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

by Victoria Wilson

  Implicated in the plot were Robert Sterling Clark, banker, stockbroker, art collector; Grayson Murphy, director of Goodyear and Bethlehem Steel; and Irénée Du Pont, whose family was one of the leading armament producers in the world, dubbed the merchants of death from the huge profits they’d made in the Civil War and the War of 1812. Du Pont was the founder of the American Liberty League, a propaganda machine whose purpose was to discredit Roosevelt in the public’s eye once the president was overthrown. Other co-conspirators implicated but never subpoenaed were Al Smith, former governor of New York and co-director of the American Liberty League, and General Douglas MacArthur.

  • • •

  Will Rogers topped the theater owners’ list of the ten stars with the biggest box-office draw. Clark Gable was next, followed by Bing Crosby; Shirley Temple, age six and the first child ever to be included; the beloved Marie Dressler, who’d passed away in the summer at age sixty-five with flags at Metro flown at half-mast and production stopped during her funeral. Norma Shearer, Katharine Hepburn, and Joe E. Brown tied for tenth place; Garbo with 73 percent of the vote was in twenty-ninth place. Gary Cooper, Zasu Pitts, John Boles, and Johnny Weissmuller were tied with 35 percent of the vote. Barbara received 17 percent of the vote, along with Paul Muni and Irene Hervey.

  • • •

  Jack Warner wanted a new title for North Shore (“In my opinion this don’t mean anything in box-office value”). Hal Wallis thought it was a mistake (“Everyone I have talked to feels that NORTH SHORE is a swell title and I don’t think we should let anybody stampede us into changing the titles of published books . . . especially when the titles are really good”). Warner suggested The Girl in the Court Room; Peggy’s Bustle; and The Girl Behind the Headlines. The title eventually chosen was The Woman in Red, a title similar to The Secret Bride, which opened in New York at the Roxy Theatre just before Christmas. It was another inferior picture for Barbara. The New York Times called it “a dashing homicide melodrama but a minor product of the racy Warner studios”; the Post pronounced it “often in need of a tonic,” with Barbara’s natural charms as the perfect “builder-upper.”

  • • •

  Barbara had still not joined the Screen Actors Guild. A new contract for actors was worked out between the Academy and the studios, but it was barely an improvement over the previous one of five years before. The earlier Guild said it was as unenforceable as ever. Whatever improvements to the contract were the result of pressure placed on the Academy by the Guild.

  Workers across the country were organizing. The labor leader John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, had increased his union’s membership in 1934 from 150,000 to 500,000 and set out to destroy the monopoly the American Federation of Labor had on organized labor.

  A series of violent strikes took place—in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York—as cabdrivers rioted for better wages. Workers struck from California’s lettuce farms to New Jersey’s tomato fields. Electrical workers in Des Moines shut down the city’s electricity for almost 200,000 residents; workers in Terre Haute picketed, as did copper miners in Butte, closing down the mines for months. In New York, the Waldorf Astoria’s cooks, waiters, and busboys picketed on Park Avenue, carrying placards and singing “The Internationale.” In Minneapolis truck drivers walked out, establishing the Teamsters as the most powerful union in the Northwest; in San Francisco, ship dockers shut down plants, theaters, and restaurants, blockaded highways, and stopped incoming shipments of food and fuel oil. The largest strike ever started on Labor Day; textile workers shut down the industry in twenty states.

  Members of the Screen Actors Guild were warned not to agree to academy arbitration of disputes under the new studio-player contract.

  • • •

  Frank Fay hated Roosevelt, Communism, unions, and Jews. Frank Capra backed the academy against the guild and admired Mussolini and his stance against Communism. “[Capra] adored him,” said John Lee Mahin. He “had a picture of the Prime Minister on his bedroom wall.”

  • • •

  In addition to being tested for The Good Earth, Barbara was approached by New York’s Theatre Guild for a stage production of James M. Cain’s novel of deceit, violence, love, and death, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Metro had bought the rights to the novel in the spring of 1934 for $35,000. When the Motion Picture Code banned Cain’s story of adultery and murder for the screen, the Theatre Guild picked up the dramatic rights from Metro.

  Cain had written the play, and Barbara was at the top of his list for the part of Cora, wife of Nick Papadakis, owner of a roadside sandwich joint and gas station. Cora is sulky, a former high school beauty-contest winner from Des Moines who wins a trip to Hollywood, tries her hand at pictures (“On the screen they knew me for what I was, a cheap Des Moines trollop”), and two weeks later winds up in a Los Angeles hash house where she stays for the next two years. Desperate to get away from the diner’s leg pinching and nickel tips, she ends up married to Nick the Greek, cooking at his Twin Oaks luncheonette twenty miles outside the city. Cora’s a hellcat; she falls for a drifter who falls for her. She’s desperate to get out of her marriage (she says of her husband, “He stinks. He’s greasy and he stinks”) and desperate to be with the drifter (“That’s it, Frank, that’s all that matters . . . You and me”); and together they set out to kill the Greek.

  Cora is tough and raw and angry in the way Barbara’s women are in Ladies of Leisure, Night Nurse, Ten Cents a Dance, Shopworn, Ladies They Talk About, and Baby Face. Much of Cora’s dialogue sounds like characters Barbara played in each of her Warner pictures, with Barbara’s inflection and sexual come-on, sultriness, and control.

  Cain saw Barbara as “a saucy little number” and talked to her about the part. Between Barbara’s demand that the studios allow her to pick the story and director for her pictures, her insistence that Fay be included in any contract she sign, and Fay’s string of failed pictures, Barbara couldn’t “give herself away,” she said. She thought seriously about Cain’s offer to return to the stage.

  SEVEN

  Average Screenfare

  1935

  You can’t be bubbly when the man you love is more often enchanted by alcohol than you.

  What is needed to hold a married couple together is horse intelligence . . . Lasting marriage is not a question of geography. The chances are as good, and as bad, in Hollywood as in any other town. No more. No less.

  —Barbara Stanwyck

  Dion, at three years old, saw his father at his most frightening. He and his nurse, Nellie Banner, were playing on the lawn one day when Frank walked over to join them. He was drunk and fell on his face in a stupor. Another time Dion and Nellie were returning from an outing. Dion walked into the house. There was a terrible noise. Nellie looked up to see Fay falling down the stairs, drunk, and she grabbed Dion just as Fay was about to land on him.

  She was upset and jangled by the “vile language” Fay used around the child and was terrified of him but stayed on at Bristol Avenue out of affection for Barbara and her devotion to Dion.

  Fay went into the nursery at odd hours, usually early in the morning, and woke the sleeping boy. Nellie was awakened as well and would try to persuade Fay to leave the nursery.

  Dion was about to go to sleep one night when Nellie saw that the rug next to his bed was on fire. She grabbed some water and rushed into the room to put it out. A cigarette was on the rug where the fire had started. Frank was the only person who smoked in the nursery.

  Nellie Banner with Dion Fay, then three years old, 1935. (COURTESY TONY FAY)

  Warner had dropped Barbara. Fay was too difficult. The word was out. There was no work; no studio would hire her.

  Barbara was trying to keep it together—her home, her marriage, her work. She pleaded with her brother, Byron, to leave the merchant marine and come and live with her. Byron had no interest in living in Hollywood.

  Warner Bros. continued to list Barbara as one of its stars along with James Cagney, Kay
Francis, Dick Powell, Leslie Howard, Ruth Chatterton, and others.

  Sam Jaffe, Barbara’s agent, along with Arthur Lyons, was in negotiations with Fox for a picture called Orchids to You, a title taken from Walter Winchell’s column. William Seiter was to direct; Clive Brook, to co-star. The picture was to go into production sometime in April. Fox was offering Barbara $7,000 a week with a five-week guarantee. Jaffe was asking $50,000 for the picture; Barbara wanted $55,000.

  Carl Laemmle Jr. was negotiating with Lyons for Barbara to play the lead in Hangover Murders, based on a novel by Adam Hobhouse, to be directed by James Whale. At issue was money.

  Lyons and Sam Jaffe were also in negotiation on Barbara’s behalf with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Walter Wanger Productions, Monogram Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and Radio Pictures.

  Other films were being discussed. Jesse Lasky had an idea that appealed to her for a picture about a department store. The novelist, playwright, and short story writer Viña Delmar (Alvina Croter) also had something for Barbara. Delmar had written two novels that were considered “daring realism”—Bad Girl and Kept Woman (“Is it daring to tell the simple facts of living and getting along in the world?” Delmar asked)—about couples living unconventionally. Delmar and her husband, Eugene, wrote scripts under her name.

  Barbara was performing on radio. The studios had first resisted radio, seeing it as a competitive medium, but they came to use it as a way to help promote their “players” and help sell theater tickets. For the first time shows about motion pictures were being put on the air. The program 45 Minutes in Hollywood dramatized soon-to-be-released pictures and featured interviews with the stars of the films. Hollywood Hotel, a variety show, was broadcast direct from Los Angeles and included dramatized excerpts from upcoming pictures using the actual stars. During 1934, more than 150 top actors appeared on radio, from Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard to Paul Muni, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, and Joel McCrea. Frank Fay was appearing regularly on Rudy Vallée’s Fleischmann Hour.

  Barbara was taken with the medium. “Radio puts you into higher gear mentally,” she said. “Everything you do must be done perfectly . . . You concentrate on every word, on every line, you rehearse and rehearse modulation, inflection. Radio does not tolerate error, even the slightest.”

  Barbara and Fay were on the air together during the broadcast of an industry banquet with Eddie Cantor and Harry Einstein as radio hosts. In attendance, and chatting over the air during the evening, were Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Will Hays, Jack Benny, David Selznick, Irving Berlin, Howard Hughes, Sam Goldwyn, and Merle Oberon.

  In mid-March, The Woman in Red opened at the Warner Bros. Downtown Theatre in Los Angeles and at the Roxy in New York. It was Barbara’s nineteenth picture in five years. She may have been deemed unhireable by the studios, but in the press she was “still the screen’s mistress in the art of telling the world where to get off.” The Los Angeles Examiner summed it up: Barbara Stanwyck “waves bye-bye to Warner Brothers as The Woman in Red. [Her] last is not her best vehicle. Neither is it her worst. [It] is average screenfare.”

  “Average screenfare” is what she was making, and no work was coming her way.

  • • •

  Barbara was introduced to Marion and Zeppo Marx. Zeppo (Herbert Manfred Marx) had been the youngest member of the Four Marx Brothers, appearing in vaudeville; on Broadway in I’ll Say She Is and in the hit sensation The Cocoanuts; and in five Marx Brothers pictures, including Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers. After being one of the Brothers for seventeen years, he had quit and opened a theatrical agency called Zeppo Marx Inc.

  The Marx Brothers minus Milton (Gummo), 1924 (from left to right): Adolph, later Arthur (Harpo), at thirty-six years old; Herbert (Zeppo), at twenty-three; Leonard (Chico), at thirty-seven; and (seated) Julius Henry (Groucho), at thirty-four.

  Zeppo originally joined the Four Marx Brothers when his next older brother, Gummo, his senior by eight years, was conscripted by the army to fight in the Great War. Zeppo was sixteen and working as a mechanic for the Ford Motor Company when the call came from his mother, Minnie Schönberg Marx, instructing him to quit his job, come home immediately, pack his bags, and go to Rockford, Illinois. “I want the name of the Marx Brothers intact,” she told Zeppo in German, the language spoken in the house. “We started that way and we’re getting along pretty good,” she said.

  Zeppo had performed a little onstage—singing and dancing—but like Gummo before him, Zeppo, as the fourth Marx Brother, was to be the straight man. After the war, Zeppo officially took Gummo’s place in the act. Said Gummo, “I preferred to sell dresses,” which he did in New York at 1375 Broadway. “I never felt at home on the stage,” Gummo said. “I was only on for eleven years. I was goddamn lucky to get out.”

  Five years after joining the Marx Brothers, Herbert, along with Leonard, Adolph, Julius, and Milton, became Zeppo, Chico, Harpo, Groucho, and Gummo. Zeppo explained the derivation of their names: “Chico because if you chased girls a lot, they were called ‘chicken chasers’; Harpo because of the harp; Groucho (‘impudent cad’) because of his funereal look; Gummo wore rubbers—gumshoe, because he was always afraid it was going to rain and his regular shoes had holes in them. Zeppo was from the zeppelin, the graf zeppelin.” It is also said that Zeppo’s name came from the way he dealt cards—with a rapid spin that dropped the card in front of the player like a golf ball falling dead to the pin.

  Of Zeppo’s character onstage, one critic wrote, “I wonder what Zeppo thinks about as he watches his brothers in their popular pranks, while he himself is not permitted to play with them.” Groucho described Zeppo’s character in the act as the “handsome, wooden, slightly obtuse, fill-in . . . [who] brought logic to a basically illogical story and was often an intrusion” and who most of the time only had to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” “It’s not that he didn’t have the talent,” said Groucho, “he simply had three older brothers.”

  During one vaudeville circuit tour, Jack Benny was to go onstage after the Marx Brothers (“Nobody could follow the Marx Bros.,” said Benny. “It was impossible.”) Throughout the tour, Benny roomed with Zeppo. “Zeppo off stage was like Groucho on,” said Benny. “He was the funniest of the four.” Benny laughed so hard around Zeppo he could hardly catch his breath.

  Zeppo was handsome, athletic, a bodybuilder. He was “completely different from the rest of us,” said Gummo. Zeppo was the most independent of the five brothers (there had been six Marx boys: Minnie’s firstborn son, Manfred, died at seven months). Zeppo had an explosive temper, like his mother, that could be set off at any time.

  “I was a real bad boy,” Zeppo said. Becoming the fourth Marx Brother saved his life. “Good thing I did,” he said. “Else I’d have gone to jail. I was a kid, but I carried a gun and I stole automobiles,” he said. “I was real bad.”

  Zeppo was adept with his hands and with things mechanical. “Zeppo could take an engine apart,” said Groucho. “Grind the valves, adjust the timing and clean out the carbon with no more fuss or effort than I would use in sharpening a pencil.” He had a talent for invention, coming up with the idea of a single-blade shaver and shaving cream that came out of an aerosol can instead of soap in a jar that had to be whipped. He designed a bottle that was filled with a cream that rolls on under the arm to control perspiration.

  By January 1934, after seventeen years as “an appendage to a fraternity already overladen,” being paid a salary rather than being an equal partner in the Four Marx Brothers, Zeppo had had enough.

  Production was about to begin at Metro on A Night at the Opera, Zeppo’s sixth picture. “I’m sick and tired of being a stooge,” Zeppo told Groucho.

  After Zeppo left the act, he knew he had to do something related to show business, which he’d come to know so well. He bought out a partnership in a theatrical agency with Frank Orsatti and Milton Bren, which became Bren, Orsatti & Marx. Orsatti’s family and Frank Capr
a’s had come from Italy together in steerage.

  Zeppo worked with the Bren, Orsatti & Marx agency for four months until the partners’ arguing forced them to dissolve the business and Zeppo started his own agency. Within seven weeks he set up Zeppo Inc. at 9201 Sunset Boulevard.

  Zeppo, Harpo, and Gummo, along with Beatrice Kaufman, wife of George and former press agent for the Talmadge sisters, wanted to incorporate as a producing organization for Broadway plays. Kaufman was a reader for Al Woods and was as well a playwright and editorial director for Boni & Liveright. She had been the editor of T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Faulkner, Steinbeck, O’Neill, and others. Marx hired Donald Friede, former editor at Liveright and co-founding publisher of Covici, Friede, as his story editor in Los Angeles; Gummo was in charge of the New York branch of the office.

  Zeppo’s first client was Alexander Woollcott, the drama critic and editorial writer. Marx negotiated a deal for Woollcott with Radio Pictures, which wanted him not as a writer but as a radio personality for its upcoming picture Radio City Revels, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. There were those who saw Woollcott less as a critic than as an amusing hysteric.

  Within a short time Zeppo’s clients included Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, and the comedy writer Norman Krasna.

  • • •

  Barbara liked Zeppo. He could be brusque, cutting, rude, but he could just as easily be charming and the funniest man at the party. Zeppo and Barbara shared a similar past. They’d both grown up on the streets (she in Brooklyn; he in Chicago); they’d each appeared onstage on Broadway and traveled across the country playing in one city after another. For Zeppo, the days on the circuit were “hectic . . . difficult.” The Marx Brothers worked “in the cheapest vaudeville theaters,” he said. They did their act five times a day. Every hour or every hour and a half they’d come onstage again because they’d be continuous. Later, when the theater became a movie house, the Marx Brothers did their act, and the theater would run a movie. The next live show would start again with four or five shows a day.