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

by Victoria Wilson

  Barbara looked at “the babies there, unwanted, unclaimed, born into a world that had no place for them,” and thought of her own childhood. “I knew those babies belonged to me almost as preciously as any child of my own could belong. It didn’t need the physical act of motherhood to make our hearts open or to give us love for these babies who were ours just because they were babies.”

  Barbara hadn’t discussed with Fay that she was taking steps to adopt a baby, but now she would have to. A woman couldn’t legally adopt a child without her husband’s approval. Fay was perfectly content not having children; he was preoccupied, in a fight for his professional survival.

  A Fool’s Advice was still without a distributor. Joe Brandt of World-Wide was interested in distributing the picture but hadn’t yet agreed to do so. Fay was trying to get theaters to book the picture with the added enticement of his personal appearance with Barbara.

  Barbara was adamant about wanting a baby. She was determined to adopt a child regardless of Fay’s objections, or his drinking. Frank finally agreed to go with her to the Children’s Home Society to see the baby. They were told that Vivian Greene had given birth to John Charles Greene in Los Angeles on February 5, 1932. The infant boy was five months old.

  “I wonder if the baby isn’t really the only important thing—the care of the baby,” said Barbara.

  Soon after, Fay was admitted for the third time to a sanitarium to dry out, this one near El Monte. On his release he was to go into a new show being produced by Felix Young called Tattle Tales.

  Barbara finished shooting The Bitter Tea, and Ann Hoyt brought the six-month-old baby boy to the Fays’ house to stay for good. She brought a nurse along with her. Miss Richter put the baby in his crib in the nursery, which was across the hall from her room. Barbara’s room was at the opposite end of the hall; Fay’s was across from hers and up one step, in the back next to the den.

  Frank started to go into the nursery to see the baby and was stopped by Nurse Richter, who said the child shouldn’t be disturbed. It was past the baby’s bedtime; he’d been taken out of the residence and was nervous and tired. Fay didn’t understand why in his own home he couldn’t see the child whenever he wanted; after all the child was his. Miss Richter said, “If I’m going to be responsible for the child’s health, I forbid you or anyone else from going in to see the child.”

  Barbara fired Miss Richter the next day.

  Ann Hoyt and several doctors recommended another nurse, the Scottish-born Nellie Banner, who was thought to be an outstanding child specialist and who had previously worked as a nanny for a banking family in San Francisco. Barbara hired her.

  Barbara changed the baby’s name from John to Dion, after Dion Boucicault, the seminal, scandalous nineteenth-century playwright, actor, translator, revolutionary theater designer (New York’s Winter Garden), and manager.

  “All I wish for him,” Fay said of his new son, “is that he will grow up to have the sweetness, the mentality and genius of Boucicault and the guts of Dion O’Banion [underworld boss, bootlegger equally famous as a florist and rival of Al Capone].”

  Dion Anthony Fay, Bristol Avenue, Brentwood, California, 1932. (COURTESY TONY FAY)

  • • •

  Barbara had been discussing with her sister the idea of her coming to live in Los Angeles. She wanted Maud to be near her because of Fay’s drinking. Maud finally agreed to move out west with Bert and their son, Al, who was three years younger than his aunt Barbara.

  Bert would leave his job at Merkent’s Meat Market, where he’d worked for almost two decades, and look for something in Los Angeles. Mabel’s son, Gene, was away at Boy Scout camp until late August, but the Merkents decided to drive cross-country in July. Gene would join them at the end of the summer and finish his last year of high school in Los Angeles.

  Maud, Bert, and Al drove west to California in their 1932 Ford Tudor Sedan. Barbara rented a small two-bedroom house for them from Dorothy Sebastian on Carmelina Drive in Brentwood, two miles from North Bristol. The Sebastian house was a modest one-story Spanish-style red-tiled house near the Brentwood Country Club. Barbara made arrangements for Gene to attend University High School in Sawtelle.

  • • •

  During the shooting of The Bitter Tea, Warner Bros., like other Hollywood studios, announced it was cutting the salaries of its stars and featured players, including Ruth Chatterton and William Powell, each of whom was earning $7,500 a week, and Barbara, who was earning $5,000 a week.

  Greta Garbo and Maurice Chevalier, according to a survey of box-office reaction to movie actors, were the two biggest moneymakers in Hollywood; each listed in the AA class. The A class consisted of Warner–First National’s George Arliss, United Artists’ Ronald Colman, and Metro’s Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, and Clark Gable. Radio Pictures and Fox followed with the BB stars Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor, and Constance Bennett, Ann Harding, and Richard Dix were listed for RKO. B actors included John and Lionel Barrymore, Jackie Cooper, and Ramon Novarro. Columbia started with C actors with Barbara Stanwyck, the only actress listed. The D list included Helen Twelvetrees, Joel McCrea, Dolores del Río, Adolphe Menjou, Polly Moran, and Jimmy Durante.

  Al Merkent, driving his parents from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Barbara had rented Dorothy Sebastian’s small Spanish-style house for her nephew, sister, and brother-in-law; it was close to the Brentwood Country Club and only a couple of miles from Bristol Avenue. (COURTESY JUNE D. MERKENT)

  Warner told Barbara that her option was being renewed for another year. As far as Barbara was concerned, the studio had allowed its option period to lapse. Her original contract with Warner had been signed on August 1, 1931, but was set back fifteen days before it went into effect. The option renewal was called for August 1, 1932; the studio had failed to notify Barbara before August 15, and to her the option was canceled.

  She insisted on a new contract. Part of the agreement was contingent on the studio contracting with Fay for the sale of A Fool’s Advice minus British rights, which Frank had previously sold to Sterling Film Company. Warner agreed to pay Fay $50,000 against 50 percent of the net, plus prints and advertising costs and 35 percent of the gross receipts of distribution cost. There was talk of Fay making three pictures for Warner, including one based on the life of the composer Stephen Foster, none of which was reflected in Frank’s contract for A Fool’s Advice.

  Warner agreed to a new contract for Barbara that would go into effect following the completion of her third picture for the studio, Women in Prison; Archie Mayo, who had directed Barbara in Illicit, was to direct the picture. Barbara’s new arrangement with Warner was for an exclusive one-year contract for three pictures, with the understanding that there would be “no more back to the farm” roles. Barbara was to be paid $150,000: fifty installments of $3,000. Warner had three one-year options: three additional pictures for the first year at $175,000; $225,000 for the second year; $275,000 for the third.

  Fay was finally free from trying to sell A Fool’s Advice. Now he had other problems. He’d been brought up on charges for a hit-and-run incident. Bail was posted at $1,500; the charges were ultimately dropped when the driver of the other car refused to testify against him in court.

  • • •

  Barbara was besotted with their son. Dion Anthony had his first two teeth; he was healthy and loved, and Barbara was considering adopting more children.

  “Did you ever notice the expression on the faces of orphans?” asked Barbara. “They’re all alike. There’s a deadness, a dreariness about them that to anyone who has ever lived in an orphanage marks them at once. Their eyes are lonely. As if they’re searching for someone to belong to.”

  TEN

  A Most Dangerous Man Menace

  1932–1933

  A product of crowded places and jammed-up emotions . . .

  —Barbara Stanwyck

  Yes, we could smell the depression in the air . . . which chilled so many of us like a world’s
end . . . It was like a raw wind; the very houses we lived in seemed to be shrinking, hopeless of real comfort.

  —Harold Clurman

  Barbara was determined to move away from the linsey-woolsey roles of So Big and The Purchase Price.

  “Thalberg has the right idea for Norma Shearer,” she said. “She does Strange Interlude and then Smilin’ Through and that’s going from the bedroom to the garden with a vengeance.”

  Barbara’s third picture under her old Warner contract, originally called Women in Prison, then Lady No. 6142, then Betrayed, began production the first week in October 1932.

  It was from a play by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles, based on Mackaye’s years in prison as a result of the murder of her ex-husband by Mackaye’s present husband, Paul Kelly. Working with Barbara were Lyle Talbot, the poor man’s Clark Gable, a lead in stock and a popular supporting actor; Preston Foster, Lillian Roth, Dorothy Burgess, Maud Eburne, Ruth Donnelly, and Robert Warwick.

  Instead of a nightclub singer who sheds her city (sullied) ways and is reborn by the toil of the land, or the selfless librarian transformed into a woman of the world who sacrifices all for (forbidden) love, Barbara’s character in Lady No. 6142 picked up where she left off with Night Nurse and Illicit.

  “I’ll be glad to get away from asparagus and wheat for a while,” she said, “even if I do have to go to jail to do it. I’m not depending on sex to put me over. People are tired of seeing me a frump and I’m tired of being one. In So Big I raised asparagus and suffered in an asparagus bed. In The Purchase Price, I did my suffering in a wheat field.”

  Now her character would do her suffering, or most of it, behind bars. “But believe me,” she said, “I’m going to do my suffering so they’ll like it. I think people would rather see a woman sin and suffer in a pair of silk pajamas than in a flannel night gown.”

  “Barbara Stanwyck is going sexy again,” said the press. “Off with the muslin and on with the satin. The Stanwyck girl is trading her flannel nighties for clinging silk . . . she’s going sophisticate, bag and baggage.”

  • • •

  Lady No. 6142 is tough and knowing; she’s been to hell and back. She’s a member of an underworld mob, a gangster’s moll who turns decoy for her bank-robber boyfriend, is caught mid-heist, and is sent up the river, serving “two to five” in San Quentin.

  It was exactly the kind of Victorian story that Darryl Zanuck, Warner’s production head, gravitated toward and had written many times before. Zanuck consistently produced great box-office successes for the studio and was considered Jack Warner’s heir apparent. Zanuck was thin, wiry, a two-goal polo player (“From Poland to polo in two generations,” said the Broadway playwright and screenwriter Arthur Caesar of Zanuck), and a challenger of Irving Thalberg’s for the title of “young genius of the films.” He was a story writer from way back.

  He’d left Omaha, Nebraska, a discharged soldier (private first class) of sixteen who survived the Great War, and headed for California with dreams of being a writer. Once out west in a “lousy rooming house” in the downtown part of Los Angeles, he wrote story after story, sometimes two a day, which he sent off to the pulp magazines looking for fiction about tough heroes brought to their knees by drink, women, and dope, who are reborn by their courage, fortitude, and the love of a decent woman.

  The tough-guy hero primed for a fall in Lady No. 6142 is the seen-it-all gun moll who long ago began her descent; she’s the daughter of a small-town deacon (“Too much deaconing took all of the sweetness out of me,” she says) who does time in reform school before the story starts, goes to the state pen, and is reborn through the love of a God-fearing evangelist, who happens to come from the same small town she does and is the son of the town drunk.

  As Nan Taylor, serving time for being a decoy in a bank heist, in Lady No. 6142, the third in a trio of Warners prison tales. The others recently released: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, mid-November 1932, and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, December 24, 1932. (PHOTOFEST)

  “I never was the type to make men think,” said Barbara about the part of Nan Taylor, “but perhaps I can make them react. I’ve known women who plodded through life, just as my character did in So Big, but the women I knew did their plodding on the pavement and not the soil. I know very little about the simple life. I’m a product of crowded places and jammed-up emotions, where right and wrong weren’t always clearly defined and life wasn’t always sweet, but it was life.”

  The moll is trapped in the bank while robbing it, and underneath her platinum wig a cop recognizes the “elegant lady” playing at-a-loss-without-her-maid as the cool, cold swagger of Nan Taylor. (“For a dumb dick,” she tells him in a slow, world-weary way, “you have a memory like an elephant.”)

  During Nan Taylor’s first day in San Quentin (to her cell mates, she’s just another “new fish”) she turns off the inmates’ communal radio. She’s told in no uncertain terms that she can’t just walk in and take over the joint. “Yeah,” says Nan, her hand on her hip. “When they add you up, what do you spell? And that goes for all of you.” Barbara as Nan is all punch and guts.

  Later Nan says, “I’ve gone around with almost everything, but it was baby’s milk compared to coming through here with all these dames staring at you.”

  • • •

  Warner wanted to shoot inside San Quentin, but the state prison board refused the studio’s request, and the prison scenes were to be shot in Burbank.

  John Seitz, the cameraman for the picture, was borrowed by Zanuck from Fox. Seitz shot without making any preliminary tests of Barbara. She trusted Zanuck’s eye and didn’t need to see how she would look.

  Shooting on the picture began right away.

  Preston Foster had made almost a dozen pictures, but this was his first time working with a star. Barbara gave Foster a Saint Genesius medal. “If Genesius was the patron saint of actors,” said Foster, “[Barbara] is the patroness. Nobody else is quite like her.”

  Lyle Talbot, as Barbara’s menacing bank-robber boyfriend, played the same part he played in Michael Curtiz’s not-yet-released 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which starred Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis.

  Lady No. 6142 is a fantasy—a jail fantasy that shows women in prison living in neat little rooms, playing records, throwing pillows, as if they’re in a girls’ school. Lillian Roth is the pretty, cute “good-girl” prisoner who shows Nan Taylor the ropes. Roth plays a ukulele and sings to her heartthrob Joe E. Brown, whose photograph is tacked on a wall in her cell (“All I do is dream of you the whole night through”). A society dowager (Helen Ware), doing time for murder (in a fit of jealousy she ground up glass and served it in the caviar to her “special guest”), is in prison with her lapdog and her black servant, who does her laundry. There’s tough old Aunt Maggie (Maud Eburne), cigarette hanging from her mouth, in for having what she calls a “beauty parlor,” until a detective sergeant comes for a manicure and busts up her whorehouse. The touch of real danger comes from a cigar-smoking gal inmate with short slicked-back hair, shirt, and tie, with a propensity for wrestling.

  Barbara gives Nan Taylor energy and spirit. The challenge was for her to take something unbelievable and make it plausible, which she does by the sheer force of her personality. She plays it with wit and intelligence. She’s free from Capra’s fantasy and what he projected onto her, not that she was uncomfortable with it; it just wasn’t that much fun to work with, which is exactly what Lady No. 6142—Ladies They Talk About—is: jazzy and fun.

  The picture was shot in twenty-four days and cost $176,000 to make.

  • • •

  Barbara was taking home more than $4,700 a week. Fay was spending it as quickly as it came in. She returned from the studio one day to find a wall of their house knocked down to enlarge the game room and a crew of ten workmen swarming throughout.

  Barbara was finished shooting Ladies They Talk About when Zanuck sent over a synopsis of a story for her next picture, about a small-town girl, a hash sling
er in her father’s rough-trade Pittsburgh speakeasy who’s pawed by the customers and, after her father dies in an explosion, is forced to go to the big city to earn a living. She finds work in the lowest rung of a banking company and seduces her way up the company hierarchy, from the humble doorman to the pompous president, destroying the lives of each of the twelve men she leaves behind, draining them of money and honor. Each is bewitched by her ways and devastated when she leaves, including the elderly head of the banking firm, who falls under her spell.

  Of the kind of woman Barbara was about to play, she said, “The baby-face type was the champ home wrecker from the gay nineties down to the shot that killed the Austrian Archduke. The petit enfant terrible, with her childish voice and helpless clinging ways, was the prize package of naughty femininity during pre-war days. She’s coming back, along with other pre-war fashions. (Long slinky dresses, ruffs and frills and corsets—even if they don’t call them corsets any more—and leg o’ mutton sleeves, and little capes and jackets and muffs.)”

  Baby Face was an original short story by Cosmo Hamilton, published in Hearst’s International magazine in 1917 and bought by First National a decade later for $1,000.

  Barbara was once again delighted to move away from the motherly and farmer’s wife roles. Baby Face was a daring role for her: from Madonna to deadly vamp in one quick elevator ride to the top. Lily Powers is ruthless, deliberate, cold-blooded, entrancing. She is the way men have been for ages.

  In early November 1932, Zanuck and Barbara met to develop the story.

  “Zanuck could write ten times faster than any ordinary man,” Jack Warner said. “He worked Saturdays, Sundays and nights. He could leave on Friday and come back on Monday with a script.”

  Zanuck had started at Warner Bros. as a scriptwriter when Jack Warner decided to make Rin Tin Tin a star. Zanuck had come up with a story and acted it out for Warner, with Zanuck playing the part of the dog. It was 1923; Zanuck was twenty-one. From his first script, Find Your Man, he took the basic ideas he’d used for the pulp magazines and in Rin Tin Tin replaced the redemptive element of a good and pure woman with a dog—the tough, courageous hero who saves his master from destruction by his constancy and love.