“My throat is burning,” he says, unaware that he is dying.
“Only for a minute.”
The camera is on her face.
She caresses him with her gentle voice. “Only for a minute.”
The pain of the poison traveling through her body is on her face, even in its stillness.
“A little longer,” she says to him, unbuttoning the collar of her uniform to catch some air.
He can no longer hear her, lifeless in her arms.
She looks down at him and closes her eyes to wait. There are tears for what they’ve lost, for their little boy, for a world at war that has taken everything from them, for the choice she’s had to make between self and country.
With the simplest gesture, the smallest physical movement, Barbara reveals force and heroic truth.
The final five minutes of a picture “were comparable to ‘next-to-closing,’ ” said Barbara. “In vaudeville,” she said, “ ‘next-to-closing’ is the star spot. A real entertainer has to hold the interest of the audience. They’re keyed up to a real punch and the star must deliver.”
In her fifteen movies, this was the first part that allowed Barbara to put across the picture’s big ideas and to deliver its power in its final moments. Ever in My Heart was completed in mid-August. The studio planned to sell the film as “the greatest women’s picture Barbara Stanwyck has ever made . . . [it] tops every woman characterization and stamps her as one of the most dramatic actresses of the screen.” Women’s clubs and societies were to be blizzarded with a direct-by-mail campaign; German communities were to be approached and ads translated for German newspapers.
The world war had ended in 1918 and xenophobia had been rife, but fifteen years later Congress was about to pass a law—the Dickstein Bill—that would prohibit the bringing of foreign actors, directors, writers, or technicians into the country “unless they are proven worthy and have genius in their line.”
Roosevelt’s special assistant secretary of labor, Murray W. Garsson, was investigating the immigration papers of every foreign actor or actress in Hollywood. Actors’ Equity Association and the Lambs Club of New York had pressured Washington to stop the influx of foreign performers to the United States who, they declared, “were taking jobs that belong to Americans.” The investigation was causing a panic in Hollywood’s foreign colony.
“We will not have an underpaid clerk pass judgment on anyone who claims to be a genius,” Garsson said. “We will not meet the boats and test foreign actors for genius. We will take the word of the picture company—but the company had better be sure it is telling the truth about it.”
Those actors in the country illegally were being asked to leave, others were searching for immigration papers, and still others had already agreed to go. The special assistant secretary of labor would not “even venture a guess as to the number of foreign players illegally in Hollywood. We are now ‘requesting’ them to leave. If they do not do so, we will arrest them and deport them. We mean business.”
Those foreign-born actors being investigated included Charles Chaplin, Elissa Landi, Marlene Dietrich, Maureen O’Sullivan, Anna Sten, Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Howard, Benita Hume, and Boris Karloff.
The first week of the investigation, John Farrow, an Australian-born writer, was dancing at a nightclub in Hollywood, when an immigration officer asked him to step outside and put him under arrest for illegal entry into the country. “We object to hordes of players coming here and settling, many of them illegally, and, while claiming allegiance to another flag, taking the work that is so badly needed by our own players. With the passage of the Dickstein Bill, there won’t be such a thing as a lot of ‘extras’ over here who are foreigners.”
• • •
Frank and Barbara returned to New York. Fay was too drunk to go on The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, and William Morris sent Lew Cody from Los Angeles to appear in his place. But Frank was hired to appear for a week at New York’s Broadway Paramount in a new act put together around him called “Frankie and Junie” with June Knight. He was being paid $2,000 for the week. The act was set to open on the Friday of the first weekend in September. Days before, he was at the Sands Point club in Long Island and became embroiled in a fight in which Senator Huey Long was punched. Frank left and went into hiding. By Thursday, the Paramount house manager, Boris Morros, was beside himself, calling everywhere, beginning with Barbara, in an attempt to find him. Morros had no choice but to rebuild the show without Fay and booked Al Trahan, along with Fay’s frequent stand-in, Richie Craig Jr. Three different ads were put together for the Friday papers depending on which entertainer would perform. On Thursday night at 11:00, Fay reappeared and begged Morros for another chance; the theater manager relented.
Barbara and Fay were booked on separate tours of the East Coast and the Midwest. The week following Fay’s engagement at the Broadway Paramount, he was in Buffalo playing five shows a day. Barbara was in New York for a week appearing in the stage show at the Capitol Theatre for $4,000 against a fifty-fifty split beyond box office of $55,000, performing scenes from Ladies of Leisure and The Miracle Woman. The picture showing at the Capitol was W. S. Van Dyke’s latest, Penthouse, starring Warner Baxter, Myrna Loy, Phillips Holmes, and Mae Clarke.
The New York Times called the stage show at the Capitol “excellent variety . . . and smartly turned out . . . except in two spots. The weak links in the chain of genuine diversion are the badly conceived personal appearance of Barbara Stanwyck . . . and the musically energetic singing of Morton Downey.”
“Five shows a day, from 11 am to 11 pm,” said Barbara. “At night it took me an hour and a half to get back to my hotel because of the crowds at the stage door. I loved the attention, the flattery, the fact that they cared enough to see me.”
Barbara lost her voice the second day. “Yelling on the stage did it. The strain was bad,” she said. A doctor was backstage during the five days of the engagement helping to treat her voice.
Barbara appeared in Philadelphia for Warner Bros. for a week at the Earle Theatre; Fay was in Philadelphia with her, appearing at the Warner Bros.’ Stanley. The picture at the Earle was One Man’s Journey, starring Lionel Barrymore with May Robson, Joel McCrea, and Frances Dee. Barbara said, “It isn’t me that’s drawing [the audience]. It’s Lionel Barrymore. What a break for me. I’ve seen the picture and I think he deserves better. It’s too bad to waste experience and real ability on poor stories. Besides, the supporting cast is inadequate. I think [Barrymore] has just about everything. That man is a genius with an invaluable background of experience. I know all his little tricks and I love them.”
By the time Barbara got to Washington, D.C., she was exhausted, and her voice was beginning to go again. She asked the manager if there wasn’t some way she could leave the theater without the hour-and-a-half delay in getting back to the hotel and her bed. “Tell you what,” he said. “You go out the front entrance; there won’t be anyone there. I’ll have a taxi waiting and you won’t have any trouble.”
The first night went according to plan. Knowing the cab would pass the stage door on its way to the hotel, Barbara got set to view the waiting crowd. “It would be fun to see all those people standing around while I was whizzing by them unrecognized,” she said.
Barbara drove by the stage door. No one was there. “Not one stale person. The next night the manager offered to escort me to the waiting taxi and I said, ‘Don’t bother, honey.’ I went out the stage door. Matter of fact, there wasn’t anybody at the stage door the whole damned week.”
Fay was canceled at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit. During the second show of the opening day, he made a scene involving the piano player. Fay didn’t like him and refused to work with him or any other piano player. He was told that the theater had invested $20,000 in his appearance; in addition, he was being paid $2,000 a week. He refused to appear for the third show. No act replaced him.
In Boston’s RKO Keith Theatre, Barbara collapsed twice while perform
ing the pulpit scene from The Miracle Woman. She hurt her spine, throwing out three vertebrae, and injured her right hand, but she was determined to finish out the week. Each day, for four days, she rested flat on her back between shows. The bandages were removed so she could be X-rayed while doctors searched for a bone sliver. She decided to cancel the last two weeks of the RKO tour and return home. Doctors prepared her for the train to Los Angeles, her X-ray plates with her. Once in Hollywood, Barbara was admitted to the hospital for exhaustion and a couple of weeks of rest.
Frank was on his way back to Los Angeles. Barbara knew he’d been on an extended bout of drinking and thought it better if her nephew returned to Brooklyn; she didn’t want him to witness Fay’s possibly violent behavior and arranged for Gene to return to Brooklyn by boat via the Panama Canal with a stopover in Havana.
Fay had been drinking since he’d left Detroit. On his return to 441 Bristol Avenue, he fell down a flight of basement stairs and hit his head so badly he was admitted to Glendale Hospital, where he stayed for some time. After his release a nurse was brought in to help care for him.
Amid gossip of trouble in the Fays’ marriage, Barbara and Frank posed for an advertisement for Mobil oil with a headline that read: “Barbara Stanwyck & Frank Fay in a Mobil Oil Movie, Double Anniversary.” Six panels of photographs showed the Fays, husband and wife, very much in love, celebrating their anniversary, driving into town in their roadster convertible to see a movie. They stop at a Mobil oil station and reminisce about the wedding trip they took in their car and realize it is the car’s anniversary as well (the secret of the car’s longevity: Mobil oil).
After Frank’s fall on the basement stairs, he changed for the worse. He could become irrational, ranting without provocation and becoming enraged. When taking a cigarette, instead of lighting it, he would put it on a table, close his eyes, and act as if he were praying to it, then smoke it. If Barbara asked him why he was praying over his cigarette, he replied, “Because I want to.”
With Maud and Dad Merkent back in Flatbush, Barbara was alone with Frank, and despite his erratic fits she was determined to believe things would get better. She still wanted to do everything, have everything, be everything Fay wanted her to be. Where Frank was concerned, Barbara described the feeling “of having no self of your own left, of being nothing but blind desire to be what he wants you to be, to serve, to please.”
Despite that, Frank’s jealousy and possessiveness of Barbara resulted in violent arguments late into the night. Dishes were broken, windows were smashed, and the police were frequently called to 441 Bristol Avenue.
If Fay left the house, Barbara would eventually beg him to return. “I love you just as much as it is possible for a woman to love a man,” she wrote to him during one separation. “If I was born with anything fine in me, and I choose to think I was, from what I know of my mother and father, you have brought that fineness to the surface. I cannot imagine life without you and I am not being melodramatic.”
To the press and in public Barbara was adamant about the solidity of their marriage. To Barbara, marriage was “being in the same room with another person everyday for twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year,” and while husband and wife would “see things differently at some time or many times,” Barbara said, if they “adjust[ed] their angles of vision . . . and talk[ed] it out,” things would be okay.
“Most couples don’t do that,” she said. “They are afraid of each other and of newspaper opinion. They hide what they believe. Or . . . reveal it only piecemeal. One of the married pair keeps quiet and lets matters drift, though inwardly protesting. I believe in free speech for the married. If anything is discussed long enough, an agreement is reached. A smothered conviction or feeling is likely to burst at last into flame.
“There must be sportsmanship in marriage to make it permanent. And religion. I had no interest in religion until I met Frank Fay. He is deeply religious. He has more books on the different religions of the world than anyone I know.”
Barbara believed that Hollywood couldn’t bear the thought of a man and a woman living together in lawful wedlock—and actually being happy. “Themselves having made a mess of marriage,” she said, “it’s as if they were determined nobody else should make a success of it. I have to smile as I read the published reports of the great sadness that overshadows Hollywood because of the Pickford-Fairbanks split. I dare say the good people of Japan and England and the farmers in the middle west who also don’t know what’s going on are truly sorry to learn of the end of that ‘romance.’
“But Hollywood isn’t sorry. It hasn’t time to be sorry. It’s busy telling all who will listen that I-told-you-so line. Now that their predictions have been fulfilled they’re gloating. Now they can turn their destructive attention to some other noted couple.”
Ann Harding with her husband, Harry Bannister, and their daughter, Jane, in happier times as a family, March 1932. Soon after, she dissolved the six-year union in divorce court in an effort to salvage the couple’s love and to help Bannister, being referred to as “Ann Harding’s husband,” from “further losing his identity.”
Barbara referred to the gossips as “venomous tattlers” and defended Fay, her marriage, and herself against Hollywood’s poisonous intrusion:
“Marriage can be destroyed by scandal mongers. I know it can. I’ve seen it happen. Had Carole Lombard and Bill Powell lived anywhere in the world except in Hollywood, they’d have been gloriously happy together until death did them part.
“As it is the gossips drove Carole off to Reno where for no good reason she legally tore herself away from the man who adores her and whom she adores.
“Hollywood did the same thing to Ann Harding and Harry Bannister. I know Ann loves Harry devotedly. I know Harry loves her no less wholeheartedly. But Hollywood made it impossible for them to remain married.”
Ann Harding had supported her actor husband, who was earning $1,000 a week as an RKO contract player. When he visited his wife on the set, he offered unwanted commentary to her directors and was eventually barred from his own studio. After six years of being “blissfully” married, Harding and Bannister divorced in a bitter custody battle over their three-year-old daughter.
Barbara’s anger at Hollywood and those who’d “gloated” at the Fays from the time they first arrived in town—“we were easy meat for them they thought,” said Barbara—made her more determined to stick with Fay.
She was waging war on two fronts. Will and blind desire held her firm against the onslaught of Fay’s drinking, his erratic violence, and fits of anger. Loyalty and a determination to show up “the rats” of Hollywood for what they were spurred her on to publicly denounce the town and to stand arm in arm with her desperately troubled husband against those who predicted the demise of their marriage. Barbara found little comfort in either camp.
TWO
Sinister Provisions
Emotion is Miss Stanwyck’s meat. She can serve it in any style.
—Variety, October 1933
Walda Mansfield, one of Barbara’s trio from New York, had married Walter Donaldson, the songwriter. His songs “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm,” “My Blue Heaven,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” and others had brought him to Metro, and he and Walda were living in Beverly Hills.
They were at a party given by MGM’s vice president and general manager, Eddie Mannix, and his wife. Mannix was Metro’s watchdog, in charge of all large expenditures. Mae Clarke had recently signed a long-term contract at Metro and was at the party as well. Mae was two weeks into production on a picture called Made on Broadway with Robert Montgomery. The party went on late into the evening, and Mannix asked the actor Phillips Holmes to drive Mae back to her house; she had an early call for the morning.
Holmes dropped off Mae and returned to the Mannix party. Mae decided it was too early to be home for the night and called a cab to take her back to the party. Mannix asked Holmes to drive her ho
me again.
A heavy fog had set in. Holmes was hugging the right side of the curb. A block from Mae’s house, he drove into the back of a parked car. Mae went onto the dash and lost seven teeth. The next day she had to call the studio and tell them that she wouldn’t be coming in.
“There wasn’t a person to blame it on,” she said. “I had this great chance opposite one of the very big stars—and I had a great part. I was heartbroken to have missed the picture.” Sally Eilers took over the part.
Mae went off salary. No money was coming in; nor was there insurance. Mae’s jaw, dislocated in the accident, was wired for twelve weeks. She was confined to her home in Westwood with her family. “We counted our blessings,” she said. “One day a knock came at the door. It was a florist with a box . . . about four feet long and two feet wide. I opened it, and layer upon layer of beautiful cut spring flowers were inside. And a little card: ‘To Mae Clarke, because I admire you. Joan Crawford.’ ”
• • •
The Roosevelt administration was taking major steps to turn the country around. The banking system was overhauled under the Glass-Steagall Act. Banks could operate state to state; depositors were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, in which Roosevelt set up a series of codes of fair practice for more than five hundred industries, as well as a maximum-hour workday and a minimum wage. Employers were allowed to regulate their own industries, but as a result many of the codes reflected antitrust practices. Lawyers, doctors, newspapermen, and writers all wanted to unionize.
The newly formed Screen Writers Guild was fighting to be included in the writing of the National Recovery Administration’s Motion Picture Code, but producers wanted both the Writers Guild and the Actors Guild kept out of the discussions so they could maintain control of industry practices.
Among the troubling provisions being put forth by the producers as part of the NRA Motion Picture Code were stipulations that no actor, writer, or director could earn more than $100,000 a year and that no agent would be able to practice without being licensed by producers. A blacklisting provision, put forth by Irving Thalberg to keep salaries low, stated that no studio could approach a writer or actor whose contract had expired until the former contract holder had decided to approve the release.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 43
