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

by Victoria Wilson

  Barbara was equally praised and criticized: “Barbara Stanwyck reaches new heights”; “the picture [calls] for an actress of considerable more gifts”; she “varies between a shrill insistence and puzzled bewilderment”; “a remarkably vivid portrait . . . unforgettable.” After the unexpected success of The Informer, critics hedged their bets and only passingly questioned the picture’s interest among moviegoers.

  Within its first month at Radio City Music Hall, The Plough and the Stars brought in $62,128, just under $1,000 less than The Informer. Several reviewers called attention to the brogue used by the actors and criticized Barbara for the inconsistency of hers throughout the picture. She was furious about the way reviewers raved about the Abbey Players and criticized her for her now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t Irish accent.

  • • •

  Twentieth Century–Fox heralded its new production This Is My Affair as a great romance set against the backdrop of a large historical drama. The studio proclaimed its stars to be the “film colony’s Number One off-screen romantic team” and said the picture gave Barbara and Bob a chance “to be together, to act together, to become greater together.”

  They had been seeing each other for more than a year, and the town, in its quest for fairy-tale turns, continued to pose the question of when they were going to be married.

  “I’m not going to marry now,” said Barbara. “I’m not going to marry for a long time. Maybe never. I don’t feel like marriage. I couldn’t even tell you why I don’t want to marry. I haven’t a reason—not one. All I want now are peace and quiet.”

  Bob and Barbara were together most of the time. Bob loved swing rhythm and listened to Benny Goodman’s orchestra and Lud Gluskin and the Casa Loma band. He loved “I’ll Get By,” “Avalon,” “China Boy,” “When Did You Leave Heaven?” They rarely entertained or went to nightclubs, though they often ate out. Bob, as a boy in Beatrice, Nebraska, had frequently eaten out with his family. His tastes were simple—steak, potatoes, succotash. He’d only just tasted champagne and didn’t know what an artichoke was.

  • • •

  This Is My Affair was originally intended to be about the McKinley assassination; then the career of the detective Allan Pinkerton; and then the sinking of the Maine. It ended up a romantic secret agent saga called The McKinley Case from a story by Melville Crossman, a.k.a. Darryl F. Zanuck, set at the turn of the century in the midwestern United States.

  A Washington newspaperman had told Zanuck of an incident involving a Secret Service operative at work on a political mission so dangerous that only the president of the United States knew of it, but before the work could be completed, McKinley was assassinated, and the agent, dishonored and unsung, in the line of (secret) duty lost his life after being court-martialed. Zanuck used it to write a story about the young nation’s stability being threatened by a gang of bank robbers, about President McKinley enlisting the help of a young naval officer (Taylor) in a secret mission to find the robbers, with those in government believed to be involved.

  Barbara was the nightclub singer implicated in the plot. Twentieth Century–Fox felt that her singing voice had fared well in Banjo on My Knee and gave Barbara three songs to sing. Though somewhat rough around the edges, her voice had the richness and mystery, the smoky tease, of Marlene Dietrich’s.

  Barbara bought a trailer to use as a dressing room, which she had outfitted and rolled onto the soundstage at Fox. Though the studio would have given her use of a trailer, she wanted her own that she could move from studio to studio and take on location to the San Fernando Valley and Pasadena.

  Barbara and Bob looked glamorous on the screen together: dark, intense, radiant. Bob’s beauty reflected on Barbara and made her more so. Barbara did her best to help Bob, but her intelligence and strength overpowered him and made him seem diminished. She was much more solid in her scenes opposite Brian Donlevy and Victor McLaglen.

  As Lil Duryea, singer at the Capital Café, St. Paul, with Bob as Lieutenant Richard L. Perry, on a top-secret mission direct from President McKinley, Douglas Fowley (second from right) as Alec, and John Carradine as Ed in This Is My Affair, 1937. “Thrillingly these real-life sweethearts achieve their true greatness in the most important story either one has ever had” read the studio’s advertising teaser. “. . . their fire and power given full scope for the first time!” (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  • • •

  Many of the most successful actors in the industry were following the path Barbara had braved four years before, when she refused to be under exclusive contract to any one studio. Barbara was under contract to Fox and Radio.

  Other actors were under term contracts and could work elsewhere; some had signed up with one producer for one or two pictures. The only actress at Metro who had the right to decide where she would make pictures was Norma Shearer.

  Gary Cooper had left Paramount for Goldwyn and was under contract as well with Emanuel Cohen. Claudette Colbert, at Paramount, made pictures at 20th Century–Fox (Under Two Flags) and Columbia (She Married Her Boss) and was about to make a picture at Warner Bros. (Tovarich). Carole Lombard refused to sign a new contract with Paramount until she was given permission to make pictures at other studios, and both Metro and Radio were bidding for her.

  Irene Dunne was under contract to Universal (Show Boat), Paramount (High, Wide, and Handsome), Columbia (Theodora Goes Wild; and was preparing to make The Awful Truth), and Radio (Roberta). Janet Gaynor, who’d been under contract to Fox for years, was freelancing and had just finished making A Star Is Born for Selznick International. Ronald Colman had moved from 20th Century–Fox to Columbia to Selznick International. Jean Arthur was at Columbia, Paramount, and Radio and was under contract to Walter Wanger.

  • • •

  Barbara’s twenty-sixth movie, Internes Can’t Take Money, was released in mid-April 1937. Reviewers liked the re-pairing of Barbara and Joel McCrea and thought they were “aptly matched” and the picture “affecting; genuine.” Max Brand’s agent, Carl Brandt, saw the picture and wrote to his client, “A lot of tears were shed by Barbara Stanwyck, but that can’t be helped. She weeps easily.” Cue called the picture a “fast-moving, tense, thrilling melodrama in the best Alfred Hitchcock tradition . . . gripping film entertainment.”

  Bob’s new picture—his seventeenth—was released in Los Angeles at Grauman’s Chinese and Loew’s State Theatres and in New York at the Capitol.

  At the preview for The Man in Possession, now called Personal Property, the MGM studio publicity advance men let it be known that Barbara and Bob were at the theater, and as they tried to leave, they were mobbed by several hundred people and had to run back into the theater and climb down a fire escape.

  Critics found Personal Property “a hilarious piece of screen fun”; others weren’t amused. Lucius Beebe thought the picture “pedestrian . . . heavyhanded . . . designed for the delight of the half-wit Croatian peasants.” But Beebe found Bob’s performance “peerless” and Miss Harlow “ineffable.”

  Irene Dunne and Bob appeared on the Lux Radio Theatre in a reprise of Magnificent Obsession. Bob was introduced as “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s sensational personality.” On the show as special guests were Dr. Lloyd C. Douglas, author of Magnificent Obsession and other best-selling novels, and John Arnold, head of Metro’s camera department and president of the American Society of Cinematographers. Arnold had started cranking his camera back in 1903, when he worked for Thomas A. Edison, and had since shot more than a billion feet of film.

  • • •

  Barbara and Anne Shirley were borrowed from RKO for Stella Dallas. Barbara’s contract was split between Radio Pictures and 20th Century–Fox. King Vidor was getting paid $60,000 to direct the picture, $15,000 less than Goldwyn had paid Henry King twelve years earlier; Barbara was getting $50,000; John Boles $35,000; Anne Shirley, at age nineteen, was paid $3,500. Stella Dallas was budgeted at $660,000. In the end it cost $677,000.

  • • •
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br />   A few weeks into the filming of Stella Dallas, A Star Is Born, also to be released by United Artists, previewed in Los Angeles at Grauman’s Chinese and opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall.

  There had been a great deal of talk about the picture.

  It was Selznick’s third picture under his new company, David Selznick International, and cost more than $1.2 million. Selznick had first approached George Cukor to direct the picture—he directed Selznick’s What Price Hollywood? for RKO in 1932—but Cukor declined the offer. Bill Wellman directed instead. Wellman and Selznick had collaborated in 1929 at Paramount Famous Lasky on Chinatown Nights and The Man I Love and again in 1932 at RKO on The Conquerors.

  Four years later, Wellman had been under contract at MGM, “picking up his weekly check,” he said, but not being given anything to direct, only write (he referred to Louis B. Mayer as L. B. Napoleon). Wellman had directed forty-five pictures, among them fifteen silents.

  Wellman had asked Metro for a young writer to help him with the typing and chose Robert Carson.

  Wellman and Carson were sprung from MGM with the start, in July 1936, of Selznick International. They brought with them two stories that MGM had turned down: a sequel to The Public Enemy, called Another Public Enemy, and, Wellman’s favorite, a story based on his memories, in which everything in it happened to somebody Wellman knew. “Sometimes a little too well,” he said.

  Carson and Wellman first worked out the story of It Happened in Hollywood in detail, and then Carson went away and wrote it. “Wellman read it, when he got around to it,” Carson said, “because he didn’t read anything—but he read it and we discussed it again. He didn’t do any of the writing. [Wellman] was engaged socially, emotionally and alcoholically in many other endeavors, and he had, in addition, his directing chores,” among them directing Robert Taylor and Janet Gaynor in Small Town Girl and Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan in a portion of Tarzan Escapes.

  Selznick read the pages and felt that stories about Hollywood were too much of a gamble. His What Price Hollywood? had been one of the few successful pictures about Hollywood.

  Wellman, not to be put off, went to see David’s wife, Irene (“Brilliant, fascinating, wonderful,” Wellman said of her, “with no fear whatsoever of her titanic father; Mayer was both scared and crazy about her, a dilemma”). Wellman told Irene his story (“with no overtones of enthusiasm; no fakery of any kind, just the simple telling of a story I loved”).

  Russell Birdwell, director of publicity for David O. Selznick, circa 1938. (GETTY IMAGES)

  Irene and David were going to Honolulu for six weeks; she told Wellman not to worry.

  “Six weeks later to the last day marked off” on his calendar, Wellman got a call from Selznick telling him to get over to the studio right away.

  Selznick gave Wellman the “fakiest explanation of a change in attitude” that he’d ever heard. Selznick said he hadn’t been able to get the story out of his mind—night or day. “It’s a gamble worth taking,” Selznick said. “We’ll get Gaynor and March and Menjou, we will make an epic of Hollywood—the real truth, we’ll tear down all the tinsel, people will know the gutty Hollywood, the tragedy, the humor.”

  “Selznick was never satisfied with one script or with the original writers,” said Wellman. “Other writers, great writers arriving in sets as if from department stores, young blossoming writers, sons of famous dead writers, idea men who will talk fast but who couldn’t write a script to save their lives.”

  There were three teams of writers on It Happened in Hollywood. In the end, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Robert Carson received screenwriting credit. John Lee Mahin wrote the final scene. Budd Schulberg, son of B. P. Schulberg—who’d “made ‘Willy’ Wellman a big-time director with Wings,” and whose career was ruined by alcohol, and who was the model for Oliver Niles, the producer in A Star Is Born—was, along with Ring Lardner Jr., on Selznick’s payroll.

  Schulberg, at twenty-two, was a reader in the story department; Lardner, at twenty-one, was assistant to Selznick’s publicity director, Russell Birdwell. Carson and Wellman used Birdwell as the model for Matt Libby, the studio publicity hack who obsequiously obliges Norman Maine his every whim and demand and endlessly bails him out of trouble until Maine has slipped in popularity and is weakened by booze and failure. Matt Libby then turns on Maine with full loathing and cunning in a vengeful campaign that will publicly finish off the actor’s career.

  Schulberg and Lardner—both good, beginning writers—were used as “trouble shooters and were brought in to fix up the picture’s ending,” said Schulberg. Adela Rogers St. Johns, uncredited, worked on the script, as did Ben Hecht.

  Bill Wellman spent most of the preproduction putting back the material that had been replaced by the bevy of writers who came as quickly as they seemed to go. Wellman would read his memos “from God” (Selznick), tear them up, and throw them away.

  Selznick’s legal department drafted a twenty-page brief that spelled out the script’s similarities to well-known situations and real-life people, such as Barbara and Frank Fay and John Barrymore.

  It Happened in Hollywood was about success and failure, comebacks and downfalls, love and sacrifice, about a destroyed marriage and a tragic death. It was about the rise of one star set against the demise of another and about how, despite personal heartbreak and tragedy, the rising star, as the price of movie greatness, must persevere. At the heart of the story was another toll exacted: the wreckage of lives that comes with too much alcohol.

  Wellman, at forty, had seen what too much booze could do to those he knew and loved: failure, humiliation, loss, and death. He knew firsthand the insanity that came with too much drinking; he’d fallen in and out of hell-raising brawls his entire life, almost as easily as he’d fallen in and out of his four marriages (“for a while,” Wellman said, he thought “the world was populated entirely by mothers-in-law”). With his last marriage, in 1933, his twenty-year-old wife, Dorothy Coonan, had straightened him out “fast,” and Wellman was on the wagon.

  Some of the incidents in the story had happened to Wellman himself, such as the scene in which the actor is brought up on drunk-driving charges and comes before a judge who berates him.

  Wellman had seen the havoc caused by alcohol in those he and Carson had chosen to write about—the silent-screen actor John Bowers; John Barrymore, the most inspired actor of his time; the silent director Bernard J. Durning and his wife, the silent star and former child actress Shirley Mason (sister of Viola Dana)—and in the career and marriage of Wellman’s good pal Barbara Stanwyck to Frank Fay. Also drawn upon were the marriages of John McCormick and Colleen Moore, and John Gilbert and Virginia Bruce.

  John Bowers appeared in more than ninety silent pictures, beginning in 1914; his twenty-one-year career did not survive talking pictures. (PHOTOFEST)

  The silent star John Bowers, a Hoosier from Indiana, an extra in 1914 in a Tom Mix picture, In the Days of the Thundering Herd, and two years later an overnight success was a leading man playing opposite Mary Pickford in Hulda from Holland. More than eighty pictures and two decades later, Bowers was washed up as an actor, done in by alcohol and by sound pictures.

  When Bowers’s old friend Henry Hathaway failed to give the former star a major part in Hathaway’s new picture, Bowers, an avid sailor who’d threatened to “sail into the setting sun” several times before, made good on his threat.

  Bowers rented a sixteen-foot boat and sailed out into the ocean. A few days later, the boat was found drifting off Santa Monica, its sails set with no one aboard. Bowers’s body was found floating in the surf near Las Flores, south of the Malibu Colony, dead at fifty. Wellman was two weeks into production with A Star Is Born.

  One of the most beloved and influential figures in Wellman’s life was Bernie Durning, Wellman’s teacher and boss for two years at Fox. Durning was in his late twenties and a top director making silent action-adventure pictures and melodramas when Wellman, in 1922, left
Goldwyn for Fox Film Corporation. To get a job with Durning, Wellman waited for three days in the great director’s reception room, along with another hopeful, Adolphe Menjou.

  Bernard J. Durning, actor/director, with his wife, Shirley Mason, who began in films when she was eleven and who retired at twenty-nine, having appeared in more than one hundred pictures, circa 1922. (PHOTOFEST)

  Wellman was “nuts” about Durning from their meeting. “Quite frankly,” said Wellman, “he was my God.”

  Durning was “a big, handsome, hard-drinking, tough, lovable guy with a terrific temper. He was well over six feet, dressed immaculately.” He was also an actor, “and a bad one,” said Wellman. Durning was “so tall that he breathed different air.” He was the handsomest man Wellman had ever met.

  Durning was married to “a little bitty gal” called Shirley Mason, also at Fox Studios. Mason started on the stage when she was four. She was so full of pranks she was called the “boy of the family.”

  Wellman was hired as Durning’s assistant and was warned by the director that he was “a periodic drunk . . . the worst drunk you ever saw, and the most helpless.” When the time came, Durning would need Wellman “goddamned badly.”

  The first year Durning and Wellman made five pictures together. Wellman never saw Durning give in to the “sickness that was supposed to possess him.” Durning’s only overindulgence, said Wellman, was chocolate ice-cream sodas. “Three whoppers at a sitting,” said Wellman, “and [he] never bat[ted] an eye or add[ed] . . . a pound to his sit-down.”

  It was in the second year, while shooting The Eleventh Hour, that Wellman saw Durning become the “slave to whatever you call it” and go into an “alcoholic hibernation for a week, just coming to often enough to replenish the burning wick.” Durning asked Wellman to finish shooting The Eleventh Hour, which he did. Afterward, Durning told the heads of the studio that he’d been on one of his “pilgrimages to the land of nod and had been gone for five mislaid days,” that Bill Wellman had finished the picture, and that Wellman deserved to be given his own picture to direct. The studio listened and complied.