The theater was part of the greatest single building project ever undertaken at one time by private capital. It began in boom times, and the major partners, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Owen Young, and David Sarnoff, continued with the project despite the dire state of the economy. The original site of three acres, owned by Columbia University, had been intended for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera Company. The notion of three acres grew into twelve as the plan expanded. A single opera house was replaced by a complex of twelve structures. It was to include the world’s largest office building, a complete Fifth Avenue frontage devoted to international buildings, a group of offices, broadcasting studios, and theaters for Radio Corporation of America and its affiliates, National Broadcasting Company and Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation. One of the buildings held the headquarters of the broadcasting studios of NBC; another, the recently opened RKO Roxy Theatre (with a seating capacity of thirty-seven hundred); and still another, Radio City Music Hall. NBC occupied twelve floors of the RCA building; RKO’s president, M. H. “Deak” Aylesworth, took seven floors above Radio City for RKO offices. The Rockefellers themselves had acquired 100,000 shares of stock in both RCA and RKO.
After the opening of Radio City, President Hoover sent a letter of congratulations to Deak Aylesworth for his “courage and vision,” as did President-elect Roosevelt, congratulating Aylesworth on the “completion of the great undertaking” and the employment of so many when it was so badly needed.
• • •
The first showing at the Music Hall of The Bitter Tea of General Yen was jammed; most of the lower-priced seats were sold before one o’clock in the afternoon, with lines later in the grand foyer and along Fiftieth Street.
On the program were excerpts from Faust sung by Alida Vane, Aroldo Lindi, and Max Ratmiroff; the Radio City Roxyettes; The Story of the Waltz performed by Patricia Bowman, Gomez and Winona, and the Roxy ballet corps, with the Roxy’s choral ensemble; the Tuskegee Singers; Ray Bolger; and an organ recital.
Of The Bitter Tea of General Yen, one critic said, “No picture half so strange, so bizarre, has ever before passed outward through the astonished doors of the Columbia Studio” (New York World Telegram). The reviews were admiring of Capra’s work (“a triumph of repression; the more spectacular sequences [are] irreproachably conceived”), as well as Nils Asther’s and Walter Connolly’s “unusually clever performances” (New York Times). Thornton Delehanty in the New York Evening Post hailed the story’s “poetry and beauty” and singled out the photography and the “cunning authenticity of its atmosphere.”
The critics unanimously praised Nils Asther and Walter Connolly, but they picked up on the effects of Capra’s feelings for Barbara that quietly deprived her work of its usual energy and force. Richard Watts wrote that her performance “hardly adds to the liveliness of the work” (NY Herald Tribune). Thornton Delehanty said Barbara was “a brittle impersonation of the missionary girl, a portrait which lacks warmth and depth.” Louella Parsons thought Barbara “miscast,” and Philip Scheuer in the New York World-Telegram said, “The complexities of the role engulf her.”
Will Hays had invited the Chinese chargé d’affaires in Washington to see the picture at the Keith. The Chinese legation wanted deleted certain “gruesome scenes,” primarily the shooting of war prisoners, and “objectionable phrases,” such as “yellow swine” and the statement that the Chinese “are treacherous and immoral.” The Motion Picture Producers rebuffed the requests of the Chinese government and saw no reason for the scenes to be removed. They saw the story as “a eulogy of the Chinese philosophy, fair dealing, morality and graciousness”; said that “while soldiers are executed before the firing squad, there is no indication that these are summary executions; there is just the fact that they are executed.” Hays was more concerned about the “missionary angle” but found that it was “very slight” and that their work was portrayed as “commendatory.”
Cuts to the picture were made state by state. In New York, The Bitter Tea was released without the scenes of prisoners falling to the ground after execution and a soldier shooting a prisoner running away from the firing squad. In Massachusetts, the firing squad scene was cut entirely, as was the scene showing Megan in lingerie playing cards with Yen. In Ohio, Clara Blandick’s dialogue was cut in which she describes the Chinese as “tricky, treacherous, immoral. I can’t tell one from the other. They are all Chinamen to me,” as was Megan’s calling General Yen “You yellow swine.” The state of Kansas took the picture in its entirety.
“I think it one of my best pictures,” said Frank Capra. “I don’t really know why audiences didn’t like it. The ingredients are already there for trouble, because of the racial question, the religious question, and to try to tell that kind of love story, I think I just flew over my head on that. It came off, in my mind, an artistic triumph but it was certainly not a public success.”
Baby Face finished production late in January at a cost of $187,000. It was shot in eighteen days. Barbara pushed her scenes through so she could get home to see Dion. She tried to arrange her days in order to bathe him and put him to bed. And she was helping Fay to cope with the mess of Tattle Tales and put in $10,000 of her own money to buy the show out from Felix Young. Headlines in the press told the story: “Barbara Stanwyck Buys Show for Fay.” She was now the show’s producer though she denied it. “I [don’t] have a penny invested,” she said. “Fay financed it all himself. Fay has been a Broadway stage star for many years. I wish I had as much in the bank as he has at this moment! It is all Mr. Fay’s. He wrote it. He secured the backing. He directed it. He manages it.”
Fay stayed out of Tattle Tales for its two-week run at the Belasco but returned to the show in mid-January, when it moved to the Hollywood Playhouse. The first three days were a disaster due to lighting problems from insufficient wiring. New transformers were ordered; the show reopened and finished out the week earning $4,300.
By the end of the month Fay had paid Young a token $1,000 and officially taken over as the show’s producer. Barbara, who had wanted to come into the show earlier but couldn’t because of Baby Face, now planned to open with it in San Francisco at the Curran Theatre. Rather than put on her old act with Fay and face criticism from the press as they had when they appeared together onstage the year before, Barbara planned to perform dramatic scenes from Ladies of Leisure and the big opening scene from The Miracle Woman.
Tattle Tales’ first week in San Francisco brought in $17,000 with most of the audience buying balcony seats rather than paying $2.50 for the orchestra. Barbara and Frank’s hotel room at the Mark Hopkins was full of flowers.
Fay had been drinking for three successive days and continued to be so drunk he couldn’t go onstage. By the middle of the second week’s run in San Francisco, Barbara decided to bring down the curtain, saying she was ill, and called off performances for the next two days. At the week’s end, she closed the show. Money was refunded. Tattle Tales had been booked at the Curran for three more weeks until Of Thee I Sing was to come in from Los Angeles’s Biltmore Theatre.
Barbara struggled with the effects of Fay’s drinking and hired an escort to travel with him to Los Angeles, where he was admitted to the Glendale Sanitarium for treatment.
Ladies They Talk About, Barbara’s thirteenth picture, opened in Los Angeles at the Warner Bros. Downtown and Hollywood Theatres. In New York, the picture opened at the Capitol Theatre, and with it for a week onstage was Helen Morgan, re-creating her role as Julie in a condensed version of Ziegfeld’s Show Boat with the original Joseph Urban scenery and a cast of eighty that included Jules Bledsoe.
The critics called Ladies They Talk About “undistinguished,” though still enjoyable and amusing. Variety said, “Barbara Stanwyck and a good supporting cast, plus careful direction and snappy dialog saves the story from being ridiculed off the screen.”
Reviewers couldn’t help but poke fun at the portrait of San Quentin, describing it “as a retreat, the sort of a place where a lo
t of gals might like to spend a vacation.” Louella Parsons called the prison like “a girl’s seminary” but was gratified that Barbara was “back in the type of role in which she excels. Barbara as a milk-and-water character is a mistake.” Other critics found Barbara’s gun-moll jailbird to be a “new role for her . . . bold and bad.”
Two weeks later, Fay was home from Glendale Sanitarium and was determined to take Tattle Tales back on the road. He made arrangements for the show to open in Portland, Kansas City, and Vancouver and then go east to Philadelphia, Washington, and New York.
In mid-February, the governor of Michigan declared an eight-day bank holiday to prevent a further run on the banks in his state. Ten days later, Maryland’s governor declared a three-day bank holiday. On March 1 the governors of Kentucky, Tennessee, California, Louisiana, Alabama, and Oklahoma followed suit. By early the following morning, the governors of New York and Illinois had suspended the banks of their states.
Eleven thousand of the nation’s twenty-five thousand banks had failed.
During Hoover’s last days in office, Agnes Meyer, writer, lecturer, and wife of the Washington Post publisher and chairman of the Federal Reserve, Eugene Meyer, wrote, “Hard on H[oover] to go out of office to the sound of crashing banks. Like the tragic end of a tragic story . . . The history of H’s administration is Greek in its fatality.”
• • •
Jack Warner was invited to the presidential inaugural. To promote its latest film sensation, 42nd Street, a backstage musical that had cost an astronomical $400,000, the studio sent some of its stars, contract players, and chorus girls cross-country on the 42nd Street Special, a six-coach express of silver foil and gold leaf that was to stop in thirty cities and towns along the way. Warner’s actors and actresses were to speak to crowds of thousands from the platform of the train, disembark, broadcast live on radio, tour a General Electric showroom, ride through the town on floats, check into a hotel, shower, change, and appear in a live stage show to sell the premiere of the picture.
The 42nd Street Special was made up of private rooms for each of the actors, a luxury dining car, with a stateroom for Tom Mix and a stall for his miracle horse, Tony Junior. On the train, compliments of General Electric, were a portable radio station, outdoor lights and speakers, and a fully electric “health kitchen” with futuristic appliances—oven, refrigerator, and dishwasher. Among those on board were Joe E. Brown and the contract players Lyle Talbot, dubbed by the press the “Romeo of the Train” with his blue eyes, slicked black hair, and widow’s peak; Bette Davis with her new husband, Harmon Nelson; Preston Foster; and Jack Dempsey. With them as well were Laura La Plante, Claire Dodd, Miss California, and a dozen Busby Berkeley girls.
The Warners 42nd Street Special starting out on its tour across America, publicizing the studio’s sensational new picture, scheduled to stop in more than one hundred cities. Its final destination was Washington, D.C., in time for the presidential inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in March 1933. (PHOTOFEST)
Tom Mix told a reporter at one of the stopovers, “What this country needs is just one big man to pull us out of trouble. Just give Roosevelt a chance and time and he will do things.”
By March 4, the day Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office at the Capitol Plaza before a crowd of 100,000 and became the thirty-second president of the United States, banks in thirty-eight states had shut their doors. The New York Stock Exchange was closed, as were the New York cocoa, metal, and rubber markets. The Chicago Board of Trade closed for the first time in eighty-five years. One woman wrote of Chicago, “As we saw it, the city seemed to have died. There was something awful—abnormal—in the very stillness of those streets.”
In Roosevelt’s inaugural speech he reassured the nation that it “will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” He explained that “the measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit . . . I am prepared,” he told the country, “under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.”
The following day, to prevent additional bank closures, Roosevelt declared a three-day bank holiday. The White House drafted the Emergency Banking Act that would close insolvent banks and reorganize and reopen those banks that could survive, and outlaw the hoarding of gold, giving the Treasury the right to confiscate all privately held gold, paying for it with cash.
At the end of the first week in March, the major studios, except for MGM, were unable to meet their payrolls and were facing a general shutdown. Each studio head said that because of the “national emergency and business at the theatres” an eight-week 50 percent pay cut across the board was the only way to deal with the crisis. Actors, writers, directors, cameramen, and all the other employees of the studios agreed to the cuts; they had little choice but to go along with the pronouncement.
President Roosevelt assured the nation by radio that it was safe to redeposit money in the banks. The following day, deposits exceeded withdrawals. Some had thought that Roosevelt would nationalize the banks. Instead, his Emergency Banking Act had offered government assistance to private bankers. “Capitalism was saved in eight days,” said one of Roosevelt’s policy advisers.
In Hollywood, electricians, engineers, grips, and musicians who were unionized under the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, refused to accept salary cuts from the studios and threatened to strike. Harry Warner said, “They’d never dare.” He called their bluff and persuaded the other studio heads to do so as well. The following day the studios shut down for the first time ever.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees was not intimidated. It refused to go along with a cut in salary and demanded that lower-paid employees—union members or not—be protected from pay cuts. If not, the union would call a strike, and the projectionists—part of the union—would walk and shut down movie theaters across the country.
Louis B. Mayer of the Association of Motion Picture Producers—he had succeeded Cecil B. DeMille as president—met with members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which Mayer had helped to found, to reach a settlement that was acceptable to union and nonunion members alike. It was decided that the high-salaried contract employees would take the biggest cuts in salary. Those who were middle salaried would take a 25 percent cut, and those on small salaries would take no cut. Some of the higher-paid contract players, such as Maurice Chevalier, Constance Bennett, and Clara Bow, chose to go off salary for several weeks rather than risk a pay cut, which they feared might become permanent. The unions that were part of IATSE went back to work but refused to accept pay cuts.
The academy and Price and Waterhouse were to decide when to end the cuts at each studio. Jack and Harry Warner refused to take pay cuts and told the press about it. Zanuck hadn’t been told of their decision and was furious. His own salary had been cut by 50 percent.
Barbara, like others, was to receive 50 percent of her salary for eight weeks. Her attitude about it was to “do nothing. I have a contract,” she said. “I expect to fulfill its terms and I expect the studio to do likewise. Had my pictures made twice the profits my employers anticipated when my contract was signed, I doubt if they would have offered me a voluntary raise. After three years of depression we are all managing to eat and keep clothed. I think recent steps taken by President Roosevelt are wise; such steps should have been taken years ago. I am most optimistic about conditions generally.”
Barbara asked for and received an advance of $10,000 against the $7,500 she was to be paid for eight weeks of work at a 50 percent reduction.
The studios reopened; production schedules continued.
Only Warner Bros. had a reserve of completed pictures. Given Zanuck’s production schedules, twenty-six pictures were ready to be released. All the other studios were rushing to complete production on their films to make up for lost time.
Admis
sion prices had been lowered, but movie audiences had decreased by 25 percent. A third of the country was unemployed. The U.S. Steel Corporation, one of the nation’s largest companies, employed more than 224,000 full-time workers in 1929. Three years later it had in its employ 18,000. By April 1933, it employed none. “As steel goes, so goes the nation . . .”
With the Warners’ announcement to the press that they were not cutting their own salaries, Zanuck realized he was never going to get to the top of Warner, that Jack Warner had been stringing him along with false promises.
Warner would have welcomed a strike over salaries and was only too happy to cut them. Zanuck didn’t support the cuts; he wanted raises to be given to most of the technicians. If any salaries were to be cut, Zanuck thought they should be those of the studio bosses. “They weren’t worth half of what they were getting,” he said.
Zanuck issued his own statement to the press announcing that he was restoring studio salaries to their original amounts without running it by either Jack or Harry. He told the press that in addition he would be giving bonuses to some. Jack Warner had no intention of restoring salaries and certainly didn’t want to give out bonuses. Warner issued another statement saying that all salary cuts would continue for nine weeks instead of the originally agreed-upon eight.
• • •
The Hays Office was hearing complaints about Baby Face from churches and women’s organizations upset about seeing a story based on a prostitute. Baby Face wasn’t the only picture that some found offensive. Bed of Roses with Constance Bennett, Hold Your Man by Anita Loos with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, and Bondage were also arousing the ire of Christian audiences.
Will Hays went to the Warner lot to discuss Baby Face, specifically cuts that had been restored to the picture on Zanuck’s orders. At the meeting were Jack Warner, Zanuck, and Sam Schneider, the home office auditor. Hays pressed Harry Warner to leave out the offending sequences. Zanuck insisted on keeping Baby Face as it was.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 40
