The London Observer described 1936 as “the year of Edward VIII, the Spanish War and Robert Taylor.”
Nineteen thirty-six was the year Barbara Stanwyck turned twenty-nine, a dangerous age to be in Hollywood.
PART FOUR
A Larger Reach
Third person—and singular. That’s Stanwyck . . .
—Barbara Stanwyck
From Stella Dallas, 1937 (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
ONE
Feelings of Uncertainty
The New Year began for Barbara with the final decree notice of divorce from Frank Fay and the formal incorporation of Marwyck. Barbara’s seven-year marriage was over, “she was out of that,” as she put it. “I’ll never have to go through it again.” “When I married Frank Fay, Mr. [Arthur] Hopkins said it was a bad marriage. And he was right.”
Barbara was different now, “immunized,” she said, against the kinds of feelings that caused “the total eclipse, the complete collapse; against the feelings” that knocked her “down on her knees and tore the heart out of you.”
When asked by reporters if she planned to marry Robert Taylor, she replied, “No. Or anybody else.”
She was still picking herself up from Fay. She had no intention of marrying again; she wasn’t ready for it. She wanted to see her friends “and see them often” and be able to “go dancing with some fellow without reading [the] next day in the papers that I’m engaged to him.”
Bob was in love with her; he was four years younger than she and prettier, the most sought-after male actor of the moment, bigger than Gable.
Bob was romantic, “just as most men are at first,” said Barbara. “Of course he has a lot of quaint ideas about being romantic. He thinks, for instance, that a gift doesn’t become a gift until it costs at least five thousand dollars. Money doesn’t make a gift important. Actually, as far as I’m concerned, it takes away from its importance.”
She told Bob that anyone with money could stop at a jewelry store and pick up a diamond bracelet in five minutes. “It might take ten times as long to pick out a rag doll with hair just the color of mine,” she said. “Money is new and important to him. His sense of values has been pushed around so quickly that it is excusable. I suppose he once dreamed of giving a girl a diamond bracelet some day, so it is easy to see why that is exactly what he wants to do when he suddenly gets the money. Soon perhaps, he will learn the importance of the unimportant little things.”
He was six feet tall, loved riding and ranch work, eating rare steak and onions, his work on the stage: M’Lord the Duke, at Hollywood Playhouse; Camille, and The Importance of Being Earnest at Padua Hills. The person in history who impressed him the most: Voltaire. “Not only was he a great writer, philosopher and diplomat, but a man who did as much good for his country as anyone has ever done. And he remains the perfect example of a free thinking man.” (PHOTOFEST)
Barbara never understood why the foremost impression of Hollywood was glamour. “Glamour has actually nothing to do with pictures at all,” she said. “Working in pictures is one thing. Glamour is a separate thing entirely. In Hollywood you don’t have to buy a certain car, a certain coat. There’s nobody to demand that of you. All pictures really ask of you is that you do your best.”
Bob was being called the hottest “screen lover” since Rudolph Valentino and laughed off the comparison as “hooey.” Valentino “was a marvelous actor and a great picture personality,” he said. “They can’t really think of me as being like him.”
As far as marriage to Bob Taylor was concerned, Barbara’s response: “Skip the romance.”
Barbara would be thirty in July. Most actresses in Hollywood were in their teens or early twenties. Barbara knew she wasn’t beautiful; more “average, nice-looking,” she said. She knew she didn’t have the beauty of “Dietrich, or the glamour of Lombard, or the grandeur and mystery which is Garbo’s. It’s a good thing,” she said, that she could “crack through with honesty.”
She was popular with the public and admired as an actress. She’d been acting for more than a decade. She knew how to fight her fights with the studios, pick the stories that were good for her, and keep on working. “If you feel a thing strongly enough,” she said, “you should have the courage of your convictions to carry it through. That’s my philosophy, and it’s gotten me into plenty of hot water.”
She and Bette Davis were considered the most “suspended” people in pictures. She knew talent wasn’t enough; neither was opportunity. What was needed was discipline, hard work, patience, stubbornness, and determination.
Barbara was constantly learning her craft; she knew there was no instant way to learn it but to learn it, and she delivered the best job she could.
• • •
King Vidor was testing actresses for Samuel Goldwyn’s remake of his 1925 hit Stella Dallas, directed by Henry King, that had starred Belle Bennett. Goldwyn had been planning to remake the movie for two years. His search for an actress to play Stella was as extensive as it had been in 1925. It was almost comparable to the search for Scarlett O’Hara, which had taken on a frenzy in the town all its own.
Barbara was at Paramount at work on Internes Can’t Take Money, based on a story by Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), working with Joel McCrea on their third picture together. McCrea was playing a young intern, Dr. Jimmy Kildare, who falls in love with her character.
King Vidor wanted Barbara for the role of Stella Dallas. Goldwyn was intent on using unknown actors and creating a new group of stars, as he had eleven years before with the original Stella Dallas.
Goldwyn in 1925 claimed he’d tested more than seventy-five actresses before he’d found his Stella. Many, among them Laurette Taylor, had turned down Goldwyn’s offer for the part of a woman who ages from young girlhood to middle age. Belle Bennett, a stock company actress who had appeared in forty-five pictures—two for Goldwyn—and who’d received top billing in many of them but had so far failed to distinguish her career, wanted to play Stella Dallas “more than anything” she’d wanted in her life, she wrote in a letter to Abe Lehr, Sam Goldwyn’s old friend from the glove trade and his head of operations for Goldwyn Pictures.
“I have kept the book near me,” she wrote to Lehr long before the company had even started to cast the picture, “reading her [Stella Dallas] over and over until she has crept into my heart and soul. I feel that she is what I have been waiting for all my life and I have built her up bit by bit until I feel sure that I have what Henry King, Samuel Goldwyn want.”
To Bennett, Stella Dallas was her “ ‘comeback’ in pictures . . . To own and be worthy of a great part,” she wrote to Lehr, “satisfies my soul as food saves the life of a starving woman.”
Bennett’s Stella was so exquisite (Goldwyn had agreed to test her as a last resort) that he gave her the part. It was the role of her career; Bennett died seven years later in 1932 at the age of forty-one. Goldwyn had brought Lois Moran from Paris at the age of fifteen and a year later had her make her screen debut as Laurel Dallas; Ronald Colman was a young actor under contract to Goldwyn who’d starred in several Goldwyn pictures but who only came to real prominence as Stephen Dallas; the 1925 Stella Dallas gave Douglas Fairbanks Jr. his first grown-up role and Belle Bennett her first important appearance on the screen.
Belle Bennett as Stella Dallas with Lois Moran as Laurel. From the original Goldwyn production, 1925.
Goldwyn had intended his 1925 Stella Dallas to be his “masterpiece.” The picture had cost $700,000, twice the amount of Goldwyn’s credit line at the Bank of America. The film’s protracted shooting schedule was nine weeks.
Goldwyn wanted the 1937 remake to be as exceptional. If he couldn’t find the right unknowns, three acclaimed actresses interested him for the part of Stella Dallas: Gladys George, at thirty-seven, under contract to Metro and impossible for Goldwyn to get because of his feud with L. B. Mayer and Mayer’s refusal to loan out anyone to Goldwyn; Ruth Chatterton, who shattered he
arts in Madame X as the noble mother risking execution to shield her son from the truth and who played the middle-aged Mrs. Dodsworth fleeing the mediocrity of the Midwest, frantically seeking her fast-slipping youth (Chatterton was forty-four), in the just-completed Goldwyn picture Dodsworth; and Bernadene Hayes, at thirty-four the youngest of the three, who had appeared with James Cagney in Great Guy and at the El Capitan Theater in Three Men On a Horse.
(GROSSET & DUNLAP)
• • •
Barbara at twenty-nine was frightened of many things, personal and professional. She felt intensely about most things. By her own admission, she was shy and silent and worried endlessly about situations that usually didn’t happen. She “climbed the wall inside,” she said, when far worse things happened—things she hadn’t worried about at all. “There are things I know I can do. And other things I can’t do,” she said. “I know myself.”
Barbara saw Stella Dallas as a woman “moved primarily by unselfish motives . . . her life was a study of mother love and of devoted sacrifice. Part of [Stella’s] tragedy was that while she recognized her own shortcomings, she was unable to live up to the standards she so painstakingly set for herself.”
Some of Barbara’s friends discouraged her from going for the part. They thought she was crazy for wanting it; the role of a mother who ages was not a part Barbara should be playing at the time when she was about to be moved to supporting roles. Playing a mother as a young actress was different from playing a mother when she herself was thirty. Actresses often became unhinged at this age. “What would the public think of seeing me fat and sloppy in those horrible clothes?” Barbara said. “Probably they would decide that was exactly the way I would look in a few years!”
Gloria Swanson refused to touch the role. It was dangerous to play a mother, and thirty was an age when actresses became frightened, feeling that their youth, their power, their allure, and their ability to work were slipping away.
Ruth Chatterton chose to do Louise of Coburg onstage.
Zeppo warned Barbara, “If you really want to do the picture, you’ll have to make a test.” Barbara was determined to have the part but said, “Screw them. I won’t test. Either they want me or they don’t want me.”
She’d made pictures for William Wellman, George Stevens, and John Ford. Goldwyn could see what she could do.
Mary Pickford was looking for a picture and thought Stella Dallas a “good character part.” Pickford had tried her hand at radio in a show called Parties at Pickfair, which took place at Mary’s celebrated home. It was a show designed to make listeners feel as if they were at the center of the court of Pickfair. The show didn’t work; the public was no longer enthralled with Little Mary, who told the press that she was finding it “pleasant to shrink in the public eye, to recede from view, to get over the highest hurdles of fame.” Despite her claim that she was enjoying private life and fading from public view, Mary was busy writing three books, eleven magazine articles, and two short stories and producing two unsuccessful pictures with Jesse Lasky: One Rainy Afternoon and The Gay Desperado. Mary was unfazed by the pictures’ losses and dissolved her partnership with Lasky. “I have a constitution of iron,” she said. “I’m as hard as rocks.”
Mary stepped into the role of president of United Artists, the company she’d helped to found seventeen years before, and replaced Al Lichtman, who’d left United Artists for the newly formed Selznick International Pictures. Stella Dallas was Goldwyn’s first picture under the auspices of United Artists. In the end Miss Pickford said, “I shall never try to be both an actress and a producer again.”
Nothing further came of her interest in playing Stella Dallas.
• • •
Zeppo and Marion pleaded with Barbara to test for the part. Barbara stood firm. She’d been a star—though she didn’t like that word; she preferred “actress”—for seven years and been on her own forever. She loved her work, her job. To survive and get where she was required indestructible faith, devotion, and irrepressible hope. Whatever sacrifices she made in the line of duty were part of the job. She understood that these demands on her life were the price of success. “Some people are too fragile for this business,” she said. “You have to be hard. This business can kill you if you’re not driven.”
King Vidor began directing in 1913 at nineteen years old. By the time he started work on Stella Dallas in 1937, he’d directed more than thirty-five pictures, among them The Jack-Knife Man, Wild Oranges, The Big Parade, and The Champ. “Man is as old as God when it comes to understanding human emotions,” he wrote. “And because of that truism, I have always attempted to adhere to the ‘earthier’ themes in the pictures I have directed . . . [and] appeal to the heart rather than the head.” (CULVER PICTURES)
Finally, Zeppo went to Joel McCrea and asked him to intervene. Zeppo knew that Stella Dallas would be the most important part of Barbara’s career. “She’ll listen to anything from you,” Zeppo said. “She won’t listen to us.”
During their three pictures together, Barbara and McCrea had become friends. McCrea thought Barbara “a trouper, a hell of an actress.”
He liked Barbara and wanted her to get ahead.
“Listen, honey,” Barbara said to McCrea about testing for Stella Dallas, “if they want me, they know what I can do. If I’m not good enough, to hell with them, let them get who they want. I’m not going to go up with three other people and make a test as though I couldn’t get a job, and have one of them that I don’t think’s as good beat me.”
McCrea went to Vidor and asked him whom he wanted.
“I want her,” Vidor said, “but Goldwyn insists upon the test.”
More than forty-five actresses had already tested for the part.
McCrea went back to Barbara and urged her to make the test.
The actor had been under contract to Goldwyn for five years. “I’m paying him three thousand a week, fifty-two weeks a year,” said the producer, “and he’s going to the beach, so use him.” In between These Three and Come and Get It, McCrea was loaned out to Universal, Columbia, and Fox, with Goldwyn getting $60,000 per picture; McCrea, $3,000 a week. “He was making $42,000 on me every time,” said McCrea.
Joel McCrea circa 1930. (DOCTORMACRO.COM)
Goldwyn insisted on referring to the actor as Joe McCreal.
“The L is on the first name, Sam,” said Abe Lehr. “It’s Joel McCrea.”
“When I sign him for five years with no options,” said Goldwyn, “don’t tell me how to spell his name. It’s Joe McCreal.”
McCrea told Goldwyn he thought Barbara was a great actress and put her forth for the part of Stella.
“Oooh, she’s good,” said Goldwyn, “but she hasn’t got any sex appeal. I want a girl like Merle Oberon that has sex appeal.”
McCrea knew Goldwyn never answered a question or listened to anyone’s opinion. When asked “What do you think, Sam?” his response was, “I think you’ll have to do what I said in the first place.”
McCrea persevered.
“Sam,” he said, “[Barbara] is Stella Dallas. I don’t give a shit if she has sex appeal or not. She must have something because she’s going with a guy named Robert Taylor who every girl has been after and she’s got him.”
Goldwyn insisted Barbara test for the part. Finally, she relented.
Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason, then at work on the script for Stella Dallas, put together the sequences for the test.
• • •
Stella is the daughter of a mill hand desperate to get away from the squalor of her life and eager to marry the handsome, well-bred, and well-scrubbed assistant mill owner of another social class. Throughout the picture, she ages twenty years. The test was made up of the four phases of her characterization: young girlhood; new wife and mother, indifferent to her days-old baby, yearning to cut loose after long months of being cooped up in the hospital; separated wife shunned as extravagant, slovenly, spirited but with a love for her daughter that is pure and boundles
s; middle-aged adoring mother who realizes that her flamboyant ways—seen as garish, coarse, vulgar (says one of Laurel’s friends about Stella as she walks across the main lawn of the elegant resort in search of Laurel, “Did you see the makeup on her, and those shoes? I didn’t know they let that kind of woman loose anymore”)—are ruining her daughter’s chances in society.
Stella pushes away her child, who fills her with joy and purpose and whom she loves more than anything in the world. Hiding the love that is breaking her heart, she steals out of her daughter’s life to end up as she always was, a solitary figure, alone, outcast, but triumphant in her pride and love for her child and uplifted by the supreme gift she has given her: Laurel’s freedom to soar and escape her mother’s commonness and exile; her daughter’s baptism into the aristocratic world Stella had always dreamed of and never dared inhabit; and deliverance into the arms of an adoring husband, where Laurel will receive the blessings of the conventional (happy) life her mother was unwilling to accept.
“She wasn’t me, that woman,” said Barbara of Stella Dallas. “But she was a woman I understood completely. She was good; cheap but good, and I could play her.” Barbara saw Stella as “a woman who cheated failure. One who eagerly paid the full measure for what she wanted from life.”
Goldwyn let Barbara know that she was “too young for the part,” that he didn’t think she was capable of doing it, and that she “didn’t have any experience with children.”
• • •
The day of the test for Stella was the coldest day of the year. Barbara had a 102-degree temperature. Her nose was running. “I looked awful,” she said. Anne Shirley was testing for the part of Laurel and was also sick “with her nose running too,” said Barbara.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 65
