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

by Victoria Wilson

  • • •

  Garbo was thought of as unapproachable, aloof. Following her return from Sweden, she was open and relaxed. When preparing for Camille, she allowed the designers to fit her with hoops, stays, taffetas, crinolines, furs, and velvets and spent hours with Adrian helping to perfect a taffeta silencer—a thick layer of silk beneath the material that wouldn’t make too much noise on the screen.

  George Cukor with Garbo shooting Camille throughout the summer and fall of 1936. (CORBIS)

  She allowed herself to be smeared with greases and paints and her hair to be pulled and twisted. When a hairdresser created a coiffure of puffs and curls that turned out to be grotesque, Garbo made fun of it, laughing and mimicking the ridiculousness of the look. One gown was so laden with jewels that after wearing it for less than an hour when shooting, Garbo almost fainted from the heat, but she refused to rest or hold up production. A large open icebox was rigged up with a wind machine blasting icy air over the set and onto the actress.

  William Daniels, the cameraman, wanted to experiment with a new screen makeup; Garbo agreed to try it out in the picture. When Daniels became ill, Karl Freund took over on the camera.

  • • •

  Camille began production the last week in July.

  Bob was nervous the weekend before shooting was to start, wondering if Miss Garbo would like him, wondering what would happen.

  “Look, she’s human, isn’t she?” said Barbara. “I think she’d like to be treated exactly like you treat everyone else.”

  Bob appeared for work on Monday and was told his introduction to Garbo was postponed until Tuesday; Miss Garbo was making tests. The next day the first scene being shot was at the Théâtre des Variétés, Paris, 1848. Gaily dressed crowds were assembled on the set. Cukor was going over his plans with the technicians. Garbo walked in. No one seemed to notice her. Bob had to look several times before he recognized her. She had long curls about her shoulders. She was slender, graceful, smiling as she greeted the cameraman and the electrician. Cukor noticed her and called Bob to her.

  “I am very pleased to know you,” said Garbo. Bob felt she meant it and was happier to find her so friendly.

  Bob called her Miss Garbo; she called him Mr. Taylor.

  The set on Stage 19 was locked, barred, guarded by a policeman at the front door. No outsiders were permitted on the set without the personal approval of Mr. Mayer. Four hours later, Garbo and Taylor were going through intimate scenes together as if they’d known each other for years.

  • • •

  “Well, how was the Swede?” Barbara asked Bob after the first day. Taylor went on for twenty minutes about how she wasn’t rude or condescending or upstaging.

  “Listen, I grant you that Miss Garbo is the most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” said Barbara, “and that she is a brilliant actress, but she brushes her teeth in the morning just like everyone else.”

  In Bob’s first love scene rehearsal with Garbo, he held her in his arms and said the line “You are the most beautiful . . .” Out of nerves, he let Garbo slip from his arms and fall on the floor. Before he could say or do anything, she jumped up and passed off the incident without anger or temperament. Garbo treated Bob much less like a schoolboy than she had some of her sixteen previous leading men. By the time the scene was shot, he’d carried her safely to the divan.

  Between shots Garbo was polite but remained aloof from Bob. As soon as a take was completed, she went to her dressing room, its door marked by a single G, and stayed there until her next scene.

  Bob felt Miss Garbo disapproved of him. “She wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence off the set,” he said. She had nothing to say to her Armand that wasn’t to be spoken in front of the camera. This went on for weeks. Bob was miserable and started stumbling around.

  In the first scene in which they kiss, Bob was sitting on the side of a love seat, next to Garbo. In the midst of the passionate scene, the love seat tipped, and Bob and Garbo fell, in front of the camera. Everyone waited. Garbo laughed and went back to kissing Bob.

  Garbo had a funny laugh. “Just explodes all of a sudden,” said Bob. “Before anyone else can readjust his features, she’s all business again.”

  He was struck by how “practical a person” she was.

  She kept her distance from Taylor. “If I [get] to know him too well,” said Garbo, “it would only confuse the images I’ve been making of myself as Camille and of Armand.”

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Armand Duval with his Marguerite Gautier.

  “She carried herself with total assurance,” said the picture’s associate producer, David Lewis. “She was magnetic. She could imply a great sense of intimacy, all the time keeping a cool distance.”

  Bob noticed Garbo didn’t upstage the other actors or ask any favors.

  He was so stiff as an actor that Cukor said to him, “This isn’t Pomona, this is Paris in 1850.” And to Garbo, the director said, “Kiss him as if you were going down on him.”

  One morning Garbo smiled at Taylor. “Not only that, she said ‘Hello, Bob’ in that husky, intimate voice she usually reserved for the chaise longue scenes.” Bob practically fell over himself getting to his place alongside her. From then on he was an awakened man, and an awkward actor. It got so that while waiting for new setups, Garbo wouldn’t retire to her dressing room alone but spent time with Bob.

  For one scene, Garbo and Taylor were seated at a table outside an inn in the Bois. “It’s hard to be angry with you, but don’t talk like a fool,” Marguerite tells Armand. He kisses her. Garbo laughed instead of getting angry. “That was beautiful, lovely,” said Cukor, “but you are forgetting to show anger.”

  “I try to get angry, but he does not give me a chance.”

  Garbo’s quality was her beauty, her remoteness, and when she finally gave her affection to someone, it was explosive.

  “There’s something about Garbo’s silence and her concentration that gets you, way down inside,” said Taylor. “The woman is one of the most powerful personalities in the world. She wears a sort of flat colorless make-up that gives her a suggestion of something out of this world . . . There’s a radiation from her when you’re playing an intense scene that makes you play up to it, whether you have the stuff in you or not. She simply makes you find it and give.”

  Thalberg saw the early rushes of the scene where Marguerite Gautier is at the theater, sitting in a box, and said of Garbo, “She’s never been quite like that, she’s never been as good.”

  “Irving, how can you possibly tell?” asked Cukor. “She’s just sitting there.”

  “I know but she’s unguarded.”

  Cukor was fascinated by Garbo. He thought her manners were “beautiful,” that she was “a creature of the greatest distinction in bearing and every other way. Her movement is exceptional throughout the picture. Even when she’s quiet,” said Cukor, “completely still, she conveys a sense of movement.” When he had a close-up of her, he would often say without stopping the camera, “One more, Greta,” and each time she would give him something different. Cukor might get eight or ten takes with her before he had exhausted all that she had to give.

  Bob hardly had time to visit Barbara on the set of Banjo. He visited once when Barbara had noticed a ring that Arline Judge was wearing. Instead of a stone set in it, it had a small watch. Barbara was called for the scene, and Bob asked Arline where she got the watch. The next morning a watch ring arrived on the set for Barbara.

  • • •

  Bob disliked wearing fancy dress clothes in pictures. During the making of Camille, he had to wear fourteen different costumes.

  Garbo described Taylor as “a fine actor—and handsome, too.” Another time she said of him, “So handsome—and so dumb.”

  The actors and crew set up a softball team, called the Camillas. Garbo was their sponsor and stood at the baseline coaching her players and telling them how to play their positions. Taylor played second base. The Camillas played against the studio
office team.

  A long way from Beatrice, Nebraska, where as a boy his chores included keeping the wood box organized and cutting the lawn, and to earn extra money, shocking wheat and painting cars. (CULVER PICTURES)

  When shooting on the back lot, after finishing a scene, Garbo, instead of going to her dressing room as she had on previous films, went to a little screened-off place and sunbathed.

  On location in Griffith Park, she and Bob went for walks in the woods, “holding hands,” said Bob.

  “She . . . was very funny and sweet and, I think, fairly happy [shooting Camille],” said Cukor.

  Toward the end of the picture Garbo gave Bob a gift. When he opened the box, he found in it a small carved Buddha, a good luck piece from his Marguerite.

  • • •

  President Roosevelt toured the country on the campaign trail; thousands stood along the railroad tracks for a chance to see the president. People cried out, “He saved my home”; “He gave me a job.”

  Bob Taylor, W. S. Van Dyke, John Ford, Humphrey Bogart, and Paul Muni gave their names to the National Democratic Committee in support of the president. Eight million Americans were still without jobs, but prosperity was in the air. The apple sellers and breadlines were gone from the streets.

  Irving Grant Thalberg, who died at the age of thirty-seven, 1936. (PHOTOFEST)

  “Four years ago and now” was the theme of Roosevelt’s campaign. Working people believed that Roosevelt spoke for them, that he was their friend. “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.”

  • • •

  Shooting on Camille was within a couple of weeks of completion when, over Labor Day weekend, Irving Thalberg became ill. He and his wife, Norma Shearer, were spending their wedding anniversary at Del Monte Lodge, the idyll of their honeymoon.

  Thalberg caught cold, and they returned to Los Angeles early. Five days later Thalberg was dead from pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven.

  Once the word was out that Irving Thalberg had died, people at Metro began to weep. They were shocked; no one knew what to do.

  Thalberg had been at Metro for twelve years, from the age of twenty-four, when he became production supervisor for the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His taste, standards, and understanding of motion pictures combined to make Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the most profitable and admired studio in the industry. Thalberg was polite, respectful, and willing to listen to others’ opinions. He had three rules: Never take any man’s opinion as final. Never take your opinion as final. Never expect anyone to help you but yourself. He refused to have his name on the screen credits (“Credit you give yourself isn’t worth having,” he said). He did the unthinkable and encouraged Metro’s producers and directors to shoot endless retakes of scenes that hadn’t played well in the projection room or with preview audiences.

  The actor William Haines described Thalberg as “a great man; the opposite of Louis B. Mayer.” “Thalberg was much respected and loved by the ordinary people in the studio,” said the associate producer David Lewis. “In many ways, he [was] the symbol of MGM’s greatness.”

  On the day of Thalberg’s funeral, Metro was shut down. Cukor, Taylor, Garbo, Laura Hope Crews, Adrian, and fifteen hundred other mourners attended Thalberg’s services at Temple B’nai B’rith. As the funeral service began, a five-minute industry-wide silence was observed by the other studios. A crowd of seven thousand stood on Wilshire Boulevard and Hobart Boulevard to watch as those attending the service passed by.

  A great sheaf of white gardenias with hundreds of sweet peas and fresh white roses covered Thalberg’s burnished copper casket, placed by his widow. MGM sent a massive wreath of orchids and gardenias with roses and lilies. Flowers stood along the bier sent by the Zukors, the Zanucks, William Randolph Hearst, the Goldwyns, Greta Garbo, the Nicholas Schenks, and hundreds of others.

  Douglas Fairbanks and W. S. Van Dyke, Clark Gable and Moss Hart, Cedric Gibbons and Sidney Franklin, were ushers and helped to seat those who came to pay tribute, among them John and Lionel Barrymore, Mary Pickford, King Vidor, Spencer Tracy, Michael Curtiz, Chico, Harpo, and Groucho Marx, B. P. Schulberg, Frank and Ralph Morgan, the Hunt Strombergs, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, Wallace Beery, Charles Chaplin, Otto Klemperer, Ernst Lubitsch, Carole Lombard, Victor Fleming, Jean Harlow, Dr. A. H. Giannini, the Franchot Tones, Jesse Lasky, and Erich von Stroheim. Norma Shearer and Thalberg’s parents sat apart from the others near the altar, behind a screen.

  Rabbi Edgar Magnin, who had married the Thalbergs, gave the eulogy: “He was a great man, a good man, a simple man . . . He gave of his money and his strength—which was more important from one so frail—to every cause of good in this city, his state, his nation and in other nations where our people are oppressed . . . His love for Norma was greater than his greatest motion picture.” The rabbi told of the tributes that had come from all over the world and read a telegram from President Roosevelt.

  • • •

  One of Thalberg’s closest friends, Bernie Hyman, who’d been at Thalberg’s bedside as he lay in a coma in an oxygen tent, made sure his own name went down on studio records as the producer of Camille.

  “Everyone wanted to diminish Thalberg,” said David Lewis, “to obliterate his distinctive stamp of perfectionism. The entire MGM upper echelon wanted to erase the fact that there had ever been an Irving Thalberg.”

  Louis B. Mayer got rid of the executives with “high brow interests” who worked with Thalberg.

  • • •

  During production of Camille, Bob began to think of his hometown, Beatrice, and scenes of his boyhood. It was three years to the month that his father had died. Bob had then been living in a room in Hollywood, taking an acting course with a Miss Dixon at her dramatic school, and going to MGM to test or try out. He’d returned to Nebraska to help his mother arrange the funeral and settle his father’s estate.

  Now, three years later during the shooting of Camille, through the wall of the big MGM soundstages, he could almost see “the golden shocks of grain in the fields,” Bob said, “and very nearly taste the fried chicken” his aunt Jameson prepared “farmer style with oceans of country gravy.”

  Ruth Brugh was visiting friends in Beatrice, and her letters evoked in Bob a keen wish to see her again in the places he remembered so fondly.

  When he was told he wouldn’t be needed on Camille for a few days, Bob let out a “whoop” and telegraphed his mother that he was coming on the first plane and would be joining her in Beatrice to help celebrate his grandmother’s eightieth birthday. Barbara had finished Banjo the month before but didn’t accompany Bob to Nebraska; she and Ruth Brugh did not get along. Banjo was to open in early December; Barbara was already set to make her next picture, also with Joel McCrea, Internes Can’t Take Money, this time for Paramount.

  • • •

  Bob left for Beatrice with an executive from Metro, Dean Dorn, and two other men, one, a friend of Bob’s, as his bodyguard. The plane landed at the Lincoln Municipal Airport. Hundreds were there to welcome the local boy who’d made good.

  Above the crowd, Bob saw a man with whom he’d gone to school standing on top of the hangar and yelled hello. The man yelled back and waved his arm. It was the signal for the steam whistle at the box factory. The whistle hadn’t been blown since the armistice. “The sound symbolized so much good will from all these folks I liked so well,” said Bob, that he almost cried.

  He was brought into town in a Packard. Stores and banks were draped with bunting and were closed in his honor. A large banner read, “Beatrice Welcomes You Arlington Brugh.”

  More than twenty thousand people came from Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and all the Nebraska counties to welcome one of their own. Bob was perched on top of the backseat of a yellow car and was driven in a parade two miles long through the streets of Beatrice. A motorcycle police escort flanked one side of his car; on the other was an American Legion color guard. Ahead of the car
was the municipal band; behind it, the legion’s drum corps, the Beatrice High School band, and the Doane College girls’ drum and bugle corps. Flags flew everywhere.

  Bob atop Packard convertible, returning to his hometown (1936); Beatrice High School star tennis player, class president, student of oratory, and winner of the oratory city, county, district, and state championship for his lecture—“The Position of the Public School Teacher in Life.” (GAGE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

  The procession stopped at the Rivoli Theatre, where The Great Ziegfeld was playing. The theater marquee read in big letters, “ARLINGTON BRUGH”; below it, in smaller letters, the name “Robert Taylor.” The governor of Nebraska was there to introduce the hometown hero. Later, Bob was brought before an assembly of twelve hundred students at the junior high auditorium, where he spoke a few words and was given a standing ovation.

  Bob stopped off in Filley, his birthplace, to see his grandfather Jacob A. Brugh and give him $20 and a $15 grocery credit.

  During the next few days Bob had dinners at the homes of family friends; went rabbit hunting with his cousin; was photographed at Penner’s Pharmacy with the soda jerk who’d been behind the fountain when Bob was a boy; went to a Nebraska-Missouri football game where women chanted, “We want Taylor”; attended a reception at a hotel in Omaha; was mobbed by a crowd of fifty women; and, with his mother, was driven onto the field of the Omaha Airport to avoid a crowd of a thousand well-wishers waiting to wave off his plane.

  It was the first time Bob had been back to Nebraska since 1933, when he’d graduated from Pomona. He heard his old friend Russ Gibson play the piano with Eddie Jungbluth’s orchestra and remembered when he and Russ and Gerhart Wiebe were at Doane College and had toured the state as a trio and sold fly spray on the side. He reminisced with old friends about when he’d had the measles and how he’d behaved in high school when he was in love with Helen Rush. Now Helen was married and had a family.