Warner had the rights to the picture but hadn’t yet done anything with it. Fay was desperate to start negotiations with another company. Jack Warner wasn’t interested in picking up the option; he wanted to let the situation go on indefinitely in the hope that Fay would agree to an independent release and the studio could avoid having to bring out the picture as a Warner Bros. production.
Frank was finding work here and there. He worked as the master of ceremonies for shows like Irving Strouse’s Frolics at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, a series of six shows modeled after the old Sunday night concerts of a decade before at New York’s Winter Garden. Occasionally, he gave a concert performance. The New York vaudeville circuit was winding down.
Barbara and Fay were more aloof from Hollywood than ever. They rarely went out; few people saw them.
They had to take out another loan from the Bank of America, this time for $10,000, with Barbara’s Warner salary once again as collateral and the studio paying the bank $1,000 a week until the loan was repaid.
Rumors about their marriage continued to infuriate Barbara. The gossips were ever more vicious, provoked by Fay’s cockiness, his brutal wit. “If the rest of Hollywood was as lovely as the climate,” Barbara said, “I’d never want to leave it.” But she found the Hollywood gossips unrelenting. “They seem to be determined that nobody shall have any private life that is immune from chatter and scandal. You feel that people are watching you all the time,” she said, “looking for the slightest word, or movement that will give them material to talk. And if they don’t see anything to gossip about they make it up just the same. That is why Frank and I never go out except to visit a few close friends in their own homes. All we ask is to be allowed to live our own lives in peace. But some people resent that. Well, they’ll just have to go on resenting.”
• • •
Wallis had two new pictures in mind for Barbara, The Right to Live and Concealment. The Right to Live was to be a remake of a 1929 picture called The Sacred Flame, directed by Archie Mayo, from Somerset Maugham’s play of the same name. Pauline Frederick and Conrad Nagel had starred in the original. Concealment was based on an unproduced play by Leonard Ide. The studio considered the play problematic (“Dialogue feeble,” said the reader’s report. “Dramatic action only implied . . . characters . . ., without exception, poorly drawn . . . the central idea could be effectively salvaged if the entire play were thrown out”). Wallis was having the script rewritten by Tom Buckingham and F. Hugh Herbert. He asked Buckingham and the producer, Henry Blanke, to tell Barbara the story. “Sell this to her,” Wallis said, “and make clear to her that we are changing the play so much it would not do for her to read it. Don’t, under any consideration, give her the play.” Wallis knew that if Barbara read it in its present form, she would reject it straightaway.
The studio asked her to come in to discuss her situation with Buckingham; she was being evasive and wasn’t showing up. They phoned her at home and were told that she was in the garden and would return the call when she came in. She didn’t return the call. Wallis was furious.
Barbara was unhappy with A Lost Lady and with Warner Bros. The pictures Warner was giving her were getting “lousier and lousier,” she said.
Her lawyer, Charles Cradick, told the studio that she would be there by eleven the following morning. The next day, Barbara, who was always prompt to the minute, didn’t show up. Nor did she appear by mid-afternoon. Wallis told his staff that if she didn’t appear by the end of the day, a letter of suspension was to be sent to her by special messenger. A studio lawyer advised him to phone her; if she was evasive about coming in, he suggested Wallis send a letter informing her that the studio expected her to appear the following day.
Barbara finally met with Buckingham to discuss the pictures Wallis had in mind for her.
The Right to Live was about an American girl who marries a wealthy Englishman, paralyzed as the result of an airplane accident. His brother, owner of a Brazilian coffee plantation, is sent for. Eventually, wife and brother fall in love. Her husband will never recover the use of his legs, and she decides to stay and care for him until he is found murdered and she becomes the accused. The self-sacrificing wife was too much like Marian Forrester of A Lost Lady; Barbara turned down the picture.
Buckingham also told her the story of the revised version of Ide’s play Concealment: a murder mystery involving political intrigue, congressional investigations, impeachment proceedings, a trial, suicide, and corruption, and at its center the daughter of the governor who marries the district attorney only to find out that her father is implicated in a high-stakes kickback scandal. Her marriage to the DA suddenly becomes a time bomb as he struggles to get to the truth without destroying his father-in-law or betraying his new wife.
After being the wilted love object brought back to life in A Lost Lady, Barbara agreed to make the murder mystery. Concealment was to be her second picture for Warner under their option agreement. Wallis’s letter suspending Barbara, typed up and ready to go, wasn’t sent. Instead, he showed Barbara a script of an adaptation of Mignon Eberhart’s novel The White Cockatoo, which he hoped would be her third picture for Warner under their option agreement. The picture was a convoluted murder mystery set on the French coast. Barbara wasn’t impressed with the script and turned it down.
Concealment was to be directed by William Dieterle, under contract to Warner. The picture’s budget: $215,000.
Buckingham and Herbert were at work on the script when Buckingham became ill and was rushed to Queen of Angels Hospital. He was operated on but died soon after coming out of the anesthetic. He was thirty-nine years old.
Wallis assigned Mary McCall Jr., a former magazine writer, to help with the script. McCall had just finished writing dialogue for the remake of the 1924 picture Babbitt, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel. Mary McCall was a “corpse ranger” at Warner Bros. She saw the studio as trying “to own you . . . They wanted to make sure you weren’t dawdling or doing other work on company time,” and she became involved in the formation of the Screen Writers Guild. She went to work on Concealment and did the best she could to finish the script quickly; shooting started two months later, early in November.
“The script was bad,” Dieterle said. But he couldn’t refuse it for “contractual reasons”; he was paid his salaried wage of $12,000. Barbara was paid $50,000.
“Why Miss Stanwyck did not reject the script,” Dieterle said, “I can only guess.” The reality was that Barbara couldn’t afford to go on suspension. She wanted to get out of her Warner contract, but she needed the income to support Fay, Dion, the staff, the house, and the cars and to get out of their financial bind with the Internal Revenue Service.
In the picture were Warren William, Glenda Farrell, and the feature players Grant Mitchell, Arthur Byron, Henry O’Neill, and Douglass Dumbrille.
• • •
Fay wanted Barbara with him at all times. He was possessive and argued with her from the moment she got home from the studio, questioning her repeatedly about whom she’d been with, to whom she’d spoken at the studio, why it had taken her so long to get home.
One day she was outside taking a photograph of Dion. She put the boy on the bench and went to frame him in the camera. Dion wouldn’t keep still, and Fay pushed him to the ground.
Barbara knew “the agony of quarreling and trying to make up,” she said. After an argument, Fay might not speak to her for days. She called it “the dull pain of making little pretexts for going into the room where he is, hoping against hope that he’ll break the heartbreaking ice and say something.”
Barbara would sit with Fay across a wordless table. In what she called a “final surrender,” she’d break down and say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I’ll do anything you say if you’ll only speak to me again.”
“The humiliation of such a surrender,” she said, “knowing I wasn’t wrong,” felt like being bound in chains of slavery.
• • •
When Dion wa
s two and a half years old, Barbara arranged for him to be baptized at a church in Santa Monica. In attendance were Buck Mack; Ann Hoyt; Fay’s longtime business adviser and friend Nick Copeland and his wife; Dion’s new nurse; and Fay and Barbara. After the service the party returned to Bristol Avenue in the early afternoon for a celebratory Sunday dinner. Everyone, except Frank, went to Dion’s room to play with him.
Fay reappeared at dinner. The guests were seated at the table. Frank began a conversation with the nurse, who was new to the United States and was still unfamiliar with English. Fay asked her if she understood the meaning of the words “whorehouse” and “fucking.” Barbara got up and left the table. Fay talked about what happens at whorehouses and was laughing at the nurse, who was at a loss to understand what was being said at her expense.
Later, a small cake for Dion was brought to the table. A piece was put on his plate, and the boy was enjoying it when he dropped some crumbs next to his plate. Fay screamed at him about the tablecloth. Dion dissolved into tears. The nurse took him away. When Fay, in the past, had dropped food at the table, he’d blamed Dion and yelled at him because of it.
Barbara felt as if she had “no life of her own at all, even in little inconsequential things,” yet she only wanted to please Fay. If she moved a chair in the living room and Fay gave her a look, she would “run, hastily, to put it back again,” she said. “You lose your life for love,” she said, “this kind of love, though you are living.” Barbara’s allegiance to Fay extended to all things, including politics; she voted as he voted.
She wanted to surprise Frank for his forty-third birthday with a gift she lovingly thought he would enjoy. Money was tight. Fay’s library consisted of an extensive collection of first editions. Barbara bought him a signed limited edition of Galsworthy’s White Monkey, the fourth book of the Forsyte Saga, published in 1924.
Returning home from work one evening, she saw Fay in the library, the present opened, and the book being read. The butler explained that when the book arrived, he’d unwrapped it and put it on the shelf in the library and Fay had picked it up. Barbara also gave him a Dictaphone and a rare crystal paperweight for his desk. With the gifts was a birthday letter dated November 17, 1934:
Dear Kid:
I haven’t any grand present to give you this year, no diamonds, no watch, no nothing!
I feel kind of funny not sending you anything but it just has to be.
However I can wish you many, many more of them and may they be happy and healthy, and full of content.
My personal wish, that they be spent with me.
But, when prayers are heard in heaven, and I hope that mine are, they are still with you and for you. And so Frank, all I have to give you today is my prayers that all will go well with you. And whatever you do shall be right, and that God will keep your path well-lighted so that you will never hurt yourself.
God bless you and spare you always. My love to you. Barbara.
Dieterle described the work on Concealment “[as] not [being] very pleasant.”
During the first few days of the picture’s production, the crew had spent an hour fixing a scrim. To see if it was right, they called Barbara’s stand-in, of whom Barbara was quite fond. Katie Doyle couldn’t see without her glasses and rarely wore them. She walked onto the set and walked right through the scrim.
Dieterle was furious and started to berate her. Other people were there working. Barbara quietly walked up to Dieterle and said, “Don’t you ever dare talk to anybody on any set that I am on, don’t you ever dare talk to anybody like that again. The next time you do, I walk. I go right up to the office and I will not finish the picture under your direction.”
She didn’t care if it was a stand-in or another actor; she wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior. Dieterle was Prussian. “You know, iron rule, iron rule,” said Barbara. “Well, screw that.”
It was the third day of production; they had weeks to go.
Barbara looked her most glamorous in the picture, but it demanded little of her.
During production, Wallis sent her a script called North Shore, based on a novel by Wallace Irwin. It was to be her third picture under the Warner option agreement, which was up at the end of September. If she rejected Warner’s second option, the studio was legally within its rights to restrain her from working in pictures for the next two years. If Warner chose not to exercise the option, Barbara was free and clear to work for any studio. Jack Warner wanted it both ways. He wanted her to go on making pictures for him, and he wanted to know what offers were coming in from other producers. In order for Warner to be notified of other offers, Barbara had to reject Warner’s option, at which time the studio would file a notice with the Association of Motion Picture Producers and Warner would then be entitled to be told of other offers.
Warner made the offer for an additional option; Barbara, through Charles Cradick, rejected it. Warner was now in a position to be notified of each incoming offer that Barbara received for the next six months. Her dealings with Warner were further complicated by Fay being written into her contract with the studio and his still-unreleased picture, A Fool’s Advice.
• • •
A Lost Lady opened on September 29. Warner advertised it as “A Lost Lady from the novel by Willa Cather, America’s greatest woman writer; the world branded her a lost lady but a million women will see in her the woman they wanted her to be.”
Reviewers were appalled by what Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola had done to Cather’s novel (“Don’t go to see A Lost Lady . . . under any misapprehension that you are going to see Willa Cather’s fine and moving novel on the screen,” said the Los Angeles Examiner. “It may bear the same title, it may give Miss Cather credit for story, but it is something else again”). Critics called the picture “a dismal drama” and “handicapped”; “it fails almost ludicrously to capture anything of the spirit or letter of the original [novel].” Reviewers were kind to Barbara (“As usual, [she] almost saves the day by giving one of her earnestly honest performances”). Barbara’s wardrobe seemed to overwhelm the picture (“Everything and everybody is subservient to Miss Stanwyck’s style parade. Even Miss Stanwyck’s acting”).
• • •
Barbara and Fay had a dinner party one evening. The topic of college fraternities and sororities came up and whether they were good or bad. Barbara, who hadn’t gone to school beyond eighth grade, stayed out of the discussion except to say, “Sororities may be all right for people with money—but where do the poor come in? Why isn’t there a sorority for working girls for example? I could have used one when I was a kid starting out to work.”
The next day, Barbara and Charles Cradick asked the women in his office what they thought of the idea of a sorority for working girls. They liked the idea, and Cradick had Barbara help to form a sorority designed to give working girls social advantages, education possibilities, and friendship. They called it Athena, from the Greek goddess of wisdom, weaving, crafts, and war; an armed warrior goddess, never a child, always a virgin, associated with mentoring heroes. Her shield bore the head of the Gorgon Medusa.
SIX
Another Routine Job
1934
Before the studio bought the rights to North Shore, it was proposed as a “pretty good vehicle for Bette Davis” and was offered to her in the summer. When Davis didn’t work out, Wallis was hopeful Barbara would accept the role of Shelby Barrett, expert equestrian, forced to earn a living by riding the horses of society folk in competition. A cameraman was sent to the Hollywood Breakfast Club to film a horse show in progress and to get on film some of the West Coast’s finest-blooded horses.
Joseph Breen looked at Mary McCall and Peter Milne’s script and found nothing “objectionable from the Point of View of the Production Code or censorship.” North Shore was to begin production on November 6.
Hal Wallis wanted Joel McCrea or Robert Young for Johnnie Wyatt, the scion of a great old (penniless) Long Island family who plays professional am
ateur polo and pursues and marries Shelby Barrett in a whirlwind courtship. Neither actor was available. Three weeks before the start date, the platinum blond Gene Raymond—born Raymond Guion and a stage actor from the age of five, who started in pictures at twenty-three, appearing in The House on 56th Street, Ex-lady, and Zoo in Budapest—was tentatively cast as the young Wyatt, who’d played polo since he was able to sit on a horse, as had his father and his father’s father. Henry O’Neill and Ralph Morgan were considered for Gene Fairchild, the arriviste with “oodles of money” determined to buy his way into society, who rides his own horses in competition, invariably placing second to Shelby Barrett’s first and who is in love with her.
The production supervisor, Harry Joe Brown, thought Ricardo Cortez would be perfect for Fairchild (“It seems to me this is the type of role Rick is most suited for,” Brown wrote to Wallis). John Eldredge, who’d just appeared in The White Cockatoo, got the part. Eldredge invariably played spineless men, the opposite of the Cortez character.
With Gene Raymond shooting The Woman in Red, from Irwin Wallace’s novel, North Shore. The book was bought for Bette Davis; the part of Shelby Barrett went to Barbara only weeks before production began in early November 1934.
Wallis wanted Barbara to come in for wardrobe fittings. “If there is going to be any squawk on the script,” Wallis wrote to Lester Koenig, his assistant, “or any trouble on the wardrobe or due to the fact that she has to work with horses or anything else,” he wanted it ironed out sooner rather than later. Barbara hadn’t been near a horse in three years, since a horse fell on her during the making of Forbidden. She was terrified of horses and for North Shore had to ride again; this time on a demanding, powerful show horse.
“I kept thinking of that second vertebra,” she said after riding Magna McDonald, the American saddlebred blue-ribbon mare, for the horse show scene, “and wondering if this horse would find a convenient gopher hole to step into.” In addition to Barbara’s regular stand-in, two doubles—expert riders—stood in for her during the demanding jumps the horse had to take on the course.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 46
