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

by Victoria Wilson

  He talked to Taylor as a son (“God gave me two lovely daughters,” Mayer had said to Bob one day when the new actor was asking for a raise, “and they are a great joy to me. But for reasons, in His infinite wisdom,” Mayer went on, “He never saw fit to give me a son. But if I had a son, Bob—if He had blessed me with such a wonderful gift—I can’t think of anything I would have wanted than that son to be exactly like you”).

  Taylor didn’t get the raise he was after, but the studio extended his contract and soon increased his salary from $50 to $75 a week, with a bonus of $125 per week. Mayer was making $10,000 a week, plus bonuses, prerogatives, and deductions that came to $1 million a year, making him the highest-paid executive in American industry.

  “Money isn’t everything,” Mayer would say to his employees.

  He had promised Bob that Metro would do great things for the young actor, that the studio would make Bob a star with an exceptional career (the year before, in 1935, Mayer had given Bob a bonus of $3,000 and then, four months later, an additional bonus of $1,500). He advised Taylor about clothes (“Maybe you can’t act very well, Bob,” he said, “but at least you can dress decently”) and sent the young man to his own tailor to get his first custom-made suit, his first dinner jacket, his first white tie and tails.

  The studio head had given Taylor his name. Louis Mayer’s secretary, Ida “Kay” Koverman, who’d served as secretary to Herbert Hoover during his days as an engineer in San Francisco, had suggested that Brugh take the name of Taylor. Koverman, who’d worked for Mayer for eleven years and who was similar to his mother despite Koverman’s being Catholic and Scottish, had insisted Mayer put Clark Gable under contract and ignore his big ears and bad teeth, just as she’d persuaded Mayer to hire Nelson Eddy and overlook the young singer’s prettiness and lack of talent.

  • • •

  Bob suggested that he and Barbara drive down to Ocean Park. Barbara said, “Fine,” thinking they would “roll down to Santa Monica, walk on the Venice Pier, take in the sea breeze and the sea view and maybe the moon.”

  Instead, Bob said, “Let’s go on the roller coaster.”

  “Love to,” she said, knowing she would hate every minute of it. “Every horrible up and down.”

  Bob took pleasure from being up in the air away from people. Frequently, on the soundstages, he climbed up to the rafters. “The biggest set doesn’t look so big from a cat-walk forty feet up,” Bob said. “No player looks big. It isn’t an urge for privacy that lures me upward. It’s just an urge to keep moving.”

  In Venice, Bob and Barbara went on the carousel, tossed darts into balloons, shot clay pigeons. Afterward, some boys saw Barbara standing in front of the shooting gallery and said, “Come on, Annie Oakley, let’s see you shoot.”

  Barbara was willing to go along with the dare, but Bob picked up one of the guns and began to shoot at the targets. A crowd started to gather and became so large the police were called to help. Barbara and Bob had to escape into a hotel lobby and were escorted by two officers to Bob’s car, but the crowd was overwhelming. Bob and Barbara were separated and didn’t find each other for an hour and a half.

  After that evening the two frequently had dinner together—mostly at Barbara’s house. They put on a stack of records and listened to jazz, “St. Louis Blues”; to swing; to Cab Calloway on the red-hot “Minnie the Moocher in Chinatown who learned how to kick the gong around.” “That’s our dinner music,” said Bob, explaining that they sat and screamed at each other across the table, “trying to make ourselves heard above Duke Ellington’s band or Benny Goodman’s.”

  After dinner Barbara and Bob went to the movies and watched the Movietone newsreels of Hitler sending fifty thousand troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty that forbade a union between Austria and Germany. They saw newsreels of the sudden floods sweeping over parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia, fourteen feet of water swirling in the streets of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh, causing thousands to flee and creating widespread damage in the Ohio, Allegheny, and Susquehanna valleys. They watched on film as the new airship Hindenburg left Friedrichshafen at 4:00 p.m. for the United States with fifty-one passengers and arrived in Lakehurst, New Jersey, three days later at 5:23 a.m., traveling at seventy miles an hour. And they watched as Mussolini annexed Ethiopia and King Victor Emmanuel became emperor.

  Bob liked to go dancing. Barbara preferred to limit their public appearances to movies or automobile rides. Bob demanded to know why Barbara didn’t want to be seen with him in public. She had her reasons: privacy; the press (she hated to be gossiped about); she was twenty-nine, he, 25 (the age difference could be a problem); and there was Dion, and Fay.

  Barbara had seen Fay at the extravagant premiere of Metro’s Great Ziegfeld. The studio had spent more than $2 million on the three-hour picture; Ziegfeld’s set designer, dance director, and scenarist had been brought to Hollywood to reproduce the extravagant, legendary production numbers. Taylor was mobbed by fans. Barbara and Fay didn’t speak.

  “It is unfortunate,” Barbara said, “but that’s the way it ended.” After Fay’s thwarted plan to kidnap Dion, Barbara was more wary of Frank than ever.

  With Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford Tone, and Bob Taylor, 1936. The Tones were married in October 1935, months before this picture was taken; Barbara and Bob were newly involved but Joan and Barbara were deeply connected as seen in this photograph.

  Driving home from a movie one night, Bob stopped the car in front of the Trocadero. The Troc was like the “clubhouse.” Bob told Barbara that they were going in to dance. Her refusal, he said, would mean that she didn’t want to be seen with him in public.

  As they walked through the aisle of tables, Barbara thought her “knees were going to buckle” under her. She was that frightened. After a few minutes, it was clear to her that no one was paying any attention to them. Bob ordered two martinis. “You’d better hang on to me,” Barbara said. “I’m not sure I can get up off this chair.”

  • • •

  Barbara and Bob played tennis together, went horseback riding, and danced at the Cocoanut Grove. They had dinner and a movie with Joan Crawford and Franchot, still newlyweds after six months of marriage. Sometimes Bob played the piano, and Joan and Franchot sang; Barbara was the audience.

  Bob was at work on Small Town Girl. The production had been problematic with a series of delays. The John Lee Mahin and Edith Fitzgerald script had required numerous rewrites; Mildred Cram, Manny Seff, Horace Jackson, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Lenore Coffee all worked on the script.

  The picture’s star Jean Harlow was to be the girl who, on a lark and to get out of her humdrum small-town life, goes off with an up-and-coming surgeon who’s had a fight with his fiancée after a big football game and is on a binge. He insists that the girl he’s just picked up marry him; she refuses and tries to talk some sense into him, but he prevails. He awakens in the morning to find himself married to a girl he doesn’t know rather than to the worldly society woman to whom he is engaged. His new wife consents to wait six months to annul the marriage and goes away with him to avoid a scandal. During their time on the family yacht, they fight and rail against one another, hate each other, fall in love, and ultimately decide to live happily ever after and stay married.

  Harlow dropped out of the production, and Maureen O’Sullivan, who had made her mark in more than thirty pictures and as Jane Parker in Tarzan the Ape Man and Tarzan Escapes, was considered for the part.

  Metro next wanted Janet Gaynor. She’d just appeared in Fox’s Farmer Takes a Wife with Henry Fonda. Gaynor resisted, thinking she wouldn’t be any good in a role that was intended for Jean Harlow, even with rewriting.

  Robert Montgomery was to be the society doctor, but Gaynor didn’t want to be billed second to Montgomery, who was being talked about for Romeo and Juliet (Bob Taylor had been considered for the picture, but the studio thought better of it). Franchot Tone was mentioned as
Montgomery’s replacement for Small Town Girl.

  Taylor had finished Magnificent Obsession two months before and got the role of the young surgeon. Janet Gaynor, who had never been on loan-out in her eight years with Fox, was starring opposite Bob as Metro’s new small town girl.

  • • •

  Bob and Barbara often went out with the Marxes.

  People watching Taylor and Stanwyck found them to be quiet, absorbed, sufficiently unto themselves.

  Bob was free from Irene Hervey; Barbara from Frank Fay.

  “We amused each other,” said Barbara. “We danced well together. We were good friends, had a marvelous time.”

  Bob was direct, open, and honest with Barbara. He appreciated her in big ways and little, was loving to her. After Fay, Bob seemed so normal to Barbara. He made it clear to those around them that he had great admiration for her.

  They were from opposite ends of the universe, though their grandparents were Scotch-English (his) and Scotch-Irish (hers); their ancestors had come to this country in time to serve in the American Revolutionary War.

  From left to right: Zeppo and Marion Marx with Barbara and Bob, 1936. (COURTESY TIM MARX)

  Taylor was the grandson of a grain merchant who’d emigrated from Holland to Nebraska by way of Pennsylvania. The Brughs were members of the Church of Brethren, Republicans, and, like most people in Nebraska, of German descent. His grandmother’s family, the Stanhopes, had come from Scotland to Michigan and were devoted Methodists.

  Taylor was the son of a farm boy, Spangler Brugh (the fastest corn husker around), who’d grown up on a working ranch that was all light, blank horizons, and routine drudgery and who lived out his own father’s dream of becoming a doctor.

  As a boy, Bob had been given everything by his parents: a pony he called Gypsy—Gyp—that he’d ridden alone for hours at a time; a pony cart, harness, and saddle; a dog; and guns of various sorts. At family holidays he hunted with his father, grandfather, and uncle for rabbits and skinned them; his mother cooked the meat and served it with dumplings and prune rabbit gravy.

  In high school, Arly was given a series of cars, including a convertible sports coupe and a 1929 beige-and-orange Buick. His parents bought him the books of knowledge and encouraged him to study the piano and cello (he’d wanted to study the saxophone, but his mother thought it too “noisy and jazzy”).

  The Brughs passed their high ideals on to their only son, teaching him honor, self-reliance, and respect for authority. As a boy, Arly had his chores at home, keeping the wood box organized and mowing the neighbor’s lawn for twenty-four cents an hour. “I cleaned and kept my own room in order,” Bob said. “I did my own homework. I understood that that was my job and that a man did his job alone.” The Brughs were strict (“There were not many spankings,” Taylor said, “but as sure as they were due, I collected”).

  The family took summer vacations together—to the lakes of Minnesota, to Lake Okoboji in Idaho, out west as far as Denver—and Arly went pole fishing with his father.

  Bob and Barbara came from different worlds, but in basic ways they found likenesses: when they were children, circumstances led them to be alone, Barbara because she didn’t have a mother, Bob because he didn’t like to play with other children. “I was almost always alone,” he said. “I never ran with a group. I wasn’t unhappy. I went to school. I was a good little boy . . . I never played hooky. I was usually the room monitor and the president of the class . . . After school, I didn’t play with other kids. I liked to be by myself . . . I always had a flock of animals to care for. I preferred being alone on the prairie or in the woods . . . I had just enough to do on my own and that’s how I preferred to do and be.”

  Like Barbara, Bob was remote. Barbara was shy and assumed she was not really welcome. Bob was private, not outgoing or talkative; he too assumed he wasn’t liked. Ruth Brugh had made sure her son in grade school and high school was well-groomed, first dressing him in short black velvet pants, a white shirt, and a huge straw hat. He’d been teased in elementary school and called Little Lord Fauntleroy. When he was older, Ruth made sure her son was immaculately dressed in slacks, sweaters, and silk clothes. The combination of Arly’s beauty, which made his classmates jealous and taunt him with names of “pretty boy,” and the differentness caused by his overprotective mother led him to believe that people wouldn’t like him. “I’ve always taken it for granted that they won’t,” he said. “I can’t make advances. I don’t mix easily.”

  Bob, like Barbara, found solace during his school years in Hugh Walpole’s Fortitude: “Blessed be all Sorrows, Torments, Hardships, Endurances that demand Courage . . . Blessed be these things—for of these things cometh the making of a Man.”

  Bob had been a star tennis player in high school; run the 100- and 220-yard dashes on the track team; was elected president of his class and of the dramatics club. He’d chosen a college that was church endowed and forty miles from home, surrounded by elms and maples on the edge of a small Nebraska town; big cities and big universities frightened him. He decided he would follow his father’s path, become a doctor, and join the family practice—his first interest, orthopedic surgery; then, psychiatry. His nickname Buddy soon became Doc.

  The two Spangler A. Brughs: son, age sixteen, and father, forty-six, 1927, six years before his death in 1933 from an infection following emergency surgery; father and son worshipped one another. (PHOTOFEST)

  Bob acted in college theatrical productions and spent hours practicing the cello and playing in the school orchestra. When he started to yearn for something bigger and to leave his parents, and Nebraska, and small-town life, he followed his cello instructor to a bigger college in a bigger small town, Pomona, California; it sounded like Utopia. Once there, Bob could easily be spotted in his brilliant yellow coupe. Arly Brugh became “Home” Brugh and was dubbed “the Sheik”; his shyness misunderstood for conceit; his good looks in place of brains.

  Bob took over where his father left off in caring for his frail mother (there were those back in Beatrice who said Ruth Brugh “enjoyed her illness”). Bob had always been the object of Ruth’s cloying love.

  When they lived together in Los Angeles, Ruth Brugh wanted Arly with her as much as possible. Religion took hold of Ruth; she was a strict Methodist and couldn’t abide Catholics, Germans, Jews, or Democrats. Ruth Brugh saw sex as an evil force and girls as the instrument of that evil. There were times when she asked her boy to sleep beside her, to hold his hand over her left breast to make sure her heart was still beating. Bob did as he was asked.

  Ruth Brugh with her son, Spangler Arlington, Robert Taylor, 1936. The people of Beatrice saw her primarily as someone who “enjoyed her illness.”

  As soon as he had enough money, he moved to his own home—a seven-room one-story Spanish house on a tree-shaded street in Beverly Hills, four blocks from his mother. There was no wall surrounding the house. The porch was decked with flowering plants; the home was furnished in warm brown shades and Monterey furniture. Bob hired a French-Hungarian manservant, Joe Mondue, to take care of it, and him, his clothes, his car, and anything else that came up.

  Ruth Brugh was concerned that her son would “get too wild,” that he wouldn’t be able to afford two houses (“We’ll end up in the poorhouse,” she said), and that she would be alone. Arly assured Ruth that he would find someone to take care of her (“Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll make sure she isn’t anyone but a white Protestant”). His grandmother, cousin, and secretary moved in with Ruth. His grandmother addressed envelopes for fans who requested Bob’s picture; his mother answered postcards; and Virginia, his secretary, answered letters. Bob telephoned every day or dropped by; Ruth said that what she liked best about her son was that he “treated her like his best girl friend.”

  The first party Bob gave in Hollywood was for his mother, in honor of her forty-ninth birthday—a small dinner dance at one of the hotels. Ruth Brugh had outwardly changed from the woman of Beatrice, Nebraska. Her clothes were fashio
nable, her hair was dyed and done in a “stylish hairdo,” and for her birthday dinner she wore her new diamond and sapphire bracelet, a gift from her son.

  Bob was drawn to women who were older and more experienced than he, who could show him how things were done. At college, an older coed, Dorothy Forster, had taught Bob how to be with girls. When he first started in pictures, Virginia Bruce had advised him about how things should be. Virginia was a year older than Bob, but she was more sophisticated and mature and a much more experienced movie actor. She’d been on the stage in New York, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies, hailed as “America’s Most Beautiful Show Girl”; in Hollywood, she was one of the original Goldwyn Girls. She’d made her screen debut in 1929. Society Doctor was her thirtieth picture; it was Bob’s sixth.

  Barbara was older than Bob as well and had been on her own forever, without parents, cars, piano lessons. She’d watched and learned how to be in the world by her own fight and will; it came out of a lifetime of watching and sorting things out for herself. She’d been wary of advice or help and thrown herself into her work. She’d allowed herself to be taken in hand by wiser, more experienced professionals like Willard Mack, Arthur Hopkins, Fay, and Capra who taught her and showed her the way. Frank Fay, she believed, had taught her everything, but in the end their marriage had almost killed her, nearly destroyed their son, and just about finished her career. With Bob she may have been the older, more experienced of the two—she didn’t want anyone telling her what she could or couldn’t do, whom she should or shouldn’t see—but he was showing Barbara for the first time how to play. They laughed together, ate together, danced together.