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

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A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 53

by Victoria Wilson


  • • •

  “When it comes to men and women,” said Barbara, “there is some equation between the sexes which makes for a natural enmity. If you fight a man he’ll either call forth all of his latent cruelty and mastery and beat you down or he’ll turn to some clinging beauty with a body which forgot to include brains. Or,” she said, “if you start right out by surrendering your will to his he’s apt to lose interest.”

  Barbara was twenty-eight; Fay almost forty-four. They’d married on August 26, 1928; she’d fled her marriage on August 6, 1935. The first Mrs. Fay had lasted two years; the second, three months. The third, who was the first, had wanted to try it again. Barbara was the fourth Mrs. Frank Fay in a marriage that she willed into lasting almost seven years.

  ELEVEN

  High Schemes and Misdemeanors

  I know I have reached the stage where I wouldn’t place my whole trust in any man. Not unreservedly,” said Barbara. “I do trust women. I really believe that women are capable of disinterested friendship, of undivided loyalty, of keeping faith.”

  Barbara and Marion Marx were becoming the closest of friends. Barbara had Marion, who wanted the finest furniture for the finest home, decorate her new house. Marion filled Barbara’s house with Early American maple furniture, antique samplers, and ruffled glazed chintz draperies, all done according to Barbara’s wishes and Marion’s taste.

  Marion’s attitude about life was based on money, prestige, and whom you knew. It mattered to her how much money one had and how important someone was. Marion shopped for Barbara’s clothes since Barbara rarely went on her own. “Partly because I haven’t the time,” she said. “And partly because I detest it anyway.” Chic to Marion was a “matter of the mind . . . poise, self-confidence . . . the knowledge that [one is] correctly attired to suit [one’s] own individuality.” Without sophistication, “I don’t see how any one can be smartly dressed,” she said.

  When Marion and Barbara first met, Marion was alarmed at how unkempt Barbara looked. “You should have seen her hair,” said Marion. Barbara was now wearing her auburn hair in a seventeen-inch bob and was proud that it was “the longest in town.”

  Without Fay in her life, Barbara was now free to indulge her whims, which extended to having her hair done three or four times a week. She had a self-described “complex” about clean, shining hair. “My hair is my only vanity,” said Barbara, as well as a “mania for shoes.”

  Barbara loathed hats. Now and then she compromised and wore a beret, but that “usually came off” before she got home.

  Marion Benda, later Marx, photographed by James Hargis Connelly, former Signal Corps photographer who set up a studio in Chicago in the 1920s, photographing dancers, singers, and actors. (COURTESY TIM MARX)

  Marion and Barbara were looking more and more alike, though Barbara’s stance was cockier; they even dressed alike.

  Marion Marx, like Barbara, had appeared on the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre in Ziegfeld’s Follies. The former Marion Bimberg Benda and her sister, Jessica, both showgirls, were known on Broadway as “the beautiful Bimberg girls.” Marion had appeared in The Cocoanuts—one of the Cocoanut Beach Octette—after the show left the Lyric Theatre and was playing at the Shubert. Before Cocoanuts, Marion had appeared in Ziegfeld’s production of Rio Rita and his 1925 Follies, which featured Will Rogers and W. C. Fields, with Louise Brooks, Lina Basquette, Vivienne Segal, and Barbara’s Ziegfeld pal Dorothy Van Alst.

  Marion’s heart-shaped face was framed by dark lustrous hair. Her luminous large eyes were set wide apart and like Barbara had a face that showed character and strength.

  Marion had dated Rudolph Valentino for six months, but it was Zeppo who made her laugh and won her heart. Zeppo saw women in terms of conquests and pursued them as relentlessly as Chico, but to Zeppo, Marion was different. She was someone with whom he could pal around. She was spontaneous in the way Zeppo was.

  For Marion’s thirty-third birthday, Barbara insisted on taking her and Zeppo to dinner at the Trocadero. Marion walked into the restaurant—dressed somewhat for the occasion—and found 150 people there to celebrate her birthday. Barbara had taken over the restaurant without giving Marion a hint of what she’d planned.

  Marion’s father, Louis, had owned an oilcloth factory with his brother, Albert. In the early spring of 1914, when Marion was eleven, her father was arrested for conspiring to burn down the Bimberg factory—the American Oilcloth Company—for the insurance money. The plant manager was to destroy the building and be paid $10,000. The Bimberg brothers had their alibi planned: when the fire was discovered, the brothers would be on a train en route to White Plains, where they lived. The plant manager went along with the scheme until the last moment, when he turned in both men to the prosecutor’s office. Louis Bimberg went to prison for ten years. When he got out, he returned to his family, who shunned him.

  Years later Louis Bimberg killed himself at home. It was a family scandal involving homosexuality and Louis’s romantic involvement with a sailor and a letter written in Chinese; Louis had committed suicide in the bathroom by stabbing himself in the stomach. Marion’s mother renounced the Bimberg name and took back her maiden name of Miller. Marion changed her last name to Benda. Her brother, Alan, followed his mother’s lead and changed his last name to Miller.

  Marion and Zeppo were married in 1927 at the Hotel Chalfonte in New York City; The Cocoanuts was playing in Newark, and Marion was living on West Eighty-Sixth Street with her parents.

  Zeppo, like most of the Marx brothers, had countless affairs. Marion knew about them but seemed unfazed. If another man looked at Marion, Zeppo became furious. There was the time when Marion and Zeppo were coming back from Hillcrest and stopped in Santa Monica to go on the carousel. A man started to flirt with Marion, and Zeppo, still in his golf shoes, chased him around the carousel.

  Marion and Zeppo slept in separate bedrooms. “I can’t stand to sleep all night with anybody,” she said. “I just need my own space. I can’t stand another person in the bed.”

  Marion liked to sit in the bathtub, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, and complete the toughest crossword puzzle in less than an hour. She was resourceful and, like Barbara, self-educated and a loyal friend. And, like Barbara, if she was crossed, the friendship was ended; there was no going back.

  • • •

  Fay was appearing on The Fleischmann Yeast Hour and on The Magic Key of RCA, making a hit with the popular “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” (“I’ll be down to get you in a taxi, honey”).

  With Barbara and Dion gone, Fay kept company at Bristol Avenue with professional boxers like Lou Nova and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom. Fay could still become enraged without provocation and start fistfights, which he frequently lost.

  Fay had a new set of upper false teeth. The day after they were put in, he and his houseman, Albert Lloyd, went to a football game at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles. Lloyd was told to speak on Fay’s behalf to people he knew, to smile if anyone looked in Fay’s direction, and to call their attention to him. Fay was sober when he asked this of Lloyd. Lloyd knew that Fay, drunk or sober, could become angry if his requests were ignored, so Lloyd bowed at people he didn’t recognize and gestured toward Fay, as instructed. Fay smiled and showed off his new false teeth.

  After the game, Fay and Lloyd went to the Brown Derby for dinner. At the restaurant, Ted Healy, comedian, former vaudevillian, originator of the Three Stooges, came over to the table and invited Fay and Lloyd to his house. They decided to go in one car; Healy’s business agent was driving. As they approached Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, Fay, in the backseat, leaned forward and called Healy’s agent “a dirty Jew son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Healy. “He’s a nice fellow and he hasn’t done anything to you.”

  “I am going to knock you on your ass,” Fay warned Healy.

  Healy had his agent stop the car. They were in front of a gas station.

  Fay and Healy got
out of the car.

  “Put up your dukes,” Fay said to Healy. “I’m going to knock you right on your ass.”

  Fay swung his fist at Healy’s face. Healy dodged the blow and struck Fay in the mouth. Fay’s upper false teeth went flying onto the ground.

  “He’s knocked my teeth out,” cried Fay.

  Healy’s agent got out of the car to help Fay look for his new teeth. Two Beverly Hills police officers came over and ordered Healy and Fay to the Beverly Hills jail. The following morning both men were released. Fay went home and got drunk and stayed in a drunken stupor for weeks.

  • • •

  Barbara, now on her own, was unburdened, living life “as I please.” She could shop, dance, “cut up” if she wanted. It was Barbara, Dion, Buck Mack, and her brother, By. Fay no longer controlled her or told her how to dress, whom to see.

  She had longed for a house in which she could do what she wanted without causing anyone apoplexy—put her feet on the chairs, spill ashes on the rugs. She wanted white walls and colonial fixtures, colorful colors and comfortable chairs, divans and rugs. “I can move that lamp there over here if I want to—and there is no-one to give me a black look of disapproval.”

  Barbara with her brother, By, and son, Dion, 1935. (COURTESY OF TONY FAY)

  The living room of her Beverly Hills house was all greens and browns and blues against white walls. The only photograph was of Dion. French windows looked out on a garden where Barbara’s four-year-old son would play with his nurse.

  Barbara went out when she wanted and came in when she pleased. “I entertain or do not entertain as I feel inclined,” she said.

  She had so many dogs that she had to take up the carpets and get rid of various chairs. A visitor walked into her house, looked around at the lack of rugs and chairs, and asked, “Housecleaning?”

  “No, dogs,” said Barbara. “Don’t sit there. The dogs have just about chewed the legs off of that chair too. It’ll crash the next time anyone sits on it. I’m saving it for a producer.”

  In the midst of her dog menagerie was a Persian cat called Velvet who could stand on her hind legs indefinitely.

  With James Cagney and Alice Faye, circa 1936.

  Barbara had emerged from the darkness of her life with Fay. She was consoled by the presence of her son. “I’m glad I’ve got him left,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him. Thank God he’s got a sense of humor. I have my own ideas about Dion and can put them into practice unmolested.”

  Barbara wanted to travel with her little boy, to live in different parts of the world “to see what it’s all like,” she said. “Twice I’ve gotten as far as Pasadena on my way to Europe.” That’s what happened when she made plans. “So I’m not making them anymore,” she said.

  She felt free. “There’s such romance in living my own life as I wish to live it,” she said. “And it’s dangerous because no woman can live in marriage this way. Perhaps, no one can live this way, for long, safely. There’s such passion in peace, that I can’t believe it isn’t dangerous. And even if it is, life is dangerous.”

  Barbara was relieved her brother was living with her. By was a plain man, simple, elegant, gallant, charming. He was well-spoken with a slight English accent. By’s travels, leaving Barbara behind when she was a child, haunted her.

  He talked to Barbara softly, calling her “love” or “dear”; his presence calmed her. He didn’t speak harshly or get angry the way she could. Once Barbara started to get angry, she couldn’t stop and wouldn’t be calmed down. Byron was gentle, sensitive, but strong. Barbara worshipped her brother as a child, and she worshipped him still. He was her idea of a man.

  Carole Lombard circa 1932, around the time she was making Wesley Ruggles’s No Man of Her Own, costarring Clark Gable, from Val Lewton’s novel No Bed of Her Own, purchased originally by Paramount for Gable and Miriam Hopkins.

  Byron, at thirty, was six feet two. His hair had changed from blond to silver. Other than the red cast of Barbara’s hair, she and By resembled each other; they had the same wry sense of humor; each loved to read. By looked distinguished; Barbara, girlish, sometimes tomboyish; together they made a handsome couple.

  Barbara bought By clothes to wear as her escort. She gave him money and was trying to get him work as an extra. By, like their father, drank heavily. He had many girlfriends and brought them home to Barbara’s, which made her angry. Barbara was possessive of her brother and questioned him about whom he was seeing. She was sure that one day he’d “get shot in the tail from so much running around.”

  Barbara came home one evening and walked into her living room to find By entwined with Alice Faye.

  “Have you ever heard of knocking?” By said later.

  “You’re in my house,” she yelled back.

  “I’m not married to you,” he said. “You’re my sister.”

  He threatened to move out, and did. But Barbara begged him to return, and he relented.

  • • •

  Fay was in New York and phoned Barbara.

  “I don’t care to listen to anything you have to say,” she said and hung up.

  A few minutes later the phone rang again. Barbara asked her brother to answer it.

  “If it’s Fay,” she told By, “tell him I don’t want to talk with him.”

  By told Frank not to call again; it was upsetting Barbara, and she didn’t want to talk to him.

  The next day she changed her telephone number.

  • • •

  Barbara went out for the evening with the Marxes. Marion was three years older than Barbara and, like an older sister, watched out for her.

  “Barbara is a moody person,” said Marion. “I’ve never seen anyone whose spirits can go higher and lower in ten minutes time. She’s intense about everything she does. And she has to be doing something every minute.”

  Marion’s great friend was Carole Lombard, whom Marion adored. She thought Lombard was the most beautiful woman she’d ever met. Through Marion, Barbara came to know Carole and grew just as fond of her.

  Men were wild about Carole and frightened of her. They thought she was promiscuous because of the way she talked. They’d give her champagne and expect to go to bed with her. Carole’s response: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” One friend said of her, “She was flying all the time. Fast and light.”

  Barbara admired Carole for being such an extraordinary athlete. She was proficient in tennis, basketball, baseball, and boxing; she’d won medals in high school for sprinting and high-jumping, was an expert diver and crack shot, and had studied dance with Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham. Barbara’s brother, Byron, thought Carole the only woman he knew who could use rough language and sound like a lady; “she could say ‘fuck,’ ” he said, “and make it sound like poetry.”

  People thought Carole was wild, an overbred, overtrained racehorse. She loved a laugh and was warmhearted, but there were those who felt that beyond the incessant gags and wisecracks, there was something of hers—a haunting terror—they wouldn’t want inside them. They referred to her as “the profane angel”; she looked like a spirit and swore like a ditchdigger.

  Carole may have talked a slangy American idiom all her own, but she was from a good family, from the Wilshire District, where Los Angeles society lived before Beverly Hills became popular. When a fortune-teller gave Jane Alice Peters, originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, the name Carole Lombard, she told her it had to have an e on the end of it.

  Lombard was hosting a White Mayfair gala for the Mayfair Club at the Victor Hugo in Beverly Hills, and Barbara went with the Marxes. In the spirit of the ball, Lombard, whose idea the evening was, wore white maline, with two bunches of artificial white flowers and a star sapphire the size of a hen’s egg.

  Six footmen bearing candelabra announced the 350 guests as they walked down the stairs. There were those with old money: Alfred Vanderbilt, Mr. and Mrs. Kyle Bellew, Coningsby Dawson, Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Botsford. And those with Hollywood m
oney: W. R. Hearst, Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Rapf, Helen Ferguson, B. P. Schulberg, Marquis and Marquise de Portago, Mr. and Mrs. W. S. Van Dyke, Mr. and Mrs. Harmon Nelson, Mr. and Mrs. Bing Crosby, Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Lubitsch.

  The men wore white top hat, tie, and tails.

  Merle Oberon was in a white studded dress with gold dots. Dolores Costello Barrymore wore a white wig with two white gardenias, white satin, and lace in Victorian fashion. Barbara was in a white ermine wrap with a shoulder cape of silver foxes. Norma Shearer was in red crepe.

  • • •

  Two months after Barbara’s divorce decree, she was back in superior court, this time to answer a complaint filed against her by her former agent, Arthur Lyons, for $3,500 plus interest he claimed was due him as his commission for work he’d negotiated on Barbara’s behalf during a two-year period.

  Lyons and John McCormick each took the stand to testify about the negotiations the agency had conducted for Barbara. Then Barbara took the stand in her defense, followed by Buck Mack. Barbara maintained that she hadn’t gone ahead with her contract at Paramount since the studio hadn’t found a picture she’d wanted to do. Judge Charles Bogue listened to the testimony and dismissed the case.

  • • •

  Fay was in New York and appeared on NBC’s Royal Gelatin Hour. Fay was the whole broadcast, including the plug for gelatin (“Buy lots of gelatin,” he pleaded, “because if you don’t, Frankie won’t have a job”). He was on the air for the entire half hour with Eddie Kay and his orchestra. “The Great Faysie” was in top form—impish and winning and, even on radio, able to put over the famous Fay air of intimacy. Variety said, “It is a yeoman’s task for a comedian to hold the interest for a half hour in person on a stage, it’s doubly so in the abstract via mike transmission.”

 

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