I like pictures better than any business in the world,” said Frank Fay. “It’s like a crap game. You can never foretell tomorrow. You make a trip to Palm Springs. The butler will ask you for your name at your own door when you return. Whenever you leave Hollywood, you are forgotten. You return to start all over.”
• • •
So Big opened in Los Angeles at the Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre along with a stage show headed by Al Kvale, Jeffrey Gil, David and Hilda Murray, and the Dancing Grenadiers with Gaylord Carter at the organ. With the picture were also a Merrie Melodies cartoon, Freddy the Freshman, and a Universal newsreel. Louella Parsons called the picture “infinitely better than its silent predecessor,” saying that William Wellman “has maintained an excellent balance, eliminating the nonessentials and keeping the big moments . . . intact.” Parsons called Barbara’s Selina Peake “beautifully portrayed . . . there are few actresses whose emotional ability equals that of Miss Stanwyck.” Also mentioned was the work of Bette Davis, though Parsons said Miss Davis had “far too much rouge on her mouth and too much mascara on her eyes.”
The Variety critic said of Bette Davis, “[She] has undergone a complete transformation since she appeared as a timid little ingénue with unstudied coiffure and make-up. She used to be ‘Alice Ben.’ Now she has discovered the chic of smart costumes, meticulous blonde waves . . . [F]ormerly terrified of her own shadow [she] has suddenly developed the most alarmingly pretentious personality.”
One critic said of Barbara’s Selina Peake, “She puts the words in the mouth of Colleen Moore . . . the consensus is that she doesn’t add much to the memory of the silent version.” Another wrote, “Barbara Stanwyck’s gradual transformation through the years . . . is a gem of insight and a marvel of make-up. She never resorts to the tricks of calculated ‘sob-stuff.’ ” Still another reviewer recognized Barbara’s ability to be funny: “The first part of the picture contains some of the best comedy of the season; Barbara in her fussy furbelows . . . Barbara at her first basket supper . . . anyone who has ever lived in a country town will rock with laughter.”
Edna Ferber felt that it was Colleen Moore who best captured Selina and gave the “true performance.”
• • •
Fay was admitted to the Merrill Sanitarium near Venice, California, for treatment of alcoholism. It was the second time in six months that he’d been ordered under the care of doctors from excessive, prolonged intoxication.
Bill Wellman knew of Barbara’s troubles with her husband. She didn’t speak about them much. Work and focus got her through. Wellman was crazy about her, and he didn’t like too many actresses. She was lusty, bantered about, was full of wit. She played tennis, went to the fights, didn’t gossip, and took trouble on the chin. She minded her own business, smoked with an unaffected pleasure thought of as masculine, exuded plenty of sex, but never used it to further her career.
Neither Wellman nor Barbara was interested in the social world of Hollywood, nor were they engaged in the political games of the town. She admired Wellman. Both stood apart from Hollywood society.
Barbara didn’t like the showiness of picture stars. “I wouldn’t wear an ermine coat to a Hollywood opening if I was offered the coat and a thousand dollar bonus,” she said. “All of the ermine coats the furriers had in stock were rented to movie people for the [recent] opening of Grand Hotel. Imagine putting on a show like that just to let people think you’re more prosperous than you are. Not for me.”
Wellman saw Barbara as intelligent, resourceful, tough: “a magnificent actress.”
“Wild Bill” was one of Barbara’s “best-beloved” people. He studied his script hard, prepared for his day’s work, and always did his best. His work was sure and fast. Wellman took chances. He would try anything that made sense to him regardless of whether it made sense to anyone else. He risked his actors’ lives and limbs, but, said Louise Brooks of working with him in Beggars of Life, “good old Bill was always safe behind the camera.”
• • •
As a “girl of the night” and torch singer, with Lyle Talbot as Eddie Fields, club owner and gangster, The Purchase Price (originally called The Mud Lark), 1932. (PHOTOFEST)
Wellman had just finished making Love Is a Racket with Douglas Fairbanks, Ann Dvorak, Lee Tracy, and Frances Dee about a Broadway gossip columnist caught up in a murder cover-up.
With the success of So Big, Warner put Bill Wellman together with Barbara again in another picture that had them going back to the land. The new picture with Barbara, The Mud Lark, began production at First National studios in mid-April 1932. Robert Lord’s screenplay took the young English-woman of the novel—who is educated at convent school in Switzerland (she comes from a family of some means that summers at Cannes and Biarritz), is orphaned by the death of her father, and by necessity becomes an “unconsidered appendicle, something between a traveling-companion and a lady’s maid”—and made her into an American girl, a torch singer in a New York nightclub. Barbara saw her as “a streetwalker.” When she asked Lord how he dared take such liberties with Stringer’s book, Lord told her, “You can’t play a lady.”
“My response to that insult was termed ‘temperamental,’ ” Barbara said. “I am Irish. I have a temper. I do not flare into silly displays.”
In Lord’s script, the “streetwalker”-singer, Joan Gordon, flees her New York nightclub life and her former racketeer boyfriend and becomes the “picture bride” of a wheat farmer in North Dakota, a man she’s never met. She ends up in the wilderness prairie town after her maid confesses that she’s answered an ad for a matrimonial agency with the singer’s picture instead of her own. The farmer is expecting to see someone who looks like the nightclub singer, so Joan gives the maid $100 and decides to go in her place.
With George Brent as Jim Gilson, North Dakota farmer. The movie’s premise—and advertising teaser: “Can a night flower step from orchids to apron strings, from penthouse to farm house, from silk lingerie to flannel nighties—and like it . . . ?” (PHOTOFEST)
George Brent is Jim Gilson, the grim, taciturn wheat farmer who sends for his mail-order bride. On their first night together, after her long train ride west and their marriage by a justice of the peace, Gilson tries to kiss his new wife, and she, wary and repulsed by him, reflexively strikes him across the face. He becomes angry, goes to the barn to sleep in the hay bin, and from then on only tolerates her, having as little to do with her as possible. She tends to her housewifely chores, he works his fields and wheat crops. The picture is taken up with her coming to know the stranger who is her husband—and his vast stark world—falling in love with him, and winning him back.
Wellman, who was drawn to women who were tough and gutsy and resilient, gave his female character the more male role and the male character a more feminine response to his wife. Jim Gilson is rebuffed by his wife on his wedding night. Instead of “taking” her, as is his “legal right” now that she’s wearing his wedding ring, he becomes hurt and sullen and withdraws. He shies away from any of her attempts to make it up to him or her advances. It is up to her to woo him out of his hurt feelings—slowly, gently—in order to allow her the chance to love him.
From The Purchase Price, 1932. (PHOTOFEST)
What interested Wellman was the education of the girl. She proves herself to be tough, not by her city ways, but by the strength of her character to hold firm against the grittiness and loneliness of her new homesteading life. What she faces is a “prairie landscape as flat as the ocean floor, and ranchers’ houses so far apart the skyline stretches from east to west as level as a windless sea.”
In the picture, Wellman kept the feel of the small, simple novel. Its plot is secondary to the series of scenes in which he shows people being real—quirky, odd, comic, ornery, conniving, demented. They’re pioneer stock, slightly teched by the brutal sun, the battle against unpredictable seasons, and the constant threat of drought or frost that can bring ruin to any hardworking farmer.
 
; Wellman was after character. He wanted to show a gentleness underneath the crustiness of the scorched, battered plains people.
In the scene where Gilson marries the girl, the justice of the peace at Elks Crossing, Elmer (Clarence Wilson), is a plucked old bird, balding and hook-nosed. He speaks the words of the marriage ceremony with a wad of tobacco stuffed inside one cheek. His wife, Ma (Lucille Ward), large and homey looking, is called to witness the ceremony with a bowl of batter tucked under her arm, held up by her ample stomach (she’s baking a sponge cake). Then there’s Clyde (Victor Potel), the other witness, who’s inbred and looks it.
With William Wellman, director of The Purchase Price, his twenty-ninth picture, their second movie together, circa 1932. (PHOTOFEST)
As the justice of the peace reads the words, a dogfight is going on outside. Clyde wanders over to the window and watches wide-eyed through the pane of glass as the mutts tangle and tear at one another. Late in the picture, when Clyde sees Gilson and his wife in town, he barks and howls, like the dogs that fought during the Gilsons’ marriage ceremony.
• • •
Wellman wasted no time. The entire picture was in his head from the day he started shooting and was cut in the camera as he shot. He didn’t appreciate star grandstanding. “They’ll hold you up every time,” he said. He didn’t like fussiness and appreciated Barbara’s disdain for all that.
Barbara was friends with the crew, the painters and electricians, property boys, makeup artists, and men handling the microphone boom. “They talk my language,” she said. “Their problems are the same kind that I have had all my life. They have babies and landlords and loads of trouble and lots of fun. I’m more interested in how the property boy on this set is going to meet the eight-dollar installment on his radio this week than I am in all the gossip one could hear in the Brown Derby in a month.” Barbara’s closest friend was her hairdresser, Hollis Barnes. Barbara called her Barnsie.
The first time she sings on-screen.
Wellman wasn’t at all subtle about what he wanted from his actors or his crew, but on-screen he summoned up telling details that were infused with a deep love of people.
He framed some of his scenes at odd angles, sometimes to show point of view: Gilson picking up the mess after a party, down on all fours, with Barbara’s character, Joan, looking at him longingly, tentatively, from the doorway of the bedroom, the camera taking in his backside. Other times Wellman framed his scenes to summon up the work of painters, like N. C. Wyeth or Thomas Hart Benton, whose style reflected the contemporary look of the moment: Gilson out back in the frigid cold, bent over as he saws, windblown, a determined dark figure set against the snow, framed by the jutting teeth of the two-man saw that leans against the shed; a buggy rig holding the horizontal line that frames Gilson’s bent-over body. Behind him off to the right, the darkened barn doorway giving shape to the curve of the car’s trunk inside.
Barbara was given her first number to sing on-screen, “Take Me Away.” Its words (“Take me away, my heart only belongs to you, knowing you love me too, take me away”) set the picture’s theme.
The Mud Lark was mostly shot at First National studios. The prairie snowstorm and the fight in the saloon were shot at the Vitagraph studios. The production traveled to Vincent, California, to shoot the Elks Crossing Railroad Station, where Joan Gordon first arrives in North Dakota. The interior scene in the barbershop was shot at the Ambassador Hotel. The long shots of the fire in the wheat fields took place in one of the largest wheat belts in the United States. The field of shocked and stacked wheat, the exterior of the farmhouse, and the climactic fire were shot at the Warner Bros. Ranch.
The fire at the ranch was filmed at night on the next-to-last day of the shoot, in heavy winds as the script required. A double was to be used for Barbara. “After the first take,” said Sidney Hickox, Wellman’s cameraman, “when the double did not show enough action, Miss Stanwyck said she would do the scene herself.”
The day had started at ten in the morning. The crew broke for supper at seven and began the fire scene forty minutes later.
To fight the fire, Barbara and Brent were to use wet blankets. The scene was set. The fire was started; both actors began to fight the flames, hitting the blazing wheat with the blankets. After a few minutes it was clear that they were drawing back the blankets too soon. The actors were spreading the fire rather than smothering it. Soon they were fighting for their lives. Bill Wellman called for them to jump through the flames and get out, but Barbara and Brent continued in the midst of the heat and smoke until the fire was put out. Hickox kept the camera turning. It was two in the morning when they finished shooting.
Barbara’s legs were scorched, and she was taken to the hospital. For the next few days she applied grease to her seared skin.
Wellman brought in the picture for $202,000. He shot two takes for most scenes, rarely more. “One for the take I wanted,” he said. “One in case something went wrong in the lab.” One print was for domestic distribution; a second was for distribution abroad.
The Mud Lark’s title was changed to Night Flower. The previous year, Warner had announced that Barbara would star in a rags-to-riches high-society story, The Purchase Price, based on a novel by S. K. Morehouse. The movie was never produced. The studio took the title, used it for Arthur Stringer’s Saturday Evening Post story published months later by Bobbs-Merrill, and released The Mud Lark as The Purchase Price.
While Barbara was making the picture, Mae Clarke had finished work on two pictures for Universal with Lew Ayres, The Impatient Maiden and Night World. During both productions Mae, ill from overwork and exhaustion, though a trained performer like Barbara, showed up for work despite fever and infection. She was also a Christian Scientist and had minimized the effects of her symptoms from sinusitis. Soon her face began to swell. The pain intensified; she began to hallucinate. Mae needed “intravenous feeding and blood and rest” and drove to Palm Springs, where “only millionaires” lived, thinking she would find the best doctor there. She found a hospital, was admitted, and was given an injection. She woke in the middle of the night, “raving. Out of my mind.”
The following day an ambulance took her to another hospital in Pasadena, where they wrapped her “in canvas and stuck [her] in a long tube of very hot water with my head poking through a hole at one end, like hanging you from a tree.” They gave her shock treatment “without sedation. I smelled death coming out of my pores,” Mae said.
No one was allowed to see her. Lew Brice’s sister, Fanny, refused “to be told no,” said Mae. “Fanny had a way. She appeared in the doorway of my little room where I was strapped down to the bed. Fanny said, ‘Thought I’d drop in for tea. I’m going to shampoo your hair and . . . I’m going to do your nails.’ ”
Mae was able to survive, she said, through her “love of God” and her desire to live and was finally released. “They released me because surely they thought I was about to die. They did not want to have any investigation on the premises of Miss Mae Clarke from the movies.”
Mae weighed ninety-nine pounds.
An article in the Los Angeles Times said that Mae would be recovering from an illness and spending the next two or three weeks in Honolulu. Instead, her mother and family took care of her round the clock. During the months of Mae’s illness, she was unable to work. The studio formally dropped her; she was on suspension.
• • •
A headline in Variety read: “SCARFACE $20,000 Looks Holdover for LA; ‘BIG TIMER’ OK at $14,000; Stanwyck helps SO BIG, $13,500.”
So Big led Boston at the Metropolitan. The picture packed in audiences in New York at the Strand, and Chicago reported its best grosses in weeks. A full-page ad in Variety had as its banner: “Barbara Stanwyck in SO BIG; It’s Gone Straight to This Mark” (showing a head shot of Barbara smiling and, underneath it, a large dollar sign). The ad’s tagline read: “Another reason why this industry has staked its future on Warner Bros.”
People were scav
enging for food while bankers and corporate executives were receiving huge salaries and bonuses. Some 750,000 people were living on city relief efforts that averaged $8.20 a month per person, while 160,000 additional people waited to get on the rolls. Henry Ford was refusing to help those who were out of work, and the Detroit bankers would only lend the city money if it cut relief pittances. Thousands of farmers lost their land for nonpayment of taxes or mortgages. In 1932 alone a quarter of a million families lost their homes.
“Here we are in the midst of the greatest crisis since the Civil War,” wrote John Dewey. “And the only thing the national parties seem to want to debate is booze.” The Republican National Convention was dominated by Hoover. The main debate concerned the Eighteenth Amendment. The president was adamant about its enforcement, even though most Americans wanted it repealed.
The delegates of the Democratic convention voted in favor of its repeal and for immediate modification of the Volstead Act to allow the manufacture and sale of beer. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the three-year governor of New York, was nominated on the fourth ballot over the four-term governor, Al Smith, whom Roosevelt had twice nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president and who held much of the Northeast, along with Speaker of the House John Nance Garner of Texas.
Governor and Mrs. Roosevelt boarded a plane in Albany for Chicago to personally accept the nomination, rather than waiting for a committee from the convention to call upon the candidate weeks later and inform him of their party’s nomination. Roosevelt’s appearance at the convention was breathtaking. He spoke on the floor of the convention hall in Chicago, before the applauding delegates:
The appearance before a National Convention of its nominee for President, to be formally notified of his selection, is unprecedented and unusual, but these are unprecedented and unusual times . . .
Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws—sacred, inviolable, unchangeable—cause panics which no one could prevent . . . We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings . . .
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 35