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

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A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 45

by Victoria Wilson


  Barbara looked through her purse one day and realized she had no money. Frank had taken it. She was going out that night and had to borrow $5 from her maid.

  There wasn’t enough money to pay off the taxes owed the government, and Barbara, through Warner, arranged for a $15,000 loan with the Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association. The bank was directed as well to pay off two real estate loans the Fays had taken in 1929 and in January 1932. The government freeze on the Fays’ bank account made it necessary for the Bank of America loan to be made under the names of John Doe Co., Richard Roe Co., and Henry Poe Co. Frank and Barbara put down as collateral the deed to their property. The money for the loan was to be repaid from Barbara’s $3,500 a week salary. The Bank of America paid the IRS the $6,102 plus interest that the Fays owed in back taxes and made available to Barbara, who was unable to have access to her own money due to the government’s lien on her account, an additional $6,000 at 7 percent interest.

  FOUR

  A Beautiful Ghost

  1934

  Warner Bros. was looking for a project for Barbara for her first picture under their option agreement. In the late fall, Barbara had rejected Wallis’s offer of Dr. Monica. The year 1934 began with Barbara turning down a script of Madame Du Barry.

  A month later, in March, Wallis sent Barbara a script called Housewife by Manuel Seff and Lillie Hayward from a story by Robert Lord; two days later Barbara called to say she wasn’t interested. Bette Davis agreed to take the part of the successful advertising writer caught between her colleague at the office (George Brent) and his wife (Ann Dvorak). Production began in early April.

  Ever in My Heart didn’t do well at the box office, barely making back its cost of just under a quarter of a million dollars and Barbara was “in the doghouse with the studio” for turning down script after script, but she didn’t care. “I worry night and day over stories,” she said.

  The Depression was changing what audiences wanted to see. Individual movie stars were no longer the draw; studios were teaming up actors—Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell—and were starring ensemble casts for pictures such as Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight. Moviegoers were willing to see fewer and fewer pictures. The federal government was supporting twenty-one million people through relief. The big moneymakers for 1933 included Dressler and Beery in Tugboat Annie; State Fair; Mervyn LeRoy’s Gold Diggers and 42nd Street, in which Warner had gambled $400,000 on an unpopular style of picture. Mae West’s pictures She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel set records, playing as many as twelve returns in one theater.

  Fewer male stars were able to draw audiences to the theaters. Those who did included Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, and Mickey Mouse. The handful of big stars holding on included Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Janet Gaynor, and Marlene Dietrich. Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory and Little Women and Bing Crosby in Too Much Harmony and College Humor were the newest stars of the year to take hold.

  In addition to Barbara, the lead roster at Warner Bros. included Edward G. Robinson, Joe E. Brown, Paul Muni, Kay Francis, William Powell, Richard Barthelmess, and Ruth Chatterton. Among the featured players were Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, George Brent, and Pat O’Brien.

  Barbara was given Ruth Chatterton’s dressing room, the last remaining of two bungalow dressing rooms on the Warner lot. Chatterton’s dressing room had originally been built in the 1920s for Colleen Moore, the Flaming Youth girl; the second Warner bungalow, for its other big star of the time, Corinne Griffith, had been converted into a steam room and bathhouse for studio officials.

  Barbara and Chatterton had a cordial but cool relationship left over from New York when Barbara, then twenty and in her first hit on Broadway, was testing for Broadway Nights, as Chatterton, who’d come to test for the same part, walked onto the set. Barbara had been given an onion by the director to get her to cry, and Chatterton had derided the notion that anyone would need anything other than concentration and acting to bring on tears, or any emotion. This when Barbara was making audiences weep by the power of her work during every performance of The Noose.

  Two weeks after seeing Housewife, Hal Wallis sent her a script from a novel by R. H. Bruce Lockhart, based on his experiences as a British agent and acting consul in revolutionary Russia from 1914 to 1917. Leslie Howard was set to play Lockhart, a former rubber plantation owner and Fleet Street journalist.

  Barbara found Lockhart’s book so absorbing she read it twice. “But it’s the man’s story,” she said. The part being proposed for Barbara was of an ardent Communist, secretary to Lenin, who falls in love with the British agent. “Howard was made to order for the part,” said Barbara. “But . . . I [see] no reason why I should play second fiddle to anyone. I’ve worked too hard to get to the top to give up top billing for no good reason. I don’t mean the actual billing, because that is unimportant. I mean the top spot in the picture. In a few years, I suppose, I’ll have to resign myself to leads and supporting parts—we all come to that eventually—but I don’t feel I’ve reached that point yet.”

  Barbara received the script, read it, and turned it down the same day.

  Wallis next sent her a comedy called Traveling Saleslady, about an industrialist’s daughter determined to go to work against her father’s wishes, with a scheme to boost the sales of the family toothpaste. The script arrived on April 24. Barbara rejected it on the twenty-fifth.

  Gambling Lady had opened at the end of March. “See the flashing Stanwyck at the peak of her form—playing a man’s game with the heart of a woman—in the love story for which every other Hollywood star would have given a king’s ransom.”

  Reviewers described Gambling Lady as “Tailored smartly to suit [her] talents . . . Barbara Stanwyck is the picture throughout holding it up all the way.” Variety called the picture “high entertainment [with] superb performances”; audiences responded. Gambling Lady was a hit at the box office and earned more than double its cost of $230,000.

  A week after the picture opened, Hal Wallis wrote to his production supervisor, Henry Blanke, about another script he had in mind for Barbara. The script of Firebird was based on a Hungarian play set in Vienna and centered on a murder mystery. “We don’t want to lose any more time,” Wallis wrote. “We want to get Stanwyck’s acceptance and go into production as soon as possible.” Wallis sent the script to Barbara on May 3; she turned it down the following day.

  A week later Wallis sent over a script for a remake of Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, originally made into a Warner Bros. picture a decade before with Irene Rich. Alfred Knopf had published A Lost Lady in the fall of 1923, months after Cather had won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours. The 1924 picture had its premiere in Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather’s hometown since girlhood.

  It had been five months since Barbara’s last picture. She approved Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola’s rewrite of the script. Production on A Lost Lady began in June. Al Green, who’d worked with Barbara on Baby Face, was the director. Green was a modest little man who smoked big cigars, collected rare books, first editions and rare manuscripts, and was known to whisper his directions to the actor so that even the cameraman couldn’t hear him.

  • • •

  Willa Cather based Mrs. Forrester, the lost lady of her novel, on the glamorous wife of the ex-governor of Nebraska. Edith Lewis, Cather’s longtime companion, wrote, “It is doubtful if anyone in Red Cloud at that time saw [Lyra] Garber . . . in the poetic light of the lost lady of Willa Cather’s tale.” Mrs. Forrester was a “beautiful ghost . . . for twenty years before it came together as a possible subject” for Cather.

  In writing about Marian Forrester, Cather created a woman seen through the eyes of others: Captain Forrester, her much older husband; the “admiring middle-aged men of the railroad aristocracy who visit” the Forrester place, known for its “certain charm and aristocracy”; and the young boy Niel Herbert, who is first brought into the
Forrester house after being knocked out cold from a fall while trying to rescue a blind woodpecker in a tree. The boy is placed on a “white bed with ruffled pillow shams” and opens his eyes to see Mrs. Forrester kneeling beside him “bathing his forehead with cologne.” To Niel, Mrs. Forrester is “an excitement that came and went with summer.” Even as a boy Niel recognizes Mrs. Forrester “as belonging to a different world from any he had ever known.”

  “There was no fun in it,” wrote Cather, “unless I could get her just as I remembered her and produce the effect she had on me and the many others who knew her.”

  “I didn’t try to make a character study,” she wrote, “but just a portrait like a thin miniature painted on ivory . . . I wasn’t interested in her character when I was little, but in her lovely hair and her laugh which made me happy clear down to my toes. Neither is ‘Niel’ a character study. In fact, he isn’t a character at all; he is just a peephole into that world . . . he is only a point of view.”

  After Niel has grown up and moved away and Marian Forrester’s world has closed in on her, left her without means—her husband, the Captain, dead; the Forrester house sold; her health failing; and she, “sadly broken”—Niel learns that Mrs. Forrester has gone west, “people supposed California.” A long-ago witness to a desperate moment in which Mrs. Forrester was at the frantic end of an illicit liaison, the young man, who was not able to think about her for years “without chagrin,” is pleased, finally, “that she had had a hand in breaking [Niel] in to life. He has known pretty women and clever ones since then, but never one like her, as she was in her best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one’s own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. ‘I know where it is,’ they seemed to say, ‘I could show you!’ ”

  The 1924 Dorothy Farnum script of A Lost Lady kept somewhat to Cather’s novel. A revised script for a remake, to be called The Reckless Hour, saw Marian Forrester as a “beautiful, sexy young woman” and Niel as “just out of college, a youth of fine ideals, loving Marian hopelessly but with respect and reverence.”

  Henry Blanke was assigned the supervision of the picture for Wallis but was overwhelmed with too many productions, so Wallis turned over the picture to James Seymour.

  Gene Markey thought A Lost Lady could be made with “dignity and great dramatic power” but felt there was “much to be done with it.” Markey took the aspect of Cather’s writing that to her was the “high quality of the novel—its inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear and not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed”—and eliminated it altogether.

  As Marian Ormsby with Frank Morgan as Daniel Forrester. A Lost Lady, 1934. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  The unfolding of the story was now literal, chronological, so that the meeting and courtship of Captain Forrester and Marian Ormsby, mentioned in one sentence toward the end of the novel, becomes the first third of the picture. There is no boy who grows up and watches Mrs. Forrester for the audience. The picture is about a girl who is heartbroken; an older man who tries desperately to bring her back to life, who marries her and saves her from herself; a lover who almost takes her away; and her resolve to remain with her loving, stalwart husband.

  Markey wrote a new ending “to avoid the low-key depressing effect of the last half of the novel.” But, he assured Wallis, “we can get a splendid picture out of it.” In a memo to Wallis, Jim Seymour wrote, “In as much as we have taken some liberties with Willa Cather’s prize-winning novel in modernizing it, it would be a mistake to mention the novel and or the novelist’s name on the first main title.”

  For their work on the script, Gene Markey was paid $10,125; Kathryn Scola, $2,775. Production for A Lost Lady began in mid-June 1934 and was finished in early July. The picture cost $230,000.

  About the script, Jack Warner wrote to Seymour saying, “If there are any more references of any Wall Street bandits or any bankers being robbers in the script, please see that [they are] cut out at once . . . I’ve already instructed the cutter not to use that particular dialogue.”

  Mentions of Wall Street bandits weren’t the only lines cut from the picture. The Legion of Decency had been formed two months before A Lost Lady went into production. The previous October, Archbishop A. G. Cicognani, the apostolic delegate to the United States, had addressed the National Conference of Catholic Charities at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He decried the “massacre of innocent youths taking place hour by hour” and asked, “How shall the crimes that have the direct source in motion pictures be measured?” The bishops pledged to stay away from all “offensive” motion pictures and those theaters that showed such pictures. More than one hundred Catholic dioceses in the United States enrolled in the legion.

  “Protests against salacious films and offensive advertising swept across the country in a rising tide,” said Will Hays. “The movement was like an avenging fire, seeking to clean as it burned. It had become clear [to Hays] that a thorough house cleaning could not be done without something resembling police power. Our industry metropolis had grown too large for good behavior by mutual agreement only.” Joe Breen, by acclamation, became the head of the Studio Relations Department, renamed the Production Code Administration. “At last we [have] a police department,” said Will Hays. Any member company that released a picture without the Picture Code Association certificate and seal of approval would be fined $25,000.

  Breen was shown a print of A Lost Lady, and he wrote to Jack Warner asking for a shot of a nude statue in the opening sequence to be “deleted entirely from the picture” as well as a line spoken by the wronged husband who shoots Marian Forrester’s fiancé. The line “I found this cigarette case in my wife’s bedroom” was taken out. Finally, and most crucially to Breen, was a scene in which Marian Forrester looks at herself in the mirror of her bedroom, wondering what madness has overtaken her as she prepares to meet her lover. Breen wanted a fade-out between it and the next scene, when wife and lover meet, to indicate different times.

  • • •

  Just before Barbara began work on the picture, for which by contract she was being paid $50,000, Fay’s financial mess once again caught up with them. Warner Bros. informed Barbara that the Internal Revenue Service was seizing her salary and any other moneys owed her, or Fay, by the studio for back income taxes for 1930 and 1932. Warner Bros. was to pay the Internal Revenue Service $600 a week until the entire $19,543.69 was paid.

  Barbara persevered and got through her work on the picture.

  • • •

  A Lost Lady previewed at Warner’s Beverly Hills Theatre on a Friday in late August. Warner production supervisors, writers, directors, and department heads were invited to attend.

  Willa Cather had received letters from what she perceived were uncultured people regarding the 1924 version of A Lost Lady that only confirmed her belief that movie audiences were made up of the lower classes. With the picture’s remake, she was so angered by what was done to the script that she added a stipulation to her will that said none of her novels could be dramatized “whether for the purpose of spoken stage presentation or otherwise, motion picture, radio broadcasting, television and rights of mechanical reproduction, whether by means now in existence or which may hereafter be discovered or perfected.”

  Cather “kept her distance from the world,” wrote a longtime friend, “and [she] expected the world to keep its distance in return.”

  FIVE

  Normal People Leading Normal Lives

  Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart, and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? . . . But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!

  —Proust, The Guermantes Way

  The Midwest was suffering from drought; dust storms were destroying more than a million bushels of wheat dail
y. Three hundred million tons of topsoil were blown away, darkening the air all the way to the Atlantic Seaboard. By 1934, huge rocks, once buried deep in the soil, stood out like monuments on the bare plains. Roosevelt asked Congress for $525 million for drought relief—for emergency work camps and to relocate destitute farmers and their families. Six million dollars a day was already going to drought relief started by Harry Hopkins, head of the Works Progress Administration. Congress approved Roosevelt’s request in less than three weeks.

  In July, President Roosevelt went on a four-week trip to Hawaii and took a cache of not-yet-released pictures with him, including The Scarlet Empress, Twentieth Century, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, and Gambling Lady.

  • • •

  Barbara loved to go to the pictures. She was mostly interested in “their technical side,” figuring out camera angles. “How the lights were placed to get a certain effect on this or that player’s face,” she said. “It isn’t what’s going to happen, but how it is going to happen. You instinctively know the what of the situation but the how of presenting it becomes of terrific importance.

  “There are only a few actors who can get me sufficiently to make me lose myself in the story. Ann Harding is one of them and . . . my idol, Lionel Barrymore. Miss Harding is so entirely natural at all times that she makes me believe in her and what she is doing. I have always hoped that my own work shows the same degree of sincerity. When I see an Ann Harding picture nothing but her work and the story interests me.”

  The work of the small patrician blonde Harding, onstage and on the screen, had been so revered that critics described her as an actress to whom the wise men carried their literary frankincense and myrrh.

  • • •

  A Fool’s Advice, which Fay had sold to Warner Bros. in 1932, was at last set to open in September after languishing unreleased for two years.

 

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