• • •
The studio made sure a disclaimer went out in its publicity about the picture stating that “Red Salute [its final title] is not intended to be a propaganda film in any sense of the word . . . it may start a cycle of similar films which will arouse both the man of the street and the intellectual to discussion of modern day modes of living, but this was not our aim and should not be your selling attack to the public.”
There is a moment in the picture when the girl’s father is pressuring a high government official to get the young man thrown out of the country. The general is told that the young man has four months left on his one-year student visa, even though the official has “more than a suspicion [the agitator] is a paid propagandist.” The general is outraged that the “student” is allowed to stay in the country and “preach revolution.” The official quietly interjects the one true subversive moment in the picture: “You’re forgetting, General, that some very wise Americans once preached revolution. Of a different sort, I grant you, but Washington and Patrick Henry left us the sacred right of free speech.”
What Runaway Daughter didn’t have was the spirit and buoyancy, the wit and sexy kick, of Capra’s It Happened One Night. The journey of general’s daughter and buck private isn’t one toward freedom; her notions don’t transform him or set him free from his regimented small thinking. Instead, his beliefs—conventional to the core—ideas she’s been raised on and attempted (almost successfully) to flee, reel her back. It Happened One Night is full of hope and promise of new ideas. Runaway Daughter is a warning not to stray from the conventional, as rigidly set as the military; those who conform and abide by rules and regulations will be rewarded.
Barbara seemed unsure of herself in the picture: her wisecracks, which she says from the perch of a worldly, rich, anointed sophisticate, seem too lofty to be funny or felt; and while she moves with ease from humor to tenderness and feeling, she doesn’t seem engaged in it, in large part because she wasn’t challenged by Robert Young. His character wants to go west toward Singapore; hers, east to Washington; and that’s the route their sparring takes, each going in an opposite direction, bypassing the other, not clicking. Young’s barking and he-man stuff aren’t playful or sexy, and his Scoutmaster conventionality takes the shimmer out of Barbara. The flatness of her work made it seem as if she were hardly in it at all instead of being the heartbeat of the piece.
• • •
During production of Runaway Daughter at United Artists, Barbara signed a contract with Paramount. She would be working with Lewis Milestone, director of All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, Rain, and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, and have her choice of two pictures: Invitation to Happiness by Franz Schulz and Arnold Belgard or Ferenc Molnár’s The Pastry Baker’s Wife [The Guardsmen].
The two-year-old 20th Century Pictures merged with the Fox Film Corporation. The new 20th Century–Fox had Joseph Schenck as chairman of the board (at a salary of $130,000) and Sidney Kent as president (at $180,000). Darryl Zanuck at thirty-two became the sole head of production of 20th Century–Fox and owner of 20 percent of the company with a salary of $265,000, responsible for producing sixty pictures a year with a budget of $20 million.
Those remaining at United Artists were Edward Small, Samuel Goldwyn (Schenck and Goldwyn hadn’t spoken in months), and Charles Chaplin. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had no films in the works. Small was producing a few, among them Red Salute.
Zanuck said of his first year and a half at his former fledgling company 20th Century, “The pictures I was working on had to carry the entire United Artists distributing organization. I had to carry the whole goddamn load.” Zanuck and Schenck realized that a large share of receipts for their eighteen pictures—The Bowery, The House of Rothschild, Cardinal Richelieu, Les Misérables, among them—was being appropriated by United Artists. “While King Fairbanks was worrying about how best to dump Queen Pickford,” said Zanuck, “there was no one around the place making films but us. Meanwhile they were helping themselves to our profits and socking us for their expenses.”
Fox Movietone City on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, with its ninety-six-acre lot (nearly twice the size of Metro’s)—house fronts, gardens, a synthetic jungle, five miles of Manhattan streets, midwestern streets, a replica of Berkeley Square in London—was part of the new company. There were twelve soundstages (seven new stages were to be built once 20th Century moved from the United Artists lot to the Fox lot; Warner Bros. had seventeen soundstages with six more under construction). Fox owned fifteen hundred theaters in the United States and England as well as its distribution facilities. The studio had thirty-seven cameras (rented from Western Electric), which were to be replaced, and forty-two artists, of which only three—Shirley Temple, Will Rogers, and Janet Gaynor—were box-office successes. It also had Warner Oland, whose Charlie Chan pictures were dependable moneymakers.
From 20th Century, Zanuck brought with him Fredric March, Ronald Colman, Loretta Young, Wallace Beery, George Raft, and Jack Oakie.
The newly merged 20th Century–Fox moved into second place after Loew’s Inc., which netted around $7.5 million a year. Had Paramount not gone bankrupt in 1933, it would have followed Loew’s in terms of earning power. Warner Bros. had just begun to show a small profit. RKO was in receivership.
• • •
Zeppo Marx heard that Jean Arthur had turned down the role of Annie Oakley for RKO’s Shooting Star. Arthur had just finished her fourth picture in seven months. Marx suggested to the RKO producer Cliff Reid that Barbara play the part of the legendary “Little Sure Shot.”
Reid had been overseeing pictures at Radio Pictures for a year, twelve in all, including The Three Musketeers and John Ford’s Lost Patrol and his latest, The Informer, just released.
George Stevens was directing Shooting Star. Reid liked the idea of Barbara as the backwoods girl who became the world’s renowned champion marksman. Barbara was taken with the part. She saw Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses), the Quaker girl from Darke County, Ohio, as a “woman of the ages, deeply feminine in spite of all of her shooting ability,” who used her talent with a gun to support her family and become “better at [shooting] than anyone else, male or female . . . She was a show-woman of the highest type and did much to raise the status of all professional women.”
Reid offered Barbara the part, and Marx was able to get her $7,000 a week with a five-week guarantee.
Annie Oakley was the first role to come Barbara’s way since Red Salute. She was desperate to work. “I have to work,” she said. “I have people to support.” Frank and their household were expensive to maintain. In addition, Fay was being sued by Los Angeles County for not declaring $50,000 in stocks and $8,000 in bank deposits. The U.S. government had filed four liens against Bristol Avenue during a four-month period as a result of unpaid back taxes.
Barbara was in negotiations with the rival studios Paramount and Radio-Keith-Orpheum, for one picture each. She wasn’t happy with the contract her longtime agent Arthur Lyons had negotiated with Paramount; neither Invitation to Happiness nor The Pastry Baker’s Wife had been mentioned in her agreement, and as a result the studio felt it wasn’t legally obligated to provide Barbara with either picture. Barbara let Lyons go as her agent and officially hired Zeppo Marx. She notified RKO and now Fox that Zeppo and Walter Kane would be taking over the negotiations for both contracts.
Barbara was on her own, outside the protection of a single studio that built actresses and created them to last, that provided movies one after the other, shaped publicity, created a singular look, and sold the image. Barbara wasn’t protected by that sense of belonging or reassured by it. She found it a constraint.
• • •
The Fays went east for a month of stage appearances to help publicize Barbara’s new contracts with Paramount and RKO. They opened first at the Palace Theatre in Chicago.
Paramount decided not to go ahead with either of the pictures that Barbara had been promised. The s
tudio put forth two additional pictures. One of them, Guns, a story of a prison breakout with Fred MacMurray, was to precede Shooting Star. The other, about an adoption home, based on the Cradle, an institution where Hollywood adopted its children, was not acceptable to Barbara; she didn’t want to appear as if she were capitalizing on Dion’s adoption. She asked for—and was given—her release from her Paramount contract.
In reading about Annie Oakley, Barbara could see parallels between her life and Oakley’s. “I have a sketchy idea of how she felt though I grew up in Brooklyn,” said Barbara. Each woman had been on her own from girlhood. Oakley’s father died when she was six; at eight or nine, she moved in with another family that cared for the elderly, orphans, and the insane. She was indentured; her education was in exchange for caring for unwanted children. Oakley referred to the cruel family as “the Wolves.” “I went all to pieces under the care of a home,” she said.
Oakley, at the age of fourteen, supported herself and her family. She taught herself to hunt small game with her father’s rifle (the first time she shot it, the kick fractured her nose, but she killed the bird). She was so good at not ruining the meat with pellets—she aimed for the head—the game was sold to restaurants and hotels as far as a hundred miles away. She earned enough money from the sales to pay off in cash the mortgage on her mother’s farm.
Both actress and champion shooter wanted to be the best they could be, man’s world or not. Oakley at sixteen was able to outshoot the Irishman Frank Butler shot for shot. Butler was one of the best marksmen in the country. Oakley married him, defying her own statement “You can’t get a man with a gun, that’s for sure.”
Each woman became more famous than her celebrated husband. Oakley got top billing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The great Western scout and showman signed her up in fifteen minutes and always called her “Missy.” The Butlers traveled with the show from 1883 to 1913, and on a tour in England during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee it was Annie Oakley the crowds came to watch; as in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and finally Russia, at a shooting match with Grand Duke Michael.
Oakley could shoot a playing card in midair thirteen times before it hit the ground; she could hit a dime with her rifle held high above her head. She once shot flying balls for nine hours straight, using three 16-gauge hammer shotguns, which she loaded herself, breaking 4,772 balls out of 5,000; and in Berlin, she shot a cigarette from the mouth of Crown Prince Wilhelm.
Miss Annie Oakley, 1899, champion rifle shot at thirty-nine years old. She used, at various times, two Lancaster guns, one Scott, one Parker, each with twenty-eight-inch barrels. Her famous Killdeer rifle was a gift from Buffalo Bill (he called her “Missy”). “Shooting is a splendid exercise,” she said. “You can figure it out this way. My gun weighs seven pounds and I shoot somewhere around 150 shots a day. That means I lift 1,000 pounds a day.” She fired more than two million shots in her lifetime. (PHOTO BY RICHARD K. FOX, AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
She was known as Annie Oakley, Sharpshooting Star, but in private she was always Mrs. Frank Butler. Each woman guarded against having her fame interfere with her marriage; each felt as if her husband had “really reared” her; that husband and wife were outside society. (“We’re not fashionable,” said Mrs. Frank Butler. “We’ve never been to Reno.”)
Each woman was childless; each had felt like an orphan; each embraced children who were unwanted; it was said that Oakley raised and educated eighteen orphan girls.
“She wasn’t born with a silver spoon,” said Barbara. “She earned her own living and provided for her widowed mother and four siblings by shooting quail and sending them to Chicago markets. It couldn’t have been much fun,” she said, “but it was the only thing that she could do and she managed to do it better than anyone else.” Barbara “wanted so much to play Annie Oakley,” she said, “because she had courage.”
Annie Oakley performed for crowned heads across Europe, “but it didn’t turn her head,” said Barbara. “I have been successful within a smaller scope, but I don’t think I’m high-hat because of it.”
• • •
Barbara had loved the Westerns as a child. The idea of the West being settled thrilled her and she’d read countless books about it. It was even more exciting for her to re-create it on film, “to become a part of the past,” she said, with spectacle, showmanship, and all the action in those lives.
To make the picture, Barbara was loaned the saddle Annie Oakley used during her fourteen years with Buffalo Bill, which she left after her death to her longtime friend Fred Stone—they’d ridden in the circus together—and which he left to his daughter, who at age twelve was taught to shoot by the champion markswoman. (THE KOBAL COLLECTION)
“The immigrants coming over on covered wagons, and atop the trains were America’s royalty. Our aristocracy,” said Barbara. “They broke the trails through unbelievable hardships to conquer the land.”
• • •
Production on Shooting Star was to start the first few days in August. The script had been okayed by the Breen Office with only two suggestions: take out a scene of a spitting contest and Sitting Bull’s “burp.” Each was cut.
Despite Barbara’s having been gun-shy all her life, in the weeks before she was to start work, she learned to shoot a shotgun and rifle from Captain A. H. Hardy, one of America’s best pistol, rifle, and trick shots. Hardy had an unequaled record of successfully hitting more than thirteen thousand two-and-a-quarter-inch wooden balls twenty feet in the air with a Marlin .22 repeating rifle.
Barbara would be using Annie Oakley’s own saddle, with its silver mountings and hand-carved leather, lent to her for the picture by the daughter of one of Oakley’s closest friends.
• • •
As Barbara prepared for Shooting Star, her marriage was slipping out of her control.
One night in July, she had dinner at Zeppo and Marion Marx’s. Afterward, the three went to Minsky’s burlesque show, which was playing in Hollywood. The next day Barbara and Dion were standing near the pool. Frank was angry with her for having spent the evening with Zeppo and Marion. He began to argue with her and punched her in the face. She collapsed on the ground. Nellie grabbed Dion and ran into the house.
Barbara was terrified of Fay, but she was about to start a new picture and couldn’t afford to disrupt her life. She did nothing to change things and showed up for work on Shooting Star. A few days into production, Barbara went home at the end of the day. Fay was drunk and argumentative. He hit her and knocked her down the staircase.
She knew she had to get out. She was lucky to be alive.
She waited until Dion was asleep. Fay was nowhere around. She told Nellie to get the boy. A high cement wall with a side gate surrounded the Bristol Avenue estate. Barbara told Nellie to meet her there. She went to the garage and started one of the cars. She drove it to the outside corner of the property and waited for Nellie and Dion.
Barbara took with her only what she was wearing. In her six years in pictures from 1929 to 1935, Barbara had earned more than $1 million, most of it spent on their elaborate compound. Money and possessions had no meaning to her now. She and Dion had to get out before Fay discovered what was happening.
Nellie came to the gate, and the sleepy boy and nurse got into the car. Barbara drove off; her only thought: to get away from Frank and Bristol Avenue and make it to Marion and Zeppo’s and to safety.
NINE
Practical Policies
1935
I’m only brave when I’m being paid for it.
—Barbara Stanwyck
As soon as Barbara, Dion, and Nellie arrived at the Marxes’, Barbara called her sister Maud back east. It was early in the morning in Brooklyn. Gene Vaslett, Barbara’s nephew, was home from Notre Dame and was staying with the Merkents for the summer. Fay had helped Gene get into Notre Dame, writing, on his behalf, to Frank Hering, founder of the Eagles fraternal organization and a former Notre Dame football coach.
Gene a
nswered the phone and put Maud on right away. Barbara told her sister what had happened and asked her to come out to California. Maud agreed and later that day flew out to Los Angeles.
Fay returned to Bristol Avenue and realized that Barbara had taken the boy and left. In the midst of his ranting, he reassured himself that she would come back, as she had the other times she’d left him.
Barbara felt safe with the Marxes (to Dion, the Marxes were Aunt Marion and Uncle Zipper), but she was devastated about the breakup of her marriage. She wanted her brother to be with her. She was terrified but went back to work as if nothing had changed in her life.
“You pay a price for everything in this world,” she said. “The price you pay for being a star is that you must learn to leave all your personal troubles behind you when you walk on to a set. Invariably, the star’s mood is reflected on the entire company. He or she, as the case may be, sets the pace.”
Barbara behaved accordingly. She was thrilled to be playing Annie Oakley—she was a great character—and saw the role as a new start.
Oakley had been called Watanya Cicilla—Little Sure Shot—by Sitting Bull, the great Sioux medicine man who successfully led three thousand Sioux and Cheyenne against General Custer’s attack in 1876 of the great Sioux camp near the Little Big Horn. Sitting Bull was awed by what Oakley could do and became her lifelong friend and adopted her as a member of the Hunkpapa Lakota and as a daughter.
Firsthand reminiscences were incorporated into the script. Sitting Bull was played by the sixty-nine-year-old chief Thunderbird of the Cheyenne, who, as a boy of ten, had known Bull during the time of the Custer massacre and whose older brother had traveled with the original Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. In 1860, Thunderbird’s father had been priest-chief of all the North American Cheyenne, consisting of five thousand warriors; his mother was a warrior priestess of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 50
