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

by Victoria Wilson

  Joan’s succession of modern glamour stories assigned to her by the studio—Chained, Forsaking All Others, No More Ladies, and I Live My Life, each identical in plot and characterization—were dismissed by critics as “Crawford formula” pictures. “In the first reel,” said Crawford, “I’m a poor girl. In the second, things have happened and I’m wearing gorgeous clothes.”

  Hollywood’s big stars were making elaborate costume pictures: Norma Shearer, Romeo and Juliet; Katharine Hepburn, Mary of Scotland; Garbo, Camille as soon as George Cukor was finished directing Romeo and Juliet.

  Clarence Brown, standing on raised platform, with Greta Garbo and Robert Montgomery on stairs, 1930. The picture was Inspiration, from the Alphonse Daudet novel Sapho, adapted for the screen by Gene Markey. William Daniels is the cameraman. (PHOTOFEST)

  Crawford desperately wanted to make a period picture; she had no intention of being left out of the costume picture craze. She was going to do her “darndest,” she said, “to get away from modern pictures” and make herself “worthy of real and vital roles.”

  The Franchot Tones—he, the handsome, erudite, socially prominent young actor, potentially the best actor of his generation, member of the Theatre Guild, a founding member of the radical, adventurous Group Theatre, who also loved the New York stage and hated Hollywood; she, influenced by her new husband’s artistry, breeding, curiosity, and boldness and hungry to improve herself in all ways cultural (a professor from one of the local universities came each week to tutor her)—were planning to take a few months’ leave to go east and work together onstage in a small theater in Connecticut. Joan planned to learn “everything that could be learned about acting.”

  Crawford told David Selznick that she wanted to play the part of Peggy Eaton. Selznick laughed at the notion. “You can’t do a costume picture,” he told her. “You’re too modern.”

  The picture’s director was Clarence Brown, who’d helped Joan in her transformation from Jazz Age dancing daughter to serious dramatic actress. It wasn’t a fluke that Brown had directed Greta Garbo in five pictures—Flesh and the Devil, A Woman of Affairs, Romance, Anna Christie, and Inspiration—before he started to work with Crawford. She admired Garbo more than any other actress.

  Crawford spotted the Swedish actress walking down steps and saw it as “a real inspiration. She seems to fly like a bird. Seeing her thrills me,” said Crawford. “When I look at myself up there on the screen, I seem to be galumphing all over the place and wonder why I thought I could ever be an actress.”

  Clarence Brown had directed Crawford in Possessed, Letty Lynton, Chained, and Sadie McKee. Crawford believed that she and Brown were “attuned in spirit,” that he understood the way she worked and “made allowances for her idiosyncrasies.”

  Metro had originally purchased the rights to The Gorgeous Hussy for Jean Harlow after RKO had wanted to make the picture two years before with Katharine Hepburn. Crawford went to Joe Mankiewicz, the picture’s producer, and asked him to give her the part.

  Mankiewicz had just started to produce at Metro. With his brother Herman’s insistence, Joe got a job as a junior writer at Paramount writing dialogue; four years later he landed at Metro as a screenwriter. Two years after that he was producing, overseeing Three Godfathers and Fury.

  As a Metro producer, Mankiewicz said, “The livin’ was easy, the fish were bitin’ and the tennis was good,” but he found the job “a sad and unhappy waste.” Mankiewicz wanted to write, and at Metro, where producers were forbidden writing credits, he was forced to write anonymously.

  Mankiewicz had written a number of pictures at Metro, including Manhattan Melodrama with Myrna Loy and Clark Gable and two Crawford pictures, Forsaking All Others (also with Gable) and I Live My Life.

  The Gorgeous Hussy was his next assignment.

  Joan knew Mankiewicz well. Mankiewicz summoned up Crawford’s sexual energy when he wrote for Robert Montgomery sharing a campsite with Joan in Forsaking All Others, “I don’t need matches. I could build a fire by rubbing two boy scouts together.” Joan was “madly” in love with Mankiewicz and said of their time together, “It was lovely. He gave me such a feeling of security, I felt I could do anything in the world.”

  She begged and pleaded with Joe to let her do The Gorgeous Hussy. Crawford saw the picture as her chance to prove she was “an actress and not a clothes horse.” Mankiewicz relented.

  Joseph Breen went over the script and wanted changes. In a letter to L. B. Mayer, Breen asked for no unnecessary drinking or rowdiness in any of the scenes. “Abusive and profane expressions such as ‘Lord!’ and ‘God’ should be avoided throughout . . . You should not speak hypocritically about the language of the cloth.”

  The Gorgeous Hussy started shooting just as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was published.

  • • •

  Robert Taylor was uncomfortable in costume and felt “too dressed up, too showy . . . I don’t like being on parade,” he said. But in the part of the young, besotted suitor of The Gorgeous Hussy, “so alive; always laughing,” Taylor was fresh and winning. Clarence Brown described Bob as “the new heart beat of America. ‘Pretty Boy’ was the fans’ conception of him,” Brown said. “Bob had classic features and some studio expert unwisely decided to make him still handsomer. Bob objected strenuously but vainly to the weeding out of the heavy eyebrows that almost met over his nose.”

  Joan made her entrances on the set in full costume, greeting her co-star Melvyn Douglas “in a distinctly Southern manner, less as I was a fellow player,” he said, “than a guest in her home.” Crawford’s new dressing room was a perfect re-creation of a New England clapboard house with picket fences, grass mats, and steeply pitched roof, “presumably,” said Douglas, “to withstand the weight of whatever northeastern snows might accumulate inside the studio.” Douglas had heard stories of Joan “being a hail-fellow-well-met sort of person whose language was not exactly sanitary,” and he was somewhat surprised by her affect.

  In response to Norma Shearer’s being seen as the gracious lady of the MGM lot, attended to between takes by a maid in black uniform with cap and apron who handed the star a mirror and powder puff from the makeup tray, Joan decided to become Metro’s “cultured” queen, wearing large horn-rimmed glasses, knitting between setups, with a ball of yarn tucked in her midriff and listening to opera. Joan, like Barbara, knew the name of every electrician and grip.

  A special phonograph in Crawford’s dressing room played music during each day of production to accompany Joan’s moods. The records were chosen by a music expert out of the five thousand he kept on file for her, including those by Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Eddy Duchin, Paul Robeson, and Lawrence Tibbett. The records played most frequently were La Traviata, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Verdi’s Requiem. Joan and Franchot were taking singing lessons with a well-known Los Angeles operatic voice coach, the tenor Otto Morando, for the moment when Joan would sing on the concert stage.

  With Joan Crawford, during the filming of The Gorgeous Hussy, with “Garbo’s director,” Clarence Brown, in charge. He described himself as “a company man who shot the story as well as [he] could and went on to the next thing.”

  During production on The Gorgeous Hussy, Joan was impressed with Bob Taylor’s easy, graceful naturalness as an actor, but she was baffled by Barbara and Bob as a couple. Joan knew what Barbara had been through with Fay, and he and Bob were different in so many ways. Joan didn’t see Bob as Barbara’s type.

  Bob Taylor as Lieutenant John “Bowie” Timberlake, navy purser, with Joan Crawford as the “gorgeous hussy,” Margaret “Peggy” O’Neal Timberlake Eaton, called by Andrew Jackson “the smartest little woman in America.”

  Mankiewicz said of Joan’s moods, “You’d have to watch the way she came in. If Joan was wearing a pair of slacks, that meant you could slap her on the ass and say, ‘Hiya Kid. You getting much?’ In turn she’d be as raucous as possible. She could come back the next day wearing black sables and incredible sapp
hires and by Jeses, you’d better be on your feet and click your heels, kiss her hand and talk with the best British accent you had; but never in any way indicate she was different in any respect from the way she was yesterday because the following day she’d come in in a dirndl or a pinafore and you’d be down on the floor playing jacks with her.”

  Joan at thirty-one was beautiful. As Peggy Eaton, the young, dewy innkeeper’s daughter of simple demeanor, supposed to look fresh and innocent, Crawford, with her face framed by ringlets and a wide-brimmed nineteenth-century bonnet, belied any trace of modesty or purity. Her head looked too large, her face too square-jawed, her features too hard. Selznick’s assessment of Crawford in a costume picture had been correct. Her features looked too modern for the part of the woman whose affairs scandalized nineteenth-century Washington and helped to shape the Democratic Party ticket of 1832 and change the course of American politics.

  With Crawford, circa 1936.

  Crawford and Franchot had been married for less than eight months. During that time they’d given a series of dinner parties for eight or ten each Saturday night at their house on Bristol Avenue, the house Joan bought after the release of Our Dancing Daughters, which she changed and redecorated when she married Doug Fairbanks. Barbara and Bob were invited to the Crawford-Tones’ for dinner, as were the Fred Astaires, the Clarence Browns, the Gary Coopers, Luise Rainer and Clifford Odets, Jean Muir and Jerry Asher. Asher was an escort and RKO press agent who looked out for Joan in her early Hollywood days and was one of her closest friends. After each dinner—the men wore sack coats; the women, backless dinner gowns—games were played—Ping-Pong, anagrams, backgammon, “Secrets,” “Guess Who I Am,” psychoanalytic word games—and the knitters went back to knitting until a new picture was shown in the projection room.

  The Franchot Tones gave a Sunday afternoon reception (a first for Joan) for Leopold Stokowski, the director, for almost a quarter of a century, of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski was in town to make The Big Broadcast of 1937 for Paramount Pictures. Invited to the Ambassador Hotel for tea were three hundred, among them Jimmy Cagney, Irene Dunne, Henry Fonda, Judith Anderson, the Otto Klemperers, Clifton Webb, Ginger Rogers, the Metropolitan Opera contralto Ernestine “Tini” Schumann-Heink, Louis B. Mayer, and Barbara and Bob.

  • • •

  Bob was set to fly to New York to do a radio appearance for the studio. He’d bought an acre and a half of land in Coldwater Canyon and was working with an architect on what was to be a French Colonial farmhouse.

  A few days before he was to leave for New York—his first real separation from Barbara—he picked up Dion and drove eighteen miles north of Malibu to be with Barbara at the end of the day’s shooting on Marry the Girl. Bob kept stopping along the way to buy the four-year-old popcorn, lemonade, candy, and ice cream. By the time they arrived at the shoot, Dion was sick with an upset stomach.

  Bob didn’t want to leave for New York and fought with Metro about going; he didn’t want to be away from Barbara. The studio was insistent. Bob thought it was Metro trying to meddle in the relationship, but the studio wanted to see how his New York fans would react to the actor, to gauge how seriously the studio should take Taylor’s fan mail.

  Bob had never been to a big city. It was his first trip east of Michigan and his first trip in an airplane. The TWA plane, carrying fourteen passengers, made a stopover in Wichita. The field was mobbed with people. Bob assumed they were there to see him, but the American hero Clarence Chamberlin had just landed and was the cause of the furor. Chamberlin had broken Lindbergh’s distance record, flying nonstop from New York to Germany, two weeks after Lindbergh’s 1927 flight from New York to Paris. Chamberlin had recently started an airline whose route was between New York and Boston.

  • • •

  In New York, Bob wanted to make sure he saw the sights—Grant’s Tomb, the aquarium, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge. He was mobbed by fans, and getting anywhere in the city became difficult. It took him half an hour to get from the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria to his suite. To make his way through the mob of women, Taylor pulled down his hat and turned up the collar of his coat “like a G-man.” One fan managed to get through the guards and climbed thirty-eight flights of stairs to the floor of Bob’s suite. He graciously let her in for an autograph and tea.

  Bob couldn’t wait to see the city and the next day got up at five o’clock in the morning to take a walk down Broadway. He realized that New York at that hour was “quieter than Beatrice, Nebraska, on a hot Sunday afternoon.”

  A while later, when the city awakened “to a turmoil of activity,” Bob was “utterly awed,” he said. “I’ve lived in small towns all my life.” He got “exactly the same kick out of New York [that] any other Main Streeter would.”

  He went to see Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End at the Belasco Theatre, and at intermission, when somebody called out Bob’s name, an army of “youngsters still up ‘way past their bedtime’ ” began to push forward; those up close were helpless to do anything about it; soon everyone was getting torn apart. Bob “hadn’t been cautious enough,” he said, and was in the center of a “shouting, laughing stampede.” He couldn’t escape back inside, and before he was able to get in the theater, his tie had been pulled from his neck and the buttons and pockets ripped from his jacket. With a New York crowd on his tail, he felt like a “dog just introduced to a tin can” and was “knocked cold with fear.”

  The radio broadcast was in the Radio City building. Private Number (Confessions of a Servant Girl), Bob’s new picture with Loretta Young, was due to open there within a few weeks. Bob was escorted by two policemen to the Radio City theater and then brought up to the rooftop, where the Rockettes and the Radio City ballet corps congregated between shows.

  Afterward, he was safely escorted to the seventeenth floor of the complex to do the radio broadcast. As he left, the corridor and stairway were jammed with people extending down seventeen flights waiting to see him, and he ducked out another way. Someone started to push forward, and in an effort to get to Bob, the crowd broke down one of NBC’s studio doors.

  Boys rode on the back bumper of Bob’s taxi for miles, and when he got out, they were on “his neck.” Girls called his hotel room pretending to be his mother; others called and said they were Barbara Stanwyck. When Barbara did call, Bob was so sure it was a fan he shouted in her ear that he wasn’t in.

  Fifteen police had to rescue him from the entrance of the Loew’s State Theatre building in Times Square. He got out of a cab in front of the theater, where he was to be on an MGM radio club broadcast, and was mobbed by a thousand autograph seekers, who picked him up, taking his shoe, grabbing at him, and causing him to be escorted in and out of the building.

  He felt a little foolish that the police had to hustle him through crowds as if he were a prisoner, but with their help he saw the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, Central Park, the Queen Mary, and the aquarium, which impressed him more than anything else.

  Bob left New York before getting a chance to eat at the Automat or walk across the George Washington Bridge. He dropped in on three nightclubs and saw Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina and Ray Bolger in On Your Toes.

  While he was in New York, Barbara appeared on Louella Parsons’s radio show, Hollywood Hotel, to do a scene with Gene Raymond, Helen Broderick, and Ned Sparks from Marry the Girl. The picture’s title had been changed from Marry the Girl to They Came Back Married to The Bride Misbehaves. At that point the Hays Office intervened.

  In a telegram to Sam Briskin, Hays said that while The Bride Misbehaves lent itself “to mischief rather than evil . . . serious suggestions require careful consideration.” The next day Briskin wired back, “Astonished your wire stop My personal assurance to you . . . picture contains nothing salacious . . . titles you suggest have no box office value whatsoever . . . stop With record studio has for clean pictures feel your position very unfair stop.”

  Hays held firm. “Opinion still prevails here,” he w
ired back to Briskin. “Will consult board members further and advise you.”

  The Bride Misbehaves became The Bride Revolts, The Bride Takes Command, She Was Independent, and finally The Bride Walks Out. Hays was mollified.

  Metro decided to make use of the Taylor-Stanwyck romance being written about daily in the press. The studio was excited about the prospects of pairing Bob and Barbara in a picture; it knew audiences would be titillated by seeing Robert Taylor make love to his real-life romance. Once Bob returned from New York, he and Barbara were to star together at Metro in My Brother’s Wife.

  The script by Leon Gordon and John Meehan had been kicking around MGM for two years, a variation on Red Dust and China Seas, originally meant for Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Then it was to be for Harlow and Franchot Tone, similar to The Girl from Missouri, their previous picture together. The director was to be Richard Boleslawski. Leon Gordon, John Meehan, and six other writers had their hand in the script, including Zelda Sears, Lenore Coffee, and Tess Slesinger.

  Three weeks before production began on My Brother’s Wife, Harlow was off the picture, and Metro decided to put Bob in opposite Barbara.

  Bob and Barbara were concerned about their “friendship” being exploited and nervous about arguing during the making of the picture, but Barbara knew it would be good for both of their careers, and they agreed to go ahead.

  Bob was the screen’s most popular star, along with Clark Gable, Shirley Temple, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Bob was the object of America’s magnificent obsession; Barbara was struggling to salvage her career. She needed the picture.

  • • •

  Woody Van Dyke was assigned to direct it. Van Dyke—Metro’s trusted director—had just completed production on San Francisco, the studio’s most expensive picture to date, budgeted at $4 million.