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

by Victoria Wilson

  Asther spoke fluent Swedish, French, and German, but with his English as unpolished as it was, he was going to have to speak his lines phonetically as General Yen.

  Once on the set, Asther was reserved. “The make-up may have had something to do with it,” said Ed Bernds, Capra’s sound engineer on The Bitter Tea, their sixth picture together. “Asther didn’t fraternize with the crew.” He said of himself, “I am not gay and amusing and social. I am ingrown, introspective, analytical.”

  The extraordinary look of The Bitter Tea of General Yen was designed by Stephen Goosson, Columbia’s art director, who worked with Capra before on Platinum Blond and American Madness. This is one of the quintessential images from Bitter Tea. (PHOTOFEST)

  • • •

  Early in the script of The Bitter Tea, the missionary wife (Clara Blandick) hosting Megan and Dr. Strike’s wedding party says about the Chinese, “They are all tricky, treacherous, immoral. I can’t tell one from the other. They are all Chinamen to me.” And of General Yen himself she says, “That’s what we call our gangsters here—generals.”

  The portrait of China is that of empire. The West is seen as civilization, and the rest of the world, primitive and savage. In the picture, the disdain for life is everywhere: the hostage taking; the firing squads shooting at prisoners in the midst of the bucolic beauty of Yen’s palace garden. Yen is shown to be a man who doesn’t care a whit for human life. His car runs down a man transporting Megan through the crowds in the war-torn district of Chapei, Shanghai. Rebel troops are attacking a railroad station, burning houses, shooting at those fleeing. Megan says to Yen when he gets out of his car, unfazed by the death, “What kind of a man are you? You’ve run down my rickshaw boy.” Yen replies, “If that is so, it is very fortunate. Life even at its best is hardly endurable.”

  The priest in the temple sings out descriptions of arms and transports and money instead of prayer. The Chinese are portrayed as ancestor worshippers for whom life doesn’t matter; Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism—all of the great wisdom of China—are nowhere to be seen. Instead, there is Christianity and self-sacrifice.

  During the chaotic scene in Chapei, Barbara, Nils Asther, and Gavin Gordon (Doctor Strike) were supposed to walk past a flaming structure that was wired and doused in kerosene to burn in sections; it was timed to fall sixty seconds after they had passed the spot. During the shooting of the scene, the wood snapped, the kerosene caught fire, and a thirty-foot square of board, lath, and plaster fell seconds before Barbara, Asther, and Gordon were to pass under it.

  “Well,” said Asther. “You might say that was ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  “I’ll take dust,” said Barbara.

  • • •

  During the making of the picture, Grace Stone was living in San Diego. Her husband, Commander Ellis Stone, was stationed there, in charge of the destroyer USS Barry. The studio invited the writer, her husband, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Eleanor, to spend a day in Hollywood and visit the set. Stone was introduced to Barbara, Asther, and Walter Connolly, Jones in the movie. She marveled at the realism of the set and felt she was back in China.

  Stone didn’t say anything but thought the movie was “grotesquely miscast,” that Barbara was all wrong for the New England young woman, that her accent was “crude” and her voice “uneducated,” and she wasn’t at all happy that a Swede was playing the role of a Chinese general.

  Capra had wanted Walter Connolly for the part of General Yen’s American financial adviser and aide, Jones, who warns the general of the betrayal of his concubine and military aide to the Communist forces. Each of the major Hollywood studios had been trying to lure Connolly away from Broadway for fifteen years without success. He had appeared steadily on the Broadway stage beginning in 1916 and had worked with Ruth Chatterton, Mae Marsh, Billie Burke, and his future wife, Nedda Harrigan, daughter of Edward Harrigan of the vaudeville team Harrigan and Hart. Paramount had wanted Connolly for the first Charlie Chan picture; United Artists had wanted him for the innkeeper in Rain. Connolly was such a surefire stage actor—the appealing, exasperated, lovable curmudgeon—that he’d been under contract for years to the biggest New York theatrical producers such as George M. Cohan, A. H. Woods, and Jed Harris.

  With Frank Capra and Grace Zaring Stone, author of The Bitter Tea of General Yen, whose first novel, The Heaven and Earth of Doña Elena, was published in 1929. At the time of this photograph, Stone was at work on her second, The Cold Journey. “I try to write the kind of books that I like to read. That is, tight, with plenty of incident. I know my stories don’t resemble in the least the books of Virginia Woolf or Wuthering Heights. Must I be called slick because I can’t write like Emily Brontë?”

  Capra was in luck.

  Connolly’s two-year contract with Gilbert Miller had expired three days before, when the extended run of The Good Fairy, starring Helen Hayes, had closed in Chicago. Capra tracked down Connolly in a Chicago hospital following a hernia operation, still groggy from the effects of the anesthesia. Connolly’s wrists were tied to the bed, and a nurse had to hold the phone for him while he listened to Capra describe the part of Jones, Yen’s American mercenary adviser. Capra assured Connolly he wouldn’t have to learn Chinese for the role. Before Connolly fell back asleep, he agreed to take the part.

  Connolly saw being a character actor as being similar to a country doctor carrying powders and pills. He believed that character actors got their training through long years of stage experience, experimenting with characteristics, foibles, mannerisms, and eccentricities that make one character different from another.

  With the versatile Walter Connolly as Jones, Yen’s American financial advisor. “I kept away from pictures for nearly sixteen years,” he said, “and I am not sorry that I finally yielded.” From The Bitter Tea of General Yen. (PHOTOFEST)

  • • •

  The Bitter Tea of General Yen was a lavish picture for Columbia. Capra took great pains with it, carefully planning each detail of the production. The sets, designed by Steve Goosson—the interiors and exteriors of the palace, a reproduction of a palace a hundred years old; the huge four-block railroad station; an entire street in the Soo Chow Creek district of Shanghai, another in the Chapei section—required 500,000 square feet of lumber, 5,000 square yards of muslin, 500 gallons of paint, and 24,000 hours of union labor.

  More than $200,000 worth of Chinese antiques, tapestries, vases, statues, rugs, chairs, paintings, bureaus, and shrines were used. Wine-red velour was used on the doors, as were gold-finished figures and muslins in pink, beige, and red. One bronze incense burner that took ten years of the life of a Chinese craftsman and then drove him crazy from the monotony of the work cost $7,000. The set dresser even found an opium bed, carved in ebony and ivory, that had never been used by anyone but its owner in Shanghai.

  Several endings of the picture were shot. Grace Stone was informed that they hadn’t been able to decide which one to go with until an ending had been chosen which was thought to be “finally right.” It was the ending Stone had written in the book.

  With General Yen and Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), his concubine, on his train traveling from Shanghai, across China to his compound. Weeks before the picture was to start shooting in early July 1932, the New York Times announced that Anna May Wong, who had appeared in Daughters of the Dragon and the recent Shanghai Express, had been hired by Columbia for one of the leads in the “appropriately Oriental The Bitter Tea of General Yen.” (PHOTOFEST)

  Joe Walker was once again Capra’s cameraman. It was their seventh picture together. The mystical look of General Yen was unlike that of most of Capra’s pictures. “People want to see things as they really are,” Capra said. “Reality is what is wanted in pictures, not symbolic touches and beautiful settings for mere beauty’s sake.” Capra was after an Academy Award. He still didn’t understand why his pictures, which he felt were better than those of other directors, weren’t winning awards.

  Harry Cohn said, “Th
ey’ll never vote for that comedy crap you make. They only vote for that arty crap.”

  Capra decided to make one of “those arty things.” He didn’t like “fancy shooting,” as he called it. He believed the camera should see life as it is and the microphone hear it as it is.

  The look of The Bitter Tea of General Yen—dreamy, exotic, otherworldly—was achieved through Joe Walker’s camera work and innovation and Capra’s direction. “A cinematographer can do more than any other individual,” Capra said, “in portraying the mood of the story. The good cinematographer portrays that mood, lights his picture so that the audience doesn’t realize he has lighted it, gets over the proper effect so that the audience doesn’t realize he has done it.”

  Walker darkened the foreground of each shot and highlighted the background farthest away from the camera, and he emphasized this by placing a piece of furniture, tiny Buddha, vase, or intricate Chinese statue in front of and closer to the camera than the action of the scene. In addition, Walker improved the technique of diffusion. Up to that time diffusion was difficult to work with. Once it was on a lens, it couldn’t be changed mid-scene. Walker’s invention of “variable diffusion” made it possible to change the diffusion freely while the camera was running. The sheen to the picture came from using silk stockings over the camera lens in different moments. When Capra wanted something to be seen clearly, a hole was burned in the stocking with a lit cigarette.

  Fourteen days of shooting were done at night. They began at 7:30 each evening and quit before dawn. Barbara went to bed at 5:30 each morning and woke at noon. Asther could only sleep for an hour or so. Connolly, who was used to the hours of the theater and didn’t usually go to bed before four in the morning, had no problem adjusting to the production’s odd hours.

  The look of The Bitter Tea was influenced by Josef von Sternberg’s most recent picture, Shanghai Express, released five months earlier. Shanghai Express was about faith and rebirth, Bitter Tea about loss, convention, and clash of cultures. Each picture puts forth the notion of a violent, exotic country where “time and life count for nothing” (Shanghai Express); where “human life is the cheapest thing” (The Bitter Tea). Each suggests an atmospheric magic—as well as a sense of the ominous, the foreboding—associated with a late-nineteenth century Western view of the Orient.

  The settings of Shanghai Express and The Bitter Tea are similar: China during a civil war in which a train carries the principals to their fate. Each production is rich, lavish, stylized: the lighting of each is diffused and alluring.

  Each features a Chinese concubine. In Shanghai Express, Anna May Wong is Hui Fei, a “coaster” who lives by her wits. She is raped by the commander in chief of the revolutionary forces (Warner Oland), who has waylaid the train in search of a hostage important enough to exchange with the government for the commander’s top aide. The Anna May Wong character is so dishonored and debased by the commander that she stabs him to death, heroically saving the passengers on the train and presumably thousands of others who would have died at his hands.

  In General Yen, the twenty-year-old Toshia Mori is Mah-Li (Anna May Wong was originally to have played the part; Toshia Mori, who came from a family of sixteen generations of doctors, won the part of the Chinese concubine). Mah-Li is General Yen’s favorite concubine. She pampers him and receives his gifts of luxury and precious jade, only to betray him by her clandestine love for Yen’s closest adviser and her revelations of the general’s plans and strategies.

  Joseph Walker was director of photography for The Bitter Tea of General Yen. He started in 1921 and worked with Capra on each of his pictures at Columbia.

  The almost still photographic shots of Barbara in General Yen were similar to those von Sternberg used for Marlene Dietrich. Shanghai Express was a great success for both Sternberg and Dietrich.

  The shadows on Dietrich’s face, the power struggle between Dietrich and von Sternberg, being submissive and dominating at the same time, were nowhere in Capra’s Bitter Tea. The undercurrents of the Dietrich/von Sternberg relationship that seem to fill every shot of each movie the actress and the director made together were not present between Barbara and Capra in The Bitter Tea. Where von Sternberg was an artist who could easily destroy himself for art and an idea, Capra was more pragmatic. His renunciation of Barbara as he attempts to deify her disarms her of her energy, independence, wit, openness. He gives her courage but not nobility in the form of sacrifice as von Sternberg gives Dietrich.

  Joe Walker’s use of his newly designed special portrait lenses that allowed Capra to get a beatific close-up of Barbara with light surrounding her hair didn’t help to create a sexual tension; Capra’s infatuation with Barbara was over.

  “For me, Bitter Tea is unforgettable,” said Ed Bernds. “It was colorful, full of action: the riots, the Chinese civil war . . . There were battles in the crowded streets of Shanghai, and there was a dramatic night sequence, an attack on General Yen’s gold train made possible by Mah-Li’s treachery,” for which a thousand extras were hired.

  The night sequence was shot with dozens of arc lights, two complete trains belching smoke and every once in a while jets of steam, and two armies. Hundreds of soldiers on both sides. “Capra, very calmly, was in charge of everything,” said Bernds. “Not excited, patient; people [were] coming from all directions, asking questions, wanting a decision. [Capra] was like a general in the midst of battle, issuing orders right and left, three or four people at the time wanting an answer. He handled the big scenes with all these soldiers expertly; he was unflappable.”

  Bernds said there was a great deal of tension around the scene of Yen’s suicide. “Usually, on a Capra set there was a lot of camaraderie. Capra liked making bantering remarks about people.” The crew was “an instrument of Capra’s,” said Bernds. “The head cameraman, his first assistant, the mike man, the head grip, the head electrician, when there was going to be a tense, demanding scene, we became tense and keyed up doing it.”

  • • •

  Capra tried everything to take the pressure off an actor. He tried not to show annoyance, knowing that if he did, it would only make the actor more tense. He knew when an actor was about to blow the line; the eyes would change, and he would yell “cut” to talk about a shadow on the back of the wall. “Walker was in on it,” said Bernds. “And Joe would fiddle with the lights, and then they would shoot again.” Usually, the actor regained his or her composure and would do the scene perfectly. When an actor blew again, Capra would pick up a handful of double-headed nails used on sets for braces and toss the nails behind him, making sure that no one was standing in back of him.

  Capra would pretend to be angry at the noise and demand to know who had made the racket. The actor then had time to cool off and think it wasn’t his fault.

  Barbara was letter-perfect with her lines even if a scene had been rewritten the night before and she was handed the pages in the morning.

  For one of the scenes, Capra rehearsed an actor over and over again.

  “I’m no novice,” the actor said. “I don’t need an all-day rehearsal.”

  “You don’t know Stanwyck. When she goes into an emotional scene, she’ll sweep you with her like a chip on a tidal wave. She’ll stir you until you’ll blow and forget everything you ever knew. But once she’s done that scene, she’s shot. She can’t do it over and give it the same stuff.”

  In spite of Capra’s warning, the scene started, and the actor instead of reacting to Barbara began to watch her and blew his line.

  “She gets them all,” one assistant director said. “Even hardened grips and electricians flood the set with their tears when she gets going.”

  • • •

  The Purchase Price was released during the shooting of The Bitter Tea. Zanuck sent Barbara a note he’d received criticizing Warner Bros. for producing such an inferior picture.

  “I chose that picture,” said Barbara. “How I fought for it. I just knew it would make a good picture. There is no one to
blame but me.”

  NINE

  A Path to Motherhood

  Barbara wanted to adopt a child. “I want one so badly that it amounts to a phobia,” she said. “I can’t wait any longer. If I do, I’ll become morbid on the subject—and no mother should be morbid.”

  After five years of marriage to Frank Fay, Barbara was determined to have a child. “All my life, I think I have wanted a baby,” she said. “When I dream, I dream that I have a baby in my arms—I can see its little face and feel it.” Barbara told her friend and business acquaintance Ann Hoyt that she was interested in adopting a baby.

  “I suppose I could go to some orphans home,” Barbara said. She was concerned, though, that the public might think she was doing it for publicity purposes.

  Hoyt went several times to the Children’s Home Society on East Thirty-Fifth Street in Los Angeles and saw one baby she thought Barbara would like. The child wasn’t up for adoption, but after several visits Ann was told the baby was available. Hoyt gave Barbara the news, and early one evening, after Barbara finished working for the day, she and Hoyt went to the home to see the child.