Royal Gelatin was pleased with the show and renewed Fay for an additional thirty weeks, changing the show’s spot from Saturday to Friday at 8:30. It was a big boost for Fay, but he was more preoccupied with Barbara than with Royal Gelatin. In the past, whenever there’d been a row, Barbara had begged Fay to come back, and he knew she would again. Fay was sure things would be back to the way they were, despite the divorce. He’d married his first wife twice; why not his fourth.
Fay returned to Los Angeles determined to see Barbara. He devised a plan. Before Dion arrived for one of his visits, Fay told his houseman, Albert Lloyd, to get the car greased, the oil changed, the tank filled with gas, and to put the top on.
Dion Fay, four years old, Bristol Avenue, 1936. (COURTESY TONY FAY)
“At four in the morning, we will be on our way across the state line,” Fay told Lloyd.
When Lloyd asked where they would be headed, Fay said, “I will tell you once we get going.”
“Don’t you think we’ll get into trouble?”
“No,” said Fay. “I’ll pretend to take the baby riding and as I am as much entitled to the baby as she is, it cannot be called kidnapping.”
Lloyd asked Fay why he was doing this. Fay’s response: “It’s my decoy, and when I get the baby out of the state, she’ll have to come to see me.”
Lloyd told Paget, his wife and Fay’s housekeeper for many years, to watch at the front gate for the black Packard bringing Dion to the house and to warn Nellie Banner and Bill, Barbara’s chauffeur, of Fay’s plan.
Lloyd drove Fay’s car to the gas station, had the car greased, the oil changed, the tank filled, as Fay had asked, and returned the car to Bristol Avenue. Everything appeared to be in place for Fay’s plan.
Dion’s arrival time came and went.
Three hours later, Dion was still not at the house. Fay was in a rage. At mid-afternoon he called his former lawyer, Charles Cradick, who had acted as the Fays’ lawyer for four years, taking care of everything from negotiating production contracts for Tattle Tales and Barbara’s agreements with Warner Bros. and Columbia to representing Fay in court for various assault and drunk-driving charges; paying fees to the Internal Revenue Service and traffic fines to the court clerk at the Beverly Hills police station. Cradick had also advanced Fay thousands of dollars.
Now Cradick represented only Barbara.
He assured Fay that Dion would be at Bristol Avenue in the morning.
Early the next day, Fay told Lloyd to go to the airfield on West Pico Street and arrange for a private plane that could carry four passengers with a pilot ready to go at all times to fly from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. When they left for the field, Lloyd was to call the pilot and tell him they were on their way.
Again Lloyd told his wife to go to the gate at the end of the driveway and warn Nellie of Fay’s new plan, that Dion was still in danger.
Lloyd went through the motions of preparing for Fay’s new scheme: going to the airport; hiring a pilot to take four passengers from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City and bring one or all back for $175. Lloyd returned to Bristol Avenue and told Fay the arrangements were set. Fay told his chauffeur, Nicholas Gyory, that once Dion arrived, he was to drive Lloyd, Fay, and Dion to the airport and bring the car back to the house.
Dion was to arrive at 9:00 a.m. Once again, Barbara’s driver failed to deliver the boy to Bristol Avenue.
Fay, Lloyd, and Gyory waited in the library. By three o’clock Fay said, “It looks like the gag is off. Do you think the telephone has been tapped or that someone has placed a Dictograph in here and found out what I was going to do?”
Lloyd acted as if he were mystified by it all.
Fay had one of his servants search the house. He was convinced there was a tap in the fireplace in the library and had the servant look for wires or evidence of a Dictograph.
Barbara was unnerved by Fay’s schemes. She stopped Dion’s visits to Bristol Drive and started proceedings to legally change Dion’s name from Fay to Dion Anthony Stanwyck.
TWELVE
This Side of the Sphinx
Marion and Zeppo were worried about Barbara. She refused to go out and be with people. On the rare occasions when she did, her escort was her brother.
The Marxes were going to a dinner party at the Trocadero given by the actor Walter Kane and asked Barbara to join them. One of the guests was Robert Taylor, Metro’s new romantic sensation whose popularity was sweeping the country.
Taylor was handsome, beautiful in fact. His face was almost perfect, with a fulsome, ready smile. His olive skin set off the corn blue of his eyes; his dark brown hair was framed by an accentuated widow’s peak.
Barbara and Bob spent the evening “talking shop,” she said. “What else can you talk about to an actor?”
Barbara thought Bob was fun.
It was Universal’s Magnificent Obsession, released three months before, that was causing the furor about Taylor and had caught Metro by surprise. Women moviegoers were finding Robert Taylor’s beauty and vigor, energy and boyish gentleness, irresistible. His freshness and innocence gave him an air of the boy next door who grew up and made good; he had an aura of sophistication—the fancy clothes, pomaded hair—but there was a simplicity about him, a carefree sense of fun. Taylor walked with an energy, one hand in his trouser pocket, his coat tucked back just so. His stride was swift and eager, taking him up steps two at a time and down in jumps of three or four.
Barbara had seen Taylor in Magnificent Obsession and Broadway Melody of 1936, admired his work, and told him so.
Magnificent Obsession was the John Stahl picture from Lloyd C. Douglas’s best-selling novel. In it Taylor was the selfish rich boy who becomes a great doctor in order to care for the woman—Irene Dunne—he accidentally blinds in a drunken selfish state and whom he comes to adore.
Robert Taylor circa 1935, age twenty-four. He was born in Filley, Nebraska, on August 5, 1911; population as of 1910: 194. His family’s wood-framed house was without insulation and had a hand-pump for water, a wood- or coal-burning stove, and an outhouse.
In the picture Taylor is warm, loving, dimensional. He ages from early manhood to midlife and ably shows the maturation. Taylor saw Irene Dunne, then thirty-seven years old, as “dignified.” He had “felt the strength of her great experience” and said that her “confident poise could not fail to help anyone with whom she played.” Taylor’s assurance, agility, and depth surprised critics.
Women by the hundreds of thousands were fantasizing about Robert Taylor as the dream combination—the perfect lover (beautiful to look at, full of spirit and play, cocky but not rough) and husband (knowing, presentable, steady, caring). Robert Montgomery, frequently given the society playboy roles, didn’t have Taylor’s prettiness. Montgomery’s world-weary sophistication seemed acidic and faded next to Taylor’s openness and purity.
Taylor with Irene Dunne, Magnificent Obsession, his eighth picture, 1935. Lloyd C. Douglas’s novel was brought to John Stahl’s secretary by Joel McCrea, who was tested for the part with Rosalind Russell. The director felt that neither actor was right and instead cast Taylor and Irene Dunne, then thirty-seven years old.
Women, who had been drawn to the dangerous rough-trade quality of Clark Gable or James Cagney’s spitfire-like energy, saw in Taylor’s beauty, openness, and loving affect a new romantic ideal. Following the release of Magnificent Obsession thousands of fan letters were delivered to Metro addressed to Robert Taylor written by women across the country, until ten thousand letters were arriving each week.
Magnificent Obsession was a sellout and played to held-over business, as did Taylor’s next picture, Broadway Melody of 1936, from the Moss Hart story “Miss Pamela Thorndyke,” in which Taylor danced with the rangy twenty-three-year-old Eleanor Powell in her first major picture and sang Nacio Herb Brown’s “I’ve Got a Feelin’ You’re Foolin’ ” to June Knight.
Taylor was at work now on Small Town Girl, his twelfth picture in two years; William Wel
lman was directing.
Newspapers and magazines were pursuing Taylor; movie stars were demanding he be their leading man. Louella Parsons called him the most promising actor of the moment.
In the midst of all the fuss being made over Robert Taylor, he was still in awe of Clark Gable’s rugged good looks and sex appeal; Nelson Eddy’s voice; Spencer Tracy’s acting. Everything that was happening to the twenty-four-year-old Taylor seemed mostly like luck.
• • •
During the dinner party at the Trocadero, Bob thought Barbara was “cute with her reddish hair; her tan, her figure”; that she was “quiet and hard to get.” Taylor knew Barbara hadn’t been out for some time, that it was the first time in seven years she’d been to a party and been paired off with a man.
Robert Taylor was self-possessed but self-effacing. His modesty impressed Barbara; he seemed so regular in the midst of the irregularity of Hollywood and the fuss being made about him.
Barbara noticed that Bob spent a good deal of the evening with his eye on the door. He asked Barbara to dance. Someone took a photograph of them walking out to the dance floor. Barbara enjoyed herself but didn’t want to be written about by the press and didn’t dance with Taylor again. Throughout the evening she referred to the actor as Mr. Taylor; he called her Miss Stanwyck. She was “non-committal,” Taylor said, “the hardest gal to get talking this side of the Sphinx.”
Barbara, ever cautious, saw no special reason to rave about Bob. She’d enjoyed herself and thought he seemed like “a good man.” She was impressed with Bob “mainly because he was not impressed with himself,” she said. She liked his unself-conscious modesty.
Bob had been voted the most popular movie star ahead of Nelson Eddy, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, and Loretta Young. Clark Gable was eighth on the list; Greta Garbo, tenth; Fred MacMurray, eleventh.
During the previous five months Barbara had barely been open to the most “casual companionship of other people.” She was “coming out of an emotional black hole of Calcutta,” so to her Taylor seemed “hilarious.”
He called her the next day. An item in the morning paper announced that Barbara Stanwyck “was being seen at all the night spots with Robert Taylor.” Barbara and Bob joked on the phone about the mention in the columns and passed it off, though Barbara noted there was a “trace of uneasy formality in the conversation.”
Bob asked if he could see Barbara; she put him off. Bob called repeatedly during the next few weeks. Barbara found excuses not to see him. The next time Bob called, Barbara’s brother, By, answered the phone. When Bob asked what Barbara was doing, By suggested Bob come over.
Marion Marx had said to Bob that if he was going to ask Barbara out, he should suggest they go for a ride instead of going dancing.
Barbara and Bob sat for a while at her house, not saying much. “I felt like a school girl with her first date,” Barbara said. Bob asked if she would like to go for a drive. She agreed to go.
Barbara wasn’t drawn to Bob. Nor ostensibly he to her. He was in love with Irene Hervey, a Metro contract player.
During the drive, Bob told Barbara all about Irene. She was twenty-six, a California girl who, like Bob, had been picked by Ben Piazza, Metro’s scout and casting director, and placed in Oliver Hinsdell’s studio dramatic school. Bob and Irene had been seeing each other for quite a while, and Irene wanted to get married. Once the studio saw what it had in Bob Taylor, Mr. Mayer had made it clear that it was better for Bob’s career to remain unmarried. It was more important for his fans to think of him as an “eligible bachelor” than it was for him to be married—and unavailable to women. Irene was impatient with the situation and had started to see Allan Jones. It was Irene and Jones that Bob had been watching for at the Trocadero the night of the Marxes’ party.
Metro wanted to ensure that Bob was seen as a man-about-town, and the publicity department, under Howard Strickling, put out several stories about Bob’s seeing other women, including Jean Parker, who appeared with him in Murder in the Fleet; Ginger Rogers; and Janet Gaynor, with whom he was finishing Small Town Girl. Irene was upset that Bob was giving in to the studio’s demands.
Bob Taylor’s feelings about Irene were clear, but so were his feelings about Mr. Mayer, whose words of advice so far had proven true. During Bob’s drive with Barbara they talked of nothing else but his romantic and career problems.
Bob had been taken by surprise by all the hoopla about him. He went from a salary of $35 a week to $750. At the preview of his first major picture for Metro, Society Doctor, nobody had stirred when the lights went up. “They were waiting of course for L.B. to hint at his reaction,” said Taylor. Mayer finally rose from his seat and marched up the aisle smiling. “The real clincher,” said Bob, was when “Clark Gable, who was sitting about five rows in front of me, turned and gave me the ‘OK’ signal.” Clark was Mr. Gable to Bob. “He set the style and the pace.”
• • •
Louis B. Mayer was like a father to Bob, and he didn’t want to be an ungrateful “son.” Bob’s own father had left the family grain business to study medicine late in life and had become a doctor in order to care for Bob’s mother, whose weak heart and frail constitution had eluded available treatments. Bob saw up close the abiding love his parents had for each other. He admired his father’s dedication, his return to medical school in his mid-thirties with classmates much younger than he in a field of medicine considered risky and out of the norm.
Bob saw his father graduate from medical school and saw the ways in which his treatments brought new vigor and strength to his mother. The smells of home and childhood emanated from his father’s office and his mother’s kitchen: “the warm mixed odors of iodoform, corn bread and hot chocolate.” Bob, then Arly Brugh, had traveled with his father when he went to see patients. He saw how his father never showed anger, how he had an instinctive flair with people.
Spangler Arlington “Arly” Brugh was an only child who’d been given everything a boy could want and in return had been on his honor to be a good son. He was heartbroken when, four months after his graduation from Pomona College, his father died of cancer. Bob discovered that aside from some property and a small insurance policy his father was owed more than $25,000 in outstanding patient fees that he’d never tried to collect.
At twenty-two, Arly Brugh, who always had everything he wanted, “never thinking where it came from or wondering if you could have it,” was now broke. As the head of the family, he tried to collect enough money from his father’s former patients to cover funeral costs. He felt it his duty to remain in Beatrice, Nebraska, with his mother and found a job at an oil station. His mother, Ruth, insisted Arly return to Los Angeles and agreed to live with him there. Back in Hollywood, Bob rented a three-room apartment for them both on Franklin Circle and tried to make last what little money he had.
Now Taylor’s name was on Hollywood’s Ten Best Dressed list in the company of Cary Grant, George Brent, Fred Astaire, and William Powell. On-screen, Robert Taylor appeared dashing, entitled, rich, the driver of fast cars and possessor of custom-fitting three-piece suits. In truth, Universal was withholding a check for $2,000 until Taylor returned the six made-to-order suits, dress coat, slacks, and tuxedo coat and vest he’d worn making Magnificent Obsession.
Taylor had come to Hollywood with a name full of pomp and pretense and with an air that was simple, unassuming, small town. Bob Taylor was a “plain American” farm boy from prairie stock, a boy from the Midwest who grew up without running water and with an outhouse as a bathroom. Filley, Nebraska (population in 1910, 194), was his birthplace; Beatrice, his hometown. Filley was a crossroads, with nothing more than a grain elevator, a hardware store, and an undertaking establishment.
As a boy back home, nicknamed Buddy, he’d attended the Centenary Methodist Church every Sunday with his parents, said grace at table, and had neighbors who were just that, neighbors, and not strangers in some mad whirl. His parents were Republicans, nondrinkers, nonsmokers and never
used profane language.
The Brugh family circa 1915, Kirksville, Missouri. Standing: Robert Flaws with his wife, Ethel, Ruth Brugh’s sister. Seated: Ruth Adela Stanhope Brugh, twenty-seven years old; Spangler Arlington Brugh, age four; and Spangler Andrew Brugh, thirty-four. The Flaws and the Brughs were married in Filley, Nebraska, in a double ceremony in January 1904. (PHOTOFEST)
THIRTEEN
The Making of a Man
Barbara understood how things worked in Hollywood and was willing to listen to Bob’s confusion. She was wiser than he and had been around the town longer.
“He was all mixed up,” she said. “Mixed up about romance and about his career. For a long time we talked of nothing else.”
Bob said he’d been given advice from everyone—“how to invest your money, what kind of movies to make, how to dress for a preview, how to zip up your fly; everything but, ‘Are you happy?’ They think they know the answer because anyone who is rich has to be happy.”
Barbara was sympathetic, “an ear and a shoulder.” She told Bob that he should go ahead, ignore what the studio wanted, and marry; “the devil with it,” she said. Mayer’s-Ganz-Mispochen—Yiddish for “Mayer’s whole family”—was how people often referred to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. To some, Metro was an “insane place,” filled with egomaniacs and frightened people terrified that someone superior might end their careers in a split second if they made a false move.
Going to Metro was a seamless transition for Bob. He revered his father (“He was my exhibit A, the pattern I wanted to copy”), and he revered Louis B. Mayer. There were those who saw Mayer as an uneducated, illiterate man, frightened of those who had less than he had, jealous of those who had more. Mayer (Lazar Meir) was from the Ukraine and lived as a boy in St. John, Newfoundland. Like Dr. Brugh, he had provided for Bob and promised him everything, and so far Mr. Mayer, who at times could be vengeful and cruel as well as wise, generous, and loyal, had come through for the twenty-four-year-old actor. He’d given Taylor his start: a contract with a salary of $35 a week, which was security and the means to support Bob’s failing mother.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 54
