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

by Victoria Wilson

  Van Dyke was known in the industry as one of its most commercially successful directors—his range as a director was impressive—and one of its most sophisticated and dynamic. Van Dyke was six feet tall, all bone and muscle, with steel-blue eyes that looked right through you. He was one of the toughest guys in Hollywood. Van Dyke was a hard-boiled drinker who’d served in the marines as a major in the Great War.

  W(oodbridge) S(trong) Van Dyke II made Metro’s first sound picture in 1929, based on the daring exploits along the Ivory Coast of the great African adventurer Alfred Aloysius Smith, alias “Zambesi Jack,” alias “Trader Horn.” The director, with more than two hundred actors and workers, and ninety tons of equipment in twenty-five trucks, traversed more than nine thousand miles of African soil through Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya, and the Congo, crossing the equator eighteen times, all for the sake of authenticity, photographing the beauty of the sun-blistered veldt land and returning to Metro with 450,000 feet of film that caught the beauty and terror that was Africa. (PHOTOFEST)

  Van Dyke never turned down an assignment even if he thought the picture was lousy (“It’s their funeral, not mine,” he said). He could direct anything and did: from a drama of doomed lovers living in an alien culture (Never the Twain Shall Meet) to one of an alien culture that brought together the most implausible of lovers (Tarzan the Ape Man, which included the director’s own process shots from Trader Horn); from a comedy romance with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable (Forsaking All Others) to two frothy operettas (Naughty Marietta and Rose-Marie), one set in eighteenth-century Louisiana, the other on the Canadian frontier, each with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy; from the just-completed epic about San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, which culminated in a spectacularly staged twenty-minute re-creation of the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city, to a light comedy (Penthouse) with Warner Baxter and Myrna Loy.

  It was Van Dyke who insisted to the Metro front office that Myrna Loy, a redhead of Montana pioneer stock, though until then typed as an “Oriental siren,” “the subject of a thousand poems and stories of the Orient,” wrote Carl Sandburg, could play a typical American girl and do comedy.

  Van Dyke saw the spark and sexy ease between William Powell and Myrna Loy, directing them in Manhattan Melodrama, and set out to find a vehicle for a picture that could capture his notion about romance after marriage—a twist on the “they lived happily ever after” ending.

  Van Dyke went through the MGM library of properties and found what he thought was the perfect story—one no director wanted to touch because of its ordinariness—a murder mystery about a detective and his wife. Van Dyke had Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who faithfully re-created the humor and mystery of the book, write additional domestic scenes, and he had his script of The Thin Man.

  It was Van Dyke who insisted on William Powell for Nick Charles against studio wisdom; Powell had been stuck in the dead-end Philo Vance series for years. The director set about using Powell’s own distinct charm and friendliness, and the actor’s improvised antics, to create the character of Nick Charles.

  Van Dyke was famous for working fast and made The Thin Man in sixteen days. D. W. Griffith so admired the picture he saw it four times.

  Van Dyke had started out in pictures in 1916 at the age of twenty-six as a makeup man for D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Van Dyke, then the most promising young leading man on the legitimate stage, was the only one of Griffith’s crew who knew how a Babylonian king should be made up (the makeup of biblical characters had been Van Dyke’s hobby since childhood). He was given a week’s job of daily transforming fifteen hundred extras into warriors and appeared in the picture as well—as a high priest, a groom, and a charioteer.

  Soon he became Griffith’s first assistant (“I was just one of Griffith’s 10,000 messengers,” Van Dyke said), making $3 a day. “Working under Griffith meant everything,” said Van Dyke. “It was a case of hero-worship, pure and simple . . . I’m still trying to do the things I learned from him.”

  Griffith thought Van Dyke was an adventurer. (“Everything that man did,” Griffith said, “he made into an adventure. Why, just to know him was an adventure.”)

  Van Dyke made his mark in 1928, when David Selznick assigned him to direct White Shadows in the South Seas. The picture was about a white man’s redemptive journey to the Marquesas in the South Pacific—“a living fragment of the childhood of our Caucasian race”; a lost paradise over the rim of the world where Gauguin fled to paint (“Your civilization is your disease,” Gauguin wrote to Strindberg, “my barbarism is my restoration to health”).

  Selznick saw White Shadows as “an ethereal love idyll”; his boss, the Metro producer Hunt Stromberg, saw it as “tits and sand” and sent off his own man, Robert Flaherty, to Tahiti to co-direct with Van Dyke.

  Selznick denounced Stromberg as “tasteless”; Thalberg insisted Selznick apologize or leave the studio. Selznick cleared out his desk and was hired by Famous Players–Lasky to be assistant to B. P. Schulberg, the head of production.

  When the rushes from the South Pacific arrived at Metro, it was Van Dyke’s scenes of White Shadows in the South Pacific Seas that charmed Thalberg; Flaherty was recalled to Hollywood, and Van Dyke became the picture’s sole director.

  • • •

  Metro was touting Robert Taylor as the “most sensational box-office draw since Clark Gable first leaped to fame.”

  Taylor’s role in His Brother’s Wife was that of a young research scientist, Chris Claybourne (it was Taylor’s fourth role in a year as a doctor), the playboy son of an acclaimed medical doctor, about to embark on his first expedition to the jungles to find a serum for spotted fever. The role, written with Gable in mind, had many of the qualities of a Gable character: a sophisticated seducer of women, an adventurer ready to kiss civilization good-bye for untamed places and primitive jungles, a rugged man equally at home in white tie and tails or heat and sweat and dust-stained linen. The role was softened by Taylor’s demeanor and at the insistence of the Breen Office, which pronounced both of the movie’s leads “immoral people of loose habits and conduct” surrounded by “the inescapable flavor of loose sex.”

  Barbara was Rita Wilson—a professional “mannequin”—worldly, beautiful, out for a lark, who meets the young scientist just before he is to set sail for South America. Their high romance is a fling, days and nights of nonstop fun and high jinks. No questions asked, no attachments. At the end of ten days, each has been drawn into a web of feeling for the other, and hours before his departure Chris decides to abandon his mission, and the promising career that will come from it, and marry Rita.

  From His Brother’s Wife, 1936. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  It is his brother, Tom (John Eldredge), who dismisses Chris’s ardor as nothing more than a momentary distraction, a last-minute romp, and not even with a girl of the family’s standing. Tom insists his brother set sail for the sake of career and family honor and uses Chris’s gambling debt as the way to prevail: Tom will pay the debt only if Chris sails for South America.

  Chris’s departure sets in motion the drama of the picture.

  Rita—proving she’s as powerful as the lofty Claybournes—seduces Chris’s brother into falling in love and marrying her and walks out on her vows minutes after the ceremony. The righteous Tom Claybourne—earnest, responsible, hardworking—is desperate, unable to work or think of anything but Rita, and his own rising star as a brilliant doctor is suddenly in free fall.

  Betrayal between brothers and lovers, the heat and hell of the jungle, a double dose of vengeance, a desperate fight to discover the elusive cure for the deadly spotted fever—all converge as the story moves toward its sweat-filled, tick-riddled climax in a steamy melodrama that caused Barbara to observe about His Brother’s Wife: “We set pictures back 50 years.”

  Jean Hersholt and Bob in the jungles of South America holding vigil as their antidote serum takes hold and (they hope) reverses the deadly spotted fever dest
roying Stanwyck’s body. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  The Breen Office insisted the studio take “the greatest care in showing scenes of physical contact” between the two characters, emphasizing in its letter to Louis B. Mayer that “this is important.” There was to be “no passionate kissing between Chris and Rita at any time.” And with Jean Harlow still being thought of as the star, Breen insisted “there should be no suggestion that Chris [leaning over Rita’s chair] is looking down at Rita’s breasts.”

  • • •

  His Brother’s Wife started shooting in early June 1936.

  Van Dyke wanted his pictures vital and spontaneous; he was known as the high priest of directorial vigor and had an inexhaustible energy. He’d spent two years in the early 1920s shooting serials and making quickies for Poverty Row studios. Each scene had to be right the first time; there was no money for retakes; a few feet of wasted film could mean a man’s job.

  Actors were hired at fantastic salaries but on a daily basis; they had to be kept moving all day and into the night to get every one of their scenes on film. Van Dyke’s one basic instruction to his cameraman was to “keep moving. No matter what the scene is,” he said, “the audience should view it from as many angles as possible.” Tempo was everything. At the end of the twenty-four hours, when the actor was half dead from exhaustion and all of the face-on scenes were shot, hot coffee was poured into him, and smelling salts were applied to his nose; he was sent on his way, and a double was brought in to finish the work.

  Van Dyke wanted his actors to speak without self-consciousness or coyness. Writers were known to cry out when they saw what Van Dyke was doing to their words, how he was causing actors to mumble lines with their backs to the camera.

  The reckless pace that Van Dyke shot was not just about saving money for the studio. He wanted an atmosphere of hurry and alertness that would give a “crisp, vital, quality to the final production.” He didn’t want actors wearing themselves out going over and over a scene. “The first rehearsal, the first shot, is always the best,” Van Dyke said. “It may be imperfect but the general effect is superior.”

  He never looked at the daily rushes. Van Dyke’s theory was simple: “Figure out how you would naturally do a thing and then do it naturally some other way.”

  During the shooting of His Brother’s Wife, Van Dyke would pull a gag in the middle of a scene to catch an actor off guard and get a reaction or element of surprise he was after; at other times he would film actors who were only half rehearsed.

  As a boy, Van Dyke, like Bob Taylor, was dressed by his mother as Little Lord Fauntleroy—in black satin and white lace with long beautiful curls. Van Dyke not only had to wear the clothes but had to act the part onstage and was sent from school to school, dressed as Fauntleroy; he let it be known he was no “sissy,” but boys tortured him in one town after another, and by the age of nine Woody viewed the world with deep suspicion and distrust. At ten, he was appearing with his mother on the Pantages Circuit; he’d perfected his sense of timing and action and learned about costuming and sewing.

  At fourteen, Van Dyke was in business school supporting himself by clerking in a grocery store, working as a janitor, oiling engines, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, driving an express wagon, and singing in vaudeville.

  By twenty, he’d been just about everything: horseman, boxer, miner, electrician, newspaper reporter, switchman, sailor, a mercenary in Mexico, a gold prospector in the Klondike, a lumberjack in Washington. He’d been a socialist, a Communist, a Christian Scientist, and a Wobbly. He’d made colonel and major, gone to jail for agitating against capitalism, and then agitated against socialism when he protested the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair.

  Van Dyke’s trick of directing was to talk fast as he gave instructions to the actors. To get the tempo for the picture, he’d say: “You come on the set. You walk toward the table. You pick up a cigarette. You start saying your lines. You walk towards the door. And you should be finished with the speech when you open the door. Come on, let’s do it.”

  Woody Van Dyke’s pictures had an ease, a naturalism, and a sophisticated glitter. They were distinguished by beautiful photography, split-second action, and perfect continuity of story. And an authenticity.

  His picture Manhattan Melodrama was so realistic it lured John Dillinger out of hiding to see it, setting in motion the circumstances of his death when he was killed by the FBI in front of the theater. During production of His Brother’s Wife, the mood around Van Dyke was one of good humor and lots of laughter. Van Dyke was exact in his work and his schedule. Lunch was from twelve to one—one hour and no longer. At exactly six each evening, Van Dyke reached for his hat and signaled to the crew and actors the day was done.

  • • •

  Bob was thrown by the change in Barbara for the first two weeks on the picture.

  “Being together socially and on the set are two different things,” said Barbara. “I usually don’t have any inhibitions, but when I work I’m quieter. I don’t want anyone to talk to me before a scene and I don’t like people to look at me when I’m crying.”

  Bob watched Barbara work “like a Trojan” and never complain. “She gives everybody in the studio a feeling that the picture in hand, is the most important job ever undertaken,” said Bob.

  Three days into the shoot, Barbara gave Bob a platinum watch with rubies as number markers on the face. Bob gave her a gift as well, a bracelet inscribed, “With Love—Robert Taylor.” Barbara opened the box and said, “Oh, Bob, I’m not the type.” Barbara didn’t wear jewelry; Fay hadn’t liked her to.

  “What do you mean you’re not the type?” Bob said. “To me you’re beautiful and you’re lovely.”

  Bob’s kindness and attentiveness were transforming Barbara. She felt “warm and glowing and happy and wanting to be loved.” She was barely recognizable to herself but still ever wary and questioned if Bob really meant what he’d said. “It’s stupid to be cynical,” she said. “It’s more that I have grown wise; I can’t be cheated if I don’t trust.”

  On the set of His Brother’s Wife, 1936.

  Barbara and Bob went to the studio together by car. He sent flowers to her dressing room, as he had with Janet Gaynor and Joan Crawford. He lunched daily in Barbara’s dressing room and left with her at the end of the day. On Saturdays they went riding in the late afternoon or early evening and ate at the Brown Derby or at a drive-in sandwich stand near Bob’s house.

  When not filming, Barbara and Bob stayed in their dressing rooms. Bob brought a Victrola to the set and kept it there during the fourteen-day shoot so Barbara would be able to listen to her favorite records, among them Ray Noble, the Ambrose and Hylton orchestras, and Ellington’s and Goodman’s bands.

  After four months of seeing each other, Bob thought Barbara “one of the great women of the Twentieth Century, a great woman and a very great actress.”

  • • •

  Camille was to start filming as soon as His Brother’s Wife was completed. Each night after work, Bob went to Barbara’s so she could help him with the part of Armand.

  Bob quoted Barbara as having said that he was the lousiest actor who ever was. She denied having said it.

  The highest compliment Barbara could pay Bob, she said, was to state, positively, that “he is the same Bob he was when he was a thirty-five-dollar-a-week actor in the MGM stock company. He has risen with such dizzy speed,” she said, “that he might have bumped his head against the stars and been stunned into a superiority complex, god knows. And if he hasn’t blown his hat now, he never will. He’s truthful with himself, with what counts. He knows just how far he can go and where to stop. He won’t change and that’s stability of character—and pretty fine. Bob has never become unfit for human intercourse, not for one moment.”

  In His Brother’s Wife, Barbara was glamorous as Rita Wilson—lighthearted, vulnerable, assured, with none of the somber, stiff quality of The Bride Walks Out. She quietly gave
Bob the picture.

  On the last day of shooting His Brother’s Wife, Barbara gave out lapel watches to the crew. The whole company signed a scroll naming Barbara their favorite actress.

  Metro paid Bob a $5,000 bonus for making the picture.

  Van Dyke gave Barbara a signed copy of his self-published book, Horning into Africa, about his adventures making Trader Horn, which she was thrilled to have. Needless to say, MGM did not give Barbara a bonus of any sort. Metro sold His Brother’s Wife as the coming together of “America’s exciting new sweethearts” and “America’s Grand New Love Team.”

  • • •

  Barbara was out, engaged with the world: dancing at the Grove, the Beverly Wilshire, the Palomar; joining the dachshund craze that had taken over the town with other dachshund lovers, including William Powell, Marion Davies, Dorothy Parker, and Donald Ogden Stewart. Barbara bought two puppies with Bob (his was black, he called it Pretzel; hers was red, she called it Lady).

  After eight years of Fay’s tyrannical, possessive ways, and months after Barbara’s divorce, she felt free to “go where I please, with whom I please, dress as I please, talk as I please, go home when I like. I’m probably the last person in Hollywood to know what to do with freedom,” she said. “Diversion of this sort would be deadly boring in time, but as a novelty it’s great,” she said.

  Barbara was socializing with people she’d previously shunned, playing doubles tournaments at Claudette Colbert’s, attending parties with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers and the Jack Bennys, and having “peace and quiet and some fun.”

  With Bob and Spencer Tracy at the premiere of the film version of Lloyd’s of London at the Carthay Circle Theatre, November 1936.

  During her marriage, Fay had told her whom she could or couldn’t know, and she’d ceded to his dictates, in part because she didn’t make friends easily. Barbara was not one to make advances to people, gush, show that she was glad to see them even when she genuinely was. “I can’t burst into a group and establish intimate terms right off the handle,” she said. “I’ve lived too much within myself. I have no acquaintances. I don’t want any. Smatterings never interest me.”