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

by Victoria Wilson

  The subject came up of the emergency salary cuts. Harry Warner had no intention of complying with the academy’s position that salaries be fully restored by April 10. Jack and Zanuck insisted the company had pledged to abide by the academy’s ruling; Harry argued his company would conduct its business as it saw fit and that Warner would restore full pay after nine weeks instead of eight. Hays left the meeting to allow the Warners and Zanuck to thrash it out. Zanuck threatened to resign. If he remained at the studio—he had been there a decade—he insisted on full production powers without home office interference and the right to hire whomever he considered necessary for production work at salaries he felt appropriate.

  Jack and Harry Warner formally accepted Zanuck’s resignation.

  Zanuck issued another statement to the press. “On April 10th,” it read, “as Head of Production of Warner Brothers Studios, I announced that the salary cuts decided upon on March 15 last would be restored immediately. This promise has now been repudiated, and since a matter of principle is involved and I obviously no longer enjoy the confidence of my immediate superiors, I have today sent my resignation to the Chairman of the Company, Mr. Jack Warner.”

  Before Zanuck left Warner for good, he looked at eight pictures and gave each its first cutting. Zanuck walked away from a four-and-a-half-year contract at $4,000 per week as President Roosevelt put to work a vast army of 250,000 unemployed Americans, men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, to help restore America’s largely forgotten national and state parks. The men were being paid $30 a month and were grateful for the work.

  • • •

  The day after Zanuck resigned as production head of Warner Bros., Jack Warner telephoned Hal Wallis, head of production at First National until the studios had merged. Wallis had moved his offices to Burbank and had become a producer under Zanuck. Warner asked Wallis to come to his bungalow on the Burbank lot. Both Harry and Jack rose from their chairs to greet Wallis and shake his hand. “Well, Hal, you’re it,” said Jack. Wallis was Zanuck’s replacement as general manager of productions at Warner Bros.

  A decade earlier Hal Wallis had been publicity director at Warner Bros., making up a press book for each picture, writing and making the trailers for forthcoming pictures, supervising their editing, plotting their campaigns, arranging interviews, greeting important performers arriving in Pasadena from New York, having red carpets laid for them and limousines take them back to Los Angeles.

  When Warner took over First National, a beautiful new studio in Burbank, Wallis had become production manager and, to meet the demand for pictures that talked, oversaw such projects as The Dawn Patrol, The Last Flight, and Little Caesar.

  • • •

  Zanuck signed an agreement with United Artists and Joseph M. Schenck to become vice president in charge of production of a new company called 20th Century Pictures. He had been besieged by offers, among them one from Louis B. Mayer, who offered the former Warner executive his own production unit similar to David Selznick’s. Other studios offering Zanuck a deal were Paramount, Radio, and Fox.

  Zanuck agreed to make eight pictures for 20th Century Pictures (Metro had offered him twelve), budgeted from $210,000 to $225,000 a picture for the first year, and to receive a $4,500 weekly salary plus 50 percent of the net profits on each picture with a 26 percent distribution fee paid to United Artists.

  Jack Warner wrote to Will Hays complaining about Zanuck’s hasty resignation and his agreement with Joe Schenck, saying that “it is common rumor that Twentieth Century Pictures has been chiefly financed by a loan from Nicholas Schenck, President of Loew’s Inc. and by Louis B. Mayer, head of Production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to the President of Twentieth Century Pictures who is the brother of Mr. Schenck.” The letter also complained that Zanuck had tried to hire numerous Warner employees, not only actors, directors, and writers, but even stenographers and “William Goetz, who is the son-in-law of Mr. Mayer.” Goetz was hired to be Zanuck’s executive assistant, and Raymond Griffith, a former star, was to be Zanuck’s production supervisor.

  Zanuck left Los Angeles to hunt grizzlies in British Columbia and took with him most of Warner’s directorial staff, including Lloyd Bacon, Michael Curtiz, Ray Enright, and Sam Engel.

  Joe Schenck felt it was “absolutely none of [Jack Warner’s] business” whom he, Schenck, borrowed money from. Both Nicholas Schenck and Mayer had put up $375,000 for the competing 20th Century Pictures: Schenck for his brother, Joe; Mayer for his son-in-law Bill Goetz. Both Schenck and Mayer received company stock. Mayer set up the Mayer Family Fund for the stock, keeping 50 percent for himself and dividing the other 50 percent among his two daughters, Irene and Edith, and Edith’s husband, Bill Goetz.

  Wallis, between Warner and First National, would now be in charge of forty or sixty features a year. He loved making pictures and “was on top of the world.”

  TWELVE

  Entrances and Exits

  On April 17, Metro restored the studio’s salary cuts. Metro stockholders received the highest dividend in years. “Oh, that L. B. Mayer,” one writer said. “He created more communists than Karl Marx.”

  A week later Paramount resumed full salaries.

  The wage cut made it clear to studio employees that their contracts were not binding, that producers didn’t have to abide by them, that the academy was not going to protect them, and that those who were part of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees were immune to the demands of the studios. Dorothy Parker said, “Looking to the Academy for representation was like trying to get laid in your mother’s house. Somebody was always in the parlor, watching.”

  The writers came to see that the existing organization called the Writers Club, a subsidiary of the Dramatists Guild, did not have the power to help its members. A meeting was called at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel to discuss how conditions could be improved for Hollywood writers.

  The writers—among them John Howard Lawson, Samson Raphaelson, and John Bright—agreed that the only way to get what they wanted from the producers was to organize so that they too could shut down the supply of screenplays, as the projectionists could shut down movie theaters. It was decided to hold a series of meetings in which each of the ten writers would bring one guest who was qualified to be a member and who would be willing to stand up to the producers.

  Roosevelt’s bank holiday and the Association of Motion Picture Producers’ call for pay cuts of 50 percent for all studio employees inspired actors as well to better protect themselves. Six met secretly in the Hollywood home of the well-known supporting actor Kenneth Thomson and his wife, Alden Gay Thomson, to discuss the idea of starting a self-governing independent organization of film actors that would fight for fair economic conditions and be open to all, unlike the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which received new members by invitation only. Ralph Morgan hoped that the organization could be effective. Morgan was a character actor of serious roles under contract to Fox, unlike his brother Frank, at Metro, who was a stage and screen musical comedy star. Ralph had appeared in more than sixty plays, working onstage with Lynn Fontanne, Laurette Taylor, and Florence Reed. He’d appeared in O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and had re-created the role of Charles Marsden in the Metro picture that starred Norma Shearer and Clark Gable.

  Ralph had got his law degree decades before at Columbia University and, a presence in Actors Equity in New York, Morgan hoped that an independent self-governing organization for actors could do “the greatest good for the greatest number” and protect them.

  Of primary concern, in addition to salaries and the forced salary cuts, were the hours actors were expected to work: twelve hours a day, usually late on Saturday night and often Sunday morning. During productions, meals would come at the producer’s whim. Actors were often told to sleep on a couch rather than be allowed to go home at night and were promised a free breakfast in the morning; there was no overtime.

  “You worked any kind of hours,” said Ralph
Bellamy. “Any number of days . . . it was brutal. The lights were enormously hot and the lesser people, not having stand-ins, standing in day after day, hour after hour, for weeks.”

  Fay Wray, when making King Kong, worked twenty-two hours straight through. “It was supposed to be test footage for the money-people back east to look at,” she said. “But that material went into the film. I don’t even know whether I got paid.” Lyle Talbot said, “Michael Curtiz worked us till midnight Saturdays. We [would] say, he must hate his wife because he never wants to go home.”

  Actors worked on several pictures at a time. Talbot rode a bicycle between soundstages and productions, carrying scripts in the front basket of pictures he was making and scripts in the rear basket of pictures he was about to make.

  To discuss bringing about these changes, Robert Young and others “met at night, in private homes, in the basement if there was one.” They had to be very careful. Actors would go to someone’s home for a party, go through the back door, walk down the alley to someone else’s house, and have a meeting in the garage. “The actors unionizing were verboten as far as the studios were concerned,” said Young. “It was risky for us. They hired ex-cops and had spies all over the place, so we were secretive . . . It could cost us our contracts. The average person like myself, under contract to the studio with a family, was extremely scared.”

  Some actors argued against organizing. “MGM and Louis B. Mayer have been very good to us. I’m not going to do this to him,” they said. Others warned, “You guys are crazy; you’re going to get us all thrown out of the industry.”

  • • •

  Through the late winter and spring, Barbara and Fay traveled with Tattle Tales, “a gay gorgeous musical revue,” on its “trans-continental” tour, to Portland, the Metropolitan in Seattle, Spokane, playing each city two or three nights and then moving east to Billings, Cheyenne, Colorado Springs, Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, the Shubert in Cincinnati, the Hanna in Cleveland, Wilkes-Barre, the Lyceum in Rochester, Philadelphia, the Capital in Albany, making their way to the Broadhurst Theatre in New York. The plan was to open on Broadway before going to Chicago. Fay continued to make changes to the revue, adding performers along the way, even changing the orchestra and its conductor.

  Richie Craig Jr., one of the Tattle Tales performers, and Western Costume Inc., were suing Fay in superior court, both claiming that he owed them money for services and material and for the cost of costume rentals.

  The Bitter Tea of General Yen opened in London at the Regal Theatre. The Times of London said of the picture, it “breaks convention bravely [but] repents of its rashness at the last.”

  Dion was at home on Bristol Avenue with his nurse. Barbara’s nephew Gene, then sixteen, had moved to Barbara and Frank’s to finish the school year at University High School and was living happily with the Fays’ cook, butler, chauffeur, Nellie, and Dion. Gene’s older cousin, Al, then twenty-three, had worked for Barbara and Fay’s decorator until he was fired.

  Maud, Bert, and Al were returning to Brooklyn, driving cross-country from Hollywood to Flatbush. Bert had tried unsuccessfully to get a job in a butcher shop in Los Angeles, there was no work to be found, and he was returning to work with his brother Ray at Merkent’s Meat Market. The trip took eight days and, Al noted in his daily log, two hundred gallons of gas.

  Hal Wallis wired Barbara at the Shubert Theatre in Kansas City about a script he wanted her to consider for her next picture. Female was similar to Baby Face in its portrayal of love being bought by power and money. The picture was intended to reunite the Baby Face cast of Stanwyck and George Brent with the writers Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola. William Dieterle was to direct. Female was from a novel by Donald Henderson Clark about an industrialist—a woman—the president of an automobile company, who goes through a string of tepid affairs, each lover quickly cast off out of boredom, until a renowned engineer comes to work for her who is not amused by either her money or her power. She falls in love; he rebuffs her, and what ensues is their dance to end up together.

  Barbara wired back to Wallis; she liked the script and agreed to go ahead with the picture.

  In Philadelphia, Barbara was onstage at the Stanley Theatre in Tattle Tales performing her second monologue of the evening, the emotional pulpit scene from The Miracle Woman. During her fiery condemnation of the hypocritical parishioners, she became so excited she gestured with her hand, cutting it as she broke one of the microphones. Barbara was unaware of it until she came offstage all smiles; though exhausted from the emotion she’d created for the scene, and saw that her hand was bleeding. “I still can’t figure out how I could have done it,” she said.

  • • •

  Tattle Tales opened at the Broadhurst on Thursday, June 1, amid such other Broadway shows as Gay Divorce at the Shubert with Fred Astaire and Dorothy Stone, Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman’s June Moon at the Ambassador, and Of Thee I Sing with William Gaxton and Lois Moran at the Imperial.

  The response to Tattle Tales was mostly cool except for The New Yorker, which said a “reviewer must have acid in his blood to be other than enthusiastic about the revue. Tattle Tales is outstanding in taste and intelligence.” Most reviewers thought the show was “a product of the urban suburbs” and “sluggish.”

  Barbara didn’t appear onstage in the evening until ten o’clock. Reviewers accused Fay of “hogging the show by the mere lifting of his eloquent eyebrows, his wardrobe of pretty dressing gowns and witty colloquies.” Burns Mantle said of Barbara, “She is blessed with that certain subtle something that distinguishes the real from the imitation; a sort of unconscious self-consciousness . . . classified most frequently as poise.”

  “Newspapers have been mean to Tattle Tales,” said Barbara. “But audiences like it. We . . . have been playing it since December. Played it across the continent, seven months. The representatives of a London theatre were here with an offer to take Tattle Tales to London intact. Unfortunately we could not go.” Fay had radio engagements: he’d been signed for a spot on The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour. Barbara had to be in Hollywood in mid-July to begin work on a picture.

  “It won’t be Female as planned,” she said. Ruth Chatterton, now Mrs. George Brent, was set to co-star in Female opposite her husband of less than a year. “I shall do Ever in My Heart,” said Barbara, “by [Bertram Millhauser and] Beulah Marie Dix.”

  From Tattle Tales, Curran Theater, San Francisco, 1933 or ’34. Frank Fay fourth from left. Stanwyck on his left, almost center stage.

  Louella Parsons wrote, “I hope Barbara Stanwyck is finished trouping through the country with Frank Fay . . . Most of the people who like her and admire her artistry shudder at the idea of her playing stooge to the Frank Fay comedy.”

  “Fay has always stolen the act,” said Barbara. “I have always been his feeder. It has always been that way. It’s our act. We did the identical act in which we toured vaudeville for years. The critics used to like the act. But that was before I was The Movie Actress. The critics did a complete about-face. It wasn’t that they panned me. I can stand that. What made me mad was the assertion that Fay made a stooge of me so that he could steal the act. I danced in the act, the same routine I used to use in vaudeville. Yet they said Fay made me dance. Just as though I haven’t been dancing ever since I was three.”

  • • •

  Fay ended his first weekend at the Broadhurst too drunk to perform onstage. Richie Craig was back in the show in Fay’s place. The revue ran for three weeks. One day it was announced the show would close; the next, that it would run indefinitely.

  Barbara’s new movie, Baby Face, opened in New York at the Strand and in Los Angeles at the Warner Bros. Hollywood and Downtown Theatres with six vaudeville acts in addition to the picture. “She played the love game with everything she had for everything they had and made ‘it’ work” was the picture’s teaser. “A woman without a conscience, she used her power over men to get what life denied her.”

  Will Hays won out
with Baby Face after recommending that the picture be pulled from theaters for violation of the code. Now that Zanuck had left the studio, Jack Warner agreed to clean up the picture to Hays’s satisfaction—it was even okayed for children—by taking out any references to Lily’s being a kept woman, by reshooting the sequences that showed Lily losing the jewels she had amassed, and by adding the final two scenes that depict Lily returning to the grime and dust of Pittsburgh to show that “vice was not rewarded.”

  Variety noted in its review, Baby Face “is reputed to be a remake of the first print, which was considered too hot. Anything hotter than this for public showing would call for an asbestos audience blanket.” Another critic warned movie audiences not to “take children to see [Baby Face]. It is hot enough to set the office files on fire. Fans will go for this picture head-over-heels.” Jimmy Starr in the Evening Herald Examiner wrote, “Miss Stanwyck’s performance [is] brilliant . . . clever and most intriguing.” The New York Herald Tribune said there was “truth in its psychology and a genuine conviction in the performance of its star.” Variety said that Barbara makes “Lil a beautiful bum . . . Baby Face and Lil are just too bad all the way.”

  The Hollywood Reporter proclaimed it “the best and by far the most entertaining picture that Barbara Stanwyck has made in years and should put her right back in the big draw class. The picture is nearly all Stanwyck.” Louella Parsons said, “Miss Stanwyck hasn’t had a vehicle that gives her as much of a break as Baby Face since Illicit put her name in electric lights.”

  Warner’s ads for the picture ran with provocative taglines that promised a hot and dangerous time: “She loves as furiously as any woman/Forgets as cruelly as any man/Has more daddies than the daughter of the regiment/And is the most dangerous man menace at large today . . . You know Edward G. Robinson as LITTLE CAESAR—Ruth Chatterton as MADAME X—James Cagney as PUBLIC ENEMY—Now You’ll Know Barbara Stanwyck as BABY FACE.”