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

by Victoria Wilson

  When shopping for her resort wear before she and Laurel go off to the Mirador, Stella buys the kinds of tacky shoes no one but a nineteenth-century London trollop would wear, and not the modest Stella who greets Stephen on Christmas Day or who tells Ed Munn she doesn’t have feelings for anyone but Laurel. Stella at the resort, getting out of her sickbed all dolled up to go and find Laurel, has put on such an assortment of clothes, jewelry, and makeup to toddle across the manicured lawn that one young man remarks, “She isn’t a woman; she’s a Christmas tree.”

  • • •

  The silent Stella Dallas was directed by Henry King. The picture had a simplicity and an honesty, King’s signature. His interest was American life. His pictures were infused with an idealization of place and captured a loneliness that came from King’s boyhood life in the South, where he was raised on a farm in Montgomery County, Virginia. His grandfather, a plantation owner, had fought under Lee in the Civil War. King quit school at fifteen and joined a theatrical stock company and toured as an actor throughout the South. Before becoming a motion picture actor, King worked in the circus, vaudeville, burlesque, and the New York stage. He’d always thought of himself as an actor, but by 1907, at the age of twenty-one, he was directing stage plays. King acted in pictures from 1913 to 1925. While he appeared in more than a hundred pictures, by 1915 he was directing them as well and had directed thirty before making his big picture for Thomas Ince, 23½ Hours’ Leave. King and Richard Barthelmess started their own production company, Inspiration Pictures, funded by the Harriman Bank and located at the Biograph studio. Inspiration Pictures was started with $250,000 and, after only six pictures, ended up with assets of more than $6 million. “I didn’t have a position in the company,” said King. “I just did everything. I was producer, director, head of the scenario department, business manager, head of casting.” King’s big hit was based on Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel about the rural South called Tol’able David, shot on location in the mountains of West Virginia, a few miles from King’s childhood home. “A lot of my boyhood days went into it.”

  Henry King circa 1915. Of his work, a leading producer said, “Run twenty new pictures and I will pick out immediately the one of the twenty which was made by Henry King.” By the time he was forty, he had made two hundred films, including The White Sister, The Winning of Barbara Worth, Romola, and Stella Dallas. (MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE)

  “You’re too good,” said D. W. Griffith to King. “You’re giving me a tough race.”

  King sold his interest in Inspiration Pictures and directed two inexpensive pictures for Famous Players–Lasky, Sackcloth and Scarlet and Any Woman, and was approached by Goldwyn to make Stella Dallas.

  King was told two things about Goldwyn: “Sam may have, no Sam does have—his idiosyncrasies, but to Sam Goldwyn, his word is his bond and a contract is something to be lived up to.” And, “Goldwyn will do anything in the world that he signs his name to, but don’t pay any attention to any of the promises he makes that are not in writing.” King received a percentage of the profits of Stella Dallas.

  • • •

  From the original Stella Dallas, 1925. Left to right: Belle Bennett, Ronald Colman, and Jean Hersholt, one of the best-known juvenile actors in Denmark. (PHOTOFEST)

  • • •

  King had discovered Ronald Colman. Colman was acting on the stage with Ruth Chatterton and Henry Miller in La Tendresse. King was casting The White Sister to be filmed in Rome—it was 1922–1923—and he needed an actor to play a young Italian. He had Colman’s ruffled hair slicked down, painted on a mustache and lipstick, and made a test of him that confirmed King’s hunch. After The White Sister, Colman was a sought-after leading man.

  While King was making Stella Dallas, Goldwyn went to him in tears. He’d just watched some rushes from the picture (the scene where Stella gives a birthday party for Laurel and no one shows up: Stella and Laurel, trying to make the best of it, sitting together alone at the festive party table set for many; Stella laughing to keep away her desire to weep; Laurel pretending to be excited by her presents until she is overcome, burying her head on her mother’s breast). Goldwyn said to King, “I’ve never seen anything like this in pictures.”

  Goldwyn wanted Stella Dallas to have its premiere in New York at George White’s Apollo Theatre on Forty-Second Street in honor of Ethel Barrymore. For the showing he hired Louis Gottschalk to write a special musical score for the picture.

  After the premiere, Ethel Barrymore wrote to Goldwyn that she thought it “the best moving picture I have ever seen. Best in its direction, acting, restraint, taste and appeal.” Cecil B. DeMille told Goldwyn, “Stella Dallas is, in my opinion, one of the few great screen achievements.”

  Belle Bennett prepared for eleven months before she was given the part of the 1925 Stella Dallas. She bought the clothes, wigs, and accessories for every period of Stella’s life to get ready for the test. Frances Marion had suggested Bennett to Henry King (“This woman has just what it takes,” Marion wrote to King. “She is a mother, she has two children, and she has had everything on earth happen to her. Both on stage and off, she is Stella Dallas”). Bennett had once played a twelve-year-old child who grows to be a seventy-five-year-old woman.

  As a child Bennett had led a nomadic life—she was born in Coon Rapids, a village in Iowa—appearing with her father’s troupe in plays and tent shows. It was Bennett’s early marriage that prompted the change in the marriage laws of Minnesota. She was married at twelve and had a child by the time she was thirteen.

  After appearing in pictures until Triangle Studios went out of business, Bennett returned to the stage a star at the Alcazar Theatre and was called San Francisco’s Sweetheart. Soon afterward, she decided to return to pictures. The studios wanted only young girls as leads. Belle, at twenty-eight, knew that she could pass as one but had to hide the fact that she had a fifteen-year-old son. She pretended the boy was her brother and once again was able to get work in pictures.

  Bennett got the part of Stella, and production was to start right away. She was being paid $500 a week; Colman, $2,000; Lois Moran, $500. King was paid $75,000 plus 25 percent of the profits. Frances Marion was paid $10,000 for the script.

  No sooner had Bennett got the part than her son—her “brother”—became deathly ill. Belle remained at his bedside round the clock. Three weeks later the boy was dead. He died in the morning; that afternoon Belle was called to the studio for a costume fitting. She was stunned by the loss of her child. He was buried on Saturday. Bennett had waited almost a year to get the part of Stella, and now production was to start on the picture. The afternoon of her son’s funeral, Bennett had to leave with the Stella Dallas company to go on location.

  Bennett loved the picture; she felt there was no villain, no bad women, just real people enmeshed by fate, trying to do and live their best. For the role, Bennett used padding to make her look thirty pounds heavier and added makeup to make her look older. At thirty-four, Bennett, unadorned, looked more like the seventeen-year-old Stella.

  • • •

  Olive Higgins Prouty saw in Laurel “a character as heroic as Stella, and far more unusual.” In King’s version, Lois Moran’s freshness and innocence as Laurel were dazzling.

  The picture’s opening in Los Angeles was attended by Chaplin, Mae Murray, Jack Gilbert, Vilma Banky, Betty Bronson, von Stroheim, Lubitsch, King Vidor, Lillian Gish.

  Marion Davies, Jane Cowl, and Jeanne Eagels were all overwhelmed by the magnificence of Bennett’s performance.

  Morris Gest said of Bennett’s Stella Dallas, “At last America has produced a great actress.” Following the success of the picture, Bennett was frustrated with Goldwyn’s choice of roles for her. “I don’t want young parts,” she said. “I am 35 and I want to portray women of my own age—past the sweetheart age, but not yet arrived at old age, the saddest time in a woman’s life . . . I am ranked among men in the picture trade as a character actor, like [Emil] Jannings. I always have the love of w
omen.”

  Belle Bennett died in 1932, seven years after the release of the silent Stella Dallas. Bennett was a follower of Mary Baker Eddy. She was forty-one years old. Among the friends at her funeral: Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, Jean Hersholt, Thelma Todd, and Zasu Pitts.

  • • •

  Goldwyn said, “I make my pictures to please myself.”

  King Vidor had directed Street Scene for Goldwyn a few years before. Soon after they started shooting the remake of Stella Dallas, Vidor realized it was going to be a good picture. “We had a good cast, great photography [by Rudolph Maté] and everything seemed to work well. I decided to give it a sense of reality.”

  Vidor was called into Goldwyn’s office. Goldwyn had just seen the daily rushes and was ready to fire Vidor and the entire cast and call a halt to the whole project. Vidor was shocked. He thought they were “getting a fine picture and that the cast were giving their best performances.” He was so upset he couldn’t shoot anymore that day. Vidor left the studio in “utter dejection” and went home to eat nothing but milk toast and Ovaltine for dinner and to try to get some sleep. At about one in the morning, the phone rang. It was Goldwyn.

  “Hello, King—how are you feeling?”

  “Not so good,” Vidor said.

  “I just ran the rushes again and they look wonderful,” said Goldwyn.

  “What happened to them since this afternoon? Did the actors change their performances?”

  “They’re giving great performances,” said Goldwyn.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I just wanted to call you up and tell you to have a good night’s sleep. Good night.”

  • • •

  To make the picture, Vidor wanted to go back to the aesthetics of the silents and use the sequences that showed the deep love between mother and daughter.

  As a boy, Vidor had crawled under the canvas fence around the Babylonian set of Intolerance, one of the largest sets that had ever been built. Griffith used a camera in a balloon that went up and down and approached the high walls. “Griffith was everything I looked up to,” said Vidor. “He was mentor, teacher, idol.” Vidor never got that close.

  “Griffith went beyond the usual or obvious moving picture technique of the time. He seemed to be able to combine a feeling of tempo, music, crescendo . . . he captured a symphonic feeling. Technically he was using new techniques, such as bigger close-ups and some sort of dissolves or irises . . . he was the master.”

  To get the silent sequences past Goldwyn, Vidor showed them with a musical accompaniment, scoring each to the same poignant music to punctuate the emotional moments.

  In one scene, Laurel gets furious with her mother for getting cold cream on the treasured photograph of Mrs. Morrison. Without use of dialogue Stella is hurt by Laurel’s obvious infatuation with the new woman in Stephen’s life and is embarrassed by her own carelessness. Stella sits at her dressing table, in a dressing gown, stunned by her daughter’s rebuke, staring into the mirror, unseeing, until she takes in that her roots are beginning to show and, to distract herself from her hurt, starts to touch them up. Laurel is ashamed of the way she’s screamed at her mother; she gently takes the coloring stick from her mother’s hand and begins to part the back of Stella’s hair with almost professional assurance—she’s done it for her mother a thousand times before—and lovingly dabs the peroxide on Stella’s hair. All without a word of dialogue.

  In another scene, Stella has taken Laurel to a resort as fancy as any that Stephen could afford. Laurel is off with her new friends, blissfully happy. Stella is seen in a mussed-up bed, sick (or hiding out) in bed jacket with caribou, hair stuck up in curls, reading confession magazines and eating chocolate creams. Laurel, in a sequence of moments, is having the time of her life: playing tennis; riding a bike on a country road, four abreast, with her newfound friends, each from a fine old family; sitting on a rock by a lake with her new young man, a Grosvenor, feeling the heat of the sun and the coolness of the breeze as she leans against him. The air is clean, they are in love, she feels free, their life is ahead of them. He gives Laurel his pin. They kiss without self-consciousness, and Laurel runs off, suddenly overcome with shyness. A montage done without dialogue.

  With Anne Shirley as Laurel (Lollie) Dallas.

  In another scene, Vidor used silent film to show Laurel and Stella on the train after Laurel has packed up their bags and fled the resort. At the hotel Stella had risen from her sickbed and dressed to introduce herself to the parents of Laurel’s new fine friends. Stella sees herself as glamorous a figure as the people in the movies and the fashion magazines. She is wearing the most outrageous ensemble of furs, feathers, shoes, and clanking bracelets, with makeup an inch thick. She sees herself as the height of chic.

  On the night train home, Laurel looks in on her mother, in the lower berth, asleep, and then climbs into the upper berth. As Laurel is drifting off to sleep, she overhears a conversation among some of the girls from the resort, sitting across the aisle from them in the car.

  The girls are talking about “the strange-looking woman parading around the grounds” at the resort who was so outrageous “she can’t be described,” says one of them. The strange, common woman “had bracelets up to here that clanged and bells on her shoes that tinkled,” and, she tells the other two, she is the mother of Laurel Dallas.

  Stella and Laurel, in their separate berths, overhear the girl say, “Isn’t it weird to have such a common-looking thing for a mother?” Laurel leans down to make sure Stella has not heard the comment. Stella has heard every word but pretends to be asleep. Laurel lowers herself onto the bottom berth. She caresses her mother’s cheek with her own. It is clear she loves her mother more than anyone in the outside world, even though she knows her mother is ridiculed. She knows the truth about her mother, but Laurel’s love for Stella goes far beyond what anyone else thinks of her.

  Stella pretends to awaken and acts surprised to see Laurel near her. “It’s lonely up there, Mother, I want to come down here and cuddle with you.” Stella pulls back the covers so Laurel can slip into bed beside her. Laurel lies with her head on her mother’s outstretched arm and curls up against Stella’s body. Stella strokes Laurel’s hair as she thinks of what she must do to free her daughter from the burden she’s realized she’s become.

  It was a difficult scene to rehearse; the set had been silent as Barbara and Anne Shirley went through it. Afterward, to diffuse the tension, as well as the strong feelings summoned by the scene, Barbara turned to Anne and said, “All these years I spend in movies, and I have a scene in bed with someone, and who do I end up with? You! Not Clark Gable, not Gary Cooper . . .”

  In another scene, Vidor used silence to show Stella, at home, after she has carried out her plan and sent Laurel to New York to live with her father and the new Mrs. Dallas. In the sequence, Stella is reading a telegram in which Laurel informs her that she is coming home to be with her mother. Stella is beside herself with upset. She realizes that she must come up with another plan, this time more wrenching, more final, if she wants to push away her daughter for good and send her back to her father, freeing Laurel from any responsibility for her mother.

  • • •

  King Vidor had a natural affection for people. He didn’t accept the glamorous, well-smoothed-over attitude of the rich. His sympathies lay at the lower half of the class struggle, although Stella Dallas is a picture that abuses ordinary people. Vidor’s family had been in the cotton business in Texas. He grew up in Galveston, “a place strange for Texas and strange for the United States,” he said. Galveston was an island, a cotton port that attracted people of all nationalities. Vidor grew up in an atmosphere of many languages and cultures. “Galveston was considered beyond the law,” he said. Gambling and prostitution went on long after they were outlawed in other Texas towns. As a boy, Vidor was interested in photography and movement. What interested him was the telling detail that reveals the way people are with one another. At the age of s
ix Vidor lived through a hurricane. The island was covered in ten feet of water. Out of a population of twenty-nine thousand, ten thousand were drowned or killed. Vidor took the first tugboat out. He walked to the boat’s bow; when he looked down from it, he saw dead bodies—horses and other animals, and people.

  “Images remain over everything else,” Vidor said.

  What comes through in Stella Dallas is Vidor’s own kindness and modesty. He was fascinated by locales in the Midwest and the Mississippi valley, especially Indiana. He’d read everything by Booth Tarkington and admired James Whitcomb Riley.

  Vidor, unlike some directors who did lots of talking and lots of acting, tried to make it clear to the actors exactly what he wanted from them. If something developed during a scene, he kept the camera going. “Those actors who had been on the stage were like children,” Vidor said. “They missed the applause. The director had to take the place of the audience.”

  “If love exists, admiration, love, exists between director and actress,” Vidor said of working with Barbara, “which I felt—I felt a deep feeling of love. It’s like a family functioning. It’s like a husband and wife functioning.”

  • • •

  During the making of Stella Dallas, Vidor never spoke to his Laurel. Anne Shirley was given no direction from him. He let her shift for herself and didn’t say whether she was doing well or not.

  Anne Shirley had grown up at RKO and graduated from the studio high school. She lived through two RKO regime changes and saw the company go in and out of receivership. Through it all, she continued to support her mother and collect her paycheck every Saturday night with a slight salary raise every six months. Anne had worked in a succession of parts, playing the young version of Myrna Loy, Janet Gaynor, and Fay Wray. She appeared with Barbara in William Wellman’s So Big and The Purchase Price—billed as Dawn O’Day—and made ninety-five other pictures as well.