Zeppo and Marion Marx, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, 1933. (CORBIS)
Barbara and Zeppo considered themselves “change-of-life babies,” each with much older siblings. Barbara liked Zeppo’s wit, his drive, his unstoppable need to prove himself, which was similar to hers.
He never finished grammar school, and like Barbara, whatever education he had, he “learned from travelling and meeting people and picking up things.”
And like Barbara’s mother, Zeppo’s mother wanted her boys to perform. “She couldn’t do a damn thing,” said Zeppo. “Couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance, couldn’t act. But she had that bug for someone.” Zeppo’s grandfather and grandmother were performers in Germany, gypsies. His grandfather was a wandering magician and legerdemain artist; his grandmother, a harpist—who passed her instrument on to her grandson Adolph, who taught himself to play on it—would play the harp while her husband performed magic. “He’d carry the harp on his back from small town to small town,” said Zeppo. “They’d get out on the street some place and do a little thing and people would throw coins at ’Em.”
Zeppo and his wife, Marion, seemed a perfectly matched couple. She was spontaneous, spirited, a jokester like Zeppo. On a lark, they once borrowed a car from a member of a Los Angeles country club where they were playing cards, drove to the farmers’ market on Fairfax, removed a large street clock, put it in the backseat of the car, drove back to the club, and resumed playing cards. The Los Angeles police tracked the thieves to the country club, found the clock in the car Marion and Zeppo had taken, and arrested the unsuspecting owner for stealing public property.
The Marxes were expert bridge players. He loved to play cards and shoot craps; she was a champion tennis player and was frequently at the racket club. Winning was all to Zeppo. He was quick to get into brawls—which he won. Zeppo gambled as feverishly as Chico, but unlike his older brother of fourteen years who bet to beat the odds, Zeppo bet to win. Growing up, Chico had been a god to Zeppo, but he came to see Chico as a “schmuck” who lost his money, who bet against gamblers and gave them odds he shouldn’t have.
Marion loved clothes and liked to shop, including shopping for Zeppo and making sure he was impeccably dressed. Each day Zeppo left the house, Marion made sure he was wearing the most beautiful suit or sport coat, shirt, and shoes.
Barbara and Marion were drawn to each other instantly, though Marion found Barbara “somewhat baffling.” She thought Barbara was “natural, unaffected; as straightforward as a man; not like many glamour queens,” and was surprised by the actress’s lack of artifice.
The two women looked somewhat alike; they had the same easy manner; each was quiet with a similar sense of humor; each had the same dramatic trick of lowering her eyes; each was shy and had a hard time making conversation. “On screen Barbara is emotional and demonstrative,” said Marion. “Off screen she’s inclined to be withdrawn and remote except with close friends.” Marion found Barbara “talkative, especially on any theatrical topic,” with one or two people. In a group of people Barbara was “the best listener present. She talks little and quickly.”
After Walda Mansfield and Mae Clarke, Barbara hadn’t made too many women friends.
Marion saw how upset Barbara was with her marriage. “Her eyes lacked luster,” said Marion. “Barbara acted like she was walking around dead, like a regular Zombie.”
Barbara was drawn to both husband and wife for their sense of fun. Zeppo saw the situation Barbara was in with Frank, and her career, and wanted to help her.
• • •
He set out to find a picture for Fay. It had been five years since he’d made the still-unreleased A Fool’s Advice.
In addition to clients like Barbara and Fay, Zeppo found clients who were undiscovered. He’d just settled a suit over a client involving Barbara’s longtime agent, Arthur Lyons, regarding a young musician, Fred MacMurray, who Marx thought had great potential as an actor and wanted to represent. Arthur Lyons had been the president of the Theatrical Artists Representatives Association and had become one of the biggest agents in Hollywood, representing everyone from Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone to George and Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill. He’d represented the Fays in New York. When Lyons had taken MacMurray on as a client, he was getting $61 a week as a saxophone player. Lyons negotiated a contract for MacMurray with Paramount Pictures for $250 a week.
Zeppo met MacMurray, liked his looks, and thought he could help the fledgling actor. MacMurray left Lyons and signed with Marx.
The actor was then earning $600 a week at Paramount, but the studio wasn’t using him; they had no idea Fred MacMurray was on the lot. “This boy has a great, great potential,” Marx had said to one of the Paramount executives. The studio said it didn’t have any parts for the actor.
Marx went to RKO and told Cliff Reid, a producer of inexpensive pictures, about MacMurray. “If you could find a little something for him to do in a picture,” Marx said, “you can borrow him from Paramount. It’ll help this boy. It’ll help me.”
“Bring him over and let me look at him,” Reid told Marx.
The producer liked MacMurray’s looks.
“He had never acted,” said Marx, “never said a word before.”
Marx had Reid call Paramount. “You have a boy over there,” Reid said, “that we would like to use in a movie.”
“We’ve never heard of him,” Paramount said of MacMurray.
“Well, he’s on the lot,” said Reid.
RKO and Paramount made the deal. MacMurray went to RKO and was put in Grand Old Girl with May Robson.
Marx then had Cliff Reid call over to Paramount to see if the studio would sell MacMurray’s contract. “Paramount said, ‘Of course not,’ ” said Marx. “They still didn’t know who MacMurray was but they renewed his contract for another year. I bought a year’s time to do something with him.”
In addition to MacMurray, Marx had signed Ray Milland as a client and now suggested both actors for a picture with Claudette Colbert to be directed by Wesley Ruggles. Each was hired; the picture, The Gilded Lily, was a big hit. Afterward, Marx went to the front office at Paramount and got each actor a new seven-year contract. “Both of them for a million and a half,” said Marx.
• • •
Much to Fay’s fury, Barbara began to spend evenings with Marion and Zeppo. The Marxes and others were invited to the Fays’ for dinner one evening. The guests had just arrived at Bristol Avenue, and Barbara was greeting them in the foyer. Fay came in through the kitchen and was on his way to his bedroom using the back stairs. He looked down from the second-floor landing, unzipped his fly, and relieved himself on the heads of Barbara’s guests.
Fred MacMurray, Claudette Colbert, and Ray Milland, in Wesley Ruggles’s The Gilded Lily (1935), a romantic lark intended to duplicate the warmth, humor, and merriment of It Happened One Night, released a year earlier. MacMurray’s charm and naturalness on screen promised to make him, said the New York Times, “one of the most popular of the cinema’s glamour men within the next few months.” (PHOTOFEST)
Fay had started to hit her. He criticized his son at every turn. Dion and Nanny were near the swimming pool one day. Fay, sober, told Nellie to put Dion in the water.
“He was already in the water,” she said.
Fay looked at Dion and said, “Get in the water.”
Dion moved closer to Nellie.
“God damn you,” said Fay. “You never do anything I tell you to do.”
Fay picked up the three-year-old boy and threw him in the pool. Dion went under. He was wearing a harness, and Nellie pulled him out of the water up to the wall of the pool. Dion was crying, terrified.
Things deteriorated to such a point with Frank that Barbara one day took Dion and Nanny and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel without officially registering. She was wearing clothes to disguise herself. She, her son, and Nellie got into the hotel elevator. Gene Raymond and his wife, Jeanette MacDonald, also in the elevator, weren’t taken in by B
arbara’s disguise and said how happy they were to see her; small talk was exchanged. Nothing was said of Barbara’s getup. She realized, though, that word would spread that she was in the hotel and, not wanting to attract any publicity, checked out with Dion and Nellie in tow. Believing she had few options, she returned to Bristol Avenue.
Afterward, Barbara told Nellie to keep a bag packed at all times.
During another bout with Frank, Barbara ran to Joan Crawford’s North Bristol Avenue house. Joan and Barbara had shared New York days together when each was a floor show dancer in clubs. Joan kept a framed hand-tinted small photograph of Ruby Stevens from those early days when the high-kicking Billie Cassin, Shubert chorine with bangs and frizzy hair in the too-tight over-the-hip dresses, danced the Charleston, said Louise Brooks, like “a lady wrestler.” Billie was now living in Brentwood, in a seven-room house, originally styled with grilled Spanish doorways and arches remade in a Georgian formal style. The house had been expanded to ten rooms, not including servants’ quarters, with a theater that seated twenty-five for Joan’s workshops of one-act plays, which she performed with her husband, Franchot Tone.
The house’s living room, playroom, and dining room, much like Barbara’s bedroom, were done in austere white—white walls, white furniture, white flowers. Joan was now elegantly dressed, correct to the last pearl. Joan had a special affection for Barbara and was able to comfort her—for the moment—about her troubles with Frank.
EIGHT
“Little Sure Shot”
1935
Eddie Small, an independent producer, asked Barbara to make a comedy called The Runaway Daughter. Small was a former talent agent who, with his brother Morris, ran his own agency in the 1920s and had started Reliance Pictures in 1932, distributed by United Artists. Small was an ignorant man with good instincts and hunches who had produced several films, among them I Cover the Waterfront and The Count of Monte Cristo, that had made him rich.
Barbara hadn’t worked in six months.
“[Eddie] called me,” said Barbara, “because Constance Cummings, whom he really wanted, refused to be separated [that] long from her husband, Benn Levy, who was in England.”
The Runaway Daughter was Reliance’s answer to Capra’s recent hit It Happened One Night. Capra’s picture about a runaway heiress who falls in love with a tough out-of-work newspaper reporter desperately in need of a story and who sees in her the scoop he’s after to get back his job had, said the critics, “plenty of laughs” but was called “improbable” and “preposterous.”
It Happened One Night set a house record on its opening day at Radio City Music Hall in February 1934 and grossed $90,000 its first week. The picture was considered a disappointment and after the second week was pulled in cities across the country. Its success was made in small towns across America, where the picture continued its run for weeks. It played for the next year, into 1935, bringing in $1 million, more money for Columbia than any other picture in the studio’s six-year existence.
Eddie Small’s Capra-like production of Runaway Daughter was a romantic comedy about a spoiled young woman, expelled from college after falling in love with a fellow classmate and campus agitator who wins her over to the radical side. Her father, a U.S. Army general, has her whisked off against her will to a Mexican border town in the hope of separating the two lovers and saving the young heiress from youthful folly and further scandal. She’s hell-bent on getting back to Washington and to her comrade-in-arms and, after losing her last $5 at a gambling house, tricks a handsome young American buck private, returning from leave, into helping her get across the border and back to Washington. Their means of travel: a ramshackle auto trailer being driven by a henpecked husband in on the adventure and happily on the lam from his nagging wife, also in hot pursuit, along with the law, who are after the runaway daughter. On the bumpy road to the USA and points north, madcappery ensues, and buck private and general’s daughter fall head over heels.
It Happened One Night had been released a year and a half before and had been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In a stunning victory for Capra it had been the winner in each of the five categories: Capra for Best Director; Robert Riskin for Best Writing, Adaptation; Clark Gable for Best Actor; Claudette Colbert for Best Actress (against Grace Moore in One Night of Love, Norma Shearer in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage). Davis had been added to the list (the academy had overlooked nominating her) only after the press had demanded to see the tabulation (the academy refused) and after the write-in ballots were so persistent the academy was forced to change its rules and allow a write-in candidate to be included on the list of nominees.
• • •
Barbara wanted and needed to work, but she hesitated playing comedy; she didn’t know if she could do it. Marion Marx said of her new friend, “[Barbara] has a terrific sense of humor—she’s forever flinging verbal barbs at herself.” It took Zeppo weeks to persuade her to try comedy on the screen.
Zeppo had an instinct for knowing who could play for comedy. He was so funny himself that Groucho was competitive with him. Their humor was alike. Zeppo was an uncanny mimic; once, in Chicago, Zeppo went onstage in Groucho’s stead when he was sick with the flu. Zeppo was so convincing as Groucho the audience was unaware that the best known of the Marx Brothers was in a hotel room sick in bed. Groucho got word of what had happened onstage, got himself up, and went back to work. Zeppo was never again given the chance to fill in for his brother.
Capra said, “Actors don’t like comedies much. They’re not dynamic like melodramas—nobody gets hurt, nobody gets killed, nobody gets raped.”
The romantic aspect of Barbara’s relationship with Capra had ended a year before he made It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert was offered the picture after Capra was turned down by Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Margaret Sullavan, Constance Bennett, Bette Davis, and Carole Lombard. Colbert agreed to make the picture “mostly to work with Clark” (Gable’s part was originally written for Robert Montgomery, who had turned it down). Columbia was desperate to find a female lead and agreed to pay Colbert $50,000 out of a $325,000 production budget.
Runaway Daughter tried for all of the elements of It Happened One Night: the sharp-tongued rebellious daughter; the father in control of police, politicians, even an army of men, yet helpless in the face of his impossible, indulged little girl; the unassuming young man caught up in the whirlwind of the spoiled girl’s mess who, with his toughness and disdain for everything she’s championing, takes matters in hand the way her father never could (she to the soldier: “Are you giving me orders, Uncle Sam?”; he: “You’ve been giving orders all of your life. Now it’s about time you found out how to take them yourself”); the jabs and wisecracks back and forth between the two (she: “I’m beginning to hate you”; he: “Oh gee. That’s terrible. I think I’ll kill myself”; she: “Why only think about it?”) as he pulls and prods her away from her folly and misguided notions and then falls in love with her; the proletariat means of travel that brings her down from her highfalutin ways and exposes her to common folk whom she comes to love; a cat-and-mouse chase involving the law—and her father—that results in a series of mishaps, missteps, and misunderstandings; even the walls of Jericho, as young soldier and general’s daughter bed down in a barn with only a few rough-hewn boards of an open stall between them.
Robert Young was the soldier, under contract to Metro and on loan-out (Mayer’s advice to Young to improve his career: “Put on a little weight and get more sex”). Hardie Albright was the campus radical; Cliff Edwards (“Ukulele Ike,” who’d sold more than eleven million records of his songs) was the henpecked husband, owner of the trailer. Ruth Donnelly was his ornery wife. Sidney Lanfield, former vaudeville performer brought to Hollywood to be a gag writer at Fox, was the director.
The Runaway Daughter had a surprising element that Capra’s picture didn’t have—a story line involving politics, radicals, campus agitators, “long
hairs,” “Communists” (never addressed as such), attempting to, in her father’s words, “undermine the government, and pervert the minds of the younger generation.”
At the heart of the picture is a general’s daughter who loves a man whose political ideas go against everything her father represents. The general to his daughter about her hero lover: “I’m part of the system he’s fighting. The system hasn’t been so bad for us. It’s given us this home, your dresses, your cars, everything we’ve got.” At a May Day rally, the young man, introduced as “Comrade” before a crowd, says, “As students of a great college you are responsible for the leadership of tomorrow . . . Destroy the old order and take the new. Militarism must be stamped out. To the young men I say, don’t let anyone ever put a soldier’s suit on you.”
With Robert Young (left) and Cliff (“Ukulele Ike”) Edwards in Red Salute, 1935. Edwards played his ukulele on Broadway in Lady Be Good!, appeared in The Ziegfeld Follies, and introduced “Singin’ in the Rain” in his first picture, The Hollywood Revue of 1929. (PHOTOFEST)
The buck private’s response is the picture’s message: “Sure I work for thirty dollars a month. I joined the army just because I happen to be full of that stuff they call—Americanism. The army’s just full of guys like me, guys from the middle west, Yankees from up north. Some of ’Em would stick in the army even if they got no pay at all. They think it’s something to be proud of, being an American soldier. They took the job to protect you and your country in case of trouble and there isn’t a one of them that wouldn’t come through for you.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 49
