Robert Florey was directing the film. He’d directed the Marx Brothers in their first feature, the movie version of the Irving Berlin, George S. Kauffman hit play, The Cocoanuts, the first musical to be made into a picture, and on the East Coast (“There was little you could do with [the Marx Brothers],” said Florey. “They had performed the show a thousand times. My main job was to keep them in the camera frame. Luckily I had five cameras going at all times.”)
Florey had worked with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and with Al Santell, King Vidor, Robert Z. Leonard, and Edmund Goulding. He had written, directed, and designed other pictures before going to Warner Bros. and being forced to submit to the studio’s dictates of picture making. Florey had been the set and costume designer on King Vidor’s The Big Parade.
As a Warner contract director, Florey “didn’t have the power to choose a scenario.” He had to go along with what was given him to direct by the studio. He thought North Shore another in a string of Warner Bros. “contract assignments.”
Florey had no say “in the final cutting and editing of North Shore. The producer and the studio boss,” he said, “would do as they please . . . sometimes changing the order of the sequences, suppressing favorite scenes.”
With Sol Polito as cameraman, Florey was able to give North Shore the right polish and old-money atmosphere of excess and entitlement and capture the right mustiness of decaying grandeur.
North Shore, by virtue of Barbara’s presence, became “more than a routine job,” said Florey. He thought she was “the greatest.”
In the picture Barbara is at ease, stylish, seductive. She didn’t complain about the script. “She was always cooperative, pleasant, helpful,” Florey said.
Her quarrel was not with the director; it was with the studio.
To the press, Barbara was still difficult to know, indifferent to her “fellow players”; on the defensive, “ready to battle at the drop of a hat.” “I have been accused of being anti-social,” she said, “which seems to be a Hollywood sin. These allegations are a constant surprise to me.” She admitted that she was not a “particularly tactful person” but someone who spoke her mind “quite frankly.” She couldn’t understand why anyone would say she was “indifferent to her fellow players. That is the last thing I could be.” Barbara made friends slowly, cautiously. She wanted to be sure she wasn’t making a mistake. “It would be the same with me if I were a waitress in Peoria or a chambermaid in Oshkosh instead of a film actress in Hollywood.”
Gene Raymond suggested that Barbara hire his publicist, Helen Ferguson, former celebrated stage and silent-screen actress. “I think she could help you,” he said. When sound arrived, Ferguson had given up acting and opened up a theatrical and public relations office. Helen had appeared in more than fifty silent pictures, among them Gift o’ Gab (1917); Just Pals with John Ford (1920); The Call of the North (1921); Hungry Hearts (1922); The Unknown Purple (1923); and In Old California (1929), perfecting the role of the winsome, tomboy outdoors girl—the opposite of the Mary Pickford role.
Ferguson understood actors and understood the need for publicity. The previous year, in 1933, Ferguson had opened a small one-room office in Hollywood for $15 a month and furnished it with three chairs, two installment-purchased fire-sale desks, a borrowed carpet, unframed photographs of her theatrical friends, and a small typewriter and, using a lipstick, wrote her name on the door of her first office. Within four months, business had improved, and Helen moved to an office with one and a half rooms; in ten months she had a five-suite agency at 6615 Sunset Boulevard, an associate, Jewel Smith, a secretary, and a switchboard. Ferguson’s first client was Johnny Mack Brown, former all-American halfback from the University of Alabama turned actor, who appeared opposite Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman and Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters. Ferguson, in addition to representing Gene Raymond, and his wife, Jeanette MacDonald, worked with Constance Bennett, Pat O’Brien, Joan Blondell, and Loretta Young. Helen was religious. She believed in prayer, and when speaking for her clients to reporters, she made sure to interweave her religious beliefs in their quotes.
Helen had married Richard Lewis Hargreaves, president of the First National Bank of Beverly Hills and the father of four children from his nineteen-year marriage to Grace Bryan, the daughter of William Jennings Bryan. Hargreaves was forty-one; Helen, twenty-nine.
Helen Ferguson was now the wife of a bank president and at the center of the Los Angeles social establishment. Her days of earning a living were over until two years later, in June 1932, when Hargreaves was accused of misusing funds—amounting to $70,000—from the First National Bank of Beverly Hills. With deposits of more than $4 million, the bank was forced to close its doors. Hargreaves was indicted on four major counts of asserted misapplication of funds and fourteen counts of false statements. He was found guilty of ten of the counts and was sentenced to serve three years in federal prison.
Helen had to help support a family in financial disaster. Her friends told her to return to acting, but she was determined to go into business for herself. She was full of explosive energy, was earnest and felt blessed with a sixth sense. She saw actors as the most important and fragile aspect of the film industry and thought stars had a responsibility to their audiences, and she expected them to accept that responsibility.
Barbara hired her.
Ferguson’s girlhood was not unlike Barbara’s. Helen had started to work at the age of nine doing odd jobs. Her father and grandfather had lost their fortunes in the panic of 1907, the year Barbara was born. Helen’s parents separated, and her mother took her two daughters to Chicago and was earning a living as a dressmaker. At thirteen, Helen went to get a job at the Essanay Studios in Chicago. Soon, Helen was in demand at the studio and by the age of fifteen was a leading lady in New York. Samuel Goldwyn brought Helen to Hollywood in 1920 for her first starring role in Going Some. She was set to return east, when she was offered an important part opposite William Russell, the hero of Western thrillers and her childhood movie idol. They appeared together in five pictures from 1920 through 1925. A year after working with her, “Big Bill” Russell (he was six feet two inches and weighed two hundred pounds) was so smitten with Helen he divorced his wife, the actress Charlotte Burton, with whom he’d made fifteen pictures from 1916 to 1918, and in 1925 married Helen.
William (Big Bill) Russell and Helen Ferguson, circa 1920.
By 1927, Helen’s popularity in pictures was waning, and she decided to go on the stage, making her debut at the Hollywood Playhouse in Alias the Deacon and appearing in stock companies with actors such as Jason Robards (in The Mutiny of the Elsinore, based on a story by Jack London) and Louise Fazenda (The Alarm Clock).
Russell died in 1929 at the age of forty-four.
• • •
After Barbara’s four-year stint at Warner Bros., she wanted to be able to choose her own scripts.
“In New York,” she said, “you simply wait until a manager sends for you. He hands you a script and you read it. If you like the part, you play it. If you don’t like it, you turn it down. There isn’t this constant battle for suitable vehicles.”
Barbara was fed up with the scripts she was getting. In addition, there was the issue of Fay; she insisted he be included in any new contract.
“Hollywood knows so little about us or how we live,” she said.
• • •
During the final week of shooting North Shore, a fire broke out one evening at the Warner Bros.–First National studios in Burbank. It began in one of the machine shops, near the New York and Chinatown sets, and, given high winds, spread to film vaults, destroying hundreds of thousands of feet of stock shots, including tens of thousands of feet just brought back from West Point by Frank Borzage. The following day production continued as if nothing had happened, but the fire had swept across fifteen acres of Warner’s land, turning antique furniture, research material, and precision machinery into tinder and twisted steel. More than forty people were
burned. Jack Warner was determined to rebuild the devastated areas.
North Shore continued to shoot.
In a few of the scenes, Barbara wore, as she did in A Lost Lady and every movie she made, the crystal medallion on a gold chain that she cherished, given to her by her sister Millie; it was her good luck piece. At the end of the production, the cast and crew gave Barbara a tiny mosaic figure of Saint Anthony for her car inspired by her lack of formality and self-complacency.
• • •
Joe Breen, director of the Production Code Administration, in a letter to Jack Warner, singled out one line in North Shore that he wanted removed in compliance with the code. Barbara’s character is in the bath and says to her husband, in the bedroom: “I think you can come in and dry my back because I love you and we are going to be big business successes.”
Warner wrote back to Breen the next day and said, “I cannot understand why any man who does not have to think right, and I know you do, objects to the line . . . they are legally married. What is objectionable to this? . . . I know you did not read the script and you just signed this letter as I know you personally would not find fault with lines of this nature.” Breen “edited” three thousand scripts a year and responded to Warner, writing, “Between you and me and the four walls, as we Irish say, I think your point is well taken regarding this back-rubbing business . . . Of course I did not read the script myself, and I am glad to know that you did me the kindness to suggest that this particular detail would not be likely to disturb me . . . Here’s for better and finer back-rubbing—married or unmarried!”
Irving Thalberg, like Barbara, was from Brooklyn (his father, an importer of lace). He was reserved, soft-spoken, with a boundless capacity for work. After two years at Universal, first as secretary to Carl Laemmle and then general manager of Universal City (though still too young to legally sign checks, he took charge, he said, because there was no one else left to do so), and after four years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as executive production manager, he was known as “the little genius” and referred to by the New York Times as “an old head on young shoulders.” (PHOTOFEST)
• • •
Barbara and Fay went to Metro to see Irving Thalberg. Years before, in New York, Thalberg had watched them perform at the Club Richman. He’d asked Barbara to his table, told her he was interested in her work, and wondered if she’d ever thought of appearing in pictures. She’d cut him short—he hadn’t inquired about Fay—let him know that her husband had just signed a contract to make pictures for Joe Schenck.
Thalberg’s gracious response: “Ah, when you come to Hollywood, drop in to see me.”
Thalberg had been on the train that first brought the Fays to Hollywood.
Now the Fays needed Thalberg. Barbara had learned his correct name.
They were kept waiting at Metro for forty-five minutes. Once they were in Thalberg’s office, he suggested that Barbara might possibly make a picture or two for the studio.
Frank had warned Barbara to keep quiet and let him do the talking, “all of it.” When it came time to “talk terms,” Barbara said, “Mr. Thalberg inquired how much money I should have to have.”
“Fifty thousand dollars a picture—and the right to choose her own directors and stories,” Frank replied without batting an eye.
Thalberg had deep penetrating eyes and shoulders that hunched forward slightly. He gave the usual producer’s gasp. “Why, my dear, we don’t do that for Greta Garbo!”
There was a pause, and then Frank said, “I’m still not impressed.”
Barbara couldn’t control herself another minute and blew up. “All I did was to laugh,” she said. “But such a laugh. And at such a moment! Can you imagine Frank’s feelings.”
Thalberg was interested in testing Barbara for Metro’s Good Earth, an ambitious production for the studio. He had overseen its development since Metro had purchased the rights to the Pearl Buck novel three years earlier, in 1931, before its publication and prior to the Theatre Guild’s production that starred Claude Rains and Alla Nazimova. At the time, Louis B. Mayer couldn’t understand Thalberg’s determination to make the novel into a movie and said, “Who the hell [is] interested in a film about Chinese farmers, for God’s sake?”
Thalberg had hoped to shoot the entire picture in China with an all-Chinese cast and had hired Pearl Buck as consultant to advise the studio about locations. Frances Marion, one of Thalberg’s most esteemed writers, who had written the best of Mary Pickford’s silent pictures as well as the scripts for Metro’s Anna Christie, Min and Bill, and Dinner at Eight, had written a treatment for the picture. Marion had won two Academy Awards for her scripts of The Big House and The Champ.
Thalberg had given up the notion of using an all-Chinese cast. “There were not enough suitable Chinese actors,” he said. He’d tested stage actresses such as Katharine Cornell and was now testing Barbara for the leading part of O-Lan, the kitchen slave sold into slavery by her parents and freed into marriage and whose struggle, side by side with her husband, Wang Lung, as they build farm and family and battle the effects of drought, famine, and revolution, is at the heart of the book.
Anna May Wong had been passed over for the part of O-Lan despite a publicity campaign on her behalf by the Los Angeles Press, started in 1933, two years before the picture was cast. Wong’s reputation in China was questionable, cautioned the Nanking government official, General Ting-Hsiu (Theodore) Tu, friend of Chiang Kai-shek, and advisor to Metro on the picture; her previous roles as prostitute, unwed mother, slave, and coaster, among others, had rankled the people of China, who believed the actress was continually losing face on-screen and misrepresenting the women of their country.
Barbara spent days at Metro working out makeup for the test. Thalberg had sent for Nils Asther, who was coming from Europe to be tested for the part of Wang. Asther hadn’t worked with Barbara since General Yen.
With the casting of a white man as Wang, the role of O-Lan would be closed to any Chinese actress. The production code’s strict antimiscegenation rules prohibited a Chinese woman from playing opposite a white man, even if he was playing a Chinese character.
• • •
A Los Angeles billboard in support of Frank Finley Merriam in the race for Governor of California and opposing Upton Sinclair, 1934. (CORBIS)
California was in the grip of a bitter campaign to elect a new governor. Upton Sinclair, one of the candidates, had attacked Roosevelt’s New Deal at its heart and ripped apart the Democratic Party. Sinclair’s campaign was built upon the idea that in a land of plenty millions of people had nothing and that instead of the government putting people on relief, they should be put to work and given the chance to produce their own goods.
Sinclair envisioned the state buying or leasing lands for people to grow their own food and renting unused factories for workers to manufacture their own goods. Workers were to be paid in scrip, which would buy those products produced within the plan. He called it EPIC (End Poverty in California), and it caught on with voters. In the August primary Sinclair won an almost two-to-one victory against George Creel: Sinclair, 436,000 votes; Creel, 288,000.
Sinclair repeated to reporters a statement he’d made to Harry Hopkins, who after twenty years of social service was given the task by Roosevelt of feeding and clothing the needy and finding work for the unemployed and was heading up the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Sinclair had warned Hopkins, “If I am elected, half of the unemployed will come to California, and you will have to take care of them.”
The Democratic machine along with Republicans panicked and set in motion a campaign to destroy Sinclair’s chances of becoming the next governor of California. The Los Angeles press, ruled by Hearst, refused to cover Sinclair’s comings and goings. Those out to defeat him used his own writing against him, distorting his words and quoting him as dismissing marriage as a bourgeois institution and the Roman Catholic Church as “the Church of the Servant Girls.” New Deal Democrats closed ranks
with Democratic conservatives in support of Governor Frank Merriam, the archconservative Republican candidate. Merriam won 1,139,000 votes to Sinclair’s 880,000.
Despite the win in California, the Republicans, instead of gaining seats in an off-year election as anticipated with the party not in power, lost thirteen seats in the House and more seats in the Senate. Democrats now had a two-thirds majority in the Senate, the biggest margin either party had held in its history. The reason: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
After the win, Harry Hopkins said, “Boys—this is our hour. We’ve got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never.”
“He has been all but crowned by the people,” said William Allen White of President Roosevelt in Time magazine.
Others were working against the president and the New Deal and the populist spirit that had taken hold of the country. In November, at a hearing before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities in New York City, Major General Smedley D. Butler, retired Marine Corps officer, a Quaker, and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, beloved by the troops he commanded, testified about a plot of Wall Street interests to overthrow President Roosevelt, establish a Fascist dictatorship backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, and reinstate the gold standard, which Roosevelt had abandoned in the beginning of the year.
Butler testified about how he’d been approached by Gerald MacGuire, a bond salesman and a former commander of the Connecticut American Legion, who’d traveled to Italy to observe the state under Mussolini and had come away impressed.
Butler was to deliver an ultimatum to President Roosevelt. The plan was for Roosevelt to pretend he was incapacitated because of polio. A newly created cabinet officer, a secretary of general affairs, was to run the government in Roosevelt’s stead. If the president refused, he was to be forced out by an army of war veterans from the American Legion. MacGuire had told Butler, “You know the American people will swallow that. We’ve got the newspapers.” MacGuire said, “We need a fascist government in this country to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 47
