Once actors became aware of the proposed article fixing salaries, a mass meeting was called at the De Mille Drive home of Frank Morgan, attended by some of the most important actors in Hollywood.
Word had spread during the summer that the newly incorporated guild (among its original members: James Gleason, Boris Karloff, and Alan Mowbray, whose personal check for $50 covered the cost of filing articles of incorporation) was “an autonomous organization composed solely of actors” whose purpose was to protect and “better the working conditions” of those who belonged. No guild member could enter into a contract with a producer unless the contract conformed to the guild’s code. The guild’s motto: “He best serves himself who serves others.”
It was clear that the Academy, which was supposed to represent actors as well as producers, was backing the producers on the issue of salary fixing. Actors resigned from the Academy out of anger, including its vice presidents, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou, and Robert Montgomery, and the members Groucho Marx, James Cagney, Ann Harding (the first of the big female stars to join the new guild), Jeanette MacDonald, George Raft, and Otto Kruger. They, and other academy members such as Chester Morris, Paul Muni, Lee Tracy, and Charles Butterworth, were determined to be part of an independent organization that would represent their needs.
“You may stop an army of a million men, but [you] can’t stop a right idea when its time has come,” said Ralph Morgan, quoting Victor Hugo, at one of the Guild discussions.
The night before the meeting at Frank Morgan’s house, all twenty-one of the original members of the guild resigned their board positions so that new members—prominent actors all—would be able to help shape the organization. “We must have a Hollywood organization for Hollywood actors and actresses,” said Eddie Cantor, who succeeded Ralph Morgan as the guild’s president. During the meeting two kinds of memberships were defined: class A for the higher-paid actors; class B for those lower salaried. New officers were chosen: Menjou and March were named first and second vice presidents; Ann Harding, third vice president; Groucho Marx, treasurer.
The new slate of officers voted to call a mass meeting four days later at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. More than 250 actors were admitted into the Guild; among the class A actors were Mary Astor, Pat O’Brien, Edward Arnold, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, and Jean Hersholt. “Those of us . . . under contract to the studios,” said Robert Montgomery, “put our contracts in jeopardy by supporting the Guild and organizing it.” Montgomery was appointed chairman of the producers committee. “The studios required you to either work on Christmas Day,” Montgomery said, “New Year’s Day or Thanksgiving, any real legal holiday, and if you insisted that you did not wish to work on that day, you had to work the following Sunday in order to make up for it.”
Barbara, who with Fay was a member of Actors’ Equity, did not join the guild.
“No actor of importance will work in a studio which signs the code,” said Eddie Cantor. “These provisions are un-American.” Actors said they would walk out if a salary-fixing board were put into effect under the code. “The days of slavery are over,” said Cantor. “The guild is out to protect the little fellow that the administration should protect.” Cantor, representing the Screen Actors Guild, and John Howard Lawson, the Screen Writers Guild, wired Roosevelt to protest the “sinister provisions” of Article 5 of the NRA Motion Picture Code. What had bankrupted motion picture companies, the wire said, was not the players’ salaries but “the purchase and leasing of theatres at exorbitant rates, caused by the race to power of a few individuals desiring to get a stranglehold on the outlet of the industry, the box office.”
The headline pay of actors ranged from $3,000 to $10,000 a week, with Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Joan Crawford, and Ann Harding receiving the former and Greta Garbo the latter. Actors who produced their own pictures, such as Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, were paid between $500,000 and $2 million per picture.
Cantor, Fannie Hurst, and Robert Sherwood traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, to meet with the president. Regarding the issue of salary fixing at $100,000, Roosevelt asked, “Why should an actor make more than I make?” Cantor explained that the president’s salary came out of the pockets of the American people, but it was producers who paid actors and writers. Roosevelt issued an executive order eliminating salary fixing from the proposed code. He also called for the formation of the “five and five committees”—five writers, five actors, five producers—to draft the amendments to the Motion Picture Code.
• • •
Ever in My Heart opened in mid-October in Los Angeles.
The response was mixed. Critics in New York called the picture “a mild little film” and “sentimental, hackneyed”; in Los Angeles, reviewers were moved by it, calling it “tender, heart-touching, tragic.” Reviewers on both coasts were in agreement about Barbara’s work. The New York World-Telegram called Barbara’s performance “one of the most searching and authentic characterizations she has yet offered”; W. E. Oliver in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Examiner wrote, “Both Miss Stanwyck and Kruger achieve a remarkably sincere, tender conviction in their roles.” Variety said, “Emotion is Miss Stanwyck’s meat. She can serve it in any style, restrained, despairing, smoldering, hysterical.”
THREE
Leading with Your Ace
Barbara was still recuperating from her personal appearance tour. Her contract with Warner, extended because of the tour, was due to expire the third week in December.
Harry Warner sent a telegram to Jack: “Keep Stanwyck/These days cannot afford to let anybody go/Harry.” Warner exercised its option and extended Barbara’s contract for a year, paying her the contractually agreed-upon $175,000—$3,500 a week for fifty weeks.
For the final picture under her Warner contract, Barbara accepted the lead in a three-generation theatrical story, Broadway and Back, with a script by Sheridan Gibney, in which she was to play the part of a young girl who ages to a grandmother. The studio thought the idea—a cavalcade of theaterdom—worth the effort and expense, but it was concerned about the flatness of Gibney’s treatment. Of concern as well was the similarity to Metro’s March of Time (released as Broadway to Hollywood), from a story, and directed, by Willard Mack. The picture followed a performing family from vaudeville’s heyday to their Hollywood triumph.
Barbara decided to turn down the Gibney script. Wallis next offered her Blood of China, and the part of a Chinese girl. Three months later the script was still being written.
The studio took note of the many doctor pictures that had recently been made—Emergency Call, One Man’s Journey, Arrowsmith, The Crime of the Century—and offered Barbara its own medical story, a picture called Dr. Monica that would go into production in early January 1934. Barbara rejected it. Warner sent it to Kay Francis, who agreed to do it. Wallis looked over the gambling pictures around, including Street of Chance, No Man of Her Own, and Show Boat, and offered Barbara Gambling Lady, based on a story by the screenwriter Doris Malloy.
As Jennifer “Lady” Lee, a one-in-a-million card shark with a code of ethics as straight as a die. Pat O’Brien (bottom) as Charlie Lang, hooked into the syndicate; Joel McCrea as Garry Madison, scion of industry who stoops to marry the Gambling Lady, 1934.
Malloy, before even writing the story, thought Barbara ideal for the part of Jennifer “Lady” Lee, a female card shark who plays in the most elegant society circles and wins on the up-and-up. Lady Lee is the daughter of a legendary straight-shooting gambler, the last of a dying breed. To write the story, Malloy had visited undercover games up and down the Pacific coast, talking with professional gamblers and racetrack habitués.
Wallis budgeted the picture at $235,000 and assigned Henry Blanke as its supervisor. Archie Mayo was the director. Wallis borrowed Joel McCrea from RKO for four weeks to play opposite Barbara as the society boy she marries, and hired C. Aubrey Smith as McCrea’s elegant gambler father, who fast falls under Lady’s spell. The studi
o used the contract feature star Pat O’Brien to co-star with McCrea as Lady’s longtime family pal who is in love with her and is gently rebuffed when he asks Lady to marry him; he’s enmeshed with the syndicate and plays a crooked game.
Joel McCrea was in demand at RKO; Gambling Lady was his sixth picture that year. McCrea had been an extra in pictures and danced with Garbo in The Single Standard; Gloria Swanson had sent him home in her Rolls-Royce one day and tested with him the next. He’d worked with Pickford and Colleen Moore, Lillian Gish and Crawford, and had a bit in Lon Chaney’s only talkie. His big break came when DeMille put the young actor under contract until the great showman went back to Paramount and turned him over to Metro. The twenty-eight-year-old actor had been featured in The Five O’Clock Girl with Marion Davies and The Single Standard with Greta Garbo. He’d appeared opposite Constance Bennett (Born to Love), Dolores del Río (Bird of Paradise), and Irene Dunne (The Silver Cord).
Louis B. Mayer let McCrea’s option lapse, and William Randolph Hearst wrote, “Dear Louie, You’ve just dropped an all-American boy . . . who Miss Davies and I thought had great possibilities. I just want you to know that I don’t approve of this action . . . In my business, running three hundred newspapers and several other businesses, we never hire anyone without thinking that they have possibilities and we never let them go until we have found out whether they do or not.”
Warner paid RKO $7,000 for McCrea ($3,000 for its standard carrying charge; $1,000 a week for McCrea himself). Aubrey Smith was paid $2,500 for two weeks of work, and Pat O’Brien, who unhappily agreed to share billing with McCrea, got $7,500. Barbara was paid $50,000.
For the part of Lady Lee, Barbara, who was neither a cardplayer nor a gambler, had to learn how to deal and shuffle as a professional. A tutor was brought in, and in three weeks she learned roulette, faro, craps, twenty-one, and poker as if they were a natural part of who she was. She used her imaginative powers to get into the nature of the game and chose to play Lady Lee with the lightness, grace, and skill a master cardplayer must have.
Gambling Lady was the first picture in which Barbara’s wardrobe, by Orry-Kelly, was extensive and lavish. Kelly had designed costumes in New York for the Shubert and George White revues before designing costumes for Warner Bros. in 1932, beginning with So Big, in which he dressed Barbara in the plainest of hopsack. The clothes for Ladies They Talk About were almost as simple. For Baby Face, Kelly’s third picture with Barbara, the clothes were luxurious. With Gambling Lady, her wardrobe was extravagant.
In the picture Barbara wears at various times a chinchilla-trimmed cape, a beaded chiffon gown with scrolls of bugle beads, a white velvet nap of Oriental cut, and a satin dress negligee, trimmed on the neckline with a fan-shaped train and bands of pink marabou. Kelly also designed for her a suit of wide-wale cloth of cadet blue, with a royal-blue georgette and gold threads in a horizontal stripe. She looked equally glamorous in Kelly’s black-crepe five o’clock two-piece gown and wedding dress of off-white panne velvet with a cowl clipped at the neckline with brilliants. She wore the clothes well, except her waist, which became problematic in the noticeable width of her seat with her back to the camera.
• • •
During the first days of shooting, a stills photographer was called in to take pictures of a scene at a gambling table. The photographer began with the extras, then photographed Aubrey Smith, Barbara, and Pat O’Brien—all Warner players.
Draped in an Orry-Kelly silver design with white marabou, March 1934. His first job in pictures was for Fox Films in their East Coast studios, drawing titles. Soon he was designing costumes for George White’s Scandals and Ethel Barrymore and, with his sketches shown to Warners by Cary Grant, he was assigned So Big and became the studio’s chief designer.
McCrea, on loan-out, figured no one would care if he was photographed and left for lunch.
When he got back, Barbara said, “Where the hell were you? For stills? Where the hell were you?”
The crew watched and listened, including Mayo and George Barnes, the cameraman.
“You think just because you’re tan and pretty you come here and coast along,” said Barbara. “You think this is a picnic. When I was doing road shows, I’d be sweating so much I’d have to go in the men’s room on the train and take my chances taking a shower so I’d be ready to get on and perform again when we got to the next town. I’d sleep sitting up in coaches. That’s what you call a trouper.”
McCrea apologized.
“Well, then, get off your fat ass, California sunshine boy, and do it.”
Joel McCrea was strong, beautiful, athletic, born and bred in Los Angeles. He’d grown up a California golden boy, delivering newspapers to Valentino, William S. Hart, Sessue Hayakawa, and Wallace Reid. He had attended Hollywood School for Girls with the daughters of Louis B. Mayer and Cecil B. DeMille with classes out of doors under oak trees, even in a tree house.
Barbara could have had McCrea fired from Gambling Lady, but instead she took the time to teach him what was right and what was expected of him. Afterward, they went on to a scene in which Barbara as Lady tells McCrea’s father, Aubrey Smith, that she loves his son. Smith tells her that she wouldn’t be happy with their pompous people and that his son won’t fit in with the gangsters she goes around with. Barbara has a big scene in which she cries and says, “Just tell your son that I don’t love him and to hell with all your class and your money and your breeding and your blue bloods.” For the scene, Barbara was to say, “I don’t love you and I don’t want to marry you!” McCrea was to kiss her, and then they were to cut.
Mayo said to McCrea, “Now, listen, when you grab her, you’re going to lose her for life. You grab her with all sincerity in the world and kiss her. Grab her by the ass and pull her to you so she knows it isn’t your pocket knife you’ve got there. Make it the goddamnedest kiss ever, do everything but screw her, and if that’s necessary, go ahead and do that.”
They did the scene.
When it was time, McCrea kissed Barbara, “practically [doing] everything.” The kiss went on for four and a half minutes. The electricians were falling down laughing. Finally, McCrea said, “Isn’t it cut?” Barbara looked up at him, laughed right in his face, and said, “You son of a bitch!” Then she grabbed him and kissed him back in the same way, though the cameras had stopped running. That was the end of the war.
With Archie Mayo (left), director of Gambling Lady, and Joel McCrea. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
McCrea’s wife, the actress Frances Dee, came to the set each day to watch her new husband work and supervise his lovemaking, shouting “Bravo! Good work!” after McCrea and Barbara’s love scenes.
McCrea was six feet two inches to Barbara’s delicate, slim, five feet three. She was diminutive, but when it came to her work, she had power and size. She gave off an ease despite being in severe pain from her collapse onstage a month before in Boston. McCrea was boisterous, carefree, to her cool self-possession.
• • •
Barbara came to work one day with her back taped. Mayo asked her how she’d hurt it.
“I fell down the stairs,” she said.
Mayo didn’t say anything more about it. He figured that Fay had probably thrown her down a flight of stairs.
This new accident didn’t help the leg she’d sprained while filming Ever in My Heart. During production on Gambling Lady, Barbara was strapped onto a board each night at home to relieve the pressure on her hip and to prevent any movement as she slept. During the day at work, between story conferences, gown fittings, and shooting, she was put under quartz lights for four hours at a time to help lessen the pain.
Frank Fay with Dion Anthony, 1934. (PHOTOFEST)
• • •
McCrea asked Barbara about Fay. “I’m still nuts about him,” she said. “That’s a man’s life. And the girl he picks up out of nowhere is not gonna walk away from him.”
She went on, publicly coming to Fay’s defense, but she no
longer felt that she could be alone in the house with him. He was often irrational. Servants were present in the house, as well as Nellie Banner to take care of Dion, but Barbara needed someone she felt comfortable with, someone she could trust. She asked James “Buck” Mack, of the vaudeville team of Miller and Mack, to move in with them.
Buck Mack had traveled with the Fays in Tattle Tales, and he agreed to make the move. Mack had been around Barbara since Broadway days. He’d encouraged her to dance when she was a girl; she’d called him Uncle Buck. Now that he was living with Barbara and Frank on Bristol Avenue, he saw how Fay drank, often nonstop for days, sometimes weeks. After he had drunk himself into a stupor, Buck would try to sober him up. He saw how Fay yelled at his two-year-old son, how his uncontrollable rages could be set off at any time, in the midst of an ordinary conversation if something favorable was said about someone Fay didn’t like. It was clear to Buck that Frank was mentally unstable.
With Dion, age two. (COURTESY TONY FAY)
Early in the filming of Gambling Lady, a lien was put on Fay and Barbara’s earnings. The federal government claimed that the Fays owed more than $6,000 in back taxes. Two weeks later Warner Bros. was summoned by the Internal Revenue Service to appear before the Sixth District Court of California to turn over Barbara’s contracts with the studio.
Fay was still overseeing the remodeling and rebuilding of Bristol Avenue and spending money recklessly. He’d put in a tennis court and a bicycle track and added a party house to the gymnasium.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 44
