• • •
George Stevens, at thirty, was considered one of the best young directors in Hollywood. Shooting Star was his second major picture. Stevens had come to RKO by way of Universal and minor features. He’d been a cameraman on two-reel comedies for Hal Roach, among them Laurel and Hardy pictures, when the two comics were hacks on the Roach lot and were paired to make a picture. At RKO, Stevens directed six pictures in exchange for the chance to direct one big feature. Months before making Shooting Star, he was directing Wheeler and Woolsey comedies for RKO.
Stevens had just finished his first big film, Alice Adams, with RKO’s major star, Katharine Hepburn, a job that had come to him by virtue of a coin toss between Hepburn and Pandro Berman, the head of the studio. The first toss had come up William Wyler. Berman suggested they toss the coin again. It came up George Stevens, which was what Hepburn and Berman wanted from the start.
Alice Adams was a different kind of part for Hepburn. Until then she’d played on-screen strong and stalwart women. Playing a simple, purposely romantic girl was something new for her, and she believed that Stevens would be the best director to help her bring it off.
Every young actor in Hollywood had been considered for the part of the young society man Arthur Russell, who is smitten with her, among them George Brent, Robert Young, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Franchot Tone, Robert Taylor. Zeppo Marx intervened on behalf of his client Fred MacMurray with the picture’s associate producer, Cliff Reid, and the twenty-seven-year-old actor, just out of Men Without Names, got the part.
From George Stevens’s Annie Oakley, 1935. (PHOTOFEST)
Hepburn was paid $55,000 for the picture; Stevens, $11,000; MacMurray, $12,000.
Shooting Star was a chance for Stevens to re-create aspects of the American West he’d experienced firsthand and come to love. He had traveled to Utah at the age of seventeen with Hal Roach as part of a camera crew; he had helped to photograph Rex the wild horse with the compact, rugged Eyemo camera and had befriended the Comanche Indians.
Stevens wanted to make Shooting Star as accurate and realistic as possible; period books and magazines were used to inspire the look of the picture. More than three hundred Indians, recruits from the reservations of the Southwest, were hired by Jim Thorpe, America’s Indian athlete, for the picture. Archival photographs, lent by Oakley’s brother, of Annie Oakley enabled Stevens to reproduce her inspiring feats shooting pennies from the hand of an assistant and puncturing the aces on cards pitched high into the air; other photographs, owned by a bronco rider, trick roper, and arena director who toured with Buffalo Bill for fourteen years, authenticated various scenes.
Preston Foster was Toby Walker, the sharpshooting star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West who outshoots Annie, falls in love with her, and pretends to be her dead-shot rival. Foster had worked with Barbara two years before in Ladies They Talk About. He had just starred in five successive pictures for RKO, among them The Informer, The Arizonan, and The Last Days of Pompeii. Melvyn Douglas was Buffalo Bill’s talent scout who brings Annie Oakley into the troupe and falls in love with her. Douglas had appeared on the stage in Belasco’s Tonight or Never and was brought to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn to make a picture from the same play with Gloria Swanson.
Stevens liked his actors to sit and discuss the characters and read through the script. Barbara played Annie as the unassuming country girl unaware of just how extraordinary her ability is: guileless, full of optimism, going about her business modestly, yet a legend to everyone in the country and beyond. Stevens liked the women of his pictures to be good, simple, true.
In Joel Sayre and John Twist’s script, unlike the historic story, Annie would rather lose the shooting match against Toby Walker than have him risk losing his job. Barbara’s characterization had the same girlish openness, simplicity, and innocence that she used with Edna Ferber’s Selina Peake in So Big.
When one of the crew, a former member of Buffalo Bill’s troupe, first saw Barbara as Annie Oakley on the RKO lot, he could have sworn he was “seeing ‘Little Sure Shot’ again in the flesh, except for the color of her hair.”
Much of Shooting Star was filmed at the RKO Encino Ranch as well as the Tarzana Golf Course. For the spectacular re-creations of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the studio rented space on the Prudential Studios lot across the street and built an arena.
Barbara was exhilarated to be in the midst of the production. Stevens was a gentleman who brought out the best of his actors. His parents had been a leading acting team; his first memory was of actors. Barbara thought Stevens “kind, gracious, patient, an excellent director.” “He was quiet,” she said, “serious, wonderfully gentle, and in the flush of excitement about Alice Adams. It’s always nice to have somebody happy with their work.”
• • •
Barbara’s sister Maud went to the studio each day, even accompanying Barbara on location shooting. Barbara was frightened of Fay and what he might do to her. Charles Cradick, their attorney, had worked out a property settlement with Fay and a visitation agreement regarding Dion.
Barbara had paid for most of the house at 441 Bristol and the furnishings, the books, the cars. She didn’t want any of it. Fay could keep it all.
It was arranged for Fay to see Dion once a week. Nellie was to bring the boy to 441 Bristol in the morning, stay with him during the day, and return with him at the end of the afternoon.
• • •
In late August, Fay went to work at Warner Bros. for two days making a picture from a story by Mildred Cram that was starring the popular singer and tenor James Melton and Jane Froman, both radio personalities making their screen debuts. It was the first film work Fay had had in five years, since making A Fool’s Advice. Zeppo had arranged with Warner Bros. for Fay to appear in Stars over Broadway for $1,000; Warner was to make out a check in Zeppo Marx’s name so there would be no record of Fay receiving the money—this because of the outstanding IRS liens on Bristol Avenue and Barbara’s and Fay’s bank accounts.
In exchange for giving Fay the part in Stars over Broadway, Warner Bros. was free to release A Fool’s Advice—it had purchased the rights to Fay’s film in 1932—in any manner Jack Warner wanted. Fay had sold the studio the picture on condition that it be released under the Warner Bros. banner. Once Jack Warner actually screened it, he decided it couldn’t be released under the agreed-upon terms. Albert Warner couldn’t even remember what they’d done with it. Now that the studio was free to sell A Fool’s Advice any way it saw fit, the picture’s title was changed to Meet the Mayor and was sold for $5,000 to a film distributor in Chicago. Warner was to get 50 percent of the gross receipts once the distributor, B. N. Judell, had recouped his initial payment.
William Keighley—a favorite director of Hal Wallis’s—was at work on Stars over Broadway from the Jerry Wald and Julius Epstein backstage script. Keighley had directed G-Men and Barbara in Ladies They Talk About. He was a pleasant man but didn’t have the humor of a Busby Berkeley, who, with Bobby Connolly, was overseeing the musical numbers of Stars over Broadway. Fay was playing the radio announcer.
• • •
At work on the Warner lot were Mervyn LeRoy, directing Kay Francis in I Found Stella Parish; Bette Davis, Franchot Tone, and Margaret Lindsay shooting Hard Luck Dame; Paul Muni in Enemy of Man; Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, paired for the swashbuckling Captain Blood (when they first met—he, twenty-five, she, eighteen—de Havilland had been “struck dumb” by Flynn’s looks, his bearing, his aura).
After two days of work in late August on Stars over Broadway, Fay went to New York to try out for Jack Curtis’s production of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the same production in which James Cain originally wanted Barbara to star. Cain had been at work on the script for a year. Barbara had decided against taking the part; she needed to have money coming in. It would have taken the Theatre Guild six months to get the play ready, cast, and into production, and Barbara didn’t have the luxury, she said, of waiting “around that
long.”
• • •
One of the objects of Fay’s hate, President Roosevelt, in June 1934, had appointed a committee to come up with proposals for comprehensive social security legislation that would include an old-age pension system, workmen’s compensation, national health insurance, and unemployment insurance.
Shortly after Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he had made Frances Perkins his secretary of labor, the first woman to serve in a U.S. president’s cabinet. Roosevelt wanted a comprehensive social security system that would protect Americans from “the cradle to the grave.” He told Perkins: “I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system. When he begins to grow up, he should know he will have old-age benefits direct from the insurance system to which he will belong all his life. If he is out of work, he gets a benefit. If he is sick or crippled, he gets a benefit.” Five years before, Roosevelt as governor had signed into being New York State’s Old Age Security Act.
Roosevelt believed hunger and unemployment in America were “personal affronts.” He wanted the Social Security Act to be a joint federal-state program financed by an “offset” tax that allowed states to collect 90 percent of the tax themselves and run their own programs; the retirement insurance was financed by a new federal payroll tax of 1 percent.
Roosevelt cautioned Americans, “A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing,” he said in a fireside chat. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism,’ sometimes ‘Communism,’ sometimes ‘Regimentation,’ sometimes ‘Socialism.’ But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical . . .
“I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing—a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals.”
Roosevelt wasn’t interested in “piecemeal” social security legislation. Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Surplus Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration, had hoped that “with one bold stroke we could carry the people with us for sickness and health insurance.” The American Medical Association denounced the notion of national health insurance as “socialized medicine,” as Roosevelt had predicted.
In early August 1935, after making its way through Congress, the Social Security Act—what was left of the original legislation—was signed into law by the president. To get southern support for the bill, congressional leaders drafted the law to deny coverage to many who needed it the most, farm laborers and domestic workers. But it was set up in a way to withstand the test of politics. “We put those payroll contributions there,” said Roosevelt, “so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
Fay believed that anyone who voted for Roosevelt was a son-of-a-bitch Communist.
• • •
Barbara and Fay’s separation was unknown to the press. After years of defying Hollywood’s predictions that the Fay-Stanwyck marriage wouldn’t last, Barbara was not ready to publicly admit that “they”—the Hollywood gossips—had been right. The Fays were still linked at social functions such as the opening night of the Shubert Festival at the Shrine Civic Auditorium of Noël Coward’s operetta Bitter Sweet.
When the news of the Fay-Stanwyck separation finally leaked out, Barbara said to the press, “I feel that we are better apart.”
Fay said, “We are still together under the same roof.”
Fay was sure Barbara would come back to him; it was a matter of time.
• • •
The Shooting Star crew was on location. It was before lunch. Barbara was about to sit down and paused midair as she looked down and saw a tarantula on the ground next to her foot. Her screams pierced the quiet of the forest where they were shooting. A propman killed the spider. Barbara was shaken up and couldn’t eat. “I’m scared stiff of snakes, spiders, flies, of anything that crawls,” she said. It took hours before she was able to calm down.
“I’m only brave when I’m being paid for it,” she said.
At heart Barbara was deeply shaken about Fay: his uncontrollable violence toward her, the way she’d had to flee Bristol Avenue, and the desperate end of their marriage.
Barbara’s hairdresser on the picture—a hairdresser on the RKO lot—was Hollis Barnes. Barbara didn’t pay attention to how her hair looked; she left its design to Holly, who studied the costuming, the period, and the character of Annie Oakley and came up with her own hairstyles using hot curlers or pin curls. To Holly, Barbara had thick, wonderful auburn hair that could take any kind of set or do anything she wanted with it.
With Hollis (Holly) Barnes, Barbara’s hairdresser at RKO, who became her secretary and close friend, 1935. Holly’s younger sister, Louise, also a hairdresser at RKO, did Ginger Rogers’s hair, including bleaching it blond each week. Louise started cutting hair at age fifteen, and taught Holly as well.
Barbara felt comfortable with Holly and had Holly pick her up each morning on the way to work and drop her off at home at night.
Holly’s sister, Louise, also a hairdresser at RKO, did Ginger Rogers’s hair, including bleaching it blond each week. Rogers’s hair was so curly that Louise had the RKO prop department make rollers for her using door screening that she covered with flannel to protect the scalp when straightening her hair.
Holly and her husband, Jimmy Barnes, were drinkers, as were Louise and her husband, Lloyd Nobles, a paymaster at 20th Century–Fox. Holly, like Fay, could get nasty when drunk. Even when sober, Holly could be ornery and had no problem telling people what she thought.
Soon Barbara was confiding in Holly, and they began to run lines together. Barnsie became Barbara’s secretary and constant companion.
• • •
Alice Adams premiered two weeks into production of Shooting Star. Katharine Hepburn came onto the set of Shooting Star one day in a burst of excitement to tell George Stevens about the notices for his first big picture. James Agee of Time magazine had called Hepburn’s performance “a masterpiece.” Agee said that Stevens was “the youngest important director in Hollywood” and called his direction of Alice Adams “almost flawless.”
Barbara was furious at the intrusion. Hepburn was stunned at Barbara’s response and fled the set. Minutes after the disruption, Hepburn apologized to Barbara for “butting in . . . I can quite sympathize with your reception of me . . . at my own gaucherie. Please forgive and try to forget my lack of tact . . . I admire you too much to have you remember me as a complete fool.”
Alice Adams crowned Katharine Hepburn’s career in pictures; she was now the star on the RKO lot.
Barbara needed Shooting Star to be successful. Her work was admired by critics, had been called “magnificent.” But the feeling from reviewers was that she had been “an invalid in pictures . . . with a chronic attack of bad stories,” that she’d been wasted in “light society flim flams or shoddy underworld tales.” Shooting Star was seen as a picture that could “bring [Barbara] back . . . reestablish her as one of the screen’s dramatic actresses . . . and one of the biggest box office bets.”
After the completion of the picture, Barbara wanted to get away to the desert so she wouldn’t “bother anyone. There’s nothing so boring to people,” she said, “as a moping woman,” and she “didn’t want to be a bore.”
“It’s hard when you’ve trusted someone for years,” she said, “believed in someone implicitly, to find out it’s all a bubble and yourself the sucker.”
Barbara, Dion, and her brother, By, went to the B-Bar-H Ranch in Palm Springs. The ranch owner’s little girl was Dion’s age, and the children played together as Barbara tried to rest and clear her head and enjoy having her brother back in America and living with her.
Byron loved the sea and had traveled the world
—to the Orient, then lived in England—but he was sensitive to Barbara’s being hurt. She’d played on his sympathies to get him to come to California and had persuaded him to move in with her and Dion. Byron loved the beach and spent his days by the water in Malibu or Newport.
During Barbara’s time away in Palm Springs, her determination of the past two years to make things right with Fay, at any price, lifted. She thought about his constant badgering and questioning of her, about his jealousy and their repeated arguments. “More than beauty or ‘having fun’ or brains or fame, men want sincerity from women,” Barbara said. “Men ask women ‘but do you really mean it? Are you telling me the truth? Can I depend on what you say?’ over and over again. They want to be convinced of sincerity. They are like children appealing to their mothers for assurance that all is well and as it seems to be. It’s rather pathetic, really, this need for stability in an unstable world.”
With her brother, By, and Dion at the B-Bar-H Ranch Palm Springs, recuperating from Frank Fay, 1935. (COURTESY TONY FAY)
It “ate away” at Barbara that “a ton of bricks had to fall on [her] head before” she understood what she had to do. She’d been in love with Fay, and “when a woman is in love,” said Barbara, “her famous instinct goes to pot. Emotion makes her believe only what she wants to believe, to see in the man only what she wants to see.”
“Love floors women,” said Barbara. “Independent, strong-minded women go down like blades of grass in a story when they’re in love. We lose our wits. We lose our sense of humor. Women who had battled life with their bare hands; women who have faced joblessness and hunger and death and illness and all of the major catastrophes and faced them standing up, collapse, fall to pieces, turn to water when they fall in love. It hits them between the eyes and takes the heart right out of them and plays ball with it.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 51