The Breen Office objected to Zanuck’s running gag in the final script—written in the end by Johnson—of “showing Newt’s efforts to have Pearl and Ernie sleep together so that the marriage may be consummated and his hopes of an heir fulfilled.” Zanuck wrote back: “Your reader has injected smut and sex where none was ever intended. It is not a case of trying to get them to climb into bed with each other. He wants them to be in love with each other because he knows that if they are, eventually they will have children and he will have an heir. In God’s name, what is wrong with this?”
John (born Elwood Dager Cromwell in Toledo, Ohio) was an easy director to work with, trained as he was for the stage. He was not, however, an imaginative director.
Cromwell had sought out the little-known Bette Davis at Warner Bros. for the part of the insolent, intoxicating Mildred in Of Human Bondage. He did not believe in deviating from the script, even with a misprint on the page. When an actor complained that a line didn’t make sense as it was typed, Cromwell’s response was: “Not a word, not a line, not a single syllable will be changed without the personal approval of Darryl Francis Zanuck.”
Despite Cromwell’s literalness, Barbara’s Pearl has just the right energy and spirit; her work was simple and fresh with an optimism that reflected the buoyancy of the Roosevelt recovery. There was a new tenderness in her that came through on-screen that wasn’t only about acting.
She was being loved, openly, adoringly, by Bob Taylor without the twisted darkness or fear that had been so entwined in her love with Frank Fay. She seemed softer, with a peacefulness that gave her work a fulsome quality.
In Banjo, Barbara had to sing for the first time in front of the camera and did so to McCrea’s harmonica. Barbara wanted someone to dub her, but Zanuck insisted she sing herself.
“I have a deep husky voice without a high note in it,” Barbara warned the soundman. “What are we going to do?” She was told how to make her voice sound as if it had range. “The result wouldn’t make anybody cheer,” she said. “But it was better than if I’d never asked the sound man anything.”
Barbara’s alto voice was sure and openhearted as she sang Harold Adamson’s lyrics to Jimmy McHugh’s music: “Oh, I never want to roam/Let me live and make my home/Where the lazy river goes by.” Her voice was smoky, soulful, and intimate. Later in the picture, she reprises the song as a duet with Tony Martin and dances for the first time on-screen—a jig. Barbara was light of step, modest, the way Pearl Holley would be.
From Walter Brennan’s first scene with Newt’s one-man contraption, the picture was stolen out from under both Barbara and Joel and belonged solely to Brennan. McCrea and Barbara knew it. “We’re supporting you, Walter,” they teased. “Be nice to us. Remember to give us a nice present at the end of the picture.”
• • •
Barbara’s brother, By, was living with her and wasn’t working. He stayed out late, dating actresses, escorting them around town, and showing up at as many parties as possible. When Barbara wasn’t at the studio, she would wake him in the morning, furious that he was still asleep. “It’s ten o’clock. I don’t know why you don’t have more get up and go.”
“I would if I didn’t have to stay in this town.” By hated Hollywood.
“Well, I want you to,” said Barbara. “I’ll get you a contract.”
By had met a young actress at the Cocoanut Grove, Caryl Lincoln, who resembled Louise Brooks. Caryl was a dancer, lithe with slim hips. She was flamboyant, sexual, extravagant in her gestures. She was the opposite of By’s first wife, Elizabeth, his soul mate; Caryl was rowdy, raucous, and funny. Her titian hair was the color of Barbara’s. By got a kick out of Caryl.
Caryl had been a WAMPAS (Western Associated Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Star of 1929—a last-minute substitution for Sharon Lynne when Caryl’s then husband, George Brown, director of publicity at Columbia Studios, picked her for the slot. As a WAMPAS star, Caryl was put across as someone who could one day become a full-fledged star. It had happened with other WAMPAS Baby Stars: Colleen Moore, Evelyn Brent, Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Janet Gaynor, Jean Arthur, Loretta Young, Ginger Rogers, Helen Ferguson.
Caryl, a Universal starlet, had appeared in small roles in more than twenty pictures, including her first feature, Wolf Fangs, A Girl in Every Port, Only Yesterday, and The Merry Widow.
Barbara didn’t think Caryl was good enough for By—she thought Caryl had no taste—and argued with him about their seeing each other. Caryl was thirty-three, two years older than By, and from a well-to-do family; her father was an executive with the Union Pacific Railroad. She was a spoiled girl who didn’t have the wherewithal to take care of herself but who was smart in many ways and, when it came to being an actress, was a hard worker. After Caryl’s divorce from George Brown, she’d dated Bob Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby.
By was torn between his love for his sister and his desire for Caryl. He continued to see her despite Barbara’s feelings. And then Caryl told By she was pregnant; they’d been on Catalina Island one night and had too much to drink. Caryl was upset about her “condition” and blamed By, who said he would do the right thing.
“You’re going to marry some dumb little extra?” asked Barbara.
She offered to pay for an abortion.
Caryl had had an abortion once before and a baby who’d died at two months. There would be no abortion.
By had had enough of Barbara’s meddling and anger. The more she yelled, the quieter he became, and the more resolute. By didn’t raise his voice; he moved out for good and found an apartment in West Hollywood.
Barbara believed that “if [life] gives you something with one hand, she takes something away with the other. Life is a jealous wench,” she said. “I’ve never known it to fail. You can’t have everything. You’re not supposed to have everything. And it’s like that with love. If you get love you usually lose somewhere else along the line.”
Barbara was disgusted about By’s marriage to Caryl, but if she wanted to keep him close to her, she knew better than to continue to be obvious about her feelings. By and Caryl went to Catalina for their honeymoon. After they were married, Barbara made peace with her sister-in-law, though Barbara would walk out of the room to get away from her. Caryl could get loud and argumentative when she drank. Barbara referred to Caryl as “that mouth.” Sister and wife came to an understanding.
• • •
A few weeks after Barbara started work on Banjo on My Knee, she received a letter, the latest of several, from the Screen Actors Guild, inviting her to join the union.
Barbara had joined Actors’ Equity in New York because of her work on the stage. She had no choice. Barbara didn’t approve of organized labor. She had no interest in joining the Screen Actors Guild, even if it didn’t call itself a “union.” She did not intend to be pulled into a strike, and the possibility of an actors’ strike was in the air. There was talk at the weekly guild meetings, under the auspices of the guild’s president, Robert Montgomery, that it was time to have a showdown with the producers. Each guild meeting ended with members being asked to pledge their support for the planned action.
The guild’s latest letter to Barbara informed her that if she didn’t join the organization, she would be suspended by the Equity Council of Actors’ Equity. The Screen Actors Guild and Actors’ Equity became affiliated in 1934 with the mutual understanding that all members of one union had to join the other in order to appear in motion pictures or on the stage.
At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936. (PHOTOFEST)
Similar letters of warning were sent to Elizabeth Allan, Rosalind Russell, and Claire Trevor.
Barbara didn’t respond to the guild’s threat.
Finally, the guild sent Barbara’s name to Actors’ Equity and requested that the Equity Council suspend her. She had no choice but to join the guild, and soon after she, along with Claire Trevor and John Barrymore, were elected senior members of the guild with the guild’s board of directors, Jimmy Cagney,
Humphrey Bogart, Paul Harvey, and others, conducting the guild meeting.
• • •
During the day Barbara was in production making Banjo on My Knee as the simple bride in the world of shanty boat people living life along the banks of the Mississippi. At night she was a young Frenchman besotted with the most glamorous courtesan in the nineteenth-century Paris demimonde, as she spent her evenings helping Bob prepare for the crowning role of his young career.
Taylor was bewildered, overwhelmed, when he learned that Thalberg had picked him for the part of Armand Duval in Camille opposite Greta Garbo’s Marguerite Gautier. Garbo, at thirty, was at the height of her career, worshipped by most of the Western world as the greatest actress of her day. She’d made twenty-eight pictures on two continents during a career that spanned almost two decades; she was idolized as “a revelation of exquisite beauty and artistry,” proclaimed by critics “a flaming genius,” celebrated for her intelligence, unerring instinct, grasp, and control as an actress.
Bob had played Armand in the Pomona Masquers’ production at the Padua Hills Playhouse; that was Pomona, and this was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Bob was new to Hollywood, new to fame, new to acting. “The whole thing’s like a madhouse,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. Most of the time you don’t know where you stand—or how!” At twenty-five, he’d made eleven full-length features in two years, playing romantic leading parts of spoiled adolescent men thrust into adulthood.
To cope with the rush of it all and the idea of working with Garbo, Bob took a plane to Salt Lake City, boarded a bus, rode to the end of the line, and started walking. He stopped at a ranch where he wasn’t recognized, asked for a drink of water, and spent the rest of the day talking about farming, the world, anything except Hollywood, and left feeling like a human being.
• • •
Irving Thalberg had offered George Cukor his choice of pictures with Greta Garbo: Marie Walewska, the mistress of the emperor Napoleon I who bore him a son; or Marguerite Gautier, of Dumas fils’s La dame aux camélias, based on Alphonsine Plessis—Marie Duplessis—mistress of Dumas and Liszt and the most cultivated courtesan of her day, who died of consumption at the age of twenty-three.
“Napoleon stumps me,” Cukor said to Thalberg of the first choice. “He’s fascinating to read about but he’s a Great Man—and they all come out like waxworks in the movies.” Cukor chose to make Camille. “I’d seen the play,” he said, “and I felt it would be a perfect meeting of the actress and the role.”
It was Garbo who had suggested La dame aux camélias to the studio. It was a role that Bernhardt had made her own. Eleonora Duse had transformed the part and performed it throughout Europe and brought the play to St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Marguerite Gautier was the one role Garbo wanted to play. But she thought it best to do Walewska first. “Camille [is] so like Anna [Karenina, which Garbo had just made with Fredric March] that I’m afraid,” she wrote to Salka Viertel from Sweden, where Garbo was on holiday. “The Walewska story [is] a newer thing—because Napoleon isn’t a usual figure on the screen, like my other fifty thousand lovers.”
The premise of Camille—that a man could be ruined by marrying a courtesan—was archaic; Thalberg himself knew many men who had successfully married courtesans, but he also knew Dumas’s La dame aux camélias was special. Henry James wrote of the Dumas play, it “remains in its combination of freshness and form, of the feeling of the springtime of life and the sense of the conditions of the theatre, a singular, an astonishing production . . . The play . . . has never lost its happy juvenility, a charm that nothing can vulgarise. It is all champagne and tears—fresh perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion, fresh pain.”
Garbo wrote of the Dumas heroine, “She is such a tragic figure. I do not know. I have not yet read the script. It may please me very much.”
James Hilton, author of the 1933 novel Lost Horizon and the 1934 novel Good-Bye, Mr. Chips, was given Camille as his first screenwriting assignment. Frances Marion was assigned the script with him. Also hired along the way to work on it were Mercedes de Acosta, Vicki Baum, Ernest Vajda, Tess Slesinger, Mordaunt Shairp, Carey Wilson, and the playwright and casting director for the Shuberts, Zoë Akins.
The Breen Office made clear to Louis B. Mayer its guidelines for code approval: Marguerite Gautier was to be the only courtesan in the picture; the Baron de Varville, Marguerite Gautier’s lover and benefactor, was not to live in the same house with his mistress; the awareness that Marguerite profited from her “sinful life” was to be kept at an “absolute minimum”; there was to be little physical contact between Armand and Marguerite and between Marguerite and de Varville; and, finally, there was to be a repentance and regeneration scene in which Marguerite was to make clear to Armand the “utter folly of her ways in a sin-doesn’t-pay speech.”
• • •
Romeo and Juliet premiered on August 20. It was a $2 million production that brought back Norma Shearer to the screen after the birth of her second child. Cukor said of the picture, “It lacked the garlic and the Mediterranean.” The Gorgeous Hussy opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre eight days later and was pronounced “one of the finest pictures of the year.” Beulah Bondi, as Mrs. Andrew Jackson, and Lionel Barrymore, as Old Hickory, “walk[ed] away with acting honors.”
Thalberg was overseeing a new set of revisions to the script of Marie Antoinette by Ernest Vajda, editing The Good Earth, and looking at drafts of Good-bye, Mr. Chips and Maytime. In between he came up with a notion for Zoë Akins to update Dumas’s La dame aux camélias; instead of the outmoded idea of respectability and ruination being at the heart of the picture, Thalberg wanted Akins to use jealousy as the source of Armand’s torment.
Akins’s script caught the drama of the period and had a modern flavor. Thalberg felt the James Hilton and Frances Marion script was overwritten, badly conceived—almost comic opera—more a dramatization of their own love affair than the story of Marguerite Gautier’s affair with Armand Duval.
Akins, who was in her late forties and had lived all over the world, had “managed” in her script, said Cukor, “to create a whole language, a kind of argot for the story.” Thalberg, Cukor, and Garbo loved Akins’s script. In the end, although her script was used for Camille, Akins had to share the writing credit with Frances Marion and James Hilton.
Zoë Akins and pals circa 1930s. She was the daughter of a St. Louis politician; a staff writer, at age seventeen, for Reedy’s Mirror, writing poetry, stories, criticism. At twenty-one, her play, The Learned Lady, went into rehearsals with May Robson. She was ordered to change scenes and rewrite one whole act. When she was asked to rewrite another, she tore up the script and promised herself that she would never rewrite another play. “And I’ve stuck to my vow,” she said. (CORBIS)
Armand is a role that supports Marguerite; Armand is a foil to Camille’s infatuation.
Cukor said of Armand: “It is historically a terrible part, usually played by middle-aged men. As a result [Armand] seemed stupid doing the things he did. When you get someone really young playing Armand, you understand him; he becomes appealing, with a kind of real youthful passion; whereas if he were thirty-eight, you’d think, ‘Oh, you ass, why do you do that?’ ”
To prepare Bob for the role, the studio thought it wise for him to be privately coached by the Metro dramatic teacher, Oliver Hinsdell. Hinsdell had directed on Broadway in the mid-1920s and was theatrical director of the Dallas Little Theatre for eight years until 1931, when a Metro talent scout lured him out to Hollywood, along with the Dallas sports reporter, actor, Black Mask short story writer, and novelist, Horace McCoy, author of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Once at Metro, Hinsdell came to feel that the studio schools had taken the place of vaudeville, the legitimate stage, and silent pictures as a way of finding new actors. He predicted that in the future the stars would come from “talent schools.”
Hinsdell worked with Bob. But the line-by-line work
for the part of Armand came from the hours Bob spent with Barbara going over Akins’s script. Barbara’s nephew Gene was on summer holiday from Notre Dame and staying with her and watched as Barbara sat with Bob, night after night, talking over the scenes, telling Bob how to say each line.
Barbara read Armand’s lines, her voice soft, almost a whisper, a caress. She spoke the lines as if in a rush of feeling. Barbara gave Bob the phrasing, the emphasis, the small gestures for the next day’s scenes. “What she’s done for me can’t be measured in ordinary terms,” said Bob. “She’s taught me more with her knowledge than I would have learned in a lifetime.”
Bob gave Barbara a large sapphire brooch.
• • •
The Baron de Varville was originally intended for John Barrymore. Cukor went to see the actor and bring him a copy of the script. Barrymore had put himself in a home to stop drinking, an old frame house that called itself a rest home. Cukor went into “some dreary depressing room,” he said, and noticed something that struck him as “very shabby . . . they hadn’t changed the table cloths.” Barrymore came in with an aide and asked him, “Can we sit in here, Kelley? Nobody’s going to come through and disturb us by pretending to be Napoleon?”
During much of the filming of Romeo and Juliet, Barrymore had been drunk and impossible. Thalberg tried to replace him with William Powell, but Powell declined the role. For Mercutio’s Queen Mab scene, Barrymore, ever drunk, got through the thirty-one lines in one take. At the end of the scene the crew applauded. Barrymore’s response: “Fuck the applause. Who’s got a drink?”
Thalberg refused to give Barrymore the role of the Baron de Varville. Barrymore fell apart and was once again locked away at Kelley’s Rest Home, this time behind bars. Henry Daniell, who made his Broadway debut in a play with Ethel Barrymore and his film debut in Jealousy with Jeanne Eagels, played the soigné and cynical, the enamored and possessive Baron de Varville. The supporting cast included Lionel Barrymore, Laura Hope Crews, Lenore Ulric, and Jessie Ralph.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 62
