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

by Victoria Wilson

  On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

  I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people . . . This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

  Barbara was a lifelong Republican. Frank Fay hated Franklin Roosevelt with a passion. Both Barbara and Frank had every intention to cast their votes, again, for their president, Herbert Hoover.

  • • •

  Barbara was set to make her final picture under her contract with Columbia. It was to be her fourth picture working with Capra, a daring love story of a Chinese warlord and a sheltered American missionary.

  The profits from Capra’s most recent pictures, Platinum Blonde and Forbidden, were sizable but not large enough to offset Columbia’s financial problems. During the time Capra was in Europe, production at Columbia had stopped. Most people at the studio were being laid off. Columbia was in the midst of a power struggle. Jack Cohn and Joe Brandt, both financial overseers of the studio in the East, weren’t interested in making the large-budget pictures Harry Cohn was determined to produce: the risks were too large, and Jack Cohn and Brandt were planning to oust Harry as head of production. Harry was warned by A. P. Giannini, head of the Bank of America, that a plan was afoot.

  Joe Brandt grew weary of the struggle and, at the urging of his wife, who wanted him to retire, offered to sell his Columbia stock for $500,000. Harry Cohn borrowed the money, bought the stock, and with it acquired 50 percent ownership of the company. Cohn, forty, became president and remained production chief of Columbia Pictures; his brother, Jack, vice president and treasurer. The Cohn brothers, who had viciously sought to undo each other during Brandt’s tenure, continued to fight just as heatedly after his departure.

  Jack Cohn was sitting across from his brother’s desk and said one day, “Harry, why don’t we do a Bible story?”

  “A Bible story, why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jack. “It’s kind of like a Western; there’s no royalty and a big audience out there, don’t cost a lot of money.”

  “You run the New York office,” said Harry. “And let me make the pictures. Anyway, what do you know about the Bible? I bet you don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.”

  Jack insisted he did.

  “For $50, you don’t know the Lord’s Prayer,” said Harry. “So let me hear you say it.”

  Jack began, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Harry said, “That’s enough. I didn’t think you knew it. Take the money.”

  • • •

  Frank Capra at thirty-five had directed sixteen pictures for Columbia in four years. The studio was able to use the demand for Capra pictures as a way around owning theaters. If the theater chains wanted a Capra picture, they had to take Columbia’s other films as well.

  Capra came back from his honeymoon to begin work on Tampico, from a Joseph Hergesheimer novel. Instead, he was hired to take over the direction of Faith from the directors Allan Dwan and Roy William Neill. Ed Bernds, the sound engineer on Faith, said, “Dwan sat impassively on the set. He accepted whatever the actors gave him in performances. Something was needed to spark intensity.”

  After several days of shooting, Cohn shut down production, fired Dwan, hired Roy Neill as director, and then gave the picture to Capra. “It was the return of the conquering hero,” said Bernds. “Capra refilmed everything Dwan had shot, scenes that had been slow picked up pace, characters came alive. Capra was at his best.”

  Faith was about an idealistic banker (Walter Huston) who lends money to people on their character, not their collateral. During the course of a twenty-four-hour period, the idealistic banker goes up against the bank’s directors, hell-bent on merging the bank with a larger one, and heroically staves off a run on the bank set off by a rumor.

  The picture was about fear and hysteria, money and banking, integrity and greed. Its ideas—radical, populist, based on the banking collapse and the country’s devastation—were those of Robert Riskin. “Riskin brought to Capra a slangy, down-to-earth humor, almost a cracker barrel philosophy,” said a mutual colleague.

  Riskin was a supporter of Roosevelt’s plan for a New Deal for America. He, like Capra, was the son of immigrants, but Riskin was a liberal Democrat who maintained an affinity with the working class. Capra, like Barbara, was a lifelong Republican and a supporter of Herbert Hoover. Capra believed that if he had made his way up from under, the American dream was there for anyone.

  Robert Riskin had been a poor boy but stayed connected to “the proletariat.” He put his dialogue—smart, witty, ennobling—into the mouths of working men and women. Through his edgy dialogue, the workers were able to stand up for themselves; they were more than a match for the educated and the rich. To Riskin, the decent values of ordinary (small-town) people would win out over the rich (city) sophisticates.

  “Frank [Capra] provided the schmaltz and Bob [Riskin] provided the acid,” said a mutual friend.

  The Frank Fays, circa 1932.

  Barbara had been in three pictures of Riskin’s. Like Riskin and Capra, Barbara had come out of poverty. Riskin was of the left; Barbara of the right and loved two men who were Republicans. Capra’s drive, which allowed him to break free from poverty and make his name as a director, is what spurred him to be a Republican. Barbara’s drive steered her toward her Republicanism as well. As an actress, she’d come out of her childhood poverty on her own, arrived at by hard work and without help from family. She wanted to get enough work and not have to worry about being poor again.

  Capra had been infatuated with Barbara for most of the three pictures in which he’d directed her. This was to be their fourth picture together in two years, their first since she’d chosen to remain with Fay and Capra had married. He was now a married man of five months.

  When Barbara married Frank Fay, it was for keeps. When she loved, it was with an elemental intensity that was almost bitter. She was reserved, seemingly undemonstrative, direct, a good sport, and unlike the characters she created on-screen, in life, black was black and white was white with no vague shadings in between. Barbara was a straight shooter, honest, and would go through hell for someone she loved. If it was clear what was expected of her, she was able to find the physical and mental endurance to accomplish it. Loyalty and service, which she never disassociated from affection, were at the heart of her being.

  Fay had been there for her in a way no one else had. It had taken her a long time to get used to having someone she could take her “troubles to when we were first married,” she said. She would sit off in a corner and think things out by herself. Frank used to say, “What’s the trouble, kid?” Barbara would answer, “Nothing.” It bothered him because he thought Barbara wasn’t happy with him. One day he said to her, half joking but hurt, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the guy you married. And that means for worse as well as for better. Tell your troubles to old Doc Fay and get [them] out of your system.” It was difficult for her, but she learned to confide in him. “And I’ve done it ever since,” said Barbara. “It is [wonderful] to have someone who can stand between you and the world.”

  EIGHT

  Object of Desire

  The Bitter Tea of General Yen was from the 1930 novel by Grace Zaring Stone, about a New England woman, the daughter of a college president who in the late 1920s arrives in a China torn apart by civil war to marry a medical missionary, Chinese scholar, and translator of the Odes; his sole intent in life is to relieve the suffering of others. The missionary, Doctor Strike, sees the Chinese as “the most tragic people . . . for hundreds of centuries they have enjoyed the highest plane of living and thinking . . . Like the Greeks they have been permitted to miss the one essential truth—the existence of a God of love.”
Doctor Strike’s much-admired former colleague, from one of the oldest Mandarin families, is the powerful and elusive General Yen Tso-Chong, a scholar turned warlord. Yen is considered dissolute by the Europeans and the Americans. (“We have to apply our standard to them,” the missionary says. “And make them accept it.”) General Yen’s troop trains have special cars for his concubines.

  The day after Megan Davis arrives in Chapei, the native city falls to the Communists, and Megan is “rescued”—abducted—carried across the country by train, under the protection of the great general Yen, leader of the Republican forces against the Communists, ruler of a province who maintains an arsenal managed by an American. Megan is brought to Yen’s house, “made for a life which began and ended with the rising and the setting of the sun.”

  Yen’s adviser and financial procurer is Mr. Shultz, an American “dedicated to himself, first, last and always,” says Yen. “My interests are his interests. As long as that remains so I can count on him absolutely. While Doctor Strike would betray me to please his God any time,” Yen tells Megan. “Shultz has all I want of the West. Doctor Strike has nothing.”

  • • •

  Grace Zaring Stone was the great-great-granddaughter of Robert Owen, a social reformer of the Industrial Revolution as well as a pioneer of British socialism whose work inspired the trade union movements and who founded the cooperative colony of New Harmony in Indiana. Stone had lived in many societies; she was born and raised in New York and had traveled to Australia, Java, France, and England. She’d written The Bitter Tea of General Yen during the two years she lived in China, when her husband, Ellis Stone, was commander of the U.S. Navy ship Isabel, stationed on the Yangtze River. Within three years of its publication, The Bitter Tea of General Yen had been published in twenty editions.

  What interested Grace Stone in the writing of The Bitter Tea, as it did Edith M. Hull in her 1921 novel, The Sheik, and William Archer in his play of the same year, The Green Goddess, was the idea of taking a white woman of good standing out of her safe milieu, putting her into a wild, exotic setting, still under the rules of “civilized” society and the protection of white men, and then thrusting her into a world where most (white) men would dare not venture, or could not gain entry; a world beyond white colonial law.

  At the heart of the novel are two civilizations, two people who come together from different worlds: an American with a belief in a Christian ethic instilled through generations of teaching, brought up to cherish the notions of goodness and mercy and forgiveness; and a Chinese warlord of rarefied tastes—elegant, educated, wise, unsentimental. For three days Megan comes up against Yen’s superior mind (“Have you read any of our poetry?” he asks her. “Do you understand our music? Do you know that there has never existed a people more purely artist and therefore more purely lover than the Chinese?”).

  Megan is shaken by the violent ways of the unchristian general Yen and at a critical moment in his campaign begs him to forgive one of his traitorous concubines rather than execute her. Megan offers him the promise of his soul’s salvation. Yen asks Megan if what she is after is understanding or changing him, “to make me over into some new image, the image of God, but also, slightly, the image of Miss Davis.”

  The questioning of her Christian ethic and her attempt to make Yen over into a humanist, or sentimentalist, comes at little cost to Megan, but her self-discovery and enlightenment come at a high price for General Yen—his empire and his life.

  Stone’s novel has no hint of romantic attachment between the two. But the script by Edward Paramore is about their impossible love: a sheltered New England woman from the West and a romantic, worldly, “inscrutable” man from the East who briefly shatter the barriers of convention, race, and custom but cannot thrive in a conventional world.

  As Megan Davis, from the finest New England family, daughter of a college president, who arrives in a China torn apart by civil war, with Nils Asther as General Yen Tso-Chong, appearing to her in a sexual dream, at first as a terrifying (Oriental) figure (above), from The Bitter Tea of General Yen, 1933. (PHOTOFEST)

  Yen treats the object of his desire with an Oriental deference that Megan finds hateful and revolting. “You yellow swine,” she says to him in her erotic dream when her Christian teaching spills out and she reaches for a knife on the desk behind her. She recoils and is repulsed, then is comforted by his presence and desires him. She is stunned more by the dream that she has just awakened from in which Yen rescues her from an evil Chinese ghoul lying on top of her than by Yen’s presence in her room.

  The costumes were designed by Robert Kalloch, his fourth picture, and Edward Stevenson, who began designing clothes in pictures in 1924 and who worked with Capra on Ladies of Leisure and Forbidden. (MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)

  In the dream a horrifying man in embroidered brocade robes, with hideous, distorted Oriental features, breaks down the door of Megan’s room. He is trying to caress her body with long talons as fingers. First she sees Yen’s face, but then it changes into a face with large buck teeth and drawn-back eyes.

  At the wall-size octagonal window is a man in Western dress, white slacks, dark blazer, shirt and tie, white panama. He has a dark mask over his eyes. He punches the attacker; the hideous Oriental man falls to the floor, far, far below the bed, and vanishes. The man with the mask takes Megan in his arms. She is relieved, reassured; she is being whirled around and around in ecstasy. Slowly, she lifts the mask away from the stranger’s face. It is Yen in another guise but dressed as she can love him: in Western garb. They lie back on the bed, he on top of her. Their mouths are touching; she belongs to him.

  During the course of three days she forgets the missionary worker she’s traveled to China to marry. She finds Yen alluring; her bigoted, puritanical ways disappear as she feels a sexual yearning she never felt before. Yen is warned by Jones (Shultz in Stone’s book), “Don’t forget she is a white woman.” Yen playfully tugs the brim of Jonesy’s hat and says, “I have no prejudice against her color.” He is captivated and willing to risk ruin for her.

  Frank Capra shot the dream sequence as a silent. To make it more dreamlike and unusual, he put Nils Asther (General Yen) on a dolly, rather than the camera. At the end of Stone’s novel, Yen is killed by the Communists after helping Megan escape with Mr. Shultz in a sampan headed back to Shanghai. The end of Paramore’s script for Herbert Brenon, the picture’s original director, adhered to Stone’s novel. But the screenwriter added a penultimate scene, in which General Yen, believing that Megan can never love him, prepares a cup of “bitter” tea to end his unbearable pain. As he is about to drink it, Megan comes to Yen’s room and confesses her love for him, and he throws away the poisoned drink.

  In Harry Cohn’s fashion of putting actors and directors under contract on their way up or their way down, Herbert Brenon had been borrowed from RKO by Walter Wanger, the picture’s producer, to direct The Bitter Tea. Brenon’s most successful films, Peter Pan and Beau Geste, had been silent, and he hadn’t fared well with talkies. While at work on The Bitter Tea, Brenon missed story conferences and fought with Cohn about money and was soon fired. Capra let it be known that he wanted to direct the picture and was hired.

  • • •

  Constance Cummings, who appeared in Capra’s previous picture, Faith, was to play Megan Davis. Instead, Capra gave the role to Barbara and turned the picture into a fantasy of a thwarted love that becomes ruinous for the one who seems to make the rules.

  In keeping with Capra’s thwarted feelings for Barbara, he had Paramore change the scene in which Megan confesses her love for Yen and puts aside the poisoned tea. In the rewritten scene, Yen has ceremoniously prepared his tea and adds the poison powder. He is seated in a chair. His bearing is that of a prince on a throne. His palace is empty; the servants and soldiers have deserted him. The money Jones has amassed in the boxcars of Yen’s train has been commandeered by enemy forces. All is lost; the game is over.
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br />   Megan comes to Yen’s room dressed in Chinese sequined pajamas and makeup. She places a pillow behind Yen’s back as she had watched his concubine Mah-Li do on the train and covers him with a silk throw. Megan kneels before him. They are close and still.

  “I had to come back,” she says quietly. “I couldn’t leave. I’ll never leave you.” Yen looks into her eyes and wipes away her tears. She kisses his hand and holds it against her cheek. He sips his bitter tea. He closes his eyes and leans his head back in the chair to die.

  She is saved from ruin and dishonor by Yen’s death.

  • • •

  For the part of General Yen, Capra wanted a tall, commanding presence. He considered thirty of Hollywood’s (white) leading romantic actors before narrowing it down to six possibilities, among them Leo Carrillo, Leslie Banks, and Chester Morris. Each of the six was asked to make a test, studying the part for days without pay. Each test required three hours for makeup to transform the Caucasian faces into that of the warlord General Yen Tso-Chong.

  Capra was taken with three of the performances. He saw The Bitter Tea as a “woman’s picture” and decided to let the women of the studio pick his General Yen. Sixty-five Columbia stenographers were called to the projection room. Each was given a slip of paper to vote for her choice of the most persuasive General Yen. The votes were three to one in favor of Nils Asther, the tall, suave, delicately restrained Swedish actor who was first discovered in 1916 by Mauritz (Moshe; later Moje) Stiller when Asther was in the National Cross-Country Skijoring Race, near Stockholm, something he’d been trying to win since boyhood. Asther lost the race, but Stiller, the film virtuoso called by Emil Jannings “the Stanislavski of the camera,” was overwhelmed by Asther’s exotic beauty and put him in his picture The Wings. Asther traveled to America in 1925, the same year that Stiller and his “Dream woman” creation, Greta Garbo, were brought over from Stockholm by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Asther was put under contract to United Artists, where he appeared in Herbert Brenon’s Sorrell and Son and in Topsy and Eva, the 1927 screen adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He then went to Metro and was starred opposite the studio’s biggest names: Marion Davies in The Cardboard Lover; Joan Crawford in Dream of Love and Letty Lynton; and Greta Garbo, to whom he’d proposed three times and to which she’d replied each time, no. Asther was thought of as “the masculine version of that mysterious fascination that is Garbo’s.” Together they’d attended Stockholm’s Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern—the Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy (Asther had said she was “always shy”)—and they had co-starred in Metro’s Wild Orchids and The Single Standard.