The newly acquired land adjoining the Fays’ house at Bristol Avenue, photographed from the top of the surrounding wall; the property now totaled four acres. Left to right: Will (Pop) Fay, Barbara, and Frank, circa 1932. (COURTESY TONY FAY)
• • •
When Forbidden opened at the Rialto in New York in early January 1932, Variety described it as a “cry picture for the girls . . . [with] a good chance of going out and getting itself and the theatres some coin.” The reviewer called it “a conglomeration of many pictures” but “the best film Miss Stanwyck has made for Columbia . . . [who has] at no time looked so well on the screen.” The New York Daily News called Barbara “splendid”; the Los Angeles Examiner, “compelling” and said that she gives “further demonstration that she is one of the truly great personalities of the screen.”
• • •
The studios were being affected by the economy. Unemployment was severe; movie attendance fell away. The president of RKO said that unless drastic steps were taken, the industry would be bankrupt within three months. At Warner Bros., staff cuts were put into effect along with salary cuts.
Barbara wanted to play Madame Bovary and to follow Sarah Bernhardt and Maude Adams in Rostand’s L’Aiglon. She wanted to play Mother Goddam in John Colton’s Shanghai Gesture. Colton, with Clemence Randolph, had dramatized Somerset Maugham’s Rain. The Shanghai Gesture’s underworld life and concern for respectability and degeneracy were not that far from the stuff of Rain.
Florence Reed had taken over the part of Mother Goddam after Mrs. Leslie Carter broke it in and was fired from the production in Newark, New Jersey. Reed created the role on Broadway of the daughter of a Manchu prince lured from her home by an Englishman, then betrayed and cast aside, becomes keeper of the most exclusive “far-famed house” in Shanghai, biding her time for revenge. The original 1926 production played for more than two hundred performances at the Martin Beck Theatre. Reed then starred in the revival two years later. Whenever Barbara began to think about a part, she imagined how Reed and Jeanne Eagels would play it.
SIX
Salt of the Earth
Edna Ferber said of So Big, her eleventh novel in more than a decade, “Not only did I not plan to write a best-seller, I thought I had written the world’s worst seller. I didn’t think anyone would read it.”
Ferber sent off the finished manuscript with a note to Russell Doubleday of Doubleday, Page: “I feel very strongly that I should not publish it as a novel. Its publication as a book would hurt you, as publisher, and me, as an author. If you decide that it will be better not to publish it I shall be entirely satisfied.”
Doubleday, Page brought out So Big in the spring of 1924. The New York Times called it “a novel to read and remember”; Burton Rascoe in the New-York Tribune said, “To Miss Ferber’s narrative and descriptive powers I genuflect in homage.”
The novel that she described as a “queer sort of book,” written against her judgment, sold 323,000 copies and received the Pulitzer Prize for the American Novel in 1925.
So Big, Edna Ferber said, is the story of “a material young man, son of his earth-grubbing idealistic mother.” Ferber described the youth of America before the Depression as having “Money. Furs. Jewels. Automobiles. Radios. Palm Beach. California. Europe. No generation of American boys and girls ever had so much money and received so little in return for it.” She used that as the core of Dirk DeJong’s character and set it against the courage and splendor of his mother (“Life has no weapons against a woman like that”).
So Big, said Ferber, “was the story of a middle-aged woman living on a little truck farm just outside Chicago. Nothing ever really happened in the book. It had no plot at all. It had a theme—it was a story of the triumph of failure.”
Edna Ferber was gutsy and idealistic and made her way out of the Wild West. At seventeen, she was the first woman reporter on the Appleton Daily Crescent in Appleton, Wisconsin, a small town outside Milwaukee where her father ran a general store. In 1902, women wrote special columns for the large papers—advice to the lovelorn, society columns, articles on the women’s pages; Ferber covered a regular news beat like any male reporter, earning $3 a week. During the eighteen months she worked for the Crescent, she “learned to read what lay behind the look that veiled people’s faces, how to sketch in human beings with a few rapid words. I learned to see, to observe, to remember.” “So Big,” said Ferber, “was all invented. The characters, situations; the theme, the dialogue, the color, the movement. I had never spent a day on a farm and certainly never had borne a son.”
Barbara read Ferber’s book and loved it. Selina Peake, Ferber wrote, was a woman with “a dash of fire . . . wholesome wickedness . . . adventure,” a woman who “took the best and [made] the most of it,” who was able to take a “worn-out and down-at-the-heel truck farm whose scant products brought a second-rate price in a second-rate market” and turn it into “a prosperous and blooming vegetable garden whose output was sought a year in advance.”
Like Barbara, Selina Peake was a motherless girl whose father sent her away after her mother’s death to live with two aunts. Like Barbara, Selina read armfuls of books. Her “years of grinding work,” Ferber wrote about Selina, “had failed to kill her zest for living.” Her will and spirit (she “used none of the artifices of a youth mad day”) were similar to Barbara’s, and Barbara saw in Selina’s soil-encrusted hands the symbol of the character’s beauty and strength.
“Edna Ferber’s story and character have an epic quality that is truly great,” said Barbara. “Selina became a farmer’s wife, and her hands became soil worn,” she said. “She lost her girlish prettiness, but she became a beauty instead. And there is beauty in fine, strong hands that have not been ashamed to work in the earth.”
So Big had all the elements that interested Bill Wellman: the epic span of the story; the stripped-down truth of hard country life versus the fancified ways of big-city living; a rugged, valiant woman following her dream, pitting herself quietly, firmly against convention.
When B. P. Schulberg had left Preferred Pictures to join Famous Players–Lasky, he’d taken Wellman with him. And when the newly named Paramount Pictures wanted a the Great War epic, Wellman was the only director in Hollywood with combat experience as a flier and was assigned to direct John Monk Saunders’s Wings. It was Wellman’s first big success. The picture was visually dazzling; Wellman’s cameramen—fifteen in all—photographed the aerial battles. Twenty-eight hand-cranked cameras recorded planes swooping and circling and diving through cloud formations and open Texas land that was meant to be the “far-stretching fields of glorious France and inglorious Germany” pocked by “innumerable ugly, dark scars from recent wounds.”
Wellman said of Ferber’s So Big, “Both story and character were made for Barbara. [Her] spirit, her sense of fair play, her capacity for hard work were similar to the character of Selina Peake,” the kind of passionate determined woman Bill Wellman understood and admired.
“Lots of actresses are getting by with good looks and practically nothing else,” said Wellman. “And there are other actresses who have brains and no beauty. A few of them do pretty well, though they work under a severe handicap. But when you get beauty and brains together, there’s no stopping her—and the best example of that is Barbara.”
• • •
This was the second picture in which Barbara went from girlhood to old age. Unlike Lulu Smith in Forbidden, Selina Peake didn’t simply age in a genteel and elegant fashion as she moved up in economic class. She goes from being a pretty young wife, steel-strong, married to a dull fellow in High Prairie, to a sallow, too-thin middle-aged woman approaching elderliness, in shapeless garments, “her skin tanned, weather-beaten, her hair rough and dry.”
The idea that Barbara had to appear drab, dowdy, middle-aged wasn’t at all off-putting to her. Monte Westmore, Warner’s makeup man, was able to age Barbara forty years in forty minutes. “Very few actresses would be willing to make u
p as a woman of advancing years,” said Westmore. “Most actresses know that nine-tenths of their public appeal is due to their youthful looks. Barbara didn’t worry about that. She didn’t have to. She is a real actress.”
Selina Peake was based on Julia Neumann Ferber. Edna Ferber wrote of her mother, “Julia Ferber as a human being was so dimensional, sustaining, courageous and vital . . . a humorous gay shrewd woman . . . She had . . . a gigantic capacity for enjoying life and for communicating that enjoyment.”
In the last scene, Dirk, or So Big, brings to the DeJong farm the young bohemian painter with whom he’s fallen in love and also Roelf Pool, now an internationally acclaimed sculptor who long ago had loved Selina.
Dirk calls his mother in from the fields—the west sixteen—to welcome his friends. The three see “a small dark figure against the background of sun and sky and fields, wearing a dark skirt pinned up about her ankles to protect it from the wet spring earth . . . on her head . . . a battered soft black hat. Her feet, in broad-toed sensible boots.” Selina is a source of shame for her son. But for Dallas O’Mara, the young, ambitious painter who wants to “do portraits [but] [n]ot portraits of ladies with a string of pearls and one lily hand half hidden in the folds of a satin skirt,” Selina DeJong is the kind of “distinguished looking—distinguishably American” woman the young painter wants to portray. He admires her “fine splendid face all lit up with the light that comes from inside . . . the jaw-line like that of the women who came over in the Mayflower; or crossed the continent in a covered wagon; and . . . her eyes! [H]er hands! She’s beautiful.”
So Big started shooting in mid-January 1932.
Ferber said, “The title had been only a tentative working one. While the title exactly expressed the book’s theme, it seemed in itself to be pretty stomach-turning and I didn’t for a moment mean to keep it.”
• • •
Bill Wellman was interested in directing every type of picture there was to make, and to be a studio director, he had to direct fast. He had twenty-two days to make So Big, which was fine with him. “No man in the business is loaded with so much energy,” said Barbara. If he’d had months to make a picture, he would have been “so bored,” he would have “blown his top and wouldn’t have been able to finish it.”
Wellman had an explosive, unpredictable temper, as did Barbara, but she rarely displayed it in front of a crew. He had piercing blue eyes that looked right through you. If he sensed phoniness, he’d cut you in half. He turned his back on the bullshit of the town and ran the show his way.
Barbara’s portrait of Selina Peake doesn’t have the authenticity and range that Capra got from her in Forbidden. On her own she reverted to a mild childlike patter in her speech, slightly singsong, which Capra had been able to smooth away. But with Wellman, Barbara did her best to portray the salt-of-the-earth character.
Barbara knew her lines—and the other actors’ lines—perfectly before she went in front of the camera. Wellman loved that about her. She didn’t care about her makeup or getting dirty. Barbara was a perfectionist, and Wellman marveled that she never missed a line. For Barbara, though, “Nothing ever seems secure,” she said. “No matter how much you may be praised for acting a certain part, you always know in your heart that there is someone else who could have done it better than you.”
“Some players are able to study the page of a script for a few moments and retain a mental photograph of every line,” she said. “My own method is rather different. I arm myself with a half a dozen pencils and a pad of paper and set about copying every word of the scene I’m studying.” Barbara wrote out the scene, word for word, four or five times and learned the speeches of all the other characters. “It takes a lot longer,” she said, “but I’m sure of myself when I’m finished.”
As Selina Peake De Jong with her son, Dirk (Dickie Moore), on their way to market from High Prairie, unaccompanied, to sell their harvest in So Big. “It was in 1897,” said Ferber, “that I glimpsed the first faint flicker of that form of entertainment which was to encircle the world with a silver sheet. We all went to see the newfangled thing called the animatograph . . . The audience agreed that it was a thousand times more wonderful than even the magic lantern.”
• • •
“The role of my son—a young fellow—needed careful casting,” said Barbara. “Out of the search came a six-year-old child by the name of Dickie Moore—a little boy with fabulous brown eyes, who looked at me sincerely. I fell head over heels in love with Dickie and luckily he took to me too.” After they worked together for a day or so, their scenes were not acting. “They were real,” said Barbara.
Dickie Moore had started in pictures when he was eleven months old, and by the time of So Big he’d appeared in more than twenty of them. Each night before he was to shoot, his mother explained what the next day’s scene was about. Dickie couldn’t read, and his mother read his lines and his cues, which he said back to her and memorized. The boy was a quick study. He knew his lines and the lines of the adults; if they said the wrong line, Dickie would stop the scene and let them know. He thought that Barbara “was very dear, very sweet” to him.
During her scenes with the boy, Barbara said to Wellman, “Give Dickie the close-up. It will mean so much to him.”
Wellman wanted Dickie to cry for one scene and asked the boy if he thought he could do it. Dickie was quiet for a few minutes and then asked, “Do you mean really true tears?” Wellman said, “Yes—that’s what they have to be.”
“He didn’t have to threaten [the boy],” said Barbara. “He didn’t have to play tricks on Dickie. Dickie said earnestly, ‘Gosh, that’s hard—but I’ll try.’ ” Dickie looked long and searchingly at Wellman, and his enormous eyes filled with tears.
• • •
Two new Warner contract players were featured in the picture. George Brent, a handsome Dubliner and former actor with the Abbey Players, was Roelf Pool, the artist as a young man. Ten days before production began on So Big, Brent signed a twenty-six-week contract with the studio, getting $250 a week.
Bette Davis, twenty-four years old, in her eighth picture, played Dallas O’Mara, the Texas-born painter with whom Dirk DeJong falls in love. Davis described O’Mara as the “artist who leads [DeJong] back to his destiny and his mother’s dream.” The Davis character is both beautiful and ugly, indifferent to convention and appearance, a woman with twenty beaux and no lover. Her ambition as a painter is to work in oils; her values—not those of the rich and spoiled—are more like Selina Peake’s than her son realizes. Bette Davis’s performance as the bohemian artist was like a flash of electricity.
Davis had one scene in So Big with Barbara. Like Barbara, she had been determined to be a dancer in the style of Isadora Duncan and a serious actress. Davis, though, had studied acting formally at the John Murray Anderson–Robert Milton School of the Theatre.
She of “the drooping eyelids and sullen mouth” (Silver Screen, September 1930) from Lowell, Massachusetts, was the daughter of a frustrated actress with huge ambitions for her little girl and a Harvard-educated lawyer who left his wife and two daughters when Bette was seven. On being told of the divorce, Bette said to her mother, “Good, now we can go to the beach and have another baby.”
Davis had worked for half a season with the George Cukor and George Kondolf Stock Company in Rochester until she was fired. “I was too talented for Mr. Cukor to mold,” she said. Mr. Cukor saw it differently and said, “She was a stubborn young lady,” who “liked to disrupt rehearsals by giving her interpretation of the author’s thoughts—not only for her characters, but for the other roles as well. It was useless to argue with her.”
From So Big, 1932. Left to right: Hardie Albright, unidentified, Bette Davis. Davis spent her early days under contract at Warners posing in bathing suits and evening dresses for fan magazines; her nights were spent at Grauman’s or the Pantages watching the movies (“If I couldn’t learn on the set I’d learn from the finished pictures themselves.”)
As far as Bette and her mother were concerned, “the world would not be a safe place to live until I conquered it.”
Davis had studied diction at the Anderson–Milton School with George Arliss and movement and dance with Martha Graham. “I worshipped her,” said Davis. “She was all tension-lightning! Her burning dedication gave her spare body the power of ten men. She was the true modern.”
At twenty-three, Davis had made her way as a stage actress from the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City to a touring company with Blanche Yurka in The Wild Duck to Broadway in Martin Flavin’s Broken Dishes, where Samuel Goldwyn caught up with her and arranged for a screen test (“Whom did this to me?” Goldwyn said after seeing the young actress on film).
Another producer said she had no more sex appeal than Slim Summerville. Universal Pictures put Davis under contract at $300 a week. She made six pictures (three for Universal; three on loan-out) in six months, until Carl Laemmle dismissed her as “a cotton-dress girl”; “the kid might be all right in certain roles but what audience would ever believe that the hero would want to get her at the fade-out?”
Ruth Chatterton, with new husband, George Brent, whom she married the day after her divorce came through from English actor Ralph Forbes, circa 1932.
She was set to give up on Hollywood and return to New York, trunks packed, car sold, when George Arliss called to say he’d been having difficulty finding a leading lady for his new picture and wondered if Miss Davis could be at Warner Bros. that afternoon. “Universal had asked to see my legs; Mr. Arliss examined my soul,” she said. She got the part and was put under contract to Warner Bros. for one picture; the studio then picked up her option.
Before So Big, Davis had come from her first starring role in the not-yet-released The Man Who Played God. She had three scenes in So Big and got the cream of the novel, unlike the Selina Peake role, which didn’t get the time in the movie to show the change from urban girl to schoolteacher who comes to love the earth. “The discovery [in So Big] of our bedrock made a deep impression on me,” said Davis.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 33
