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

by Victoria Wilson

  Vidor spent an entire day, “instead of the customary few hours,” said Barbara, shooting the scene of Laurel’s long-anticipated birthday party in which mother and daughter await the guests who never arrive. The parents of Laurel’s classmates have been warned away by Laurel’s teacher, who has deemed Mrs. Dallas an improper mother and her house unfit for upstanding children; mother and daughter are left to make the best of it, each for the sake of the other and to celebrate Laurel’s birthday together.

  Barbara acted various crucial scenes.

  Vidor had tested actresses from stock companies across the country, from Hollywood to the New York stage. Miriam Hopkins tested for the part around the time of Barbara’s test.

  Goldwyn had each of the forty-eight tests edited into a short reeler.

  “Stanwyck’s test was undeniable,” said Vidor. “She put everyone else to shame.” Barbara’s versatility was undisputed.

  Goldwyn told his production manager, Robert McIntyre, then in New York testing actresses, to return to Hollywood; they had found their Stella Dallas.

  • • •

  Barbara was outwardly charming and funny and full of energy, but there were feelings of uncertainty, the fear that “it” wouldn’t last, that something would take it away, that she would end up “a wardrobe woman, or a scrub woman.” Movie fame lasted as long as people liked her. When they stopped going to see her, that would be that.

  There were feelings of bitterness deep inside that wouldn’t go away: the anger at having a mother who had left her; the rage at having a father who’d taken off, leaving her and her brother stranded as small children and apart at a time when they needed each other most; the longing to be with her brother, who’d left her first when she was a little girl and then again, most recently, for a woman Barbara didn’t like and didn’t think was right for him; the sudden deaths of her beloved sisters Millie and Mabel (these weren’t seen as deaths to Barbara; everyone had left her); and finally, her marriage, and the ugly, violent nightmare it had become in which she’d surrendered her pride, her dignity, her self, in order to serve and to please. Out of blind desire, she’d willed the marriage to work and failed, despite her discipline, her devotion, her hope. She’d been humiliated, lived with desperation, felt as if she were “in chains of slavery,” and, still loving Fay, had been forced to flee into the night in order to save herself and her son.

  “Someone has said that ‘pain is the keenest of the pleasures,’ ” said Barbara, “and certainly you’d better not face love unless you can also face pain and hard work and sacrifice which are component parts of love, along with the clouds and the halos and the harps.

  “Don’t expect the man you love to be a combination of Mussolini, Gable, Lindbergh, King Edward Eighth or a Robert Taylor. If you do, you’re riding for a fall . . . All men are human, mortals, and, if they do exhibit a few godlike traits that’s velvet.”

  • • •

  Internes Can’t Take Money—originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine and bought by Paramount for $5,000—had started production days before Christmas. Barbara was getting paid $55,000 to play a young woman desperately looking for her baby who is being held by gangsters. The character is a laundry worker, the estranged widow of a two-bit bank robber. A racketeer knows where the child is and has a yen for the young woman. The price for the information: $1,000 (he might as well be asking her for a million) or the young woman herself.

  Joel McCrea was the idealistic, hardworking Dr. Jimmy Kildare, who believes in the goodness of medicine. He earns $10 a month in training at the hospital plus three meals a day and clean “whites.”

  When Kildare saves the life of a badly wounded big-time mobster at the local saloon where the doctor stops each afternoon for his two beers, he’s given an envelope stuffed with money, $1,000, as thanks. Interns can’t take payment for their work, and despite his dire need for cash Kildare returns the money.

  Rian James, known for his books about hospitals, including The White Parade, and Theodore Reeves were hired to adapt Max Brand’s story and added two elements: a mother’s search for her missing child and her romantic involvement with Dr. Kildare.

  • • •

  Al Santell was hired for $42,000 to direct Internes. Santell was a Fox director and former short story writer and actor who, the year before, had done an impressive job with Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset.

  Internes was budgeted at just over half a million dollars and cost more than $600,000 to make. Benjamin Glazer was in charge of production. Glazer—former lawyer, newspaperman, and adapter of stage plays that included Liliom, The Swan, The Merry Widow, Flesh and the Devil, and Anything Goes—was interested in accuracy and authenticity, and he wanted both for Internes Can’t Take Money. He used an entire soundstage 150 feet by 50 feet in order to re-create a fully equipped clinic as well as an operating room, outer room, and waiting room. He hired the chief resident physician at Hollywood Hospital to be the picture’s adviser and sent McCrea there to observe surgeons at work in the operating theater.

  To Santell’s relief, Glazer was never on the set. “Good directors need producers like they need a third leg,” said Santell. “What does one do with it? Where does it hang?”

  Paramount’s head costume designer, Travis Banton, passed over the picture. Barbara’s wardrobe as a working woman didn’t interest him. “After all, Dietrich was at Paramount,” said Barbara, who didn’t have the kind of glamour that appealed to Banton; he designed for Claudette Colbert and Mae West.

  With Theodor Sparkuhl, the cameraman on Internes Can’t Take Money, who gave the picture its distinctive expressionistic look, 1937. His more than fifty German pictures, made from 1916 to 1930, included many with Lubitsch; he was the cameraman as well for Jean Renoir’s first talking picture, On purge bébé.

  Banton assigned the picture to his assistant, Edith Head, a former high school teacher of Spanish grammar from Bishop, California, who knew nothing about sketching and designing. Head had wanted to be a landscape or seascape painter and had started to study at the Chouinard Art Institute. To get a job at Paramount, she borrowed the drawings of her fellow classmates, put her name on the work, combined them with her own sketches, and brought them to the studio. Head showed up with a portfolio made up of landscapes, portraits, and costume designs. Howard Greer, Paramount’s designer, who said he’d never seen so much “talent in one portfolio” and hired her, soon realized that Edith couldn’t draw.

  Barbara was insulted that Banton didn’t want to dress her and that he’d passed the job off to his assistant. Banton dressed the stars; Edith Head dressed the “grandmothers,” the “aunts,” and the relatives. She did the clothes for all of the “horse dramas,” dressing the horses and the cowboys.

  When it was time to do Barbara’s wardrobe, a little lady came in with bangs and dark glasses, bubbling with enthusiasm. She wanted the two suits Barbara was to wear to be more feminine than the current vogue.

  Barbara said, “Look, Edith, let’s understand each other. I can’t wear fancy feminine trappings.”

  “Of course you can wear them,” said Edith.

  “Not that Edith doesn’t always consider the story first,” said Barbara. “But she wanted the suits to do something for me.” They did.

  “She gave me the kind of care Banton gave the big stars,” said Barbara.

  With Alfred Santell, director of Internes Can’t Take Money.

  Head was able to make an actress look taller or shorter, or thinner, combined with her ability to be motherly or sisterly. She made Barbara glamorous.

  • • •

  The look of Internes, photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl, belied its mundane story of a young doctor in love with a woman desperately searching for her little girl, caught in the middle of a mob world. Sparkuhl and Santell gave the picture the gritty look of a crime movie and interwove throughout a German expressionist feel, using a deliberate blend of silent and talking techniques, “held together,” Santell said, “by mood, intensi
ty and sincerity.”

  Photographer and director captured the shadowy, dreamlike state of the Max Brand story and caught the loneliness of Jimmy Kildare’s interior life.

  Sparkuhl had photographed more than twenty of Ernst Lubitsch’s German pictures. Santell was trained as an architect and was fascinated by the techniques used in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, by the shadows of Caligari painted on the floor instead of being cast naturally by objects or protrusions. When Santell wanted a long shot of a hospital corridor for Internes, he borrowed the idea used in Caligari of violated perspective: as the perspective diminishes, so do the objects. Instead of building a set eighty feet long, Santell worked out, architecturally and mathematically, the reduction of the arches all the way to the end of the corridor and then used midgets and children dressed in nurses’ and doctors’ uniforms to give the illusion of distance.

  Director and cameraman caught the darkness and solitary feeling of the saloon where Kildare drinks and where he saves the gangster’s life. Sparkuhl photographed it as a kind of netherworld of loneliness. The scenes in the orphanage were photographed in the dreamlike religious light of a medieval cathedral. The staircase in the tenement where the young woman lives was filmed from overhead, reversing the principle of violated perspective, foreshortening the flights of stairs, creating a framed geometric image, an expression of the dangerous maze the young woman has entered in a frantic blind search for her child.

  Of Barbara, Santell said, “She knew the whole script and memorized all the other parts. Occasionally, in rehearsal, she’d toss a floundering actor his next line.”

  McCrea watched Barbara work and marveled that she could be as good as she was.

  Paramount thought of making a series of Dr. Kildare pictures if McCrea agreed to play Jimmy Kildare; the actor wasn’t interested.

  • • •

  Bob and Jean Harlow began production on a remake of The Man in Possession a week into the New Year. Bob was in the Robert Montgomery part from Metro’s original 1931 production. Woody Van Dyke was directing; Harlow had just signed a long-term contract with Metro. Jean called the picture How Not to Buttle—Bob played a butler in the picture—and one day showed him, in her own style, how to look more ridiculous than he was feeling. “I don’t think I ever laughed more than I did on that day,” said Bob.

  Taylor was listed on Variety’s ten most popular international box-office draws. Shirley Temple topped the list; Gary Cooper followed; Laurel and Hardy were ninth; Taylor, tenth. Following The Man in Possession, Bob was to make Three Comrades with Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart. R. C. Sherriff was finishing the script.

  Three weeks into production of The Man in Possession, Bob and Jean Harlow were asked by the studio to attend the president’s fifty-fifth birthday. Five thousand birthday balls were being held around the country and in seven hotel ballrooms in Washington to help raise funds to fight the disease that had crippled Roosevelt and to help care for the more than 300,000 children and adults afflicted with polio.

  Production stopped on The Man in Possession. Bob and Jean—sick with the flu—took the train to Washington for two days and nights. She’d nursed her mother through an attack of it, and it hadn’t helped that Bob came down with it as well. Jean was miserable but agreed to go east and took her mother and her hairdresser with her.

  Bob in Washington for President Roosevelt’s birthday and to help support the fight against polio, January 1, 1938. Left to right at the White House: Frederick Jagel, Marsha Hunt, Bob, Maria Gambarelli, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt braving the cold without a coat, Jean Harlow, Mitzi Green.

  After more than three days on the Santa Fe Chief, they arrived at the Washington station; Howard Hughes had just broken the transcontinental airspeed record from Los Angeles to Newark in seven hours, twenty-three minutes, and twenty-five seconds without refueling in his Hughes H-1 plane.

  The Santa Fe Chief was met by more than a thousand well-wishers. State troopers on motorcycles accompanied Bob and Jean and the others to the hotel. Later, they were given the keys to the city, before seven hundred fans and guests, and attended a formal dinner in their honor with government officials and the diplomatic corps. The official hostesses of Washington society were appropriately stately and formal until they saw Bob and then began to swoon and shriek as they surged forward to touch America’s heartthrob and tear off his necktie.

  The next day Bob and Jean posed for pictures with the First Lady at the White House and lunched with the Roosevelt family in celebration of Roosevelt’s birthday. All of Roosevelt’s children were there, but the president was rewriting his birthday broadcast speech as a result of the disastrous flooding of the Ohio River. Mrs. Roosevelt told the guests how “disappointed the President was to miss you” and suggested that Bob and Jean and Marsha Hunt go to his office upstairs and say hello. “Down the hall from the top of the stairs, third door on the right.”

  Bob was nervous as they went up the stairs. Harlow asked the others to go ahead of her. Marsha Hunt opened the door to the office. The president was sitting behind his big desk and was friendly and welcoming.

  The birthday balls—all seven of them—began at 9:30. The limousines with Bob Taylor and Jean and the others, flanked by motorcycle escort, made their way from hotel to hotel. The movie stars were rushed past screaming crowds and ball goers, through hotel kitchens, service elevators, and back corridors, and made their way into the ballrooms, where they heard the music of Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, George Olsen, Ted Weems, Benny Goodman, and Ted Fio Rito. Bob and Jean were introduced from the stage or bandstand, greeted the crowd, said a few words about the need to support the fight against polio, and were whisked off to the next ball. More than a thousand Washington police were on hand but were unable to control the crowds of people pushing, screaming, dancing. Finally, the district National Guard, the U.S. Marines, and the U.S. Navy Reserve were called in to help.

  Bob and Jean and the others were to leave for the gold-plate breakfast dance at the Carlton Hotel, from two to five in the morning, and instead were brought back to the White House at 11 pm to a room below the main floor. The president sat in front of newsreel cameras, lights, and microphones, about to deliver his birthday broadcast to the nation that would be carried on all three radio networks. He had rewritten his speech to address the disastrous flooding of the Ohio River. Just before he was to begin the broadcast, the president looked up from his notes and gave Bob and Jean a big wave. “Is my toupee on straight?” he asked.

  On the train back to Hollywood, after twenty-two personal appearances in one day, Bob’s cold returned. Jean and her mother, both still sick from the flu, stayed in their compartment during the trip west.

  The cost to MGM for halting production on The Man in Possession: $100,000.

  TWO

  Goddamned Sinkhole of Culture

  Bob and Barbara were nervous about money, about having it and spending it. Bob never carried it with him, and when he needed it, he borrowed it from Barbara, writing her a check at the end of the week. Bob returned from Washington to a story in the press that said his paternal grandfather, Jacob Brugh, was on county relief in Holmesville, Nebraska. Brugh’s two surviving sons, both farmers, and his two daughters couldn’t contribute to their father’s welfare. Bob and his mother told the press they were unaware of the situation and that they would make sure Brugh wouldn’t need to seek other assistance. Bob arranged with his uncle Roy for his grandfather to live with his son. Two weeks later Brugh, at eighty-three, was dead from influenza.

  • • •

  Barbara was set to star in Private Enemy from Lamar Trotti and Allen Rivkin’s screenplay about a federal undercover agent and a bank robbery ring at the time of President McKinley’s assassination. William Seiter was to direct. Zanuck had originally wanted Franchot Tone or Tyrone Power, Fred MacMurray or Clark Gable for the part of the agent and Alice Faye or Claire Trevor for the café singer. Once Barbara was cast, the plan was to star Don Ameche opposite her. But 20th
Century–Fox decided it wanted Bob Taylor instead.

  It was Bob’s first time back at Fox since making his debut in Will Rogers’s Handy Andy. Metro paid Bob a $10,000 bonus for the picture. Fox paid Metro $75,000 for Taylor. Barbara saw it as an important picture for Bob; playing the part of a federal secret agent would get him out from under the beautiful glamour boy roles that were becoming a problem for him.

  The lure for audiences who wanted to watch Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor together on the screen was so great His Brother’s Wife had broken box-office records and started a new fad. It was all the rage for studios to feature couples in pictures who were romantically connected or recently disconnected. Margaret Sullavan appeared opposite Henry Fonda in The Moon’s Our Home; Carole Lombard and William Powell, following their divorce, made the just-released My Man Godfrey; Metro teamed Harlow with Powell in Libeled Lady now that they were seeing each other. The studio was trying to pair Lombard with Clark Gable. Joan Blondell and Dick Powell, newly married, made Colleen, Stage Struck, and Gold Diggers of 1937, and Ginger Rogers and Jimmy Stewart were set to make Vivacious Lady.

  • • •

  The Plough and the Stars opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York days before Barbara and Bob were to start on Private Enemy, now called This Is My Affair. In the wake of the acclaim and box-office appeal of John Ford’s Informer and the four Academy Awards the picture received for Best Actor, Director, Music, and Writing, the notices for The Plough and the Stars were full of praise. Critics called the picture “a masterpiece” and “one of the most artistic pictures ever seen on the screen,” Ford’s direction “magnificent.”

  Dudley Nichols’s adaptation was both praised (“notable” for its “rich texture of melancholy and laughter, heroism and cowardice,” said one reviewer) and criticized (“The tragic original has been modified into a romantic melodrama,” said another).