Barbara was teaching Bob about acting, about business, about sex. Barbara wanted to advise and guide Bob; it was clear to her he was mixed-up, overwhelmed. “His sense of values have been pushed around so quickly in the past year,” she said, “that it is excusable.”
Bob got a kick out of being recognized and giving autographs. He was out at nightclubs watching people watch him. Rumors wreaked havoc before friendships could even get under way. Barbara understood how dangerous fame could be—especially fame that came so quickly one didn’t know what to do with it.
She was teaching Bob humility. “If you want to stay up there [on the marquee],” she said, “you’ve got to learn something every time a camera gives you the evil eye. When you can’t learn anything more, you’re through.”
Chester Morris, Virginia Bruce, and Robert Taylor, Society Doctor, 1935.
Until Magnificent Obsession, Bob hadn’t been considered much of an actor. He was on time to the set and knew his lines. He had been in a number of pictures. His first, Handy Andy, with Will Rogers, was made at Fox. Bob was disappointed it hadn’t been a Metro picture (“Why couldn’t I make my first picture in my own studio; wasn’t I good enough?”); in it he’d had three lines and whistled. In Buried Loot, his next picture, for Metro, one of the studio’s Crime Does Not Pay series, he was given the lead. In it he was handsome and slick.
In Society Doctor, Taylor was the best friend of, and junior intern to, the star of the picture, Chester Morris, in love with the staff nurse Virginia Bruce; she’s beguiled by the Taylor character, but her heart belongs to Morris (at the time, Taylor and Bruce were secretly having an affair—she, just recently divorced from John Gilbert, with a young child. Bruce had married Gilbert in her early twenties—his third marriage. Their two-year marriage had ended six months before making Society Doctor. She was Taylor’s first serious romantic involvement; he thought Bruce “exquisite, graceful, an exotic flower”).
In Society Doctor, Taylor was cocky and brash as the handsome intern, even playful at times, but not yet able to carry the difficult moments on-screen.
Taylor and Bruce were teamed up again in Bob’s next picture. She was the Times Square Lady who comes from the Midwest (Bruce was born in Minneapolis, the daughter of an insurance broker, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota) to claim her father’s empire after his death. It becomes clear that her father’s vast holdings are a network of crooked sports events watched over by racketeers. Taylor is the racketeer assigned to seduce her into selling out fast to those who want full control of her father’s syndicate.
Jean Hersholt worked with Taylor in Murder in the Fleet and said of the young actor, “I’ve been in Hollywood for twenty years and if I ever saw a newcomer who was marked for stardom, it is Robert Taylor. Can you see something of Gilbert in that turn of the head, and the sudden smile?”
In Magnificent Obsession, Taylor is beautiful, polished, worldly; his performance has a depth, thoughtfulness, and emotional undercurrent that made his prettiness seem beside the point. John Stahl, the director, was known for the care he took with his pictures.
“Once more,” Stahl would say to the actors while the film was still running and not bother to say “cut.” Stahl exposed more film than any other director, and he made only one picture a year: Back Street; Only Yesterday; Imitation of Life, among them. William Wyler worked as Stahl’s script boy and learned about endless retakes from him.
Stahl had started in pictures in Brooklyn in 1913 as a bit player and extra and “approached the responsibility of a director with infinite care and painstaking slowness,” said Taylor.
It was not uncommon for the director to do thirty, forty, or fifty takes on a relatively simple scene at the same time that Bob was filming retakes on Broadway Melody of 1936, directed by Roy Del Ruth. Woody Van Dyke, who shot certain scenes of Melody, “cut as he shot,” said Taylor. “Van Dyke used his camera as if it were a six shooter and he was the fastest gun in Hollywood.”
“With Stahl you acted,” said Bob. “Woody can’t stand acting; give him acting and he kicks it right out of you. [We] rarely got more than one take on any scene, then the camera was moved rapidly to another set-up.”
Going from endless retakes with Stahl to rapid-fire scenes with Van Dyke “was going from the sublime to the ridiculous,” said Taylor. “But it seemed normal.”
• • •
Bob admired Barbara’s long years of experience as an actress. “She’s been a trouper since she was a kid,” he said, “older in experience.” Often when Bob left the studio at night, “all temperamental and steamed up about something,” he would talk things over with Barbara. “When I’ve finished my recital,” he said, “I’m feeling ashamed of myself and that the matter in hand wasn’t very important anyway.” Bob was reassured by Barbara’s having both feet on the ground and felt that she knew the answers.
Barbara was becoming Bob’s greatest influence for improvement. “I used to get into an awful state, listening to everybody,” he said. “I know players of experience who still get almost frantic over the things people tell them and don’t know whom to believe or what to do.”
Barbara gave Bob the confidence to trust his impulses; he was carefree, buoyant. She was showing Bob how “to sort [it] out. How to judge,” he said, “what’s the right or the wrong thing to do.” She not only gave Bob good advice but demonstrated, in her own career, how it works. Bob believed that there never had been, or ever would be, a greater “pro” than Barbara.
“She’s taught me more with her knowledge,” he said, “than I would have learned in a lifetime. She’s the grandest sport alive.”
Barbara was happier than she’d been in years.
FOURTEEN
Exactly Like Anybody
1936
Let me tell you about a boy I know
They all call him Jitterbug Joe.
Bob Taylor hated to quarrel; he hadn’t grown up around it. His mother and father had loved each other without reservation, selfishness, bickering, or jealousy. “My father,” Bob said, “used to say to my mother almost every day of his life, ‘You are the most beautiful woman in the world to me. Every day we live together, I love you more.’ ”
Barbara didn’t get angry easily or publicly; she rarely showed it; instead, it festered, and she didn’t forget. When Barbara did get angry with Bob, he didn’t argue back. Barbara suffered from moods; she called them her “black Shanty-Irish gloom.” She would get up in the morning feeling fine. By noon she would begin to sink “right down.” If Bob called her from the studio, he’d ask how she was. She would answer, “Fine.”
“Feeling all right?”
“Fine,” she’d say.
“Anything happen this morning?”
“No.”
“Well, I see you’re in one of those things again. I’ll call you later.”
From years of experience with his mother, Bob understood erratic behavior.
He admired how little effort Barbara wasted in her life; except for her moods, high or low (“extremes always,” she said), how quietly she lived; how she stayed away from nightclubs; wore no makeup besides red lipstick, kept her hair color her own. Clothes held little interest for her, on-screen or off. When she was considering a script, the clothes never entered her decision. She didn’t pay attention to them until it was time to put them on. Some thought Barbara looked as if she were from a small southern town, and when asked if she was, she said, “Ah’s sho is, honey; South Brooklyn.” “She’s so completely natural. So real,” Bob said. It was a relief to him that Barbara looked like a well-scrubbed child of twelve.
Bob wasn’t much of a reader, but reading was like breathing to Barbara. He began to tease her about it.
Bob was shy but he liked people and liked to be around them. Barbara seemed to cut them off. With Fay, Barbara was thought of as shy, distant, unapproachable; the press saw her as impulsive, hot-tempered, always in trouble. Barbara would freeze up when meeting someone new; parties with three or m
ore people were uncomfortable for her; even with friends and acquaintances, she’d snap out a dismal “hullo” and sink in the nearest chair—with thoughts of “Do these people want me here? I’m sure they only invited me out of sympathy. I know those two women are talking about me over there”—until she could muster enough courage to leave.
With the people Barbara did like, “it was all the way overboard,” Bob said. The differences between them didn’t pose a problem.
Once Bob was finished with Bill Wellman’s Small Town Girl, he was lent to Fox for Confessions of a Servant Girl with Loretta Young, from the 1915 play about class and society Common Clay, by Cleves Kinkead. Gene Markey and William Conselman had written the script; Roy Del Ruth was directing. This was the third remake of the play.
Bob Taylor once again had the role of the scion of an aristocratic family. Loretta Young was the maid in his parents’ household with whom he falls in love and secretly marries.
Bob was assigned to co-star with Clark Gable and Wallace Beery in a remake of the 1913 spectacle Quo Vadis, from the Henryk Sienkiewicz novel. Irving Thalberg was planning the remake with sound and dialogue. The picture was to go into production once Taylor finished shooting Confessions at Fox.
Bob finished production on Confessions of a Servant Girl just as Barbara was to start her second film for Eddie Small at Radio. Leigh Jason was directing.
Small Town Girl opened in Los Angeles at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and Loew’s State in time for Easter and was held over an additional week by popular demand. Bob took Barbara to the preview.
A Message to Garcia, which opened as well, didn’t fare as successfully. Frank Nugent in The New York Times called Gene Fowler’s screenplay “ridiculous.” Variety said Barbara was “no more a Cuban patriot’s daughter than Carnera is a ballet dancer. She’s a Cuban girlie who speaks her native language with an English accent and English with no accent at all.”
• • •
Twenty-two actresses were considered for the star role in Eddie Small’s production of Marry the Girl before the part went to Barbara despite their having worked together on Red Salute.
The woman in the picture is a successful fashion model with no interest in getting married despite her numerous suitors but somehow agrees to marry the most persistent (and the poorest)—an engineer, who insists she quit her job and they live together as man and wife on his meager $35-a-week salary.
Among those considered for the part before Barbara: Jane Wyatt, Frances Dee, Wendy Barrie, Mae Clarke, Claire Trevor, Gail Patrick, Nancy Carroll, Dixie Lee. Barbara’s name was not on the list.
Radio-Keith-Orpheum was in the throes of being reorganized and redesigned for the fourth time in eight years. As part of its reorganization, Sam Briskin, former vice president and general manager of Columbia Pictures, was hired as the new head of production. Briskin increased the number of “A” pictures from fifteen a season to twenty-four “A” and “B” pictures and hired box-office names.
Into this new RKO, flush with ambitious plans and large expectations, with two new owners, Floyd B. Odlum and John D. Hertz, and a new president, Leo Spitz, Briskin signed Herbert Marshall to a five-year contract and brought John Boles and Gene Raymond to the studio. Briskin welcomed Eddie Small’s production unit and worked out a schedule with Fox that would allow Barbara to make two pictures with RKO within the year, the first time in history that a star was under contract to two studios at once.
• • •
A radio operator with the Byrd Antarctic expedition on the SS Bear of Oakland wrote to Barbara telling her that her photograph hung over his bunk “in Little America all through the long winters night, taking the place of home and mother.” The radio operator went on to say in his letter that Barbara’s photograph had accompanied him “on more than 2000 miles of tractor travel over the Antarctic snows. If it had been you in person, it couldn’t have been more prized . . . you might be interested to know your spirit did such great things at a distance of even 10,000 miles.”
• • •
Zeppo Marx was sure Barbara could do comedy regardless of the difficulties of Red Salute. She was naturally funny, and her timing was good. Barbara had thought about it, but she couldn’t connect herself with comedy. “It’s always seemed to me there’s something too heavy about me,” she said and thought she should stick with what she called “the Get Outs,” the point in every one of her pictures where she told someone, “Now get out!”
It took Zeppo many weeks to convince Barbara to take another chance with comedy on the screen and make Marry the Girl.
The picture, Barbara’s twentieth in six years, was standard fare, but the dialogue by P. J. Wolfson and Philip Epstein was clever and amusing. Wolfson’s twelve pictures included Selznick’s Dancing Lady with Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Franchot Tone and Reckless, from Selznick’s story, with Jean Harlow, William Powell, and Tone. Philip Epstein was just starting out and had worked with Wolfson on Love on a Bet.
Sam Briskin informed Leo Spitz, the new president of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, that shooting was to start on Marry the Girl with Barbara, Gene Raymond, Ned Sparks, Robert Young, and Helen Broderick. “I would trade all five of them,” Briskin wrote to Spitz, “for one really big name, but that being impossible, I think the cast outlined above will do the trick.”
The studio considered it “dangerous to use Stanwyck as a comedienne instead of [as] a woman with a baby in her arms.”
Briskin assured Spitz that Leigh Jason, who’d just directed Gene Raymond in Love on a Bet, “ought to be able to get a fine and very exciting comedy out of it.” Leigh Jason, born Jacobson, had started out in pictures as an electrician and progressed to screenwriting before becoming a director.
Briskin knew Marry the Girl depended on Barbara’s performance. “We will have to hope she pulls through in this new type of role for her.”
Barbara was getting $42,500 for four weeks of work; Gene Raymond, $14,500; Ned Sparks, $14,000; Robert Young, once again borrowed from Metro, $8,750; Helen Broderick, $9,550; and Eric Blore, $450.
The story of Marry the Girl reflected the dilemma facing many urban American couples: working girl marries poor boy—just starting out—who insists his wife quit her well-paying job and be a stay-at-home bride. The girl in the picture relents and allows him to be the breadwinner until the leasing company comes to reclaim the furniture for nonpayment and then she secretly goes back to work. Their marriage is bliss until he finds out his salary alone has not bought them their self-satisfied happiness. He is furious; she refuses to give up her work and leaves him—until she realizes that poverty and true love win out over money and the prettier things of life.
With Ned Sparks, Robert Young, and Helen Broderick, Marry the Girl (later, The Bride Walks Out), 1936. “5 brilliant stars in a laughable drama of love on a budget . . . the story of a girl who married in haste and repented on 35 a week.” (RKO PICTURES LLC)
Barbara’s character was literal and grounded, and she played it that way. She may not have had the elegance of Carole Lombard in The Princess Comes Across or the lyricism of Claudette Colbert in She Married Her Boss or the vulnerability and quirkiness of Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, but Barbara brought to the character in Marry the Girl a lightness, modesty, and intelligence and held her own against the banter and charm of the supporting actors, who were the vitality of the picture and were given whatever humor there was in the piece. (Ned Sparks in his steely twang, stogie between clenched teeth, to Gene Raymond, on marriage: “Listen, pal, when a dame gets you going, keep on going”; Sparks to Helen Broderick: “When I married you, you didn’t have a rag on your back”; Broderick back to Sparks, “Well, I’ve got them now”; Hattie McDaniel to Broderick, about life and deception: “Well, you know what Mr. Lincoln said: ‘You can fool some of the people all the time and some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool some of the people some of the time’ ”; Broderick, in response, bemused and nibbling on an olive: “He certainly did.”)
Leigh Jason found Barbara to be “a real craftsman. She . . . would dig to the bitter end of what you really wanted—and then give it to you,” he said.
There were times when Jason had to make two or three takes because Barbara would be laughing at the comedic blustering and exquisite dim-wittedness of Billy Gilbert, former vaudevillian, Laurel and Hardy foil, and master of the “take ’Ems.”
• • •
Metro assigned Bob the role of his career to date, that of Armand Duval, opposite Greta Garbo as Marguerite Gautier, the tragic Dumas heroine of Camille. The studio believed it was to be Garbo’s greatest role, and by casting Taylor as the young man in love with “the lady of the camellias,” the dazzling courtesan of her day, it was making it known that Robert Taylor was one of its most important male stars.
Bob was making The Gorgeous Hussy from the popular Samuel Hopkins Adams novel about General Andrew Jackson’s rise to power and about Peggy Eaton, a Washington innkeeper’s daughter who becomes Jackson’s unofficial First Lady (mistress) after he is elected the seventh president of the United States. She so scandalized Jackson’s presidency that the whole episode was called the “Eaton malaria.”
Melvyn Douglas played the senator from Virginia who secretly loves the woman he’s watched grow from girlhood to beautiful woman. Taylor is her first husband; Franchot Tone, her second; Lionel Barrymore, arthritic and often in pain, Andy Jackson.
Taylor’s role in The Gorgeous Hussy was small, but he was playing opposite Joan Crawford. The Gorgeous Hussy was the first costume picture for both Crawford and Taylor. Taylor and Melvyn Douglas had been cast early. Crawford’s casting came later and was hard-won.
She was determined to break free from the tired up-from-under pictures she was given, such as Dancing Lady and Sadie McKee, in which the Crawford character triumphs over poverty, class, and a dubious past, “Cinderella stories,” she called them. Crawford had returned from the East after secretly marrying Franchot Tone in Fort Lee, New Jersey, a change from her first wedding, at twenty-four, to Doug Fairbanks Jr., then nineteen, in New York City’s Parish House of St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-Ninth Street.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 56
