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

Page 52

by Victoria Wilson


  Her bewilderment about Fay and how things had turned so ugly began to fade. It became clear that she had to file for divorce.

  Barbara saw that “the only safe test at all is time—give enough time to any person or emotion,” she said, “and you’ll get the answer eventually, one way or the other. Sometimes it takes years—and if you get the breaks that’s swell and if you find yourself a sucker there’s nothing you can do about it but take it on the chin.”

  • • •

  Zeppo was able to negotiate a new contract for Barbara with Radio for three pictures with options, to be made during the course of a year. The first picture, Volcano, written by Adele Buffington, was being turned into a script by Rian James. The recently formed 20th Century–Fox wanted Barbara for a picture called A Message to Garcia, based on a true story of high adventure, a critical moment in history involving an urgent dispatch from President William McKinley to a revolutionary leader “in the mountain vastness” of Cuba, on the eve of the Spanish-American War.

  Barbara arranged for Morgan Maree, her business adviser, to set up trust funds and annuities on her behalf. She never intended to be as financially desperate as she had been when she was Mrs. Frank Fay.

  TEN

  Scar Tissue

  An early version of A Message to Garcia, made by Edison in 1916 and filmed on location in Cuba, was based on the inspirational essay of the same title by the writer and publisher Elbert Hubbard (“Life is just one damned thing after another”). The essay had been published in 1899 and was known to tens of millions of readers. “Someone said to the President, ‘There is a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.’ Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How the ‘fellow by the name of Rowan’ took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point that I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?’ ”

  Elbert Hubbard died on the Lusitania a year prior to the making of the Edison picture.

  Ten days before production was to begin on the 20th Century–Fox remake of A Message to Garcia, Barbara’s lawyer, Charles Cradick, served Fay with a summons to appear in superior court. Barbara was suing Fay for divorce and asking for custody of Dion. The complaint charged Fay with “grievous mental suffering” and harassment over trivial matters that resulted in Barbara becoming “extremely nervous and ill and . . . unable to properly attend to her various duties.” The court date was set for the end of December.

  Barbara had rented a house at 707 North Arden and then moved to a small house with English gardens in Beverly Hills at 615 North Bedford Drive across from Marion and Zeppo.

  Barbara stayed home at night. During the day, she went to bookstores in a simple tailored suit with a no-nonsense hat pulled low over her face and bought as many books as she could. Reading assuaged Barbara’s loneliness; it always had.

  Before Fay went to New York, Nellie Banner brought Dion to 441 Bristol as agreed on, though Fay paid little attention to the four-year-old boy. Nellie would bring Dion to the house by 9:10 in the morning. On one visit Frank told Nellie to come back at five in the afternoon. She insisted that she stay with the boy, to which Fay replied, “Get the hell out of the house.” Nellie was terrified and left. Dion could be made so upset and nervous by visiting his father that he would be sick for a week.

  Often, when Nellie brought Dion to visit, Frank left the house at ten in the morning and wouldn’t return until four in the afternoon. At other times, Fay might be friendly to the boy until Nellie left, then he would ignore the child. After a couple of months, Fay asked Dion about “Mommy’s house” and what was going on there and whom she was seeing at night. “Did you go to church last Sunday and what did you wear?” Dion stared at his father as he was asked one question after another. The boy didn’t answer Fay’s questions except to reply that he had worn his raincoat to church. Fay wasn’t satisfied and asked Dion the same questions over and over again.

  • • •

  The script for Zanuck’s Message to Garcia, by W. P. Lipscomb and Gene Fowler, used the Elbert Hubbard essay, as well as an account by Colonel Andrew Summers Rowan, How I Carried the Message to Garcia, published in 1922. The Spanish minister in Washington let it be known to 20th Century–Fox that if the picture was “in the least bit considered offensive to Spanish-speaking people,” all of Zanuck’s films would be banned in Spain.

  • • •

  The picture takes place before the Spanish-American War. Rebels in Cuba are fighting for independence from Spain. Leading the guerrilla warfare is General Garcia. The battleship Maine is blown up, and President McKinley makes the decision to send men to Cuba to support Garcia and to go to war against Spain.

  For Zanuck and Gene Fowler, McKinley’s letter to Garcia and getting it to him, which changed the destiny of three nations, had all the elements of great adventure: a courageous American officer in the line of duty carrying a fateful message telling a rebel leader where American forces will land to join him and his troops in their just fight; a president of the United States poised to send in an army; a perilous mission through death-ridden jungles and a maze of danger to the battle lines of a rebel camp; spies betraying spies; guerrilla executions; near escapes; alligator-infested swamps; and the passionate love between a guerrilla warrior’s daughter and a courageous American soldier.

  Wallace Beery (left) as Sergeant Dory (“His loveable villainy was never more uproarious,” said the 20th Century-Fox ad for the picture) and John Boles as Lieutenant Rowan crossing a swamp-infested Cuba on his daring mission to deliver A Message to Garcia, 1936. Rowan’s actual journey to Garcia’s camp was considered at the time to be one of the most gallant and brilliant exploits in U.S. military history. (PHOTOFEST)

  John Boles was the man delivering the message. Zanuck saw the character “as a cross between Franchot Tone and Warner Baxter, or an American Ronald Colman . . . with all the attributes of a West Pointer, an intense patriot with a fierce determination to carry through all his work; he’s a soldier no matter how he is dressed.”

  Wallace Beery was the illiterate, conscienceless scoundrel who betrays each side for the other, who agrees to take the American soldier to Garcia’s closest lieutenant, the only man who knows the whereabouts of Garcia’s camp and who will escort the American to Garcia. The Beery character for Zanuck was “always looking for some new form of larceny with which to turn a dishonest dollar.” Beery looked the part, exactly as Zanuck had envisioned him: “close cropped hair, bull neck, broken hands and overhanging gut.” Beery was funny on-screen and a big draw with moviegoers, but in life he was seen as a tough old grouchy son of a bitch.

  Zanuck’s idea was for the clash of the two men to be the center of the picture, in which each man comes to respect the other: the American with breeding and a sense of honor, determined to see his job through, chancing death and the perpetual top sergeant adrift in Cuba who believes in nothing—his flag, principles; a gunrunner and deserter; a murderer who would do anything for money and as the buffoon-like, gluttonous, lovable guide who sells out each side against the other and ultimately saves the American soldier and the Cuban rebel daughter.

  As Señorita Raphaelita Maderos, with Boles (tied up) and Alan Hale as Dr. Ivan Krug.

  Barbara was the daughter of Garcia’s adjutant who witnesses her father’s execution and agrees to take the American soldier to Garcia’s hiding place. (“My father died for his country,” she tells the American, “can I do any less?”)

  Zanuck wanted Roy Del Ruth to direct the picture following Thanks a Million, from one of his stories and a Nunnally Johnson script. Instead, Zanuck put Del Rut
h on It Had to Happen with George Raft and Rosalind Russell. Zanuck considered John Ford for Garcia once the director returned from a holiday in Florida. Instead, he put Ford on The Prisoner of Shark Island and gave Garcia to George Marshall, a longtime Fox director who’d just directed The Crime of Dr. Forbes. Marshall had been at the studio since 1925, in the days when it was the William Fox Vaudeville Company.

  Zanuck borrowed Beery from Metro for $75,000 instead of Beery’s usual $6,000 a week. Of Louis B. Mayer and Metro, Beery said, “You can’t tell nothing to this god-damned studio. Louis B. Mayer, why he was a god-damned blacksmith. He would blow up ships in the Boston Harbor. He’s full of shit and we’re working for him. How do you like that?”

  For the part of the rebel daughter, Zanuck had originally wanted Simone Simon and then planned to put her in a remake of Under Two Flags, an adaptation of the successful stage play about the French Foreign Legion based on the novel by Ouida. Zanuck used Claudette Colbert for the part of Cigarette, a part for which Barbara had been suggested and that Zanuck had dismissed; he felt Barbara was “too American in appearance” and that the “French accent she would have to assume for the role . . . would be bad for her as well as for ourselves.”

  For the role of the rebel daughter, Barbara had to speak Spanish and began to take lessons with the technical director François De Valdes. Barbara had to wear boots and riding britches throughout the picture and went on a celery diet to lose weight in her hips and thighs, eating celery salads, celery soup, cooked celery, and celery stalks.

  During the making of the picture, Barbara was in muddy water for hours—she chose not to use a double for the physical shots—as she and Boles were shown fleeing the Spanish army in the swamps of the Cuban interior.

  Rita Cansino was to play Barbara’s sister because of her fluency in Spanish and English; Zanuck instead put her in Paddy O’Day.

  The rebel daughter of Garcia was a small part, but that made no difference to Barbara. “When you’re in a picture with two other stars like John Boles and Wally Beery, you can’t expect to have your part dominate theirs.” She was just grateful “to Mr. Zanuck,” she said, “for his confidence in her.”

  And for the work.

  • • •

  Fay’s picture Stars over Broadway opened in mid-November. Louella Parsons called it “topnotch” and told her readers it was not to be missed. She noted that Fay had returned to the screen “after a long absence.”

  Capra called Fay a genius. “He can dominate any audience,” he said. “He can do what he likes with them—in person. But he does it by superiority. By being bigger and smarter and faster than his audience. He’s fresh and superior. That’s great in the theater or a night club. But for some reason it just won’t work in pictures. Picture audiences resent it.”

  Fay, the once Favorite Son of Broadway, left for New York on Thanksgiving. The government had slapped another tax lien on Barbara and Fay for asserted arrears of $22,000 each.

  • • •

  Runaway Daughter, retitled Red Salute, opened in New York at the Rivoli Theatre, which showed it with a Mickey Mouse cartoon, Pluto’s Judgement Day. The main attraction was greeted with protests from the antiwar National Student League, who picketed in front of the theater giving out handbills and calling for a boycott of the picture because of its anti-left-wing politics.

  The New York Times leveled the picture, describing it as “one of the weirdest exhibits to come out of Hollywood since that wartime masterpiece, ‘The Beast of Berlin.’ With the subtlety of a steamroller and the satirical finesse of a lynch mob, the film goes in for some of the most embarrassing chauvinism of the decade.” The reviewer, however, thought the Mickey Mouse cartoon “brilliant . . . [s]uperb in its craftsmanship and endearingly comic” and said it “ought to win a place among the distinguished films of the year.”

  Picketing against Red Salute continued on the East Coast. In New York more than a hundred people—half of them young women—were arrested. In Baltimore students from Johns Hopkins and Goucher College presented the manager of the Baltimore Loew’s Century with a petition denouncing the picture. In New Orleans, picketers from the American League Against War and Fascism carried posters declaring the film war propaganda approved by W. R. Hearst (“Who got us into the Spanish American War?” the posters read).

  President Roosevelt was fishing off the coast of California and asked the Hays Office to send a print of the movie along with nineteen other pictures, among them Shanghai, Reckless, Bright Lights, and The Call of the Wild.

  • • •

  Shooting Star, now called Annie Oakley, opened in December for Christmas while Barbara was at work on A Message to Garcia.

  A month before Annie Oakley opened, Barbara and Preston Foster appeared as guests on Louella Parsons’s radio broadcast and performed a scene from the picture.

  At an advance showing of Annie Oakley at the Pantages, the preview cards were mostly positive. “Authentic atmosphere—all the glamour of the wild Wild West, good love, comedy angles, a fine cast.” “Stanwyck never better,” said another. “Stanwyck was so natural, unaffected, charming and yet subtle with fine technique.”

  “A picture worthy of her talents,” said Carol Frink in the Chicago Herald and Examiner. “Miss Stanwyck [as Annie Oakley] has a chance to exploit her own most salient characteristics; her forthright honesty and tenacious loyalty; her genuine simplicity and level-headedness.” Variety was not as taken with the picture or with Stevens’s direction. “If the picture misses as outstanding,” said the reviewer, “it’s because the script and direction are not up to the star.”

  • • •

  Barbara was now one of the leading actors at RKO, along with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, William Powell, Ann Harding, and Irene Dunne. The studio relied heavily on its featured players, who included Preston Foster, Gene Raymond, Anne Shirley, Helen Westley, Lucille Ball, Betty Grable, and Margaret Hamilton.

  The only thing Barbara wanted to do was work. She was lonely and broke. She had devoted herself to Fay with all of her intensity and will for seven years. When she fled in August, she’d left everything behind, everything they’d built together, along with her possessions—clothes, jewelry, furs, the first editions and silver she’d collected, the antiques. The property. Possessions never interested Barbara, and she learned early not to cling to them.

  She still loved Frank, and to get over him, she had to “somehow kill time,” she said. “To kill the time that must inevitably elapse between now and the time when scar tissue will have formed over my hurt.

  “I didn’t want it to happen, but now that it has, I want to forget and I want to be allowed to forget.”

  Barbara was working hard and steadily, “but it’s not enough,” she said. “I want more. I want so much work that I won’t have time to think.”

  She was alternating pictures between RKO and 20th Century–Fox. Her next picture was for RKO, called Volcano. Rian James had written the treatment fast, as requested, but was being held up waiting for story conferences to discuss the pages.

  After Volcano, Barbara was to go into a remake of Four Devils, the F. W. Murnau picture made in 1929 about four orphans raised by a circus owner who forms a high-wire act, with Barbara in the Janet Gaynor role. Barbara was enchanted by the circus; she’d never been to it as a child, and the spectacle of it—and the clowns—seemed magical to her.

  After Four Devils, Barbara was to go back to RKO for another picture and then “back [to Fox] again,” she said. “I’m calendared right up to the hilt—and if I have my way, it’ll be for months after that.”

  “Barbara may be exhausted when she finishes a picture,” said Marion Marx, “but three days later she’s asking Zeppo to hurry up and find another picture for her.”

  Barbara was set to make the John Ford picture The Plough and the Stars for RKO from the Sean O’Casey play with a script being written by Dudley Nichols. Production had been postponed; Radio Pictures was concerned its
themes were too similar to Ford’s Informer and that it would follow too soon after its release. Ford was going to make Mary of Scotland instead with Katharine Hepburn in the lead.

  Through Zeppo, Barbara was being introduced to many new people: the Jack Bennys; Moss Hart; Alexander Woollcott, who wrote to Barbara just before Christmas to thank her for flowers she’d sent him and to wish her luck in 1936.

  In between working, Barbara went to the movies.

  Fay was in New York performing.

  On the day before Christmas, Fay wired $50 to his housekeeper, Paget Lloyd, with instructions to buy Christmas presents for his mother, his father, Dion, and herself. Lloyd bought Dion a ski suit and had it delivered to Barbara’s.

  Fay phoned his housekeeper from New York four times a week; each call costing $50. He didn’t ask about Dion or the present Lloyd had picked out for him, only if Lloyd had seen Barbara or heard anything from her.

  Christmas came and went, and days after it Barbara appeared in superior court at 9:30 in the morning wearing dark glasses. She took the stand before Judge Dudley S. Valentine and testified to the many arguments she’d had with Fay. Barbara, in a tailored suit and a fedora, was composed as she recounted the litany of explosive fights they’d lived through.

  “It was mostly during the time when I was working,” she said. “I would come home and find him very sullen and cool toward me. He wouldn’t talk to me. He would argue almost throughout the entire night about some unimportant matter so much that I could not sleep.”

  Judge Valentine listened to Barbara’s testimony. Her voice quavered. “Fay [treated] my friends as coolly and his conduct caused me to become nervous and lose weight,” she said.

  The judge granted Barbara an interlocutory decree of divorce and custody of her son. The judgment also said that Fay would “have the right to visit with said child at such reasonable times and places as the parties hereto may agree from time to time.” Barbara wanted no alimony. Fay had little money. The money to be had was hers.

 

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