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

by Victoria Wilson

  The picture helped spur box-office sales for Tattle Tales but didn’t act as a deterrent to Fay’s drinking.

  Nancy Bernard Levy went to the Broadhurst to see her old friend from Ziegfeld days. She hadn’t seen Barbara in a couple of years and got tickets for the first row. “Barbara came onstage and saw me,” said Nancy. “There was no response from her. She kept turning to look at me. She knew I was there. She acted so peculiar. It was as if she was in a daze. I thought, ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to have dealings with any of her old associates.’ ”

  With Frank Fay, Hollywood Boulevard, February 1933. (CULVER PICTURES)

  At intermission, Nancy went back to say hello. At the stage door, Pops, who knew Nancy from other shows, said, “I advise you not to go in. She’s in a terrible way. Frank is very abusive to her, and I don’t think she’d be happy to see you now. Call and get in touch with her later.”

  Barbara’s willpower, organization, and management carried her through the run of the show. Loyalty, self-sacrifice, and service, which she never disassociated from affection, enabled her to stick by Fay.

  “A couple can’t be in love without fighting,” she said. “I hope Fay and I always fight. And just as I fight with Fay, I’ll put up an awful scrap for him. Not that he needs me as a defender. He is well able to take care of himself. He wants to laugh off all this talk, but it makes me see red and I can’t laugh.”

  Barbara denied press reports and rumors that she was going to leave him:

  “All this talk, talk, talk. . . . It’s like rain on a tin roof. You don’t mind it at first. Then it seems that if it doesn’t stop for a moment, you’ll go insane. In Hollywood it never stops—gossiping.

  “They can jabber as much as they please. Say whatever comes into their heads, gossip from now till Doomsday. But the fact remains: I’ll never divorce Frank Fay. If I can’t stay married and stay in pictures, I’ll get out of pictures. I will too, unless they lay off Fay.

  “Fay and I try to live our own lives. We never are seen in public, seldom leave our home in Brentwood. We have no friends among the movie crowd, which means we don’t attend their parties or give parties for them. What few friends we have are old acquaintances from Broadway.

  “Under ordinary circumstances, an attitude such as ours would be respected. But Hollywood is not an ordinary community and has utterly no respect for anything.”

  Tattle Tales folded on June 24 after playing to small audiences for three and a half weeks and losing $110,000; the production showed losses during the seven months that it toured. The final week cost the show $11,000 to cover the fares home for thirty-nine company members. Fay’s refusal to change the revue was at the heart of the show’s problem, as were his erratic stage appearances from booze.

  Barbara returned to Los Angeles to start work on Ever in My Heart.

  PART THREE

  Valor and Fire

  If you’re mistaken, be terribly mistaken.

  —Marguerite Young

  Photograph: George Hurrell, circa 1934.

  ONE

  Adjusted Angles of Vision

  1933

  Hollywood, where gossip flourishes like fungus in a swamp.

  —Joan Crawford

  Barbara’s sixteen-year-old nephew, Gene, was living at Bristol Avenue during the months that she and Frank were touring with Tattle Tales.

  Gene one day took some of his friends through the house and made a point of showing them his aunt’s all-white bedroom. The servants told her about it. “She didn’t like it,” he said. “She was a taskmaster with me. She looked right at me and said some of the darnedest things, as if what I did was the worst thing in the world. Her eyes were piercing. You were just glad to get out of her sight.”

  Barbara and Frank more often enjoyed having Gene live with them. “We’d be in the living room,” said Gene, “and Frank would start to sing vaudeville tunes. He was a great entertainer. We’d stand by the piano and sing along with him.”

  Barbara made sure that Gene was unaware of Frank’s drinking exploits. There were times when Frank went away and didn’t show up for a couple of days until someone would call from as far away as San Francisco and tell Barbara, “He’s in the gutter up here.” Other times, Barbara would get a call from Catholic Charities telling her that Fay had just donated his Cadillac and that someone should come and get it.

  Fay’s father often stayed with Frank and Barbara. “Pop Fay was a charming old guy,” said Gene. “He told me stories about the Indian Wars.”

  With Frank Fay and his father, Will (Pop) Fay, circa 1933.

  • • •

  Ever in My Heart started shooting the third week in July.

  The script was about an American woman who falls in love and marries a German, educated at Oxford, who has come to America to teach at a small New England college. He becomes a citizen and loves his new country and works hard for his wife and baby until the war against Germany breaks out and, because of national fervor, he loses his teaching position. Socially demonized by patriotic frenzy, he leaves his wife to spare her from further ostracism, is driven to return to his country of birth, and joins the enemy ranks to fight for the fatherland. The young woman, brokenhearted, volunteers as a canteen worker in France, sees her husband there posing as an American, and realizes he is a German spy. Rather than turn him in, she takes his life—and her own (“Du, du liegst mir im Herzen,” he sings to her when they are courting, and later as they are dying: “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen / Du, du liegst mir im Sinn / Du, du machst mir viel Schmerzen, . . . You are ever in my heart/ You are ever in my thought/You, you, make me hurt so . . .”).

  The New England girl whose marriage is torn apart by the outbreak of the Great War was a role more like the puritanical girl of The Bitter Tea of General Yen than the gold-digging vamp of Baby Face, the gangster-moll and convict of Ladies They Talk About, the cabaret singer and girlfriend of the bootlegging proprietor of The Purchase Price, and the rough, streetwise taxi dancer of Ten Cents a Dance.

  With Otto Kruger as Hugo Wilbrandt, from Ever in My Heart, 1933. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  Hal Wallis, the executive producer, had considered Kay Francis as Mary Archer, the New Englander, and Paul Muni as the young German professor. Francis had finished making The Keyhole, Storm at Daybreak, and Mary Stevens, M.D. and was at work opposite Ricardo Cortez and Gene Raymond in The House on 56th Street. Paul Muni, who had been nominated as Best Actor by the academy for his last picture, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which was nominated as Best Picture, was making The World Changes.

  Archie Mayo and Wallis chose Otto Kruger, under contract at Metro, for the part of the young German émigré. Kruger was the suave, sleek romantic Broadway star who had spent more than twenty years on the stage as a sophisticated farceur, debonair leading man, best known for his work in The Royal Family, Private Lives, Counsellor-at-Law, and The Great Barrington. Metro agreed to loan out the forty-eight-year-old actor to Warner for four weeks.

  Kruger had worked in Hollywood for a year—he’d appeared in Turn Back the Clock and Beauty for Sale—but still wasn’t used to making pictures. “The props, lights, cameras, people standing around and other minor things combine to cheat a performer,” said Kruger.

  Barbara believed there was “little difference between film and stage. Acting is acting. Period. One has to cut down on facial expressions and gestures but the main thing is acting and that comes from within oneself.”

  Ralph Bellamy was playing Barbara’s cousin and fiancé coming home from Germany with his German friend to marry his childhood sweetheart. Bellamy disagreed with Barbara about acting onstage as opposed to acting for the camera. “There is a marked difference [between the two],” said Bellamy. “On the stage, you’re playing to the last row in the gallery. In pictures, you’re appealing to someone across the desk from you. It’s more intimate, quiet.”

  Ever in My Heart was budgeted at $248,000. Archie Mayo was paid $16,000 for directing th
e picture; Barbara, $50,000; Otto Kruger, $4,550; Ralph Bellamy, $6,000; Laura Hope Crews, $1,750; Ruth Donnelly, $3,600.

  • • •

  Ever in My Heart was a portrait of the havoc and violence wrought by patriotic frenzy and xenophobia. It showed Germans to be loving husbands and fathers rather than the torturers and baby killers they were portrayed as during the war.

  Millhauser’s script was almost an apology to Germany for the ugly claims put forward about it as part of wartime propaganda. The Germany of the previous decades was of little interest to most moviegoers, unlike the Germany of 1933, which was much more on their minds.

  Six months before Ever in My Heart went into production, the chancellor of Germany, General Kurt von Schleicher, resigned and was succeeded by Adolf Hitler. A month later the Reichstag caught fire and burned down. The president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, passed an emergency decree in Berlin suspending all constitutional articles guaranteeing private property, personal liberties, freedom of the press, and the right to hold meetings and form associations. A week later, on the day Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, the National Socialists in Germany won a majority of the Reichstag in the parliament elections. The new government was voted into power; American Jews were attacked in Berlin. Reports by the foreign press that atrocities were being inflicted on German Jews by the Nazis were called “pure invention” by the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith.

  In New York City, twenty thousand rallied at Madison Square to protest alleged Hitler-Nazi atrocities against Jews.

  Ever in My Heart was to start shooting as the German cabinet decreed the confiscation of property of all “hostile” persons and corporations and the alienation and property seizure for all German critics of the government living abroad who refused to return to Germany. The Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Berlin announced that German Jews were no longer allowed to be involved in the production of German films or any American films being produced in Germany.

  Hal Wallis, circa 1940.

  • • •

  As executive producer on the picture, Hal Wallis looked at Archie Mayo’s dailies and for the most part thought what he was seeing was “splendid,” but he sent notes to the director and to Robert Presnell, the supervisor, commenting on all aspects of the picture, from Otto Kruger’s hairpiece (“too fluffy on one side, [it looks] like a pompadour,” the style of the second decade of the twentieth century), to Mayo’s camera shots (“don’t shoot these group things without giving me something to cut on”; “there must be at least five different angles on this two-shot . . . cut down on your angles and put the time in on getting more scenes”), to the use of the word “Huns” (“The Hays office . . . have agreed to wink at this one, particularly as it is a comedy scene, providing we are careful not to use [the word] elsewhere . . . They tell me that every time the word ‘Hun’ is used on the screen, they receive violent protests from the German Ambassador in Washington”).

  • • •

  Executives at Warner found Barbara difficult to talk to. “People think I’m stand offish and they stand off,” she said. Those who didn’t know her saw her as tough, cynical. “People usually detest me on sight. They think I’m sullen and sulking . . . that I’m bitter or bored. I’m neither. I can’t give myself until I know what ‘gifts’ are wanted of me,” she said. “I’m afraid of making a fool of myself. I’m interested in watching people. I’d get a great kick out of it if I could be invisible.”

  On the set, those who watched Barbara work and who worked with her—the property men, grips, electricians, cameramen, and others—confided in her, trusted her. To the crew Barbara was unassuming, hardworking, generous.

  She walked into the makeup department one day and saw the makeup women putting bottles of milk in the watercooler. The next day, a Frigidaire arrived. The package was marked, “For the make-up girls to keep their milk cool for lunch-time.” The card was unsigned.

  On one Saturday when the company was working until daylight on night sequences, the prop boy came back drunk from midnight dinner. Barbara knew he would be fired if he was found in that condition and sent him on an errand at the far end of the lot. When he returned, he was still drunk. She sent him back again on another pretext. This time he returned sober.

  The script girl on the picture, Virginia Moore, was someone Barbara had worked with seven years before in the chorus of the Shuberts’ Gay Paree and hadn’t seen since. Because Barbara was at work, she allowed their friendship to resume as if it had never been interrupted.

  One of the electricians talked to Barbara about wanting to adopt a child. She quietly watched to see if he and his wife would make good parents; she decided they would and wrote a letter of recommendation on his behalf, helping him with the adoption.

  Barbara demanded perfection of her work, but she was often sentimental about others. The five-year-old boy in the picture who played Barbara’s son had to shoot some scenes with a dachshund puppy. Boy and dog played together on the lawn of the set of the New England house. At the end of a week, their sequences were completed; the boy asked about the puppy and was told that the dog’s work was finished, that he wouldn’t be back. The little boy was upset, but he had a big scene to do, his final scene on the picture. In it, he was to be taunted and ridiculed: his German father has left America to fight on behalf of the enemy. During the scene, the boy began to cry. It was clear to Barbara that neither the teasing in the scene nor his screen father gone to war was the cause of the upset. Barbara spoke to the director; the Eastbrook kennels were called.

  When the boy’s work on the picture was completed, Barbara hugged him good-bye and told him that there was a “little present” in the backseat of his mother’s car. “It’s from all of us who think you are a pretty swell guy. Now you’d better run along and see if you like it.”

  With Otto Kruger (left) and Ronnie Crosby as Teddy (Sonny) Wilbrandt, Ever in My Heart, 1933. (PHOTOFEST)

  Midway through the picture, Barbara wrenched her leg and was in great pain from it and from a back injury she’d sustained in Boston on tour with Tattle Tales. “It won’t hurt the picture if my face is drawn,” she told the director. “In fact it should make it more realistic.” They had finished shooting “the cheerful part,” she said. “Now we are going into the tragedy and I can just be myself and do whatever suffering I have to do before the camera.”

  Barbara reported to work so ill one morning that Mayo told her he was going to dismiss the company for the day. Her discipline was almost military; she refused the offer. It was past midnight when the final day’s scene was shot. After it was okayed, Barbara fainted from pain and exhaustion.

  • • •

  In the last few scenes of Ever in My Heart, Barbara’s character chooses country over her own life and that of the husband she adores.

  She played the scene in stillness and with the simplest of movements. Days before the scene was to be shot, she worked out placement with Mayo and the cameraman, Arthur Todd, so that she wouldn’t have to be distracted discussing it with them the day they were to film.

  Anytime Barbara had a big emotional scene, she needed to be left alone. “I’m building it up from scratch,” she said. “By then, that’s not me. I’m somebody else. I’m within somebody else’s body and mind and I don’t want to be pulled out again.”

  Barbara’s character has recognized her husband in the canteen where she is stationed in France. He is sitting in uniform with his back to her; she realizes he is trying to pass as an American soldier. Instead of turning him in to military authorities, she becomes giddy with fear and diverts the attention of the American (the Bellamy character) who is trying to capture “the spy” (Bellamy’s former beloved friend) in their midst. She enables her husband to vanish into the crowd of Allied soldiers milling about. Outside, hundreds of young men are marching in formation going off to fight. It is the “big push”; the Rainbow Division is heading into battle. The din of artillery and soldie
rs’ boots in the muddy terrain is deafening and doesn’t let up.

  Her character is stunned by having seen her husband, by the recognition that he is a spy, and by having colluded with the enemy, allowing him to escape. She returns to her room, dazed. He is there, waiting for her.

  She realizes the nightmare of their situation. Her body is taut. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she tells him. “I won’t help you again. I’ve got to give you up.”

  “Give me just a few minutes,” he whispers in her ear. “It’s been so long, so long. Have you forgotten everything we had together? The tears. The laughs.”

  He is lying on her bed, his head in her arms. Her love for him washes over her. At early dawn, he must try to make it back to enemy lines. If she lets him go, thousands of soldiers will die.

  She watches as the young men march past her window and turns to the photograph of her brother in uniform: he could easily be one of those soldiers.

  Barbara, with hardly a gesture or movement, makes it clear that she is as trapped as Hugo; she can’t betray her husband or her country or the young soldiers going to battle. Her once innocent love is no longer theirs to have; it’s doomed by duty and sacrifice and a war they had nothing to do with.

  She suggests they drink some wine before they part and secretly adds poison to each glass. They drink, arm in arm: he, unknowing, happy to be with his wife; she, loyal to husband and country and resolute in her decision to betray neither.

  “Rest awhile,” she tells him. “I’ll call you when it’s light.” She holds him in her arms to help him through the end.

  They are in profile, his head on her shoulder, holding hands. Her face is still, radiant.