enjoys working with them but when it came to picking a second bride, he chose a home girl.”
Capra (left) with his wife, “Lu,” and Robert Riskin, circa 1937. (PHOTOFEST)
Cohn made the wedding arrangements, and Capra and Lu were married by Cohn’s friend the Brooklyn Supreme Court judge Mitchell May. The Capras’ honeymoon was to have been a cruise to Cuba, the same cruise that changes the course of Jo Swerling and Capra’s mousy heroine of Forbidden; instead, Capra and Lu went to the Adirondacks’ Lake Placid for the 1932 Winter Olympics. On Capra’s return, he was to begin work on a picture called Tampico, set in Mexico about a corrupt American oil driller and based on the 1926 novel by Joseph Hergesheimer. Swerling was at work on the script.
• • •
After the Malibu fire Fay and Barbara took an apartment in town and began to look for land to build a house, which Frank wanted to design himself. They agreed to appear for a week on the stage at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles to accompany the feature playing there, George Bancroft’s Rich Man’s Folly, directed by John Cromwell and based on Dickens’s Dombey and Son. The movie was considered somber, but the Fays’ singing, dancing, and wisecracks, which they had performed together before leaving the East for Hollywood, were a hit. Fay said, “We’ve both missed the audience reaction which means so much to anyone who has been on the other side of the footlights as much as we have . . . the audience is always lacking in a studio.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 31
