• • •
Metro sent Bob to Dallas to attend the Texas Centennial on July 4 and paid him $1,000 for expenses. Barbara saw Bob off at the airport. When he arrived in Dallas, fans almost tore him apart, climbing all over him, ripping at his clothes, insisting on autographs.
On the way to the Texas Cotton Bowl, his car was stuck in traffic. An elderly farm woman came to the window and put her head inside the car to gaze at Taylor. “Why I’ve got two sons about your age,” she said. “You’re no different from them. You’re exactly like anybody.” Bob shook her hand and said, “You never said a truer word, ma’am.”
Thirty thousand people showed up and jammed the stadium to see Robert Taylor, more people than turned out for President Roosevelt, who’d traveled to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin to take part in the state’s centennial celebrations. Roosevelt was up for reelection.
His longtime friend and supporter the four-time former governor of New York, Al Smith, denounced the president at the first dinner of the American Liberty League. Smith called Roosevelt and his administration socialistic and traitorous to many of the 1932 Democratic platform pledges and warned that if the upcoming Democratic National Convention endorsed the administration’s treasonous acts, he and other old-time Democrats would “take a walk . . . There can be only one capital,” said Smith, “Washington or Moscow.”
Hearst’s newspapers accused Roosevelt of surrounding himself with a “Communist entourage”; the Chicago Tribune headline said, “Moscow Orders Reds in U.S. to Back Roosevelt.”
At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, former president Herbert Hoover compared the New Deal to the “march of socialism and dictatorships” in Europe and called on the American people to enter a “holy crusade for liberty.” To that end, Alf M. Landon, forty-eight, governor of Kansas, unanimously was named the Republican candidate for president. Landon was in the progressive tradition of Roosevelt.
Days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, five Democratic critics of the New Deal, led by Al Smith, asked the convention delegates to repudiate President Roosevelt and to nominate in his place a “genuine Democrat,” Landon, “as the remedy for all the ills” of the country. Instead, the convention passed a platform that endorsed the New Deal and by acclamation renominated Roosevelt and John Nance Garner.
“America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task,” Roosevelt told the 100,000 cheering Democrats on the convention floor. “In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived . . . But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places . . . We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”
In New York City, the Communist Party of the United States opened its national convention and nominated Earl Browder for president and James W. Ford for vice president. Ford was the first black man to be nominated for vice president of the United States.
FIFTEEN
Good Luck at Home
Barbara was set to make Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. John Ford was to direct. He’d just finished shooting Mary of Scotland with Katharine Hepburn, who had reluctantly agreed to be Mary.
“I never cared for Mary,” said Hepburn. “I thought she was a bit of an ass.”
The life of Mary Stuart fascinated Barbara. As a child, without mother or father, Barbara had spent endless hours dreaming of a family—a royal family—to which she imagined she rightfully belonged.
Mary’s father, James V, dying when Mary was six days old, her accession to the throne to become queen of Scotland, being sent at age six to live in France at the center of one of the richest and most powerful monarchies in Europe, barely knowing the mother she adored—all of it captivated Barbara.
Mary lived with the forces dealt her in a life marked by bravery, adventure, boldness. Before her eighteenth birthday, she had lost her father, her mother, and her husband, with whom she had grown up and who had been her constant companion since childhood. She was alone.
Mary was a horsewoman of style: dressing like a man, riding with a pistol in her belt, and, even when pregnant, leading an army of thousands to defeat oncoming rebel forces. She was emotional, impetuous, headstrong. She had the ability to govern, but unlike her rival cousin, Elizabeth, queen of England, Mary had been educated to be a consort to a king, rather than a ruler in her own right. Where Elizabeth toyed with marriage, Mary was fully engaged with men and married three times. Marriage for Elizabeth was synonymous with death and disempowerment. She remained the Virgin Queen, married to England.
The life of Mary Stuart had all of the drama, size, and emotional pitch that held Barbara enthralled: heroism, passion, adventure, loss, sexual intrigue, murder, imprisonment, martyrdom; Mary’s claim to the throne of England; her imprisonment in her own country; her forced abdication in favor of her son; fleeing Scotland for England only to be incarcerated by Elizabeth and kept prisoner for seventeen years amid plans of escape and constant plotting; being implicated in a trap and found guilty of a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, and finally beheaded on Elizabeth’s own order; living as a Catholic queen and dying as a Catholic martyr. Barbara had read every book written about Mary and was intrigued by how she was portrayed by different biographers.
It was Mary’s rival cousin, Elizabeth I, who fascinated Bette Davis and compelled her to read every biography or play written on the subject. Davis desperately wanted to be in Ford’s picture and to play the Virgin Queen to Hepburn’s Mary Stuart. Katharine Hepburn was practically the only woman for whom Davis had “admiration and envy. I would have given anything to look like Katie Hepburn.” Davis saw Hepburn as a Hollywood star “to be reckoned with.”
Warner was adamant in its refusal to let Bette Davis work at the rival studio following the critical success she’d won for Of Human Bondage. Davis took it upon herself to go straight to John Ford to discuss the part. Ford laughed in Davis’s face and told her she “talked too much.”
Ginger Rogers wanted the part of Elizabeth as well and, after she’d finished production on Swing Time, began to campaign for it. The studio dismissed the idea of Rogers as the English queen. Rogers was not to be put off and disguised herself as a British Shakespearean actress—Lady Ainsley—visiting America, willing, for the fun of it and as a favor to John Ford, to make a silent test for the picture. Rogers made up for the test in full Queen Elizabeth garb: skullcap, wig, white face, and large stiff ruff. Hepburn, in her Mary costume, was there as well. Both Ford, who was delighted by the prank—and its cost to the studio—and Hepburn, who was not amused by Rogers’s high jinks, were in on the ruse.
Pandro Berman, RKO’s head of production, was so impressed with Lady Ainsley’s test that he ordered it to be reshot with sound, until someone (Hepburn?) spilled the beans about the actress’s true identity. Berman was a sport about the prank but told Rogers to stick to her high-heeled slippers and promptly put her in her seventh picture opposite Fred Astaire, Shall We Dance.
Ford wanted the part of Elizabeth to go to Tallulah Bankhead. Florence Eldridge was ultimately cast as Elizabeth I (Eldridge’s husband, Fredric March, was Bothwell; when March was having difficulty with his character, caught in a tragic set of circumstances, Ford advised the actor to “play him for comedy”).
John Ford (reflected in the mirror), Pandro S. Berman, and Katharine Hepburn during the filming of Mary of Scotland. Berman was producing the picture, 1936. (PHOTOFEST)
• • •
Maxwell Anderson, George Jean Nathan, and Eugene O’Neill all had thought The Plough and the Stars to be one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. “Oh, if I could write like that!” O’Neill had said about O’Casey.
John Ford had to fight to make The Plough and the Stars, even after receiving the Academy Award and the New York Film Critic
s Circle Award for The Informer. Ford had started directing at nineteen and made thirty-one serials at Universal and twenty-five feature pictures.
“They may let us do it as a reward for being good boys,” said Ford of the prospects of making the O’Casey play into a movie.
• • •
Ford finished shooting Mary of Scotland in late April and left on a two-week holiday with Katharine Hepburn, visiting his parents in Maine and hers in Connecticut. He was back in early May and went to work on The Plough and the Stars the day after his return.
Sam Briskin, RKO’s new production chief, was mystified about O’Casey’s play. He didn’t understand why, during the Great War, the Irish were fighting the British.
“What did George Washington want?” Ford said to Briskin. “They wanted liberty.”
“They’ve got liberty,” Briskin said of the Irish struggle and told Ford he thought the idea of the picture was “an entirely wrong premise.”
• • •
Barbara had read the script of The Plough and the Stars and saw pages of dialogue for other characters and only a line here and there for Nora. It seemed such a minor role that she was skeptical about taking it.
“I can walk through this part,” she told Ford the day she appeared for rehearsals. “It isn’t as good as the role I had in Message to Garcia; in that at least I had a horse.”
It was a part more emblematic than dimensional.
Thereafter, when Ford wanted her for a scene, he’d say, “Come on, Barbara, and walk through.”
Up to ten days before the picture was to start shooting, Spencer Tracy was to play Jack Clitheroe at a salary of $27,500. Spyros and George Skouras “had a fit” about casting Tracy in the part. Spyros said that Tracy was “absolute poison at the box office; [that] he actually keeps people away from the theatre.” The press reported that it was Tracy who bowed out of the part, saying that after reading the script, he’d decided “the part wasn’t good enough.”
Ford wanted the Abbey Theatre actors for the picture. In exchange, the studio insisted Barbara star as Nora Clitheroe, the young woman who runs the Dublin boardinghouse.
Cliff Reid, one of the picture’s two associate producers, who’d worked with Barbara on Annie Oakley, put her together again with Preston Foster, RKO contract player, who had worked with Ford in Liam O’Flaherty’s Informer and with Barbara in Ladies They Talk About.
Foster was given the role of the idealistic young man who accepts a command in the Irish Citizen Army, under the flag of the Plough and the Stars, and goes to fight for Ireland’s sovereignty.
• • •
The plow on the flag is a primitive piece of equipment used by Irish farmers; above it, in deep green, on the field of the flag, is a constellation of Ursa Major, “the Plough,” symbol of the aspiration of the Irish Labour Party, whose banner it became.
The uprising begins on Easter 1916; in the picture, the Irish Citizen Army mobilizes and is ready to strike. General James Connolly and thirty men capture the Dublin post office and barricade themselves inside; Jack Clitheroe, a commander, is among them.
Sean O’Casey, 1934, who taught himself to read and write at age thirteen; a former builder’s laborer, dock hand, and railway worker. (“My chest measured 46, my arms were as big as tree limbs and I had a great ball of muscle on my hand where I gripped the pick handle . . . I worked all day and was ready to live joyously through the night.”) He was down to his last shilling weeks before his first play, Juno and the Paycock, opened in London. (THE GRANGER COLLECTION)
Throughout Easter week, the British send in forty thousand troops; the uprising spreads through the city. Communication between those barricaded in the Dublin post office and the other strongholds throughout Dublin is cut off by the British; without contact they are lost. The post office falls; Connolly is executed by firing squad. Those fighters who make it out flee to the Dublin rooftops and, in a last desperate effort, snipe at the British troops below; Clitheroe manages to evade their hunt and make it back over the rooftops to his house and to safety.
Sean O’Casey had witnessed the uprising firsthand; he’d fought in it, was captured, and was sentenced to be shot before a firing squad. Just as the British soldiers were about to fire at him, a shell burst overhead, and the soldiers ran for cover. O’Casey escaped.
Ford considered the opportunity of making the picture “the greatest honor which has befallen me in twenty somewhat active years of picture making,” he wrote to the playwright.
In a separate letter to O’Casey, Ford wrote that for years the stage had “represented our people as either comic characters or maudlin sentimentalists.” The Plough and the Stars captured the spirit of rebellion, the fight against injustice, and the laughter and anguish of human life. Ford saw it as the showcase of “the greatness and superb achievement of our national sacrifice” and a way to mark the “awakening of the Irish national consciousness.”
He asked O’Casey to add a sentence or two at the picture’s end for Nora or Clitheroe or possibly Fluther after the uprising has failed. Ford wanted The Plough and the Stars to make the point that “what they fought for would some day come true, that one day the flag of a Free Ireland might fly again.”
O’Casey was a man without pretense. He had traveled to New York two years before to accompany his play Within the Gates, and had brought so few possessions—a brown suit and cap, a few shirts, socks, and underwear—that when unpacking, he put one sock in one drawer and its partner in the other.
O’Casey didn’t want the theme of the play altered, and he didn’t want Clitheroe to make a speech in the midst of the child Mollser’s funeral. Ford assured the playwright that the “production would remain as close to the original as possible.” Despite O’Casey’s wishes and Ford’s assurances, the director had Dudley Nichols, the scriptwriter, make the additions.
Ford and O’Casey corresponded about the revisions from January through March 1936. Perhaps the hopeful finish Ford sought was to honor his father, who had taken Ford at age eleven—the youngest of thirteen children—on the Red Star Line to Ireland, where the young boy had fallen in love with his father’s childhood country.
Ford had been brought up to speak Gaelic, respect the Catholic Church, and hate the British, who ruled Ireland. His father, John Feeney, had lived through the famine. He grew up in a time when he’d had to sneak out at night with the other Catholic schoolboys to get his education with the help of the priests, despite the British governors, who, under the British Penal Laws, had outlawed parochial schools.
Ford’s father had come to America at the age of sixteen at the end of the Civil War. He made his way to Portland, Maine, opened saloons and restaurants, became a successful politician, and rose to a position of power in the city.
Weeks after Ford’s last visit with his father and just before the director was to start production on The Plough and the Stars, his father died.
In the final scene of The Plough and the Stars, Nora and Jack watch as the Irish tricolor flag is thrown down from what remains of the Dublin post office; the Union Jack is run up in its stead; the uprising is over.
“Oh, my darling, what was it all for?” Nora says to Jack in Ford’s additions.
“Thousands dead—homes in ruin—what for?”
“Ah, Nora, we’ll live to see Ireland free and go fighting till we do.”
“Aye,” she says, “and we’ll go on weeping.”
The haunting anguish and delicate quality of the final moments of O’Casey’s play were replaced by Ford’s rousing, hopeful rallying cry.
Ford wanted O’Casey to make revisions in the play to comply with the British censors, who wanted certain changes made, among them the removal of references to God. O’Casey wrote to Robert Sisk, the picture’s second producer, calling the cuts, “God damn ridiculous. I may say that some of the cuts are the actual words spoken by Patric Pearse, Commander-General of the Irish Volunteers, at a meeting which I helped to organize. I can’t see why they sh
ould object to this.”
Left to right: J. M. Kerrigan, Barry Fitzgerald, Una O’Connor, Barbara, and Dennis O’Dea, from The Plough and the Stars, 1936. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Four members of the Abbey Players were brought over for the picture: Barry Fitzgerald (Fluther Good), who already had an offer from Metro; Denis O’Dea (the Covey); Eileen Crowe (Bessie Burgess); and Arthur Shields, Fitzgerald’s brother (Padraic Pearse). Shields, like O’Casey, had lived through the Easter week turmoil in Dublin and had been one of those holed up in the Dublin post office.
RKO wanted to reduce Barry Fitzgerald’s salary from $1,000 to $750 (he settled on $850) and to get the use of the Abbey name for $750 and a four-week guarantee rather than six weeks.
• • •
As a director, Ford had a commanding presence and drove himself and his crew. One of the men working with Ford thought he was a “despot and professional Catholic,” another thought he was a “sadist” who liked to terrify actors and provoke them into good performances. He created a tension on the set and would choose a patsy, ridiculing him or her. Philip Dunne, a screenwriter, thought Ford “a very temperamental, feisty character [who’d] flare up over any kind of criticism.”
Others thought of him as fatherly.
Katharine Hepburn, then in the waning months of a romantic relationship with Ford, thought him “enormously rough, terribly arrogant, enormously tender, never smug, never phony . . . truly sensitive.” She found him “fascinating but impossible. He was definitely the skipper of his own life and you had better not disagree with him too often.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 59
