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

by Victoria Wilson

  Fay’s script for a picture called A Fool’s Advice from his own story had been turned down by every studio in town. He decided he would produce the picture himself and so needed the $8,000 he and Barbara were being paid to perform. In their act for the Paramount, Barbara incorporated the acrobatic dancing of her club days before going on the Broadway stage. At the conclusion of the dance, Barbara cartwheeled off the stage. The columnists referred to the cartwheels as “vulgar exhibitions.” “[That] statement seemed entirely unnecessary,” said Barbara, “and I sent [a reporter] word that if he would visit me, I’d black his eye. He never visited me.” “People were horrified because the mean old Frank Fay forced his wife to do cartwheels,” said Barbara. “Frank had nothing to do with it. In fact, he argued against my doing a vaudeville turn and said, ‘you’re a dramatic actress now.’ ‘Well I can still hoof. Is there any law that says a dramatic actress can’t have the use of her legs?’ I made [Frank] let me. It was all my idea.

  Mr. and Mrs. Frank Fay, January 1934. (CULVER PICTURES)

  “I suppose, to be a perfect lady,” said Barbara, “I should have made an entrance and told the audience about my latest starring picture. That’s novel isn’t it? Then I could have finished by doing one of the dramatic scenes. That would have been different too.

  “In the first place, I wouldn’t be caught doing such an idiotic act, and especially in a movie theatre. No one can possibly hear you beyond the twelfth row. Of course, Frank got all the blame from those who do not want a dramatic actress to show any versatility. I was so proud of those cartwheels,” said Barbara. “I was proud of my dance when I was in vaudeville; I am still proud of it. I regard the dance as an old friend—and I have not forgotten old friends because good fortune has befallen me. But I suppose Frank was right—they weren’t very lady-like.”

  Critics were equally upset that onstage Barbara was the straight man for Frank’s jokes and acted as his stooge, feeding him lines for comedy. “Mr. Fay is essentially a comedian,” said Barbara. “I am not. Therefore, to provide entertainment, I played ‘straight man’ and he supplied the laughs. I fed him lines for comedy the way I did in our act at the Palace. Audiences appeared to enjoy [it]; otherwise, we would have changed it.”

  Barbara was “getting almighty sick of [Frank] being on the spot” because of her actions.

  “I am a star today,” she said, “but give me one or two bad pictures and Hollywood will consider me a flop again. It isn’t what you do or have done that counts here. It’s what happens. That’s why I have never understood the minds of the picture brains. And never will.

  “The same is true nowhere else,” she said. “On the stage, if an actress is once great, she is always great. Alice Brady hasn’t had a good play in five years in New York. But Alice Brady is still considered a splendid actress by the producers. If they have what they think is a fine play, they still call Miss Brady and not somebody unknown and unskilled.”

  Barbara defended Fay against Hollywood and was angry about the way the town was treating him. Her outspokenness led to the press calling her “temperamental” and “hard to manage.” She was quoted as saying that she “would rather live happily ever after and quietly with Frank Fay than be the biggest star in the business.”

  As Fay’s drinking worsened, Barbara was caught between her husband, whom she fiercely loved and whose binges were beginning to frighten her, and the town whose false values she resented and whose continuous prediction of the demise of her marriage made her fight even more for her husband. In the midst of all this was her own deep ambition to work and keep working as an actress and to be perfect at it in an industry she was coming to love.

  • • •

  A Fool’s Advice, which Fay was producing from his own story, was to be shot at Columbia at the same time that Barbara was filming Zelda Marsh; Fay’s leading lady, Ruth Hall, was borrowed from Warner Bros.

  Fay said of producing and making movies with his wife, whom he affectionately called Red or Shorty or Smack: “I want to use Mrs. Fay in as many of my own pictures as I am able to, but there are her contracts with other studios to be considered . . . Only a short time ago I approached a studio executive with the idea of borrowing her for a picture I have in mind and was told I couldn’t have her at any price.”

  To remain in Los Angeles and enable Fay to work, Barbara and Frank were considering putting together a new edition of the Nine O’Clock Revue with Eddie Lambert, Eddie Borden, and Al Herman.

  “If Frank is happy [in Los Angeles],” said Barbara, “nothing else matters.”

  FIVE

  F•A•Y

  1931–1932

  Barbara’s first picture under her new Warner contract was a remake of Edna Ferber’s So Big. The novel was originally made into a picture in 1924 by First National, starring Colleen Moore as Selina Peake, Ben Lyon as Dirk DeJong, and Wallace Beery as Klass Poole. Warner remade it six years later as a two-reel short. A new contract between Ferber and Warner Bros. was signed in early December 1931 giving Miss Ferber an additional $20,000 for the rights to remake the picture and approval over the director. Ferber okayed Bill Wellman as the director, but she didn’t want Barbara for the part of Selina Peake and refused to meet with her.

  Production was to begin in mid-January 1932 following Barbara’s work at Columbia making Zelda Marsh, based on the Charles G. Norris novel.

  Barbara wanted the role of the sexual beauty and got it. The studio was set to adapt Norris’s novel, published in 1927, but in the spring of 1931 the Production Code Association pronounced Norris’s novel “full of dangerous material [abortion included] and immoral relations.” Zelda Marsh was a sensational, melodramatic book about a young woman whose father dies and who goes to live with her aunt and uncle, falls in love with a young man, is driven by desire to sleep with him, is found out, and is sent away for three months to an institution for the disciplining and regeneration of fallen girls. When she gets out, she marries a man she doesn’t love and begins a downward spiral, only to regain her life and make her way as a young actress, until she remeets her first love, now terminally ill, and begins a life of redemption, choosing to give up everything she holds dear, to “leave her heart behind in order to gain her soul” and to care for the man she loves in his last months of life.

  A story loosely based on the novel was written by the actress and writer Sarah Y. Mason. A draft of the script was finished in December. The title of the picture was changed to Shopworn. The Production Code Association still thought the script “a very grave problem,” given the lead becomes a prostitute after her release from the reformatory. The Code criticized the underlying sentiment of the script, which, it said, saw “prostitution and its reward as attractive” and found “decent and conventional society unsympathetic, narrow, selfish and insincere.” In addition, the Code accused Columbia of trying to include “incidents of fornication, prostitution and a ‘kept’ woman.” The Code suggested that the female lead struggle against other unscrupulous characters to “justify the sympathy and final admiration of the audience and of the people who represent the cleaner and conventional side of life in the story.”

  As with the dialogue Jo Swerling wrote for Ladies of Leisure, his script of Shopworn, with dialogue by Robert Riskin, ended up being a picture about class warfare, pitting the purity and honesty of the working class against the conniving, meddlesome ways of the selfish, hypocritical rich, thereby giving the Code the element it asked for. “Other unscrupulous characters” provided enough injustice for the audience to sympathize with the female lead.

  Swerling and Riskin’s script showed the precariousness of life, the poverty of life lived at the back of the store, and how hard most people except the rich have to work. At the heart of the script is the ennobling and wish-fulfilling quality of ordinary people—the dream of revenge: He treated her badly. She is sent to jail. They’re all heels. She’ll make them sorry. She’ll be a star. Poof—she’s a star. Swerling and Riskin tapped into the longing of the aud
ience and made their dreams come true. Without Barbara’s instrument of feeling and authenticity, the picture wouldn’t have worked.

  Kitty Lane is the daughter of an engineer who dies in an avalanche caused by one of his own explosions for a construction camp (his dying words of advice to his daughter: “You’re going to find the world a tough place. Be tough yourself, then they can’t hurt you . . . not if you learn to take blows on the chin”).

  To placate the Production Code Association, Swerling and Riskin show Kitty’s rise as an acclaimed actress (as close to prostitution as Swerling and Riskin could get, at least in the eyes of society). By removing any hint of Kitty’s sexual avidity, the picture lost its point: that the notorious young woman becomes shopworn not of her own accord but through necessity, when the young man fails to believe in her innocence (the inverse of Swerling’s Ladies of Leisure), and that those who point the finger of scorn have little reason to brag of their own decency.

  Harry Nicholas “Nick” Grinde was directing. Grinde, whose training was in vaudeville, where he wrote sketches for the foremost two-a-day stars of variety, was a screenwriter (The Divorcee) who’d worked as an assistant director (Excuse Me; Upstage; Body and Soul) for three years before becoming a full director. Shopworn was his eleventh picture in four years. Grinde was competent as a director, but Barbara didn’t like the script or the experience of making the picture.

  Regis Toomey, who played the college student who falls in love with Kitty Lane, said, “Barbara was not too happy about [the picture] from the beginning.” Toomey wasn’t sure if the cause of her unhappiness was “the script, the director—who was known as a ‘B’ picture director—or her leading man.”

  The picture’s cameraman, Joe Walker, described the production as a “low budget affair.” Barbara saw it, she said, as “one of those terrible pictures they sandwiched in.”

  She was on her own again as an actress. She could handle Riskin and Swerling’s dialogue and fill it with heart. She creates a woman who is brave, open, simple, and plain. She summoned up the girl of Capra’s Ladies of Leisure, Miracle Woman, and Forbidden and the tough, no-nonsense, brawling spitfire of Wellman’s Night Nurse.

  • • •

  While Barbara was filming Shopworn at Columbia, Fay was on the same lot filming A Fool’s Advice with half a million dollars given to him by the studio to make his picture. Fay’s name was listed in Variety as someone whose popularity at the box office was waning. Also listed in their decline were John Barrymore, John Gilbert, William Haines, Ramon Novarro, Clara Bow, Mae Murray, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Marion Davies.

  A Fool’s Advice was Fay’s attempt to show himself as a true leading man. The roles that Warner Bros. had consistently given him, that of the Latin lover, the sophisticated, irresistible ladies’ man, had met with disastrous audience results. Fay had written the script and was the picture’s producer and was no longer at the mercy of studio executives who were trying to make him into something that couldn’t work on-screen. Fay understood his audience, what constituted a well-made plot, and the craft of moving pictures. He was banking on this as the movie that would show audiences what he could do, that his appeal—and control—were as powerful on-screen as they were on the stage of the Palace.

  A Fool’s Advice was a series of scenes, like Fay’s monologues onstage, in which he put himself at the center of the frame and talked. To direct him, Fay chose Ralph Ceder, a second-unit director new to Columbia. The plot was about a small-town yokel, Spencer Brown, a young man in his thirties, a bumpkin, an innocent, beloved by all, who, through naïveté, goodness of heart, and belief in what he knows to be right, prevents a crooked politician from running for mayor and destroying the town by selling it off to the railroad bosses.

  Fay’s Spencer Brown was a Candide—“a youth whom Nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity.” The Spencer Brown of A Fool’s Advice was the opposite of Fay’s public persona; it presented a character who thinks solely of others yet who is romantically unloved. It was an attempt by Fay to redeem himself in the public’s—and Hollywood’s—eyes. He is both beloved and a loner, someone who belongs and is an oddball.

  The budget for A Fool’s Advice was tight; the schedule was demanding. Ed Bernds, the head sound mixer on the picture, described the production as “murderous, the worst of any picture” he ever worked on. “The picture was shot with everything Columbia,” said Bernds. “Columbia sound, Columbia photography.” Bernds saw Fay’s script as “a haphazard, pointless story. Mainly a vehicle for a couple of Frank Fay monologues.

  “Fay was the leading man and the producer,” said Bernds. “We worked 105 hours from early Monday morning to late Sunday night; we finished on Sunday at three or four o’clock in the morning.” Bernds was getting paid $85 a week regardless of the number of hours he worked. “I didn’t get paid overtime,” he said, “not a nickel.”

  Bernds described Fay as “sluggish until he was about to do a scene. Then he would come to life. We shot some of the picture in Encino Park,” where the RKO Ranch was located, one of the lowest spots in the valley.

  “There were rain scenes,” said Bernds. “It was midwinter. The mist from Columbia’s rain towers produced a kind of spray. It was so cold the spray froze on our sound truck, and on us,” said Bernds. “[The picture] was done in six miserable days of shooting.”

  Fay’s lyrical vision was an evocation of an idealistic forward-moving America, an America of promise and principle. There are no heroes, just simple, hardworking people, a community full of eccentrics and the fellow who loves them all, people who press onward with dignity and conviction, each in his or her own way.

  The picture was not a great work of art—it was static, and except for Fay no one has a real character—but it tapped into a feeling that was beginning to make its way across the country as a result of the Depression. The picture embodied the common touch—small-town values, simplicity, and innocence—that was missing from most pictures coming out of the studios.

  The gymnasium at 441 Bristol Avenue, the house that Fay built and built and built—and that Barbara continued to pay for. The dining room he designed was large enough to accommodate a thirty-foot table with six chairs on either side and a chair at each end. (COURTESY TONY FAY)

  While B. P. Schulberg, then production chief at Paramount, had discovered that the public wanted family pictures with real characters and down-to-earth themes and that the trend was away from sophistication with its sex and frankness, the studios were much more apt to make pictures like Shopworn and Safe in Hell—with sex, sin, and redemption—than A Fool’s Advice.

  • • •

  Production on Shopworn ended four days after Christmas (the studio gave each of its employees a $10 gold piece to celebrate the holiday).

  Barbara was working at the studio, while Frank was busy overseeing the construction on their new house in the Brentwood Heights section of Los Angeles. The estate was situated on four acres of land on Bristol and Cliffwood. A large white wall enclosed 441 Bristol Avenue.

  The house had originally been built in 1926. Fay was adding a fifty-yard swimming pool, one of the largest in the colony, with a cabana in Spanish style and a red tile roof. He was overseeing as well the building of a large separate gymnasium with wood interior and exposed wood rafters and beams. Windows and French doors were to line the walls looking out on the lawn. The main room was designed to be expansive, with exercise apparatus, billiard tables, and a full-size punching bag to accommodate Fay’s lifelong wish of being a prizefighter. He frequently walked through the house wearing green running trunks and bedroom slippers. Both Barbara and Frank frequently went to the fights. Barbara’s favorite boxer was Jimmy McLarnin. A six-car garage was being built to house the Fays’ two Fords, one opened and one closed, their Lincoln Phaeton, and their Cadillac limousine. A wooded landscape surrounded the house. A garden was being put in
that would be illumined at night.

  Fay ordered large religious statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary to be placed on the grounds in and among the flower beds. Other statuary, five feet tall, was placed near the house. There were grottoes, bridges, and in the shrubbery behind the house a miniature two-foot-high stone Italian castle. A separate building was built to house the servants, who included a butler, cook, chauffeur, and night watchman.

  The living room of the main house was done in Spanish decor. A den, outside Barbara’s bedroom and across from Fay’s, was designed by Fay to look like an English pub and was where Fay and Barbara preferred to spend time after dinner. The den’s walls, ceiling, and floor were paneled in dark mahogany. Red leather sofas and chairs filled the room, with a portrait of Shakespeare hanging over the imposing mantelpiece. Four walls with screened-in floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases, Prairie-style, held the Fays’ collection of first editions, many of which had been signed by the authors.

  Fay designed the bedrooms himself, including the drapes and the furnishings. The towels, washcloths, and linens were each monogrammed with the letters FAY, as was Fay’s bedspread.

  Frank specially designed the entrance to Barbara’s bedroom. Instead of being the standard dimensions, it was a small doorway that Fay designed to fit Barbara’s diminutive size. The bedroom was furnished in white. A gold vanity with a tray had a special gold plaque from Fay that read: “Barbara, just to remind you I love you.” The large dining room accommodated a thirty-foot table with six chairs on either side and a chair at each end. Opposite the table was an equally imposing buffet that held a large sterling silver tea and coffee set. The kitchen was hotel-like.

  The surrounding grounds took up the entire block. Joan Crawford lived up the street on Beverly; Helen Twelvetrees was across from the Fays. Hal Roach had a house down the block.