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

by Victoria Wilson

  Shirley had brown eyes, and her once brown hair was now corn colored. She was born Dawn Evelyeen Paris. At three, when she was cast in Herbert Brenon’s Miracle Child with William Farnum at the Astoria, Long Island, studios, her name was changed to Dawn O’Day (“You’ve a career ahead of you,” said Jimmy Ryan, Brenon’s casting director. “It’s the dawn of a new day—so I dub you Dawn O’Day”). Dawn and her mother were advised to go west to follow the future of movie work. RKO legally changed Dawn’s name to Anne Shirley at fifteen after the character she made famous in Anne of Green Gables.

  Three years later (she celebrated her eighteenth birthday on the set of Stella Dallas; Goldwyn gave her her first car for the occasion) and with almost two decades of screen experience, Anne Shirley was making $1,750 a week. She had been her mother’s sole support from the time she was eighteen months old. “Be nice to the director, dear,” she was told by her mother. “If Mommy has to work, then she’ll be separated from her baby. But if the baby works, then they can be together all the time.”

  Anne went to professional school with Mitzi Green, Anita Louise, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Virginia Weidler and worked for every studio in town until RKO put her under a long-term, eight-year contract. Up to that point Anne and her mother lived in a tiny three-room apartment above a neighborhood hardware store.

  When Dawn Paris first arrived in Hollywood, she and her mother had come upon apartment houses with posted signs that read, “No Dogs or Actors Allowed.” After Anne signed her contract with RKO, she and her mother moved to a six-room bungalow, still on the wrong side of town but five blocks from the studio.

  A month before production began on Stella Dallas, Vidor was still looking at tests for an actress for the part of Laurel. Bonita Granville’s test was convincing for the older Laurel. But Vidor felt that Granville lacked “something in gentleness and softness,” he wrote to Merritt Hulburd, associate producer for Dodsworth and Stella Dallas. “I would be happier if we could get the perfect girl, but as yet I haven’t seen one.”

  Lois Moran sent both Goldwyn and Vidor letters asking them to consider her younger sister, Betty, for the part of Laurel. “Knowing something about the character Laurel,” she wrote Goldwyn, “and knowing Betty’s capabilities as I do, I cannot but feel she would do a grand job of the part in your forthcoming production of Stella Dallas.”

  During production on the picture, Anne did her work, went to her dressing room, and went home and cried every day. She was sure she would be fired at any moment. She knew she was the second or third choice for the part, and it was clear to her that she wasn’t wanted. Despite Vidor’s sense of it being family, Barbara felt as Anne did; neither felt wanted.

  Anne wasn’t used to this kind of treatment and made an appointment to see Goldwyn. She was ushered into his office and burst into tears.

  “Mr. Goldwyn, you’ve got to replace me,” she said. “I can’t finish this picture. I can’t work like this.”

  Goldwyn told Anne to dry her eyes and go back to the set. He was sure she wouldn’t have any more problems.

  As soon as Anne left the office, Goldwyn picked up the phone.

  “I don’t care what you tell the kid,” he told Vidor. “Tell her she’s lousy if she’s great or great if she’s lousy. Tell her any damn thing you please. I just can’t cope with hysterical females and I don’t want to be bothered again!”

  Left to right: Anne Shirley, Barbara, Rudy Maté (on camera), unidentified (behind Maté and in plaid jacket), and King Vidor, Stella Dallas, spring 1937.

  After looking at the first day’s rushes, Vidor wasn’t happy with Barbara O’Neil in the Mrs. Morrison role. “I want to repeat what I said about ten days ago,” Vidor wrote. “I am very much worried about [O’Neil’s] appearance, which isn’t offset by her great ability as an actress. I don’t think we should go too far with her until Mr. Goldwyn has seen the first two days rushes and put his approval on them. It would be too bad starting this picture off with an actress looking the way she does in the first scene with Boles.”

  This was Barbara O’Neil’s first picture. O’Neil was a stage actress who’d been brought to Hollywood by a Goldwyn scout specifically for Stella Dallas. She’d won the part of Helen Morrison over Mary Astor, then embroiled in a court case against her ex-husband for custody of her four-year-old daughter. Out of the messy legal battle had come Astor’s most intimate sexual disclosures, which made front-page headlines across the country. Stella Dallas’s Mrs. Morrison, the elegant society widow, couldn’t possibly have been played by an actress who “willfully abandoned” her young daughter for a married man and whose “stray thoughts” told of her “gross immoral conduct” (so claimed Astor’s husband).

  • • •

  The start of Stella Dallas had been delayed by a makeup artists’ and hairdressers’ strike in an effort by the Federated Motion Picture Crafts unions to win recognition from the producers as a guild shop; when production finally began on Stella Dallas, there was only a skeletal crew to cover for those artists on strike.

  Barbara O’Neil was unhinged that she had to cross a picket line each morning and was further upset when she wasn’t allowed to put on her own makeup as she had each night at the theater in the privacy of her own dressing room backstage.

  Months before, O’Neil was appearing on Broadway at the St. James Theatre in Sidney Kingsley’s Ten Million Ghosts along with twenty-one-year-old Orson Welles, who’d just come from adapting, directing, and starring in several plays. Barbara O’Neil had been on the Broadway stage for a few years, working with Melvyn Douglas in his production of Mother Lode; with Tallulah Bankhead in Forsaking All Others; and with Josh Logan, James Stewart, and Esther Dale in Blanche Yurka’s staging of Carry Nation.

  Now at the Goldwyn Studio, O’Neil was greeted each morning by Bob Stephanoff, the head of the United Artists makeup department, who applied O’Neil’s makeup and because of the strike was forced to do it behind drawn curtains while his fellow makeup men and women were picketing outside the studio walls. As Stephanoff applied O’Neil’s makeup, she became more agitated, knowing just how dangerous it was for him to be working at all.

  By the time O’Neil arrived on the set “in the presence of Miss Stanwyck, Mr. Vidor and Rudy Maté,” the cameraman, she said, she was an “already shattered, New York–imported commodity” who knew little about acting before cameras.

  Vidor wasn’t happy after looking at the first day’s rushes, in which Helen Morrison and Stephen Dallas are engaged. (The picture’s opening was originally shot as the Henry King silent had been but wasn’t used. The scenes that show Dallas fleeing the family scandal—his father’s suicide because of the front-page headlines that tell the world he has been caught embezzling and has brought ruination and shame to his family—were replaced with the establishing shot of the town of Millwood and the young, pretty Stella Martin waiting at the gate of her parents’ simple house to be seen by the oblivious, to her, Stephen Dallas.)

  When things became particularly rocky for O’Neil, Barbara went to the actress’s dressing room and encouraged her to keep in there pitching and to try not to let Mr. Goldwyn bother her. O’Neil saw Barbara as a life raft in the tension-ridden atmosphere created by the strike and Sam Goldwyn.

  O’Neil said of watching Barbara, “I understood the depth and strength of her work. She is an actress [who] works from the inside out. This privacy makes her performances . . . last.”

  • • •

  For Barbara to age fifteen or twenty years as Stella, she had to wear five pairs of hose to make her ankles thick and use padding to fill out her girth, which was needed even more so after she’d lost twenty pounds. Barbara practically collapsed from the heat during production. In addition, she put sags in her cheeks by stuffing cotton in her mouth as Helen Hayes did during her run as Queen Victoria.

  “It was a matter of upholstery,” said Barbara, who said she felt like a football player. The pouches under her eyes and the lines and wrinkles on her fac
e and on her hands were done with paint and brush.

  Barbara was offered the use of wigs in the picture, which she rejected. Wigs would have prevented her from doing anything with her hands, “like running them through my hair,” she said. “Furthermore in Stella’s home her hair was neglected, unkempt—and that just can’t be done realistically except with one’s own hair.”

  Barbara agreed to have her hair bleached blond.

  Her hairdresser, Holly Barnes, had been with Barbara for two years, moving with her from production to production, from RKO to Fox. Barbara and Holly worked together six days a week. On Sundays, Holly went to Barbara’s to go over her fan mail and to do Barbara’s nails. Barbara felt comfortable with Holly; Holly was always there with Barbara. Their closeness annoyed people.

  Holly and the other hairdressers and makeup artists were on strike along with scenic artists, art directors, and draftsmen. To bleach Barbara’s hair, the studio brought in hairdressers out of a Los Angeles beauty college. The inexperienced hairdressers tested Barbara’s hair to get the right shade of blond for Stella’s hair and to see how various tints photographed. Nine tints were tested before they found the right shade of blond, damaging Barbara’s hair in the process.

  • • •

  A few days before she was to film the scene at the train station, where Stella says what she believes will be her final good-bye to Laurel, Barbara and Bob and Marion and Zeppo Marx had been riding on a mountain trail above Marwyck. One of Barbara’s favorite horses, Buck, stumbled into a gopher hole. The horse tripped, Barbara was thrown, and the horse fell heavily across her body. Her legs and right arm were badly bruised and bandaged, and it was suggested she stay in bed and rest. Barbara insisted on returning to work.

  The good-bye scene between Stella and Laurel was to be shot at the Santa Fe station in downtown Los Angeles. Barbara was to walk alongside the train as Laurel leaves for New York for what she thinks is her annual summer visit; Stella has arranged with Stephen and his new wife for her daughter to live with her father and stepmother. Laurel is unaware of the arrangement; Stella knows this is the last time she will see the child she adores.

  Barbara was limping and put aside the cane for the shot. As Stella, she tearfully held on to Laurel; the train started to pull away from the platform. It lurched forward. Anne Shirley lost her balance. Barbara, still in pain and banged up from her fall, had to walk alongside the train holding on to Shirley to keep the young actress from falling until the porter could help stabilize her.

  • • •

  Vidor shot the last scene of the picture with few words of dialogue. Stella is outside the Dallas apartment, standing in the street close to the wrought-iron fence with the other onlookers watching the grand guests inside in the warmth and comfort of the town house, the bride and groom—Laurel Dallas and Richard Grosvenor III—stand together aglow with happiness in front of the picture window. Stella, watching with the throng, is worn, seared, outcast.

  The final scene of the original Stella Dallas: Belle Bennett gazes into the living room window of the Morrison/Dallas home as her daughter, Laurel, is wed to Richard Grosvenor III.

  What she sees has a fairy-tale quality. She is watching the lovers as if it were a movie. She is transfixed, crying at the picture’s happy ending, rapt, a corner of her handkerchief in her mouth, as the lovers embrace.

  The only line of dialogue comes from the cop who drives away the crowd and tells Stella and the others to “move along.”

  “I had to indicate to audiences, through the emotions shown by my face,” said Barbara, “that for Stella, joy ultimately triumphed over the heartache she felt. Despite her shabbiness and loneliness at that moment, there was a shining triumph in her eyes, as she saw the culmination of her dreams for her daughter.”

  Barbara didn’t try to pretend or signal that she was acting, or overact. She exceeded the bounds of good taste and suspended sex appeal of any sort.

  • • •

  Stella Dallas is a woman whom the audience suffers for every step of the way; she is humiliated, unseeing, silly, or pretentious, but she loves her child. Barbara makes the character endearing, even though terrible things happen to her and she is punished. The film plays off the illusion about parenthood and class. Vidor embraced naïveté and put audiences on the side against the hypocrisy of the society Prouty wrote about. The punishment of trying to change class is that in the end one doesn’t belong anywhere. Laurel is permitted to change class because she has the makings of it from the father’s genes. Prouty punished Stella Dallas, and Barbara punished her as well, by being so relentless, so tough on her.

  Twelve years later, the same scene with Barbara Stanwyck in King Vidor’s 1937 version of Stella Dallas. (PHOTOFEST)

  “It is difficult with that sort of performance,” said Vidor, “to keep from going overboard in getting funny and comical. [Barbara] knew how to handle it. She won admiration and sympathy in spite of the broad strokes of her character.”

  Vidor admired Barbara’s “humanness and ability and the way she came over as a down-to-earth person.” She made “everything entirely believable—makes you think it is really happening when she does it. And this to me,” said Vidor, “is the test for all acting and directing—if someone watching in the audience can entirely forget that he’s looking at a movie.”

  Barbara was “prepared to the very top of her ability,” said Vidor. “Dialogue learned perfectly. Hair, clothes, energy ready. There was no ‘I am not feeling well today.’ Or ‘I have a personal problem’ and then a request to be excused for the day, as happens with so many actresses. She felt she was in a business . . . You gave a day’s work for a day’s pay.”

  “King was very nice,” said Barbara. “But there wasn’t any great affinity there, not the kind I felt for Capra, and Wild Bill Wellman. King did his job and I did mine.”

  “Sam Goldwyn made sure everything was first-class,” she said. “He may have come out of the penny arcade, but he took a lot with him—and what he took he used.”

  “ ‘The Goldwyn touch’ is not brilliance or sensationalism,” said Alva Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who wrote about Goldwyn for The New Yorker. “It is something that manifests itself gradually in a picture; the characters are consistent; the workmanship is honest; there are no tricks and short cuts; the intelligence of the audience is never insulted. With his background, the most impressive fact about him is his development of taste and artistic conscience.”

  • • •

  Vidor tried to cut the picture with the camera; there weren’t a lot of ways to put the picture together, and he decided on the set which shot he was going to use. One night Goldwyn called up Vidor and said, “You told me you were going to take close-ups, but you didn’t take them!”

  Vidor told Goldwyn the close-ups were there, that perhaps Goldwyn had turned away to talk to someone when the close-ups were on the screen. Goldwyn said, “Well, I didn’t see them and I was watching all the time!” “Go watch them again!” Vidor said.

  • • •

  As they were making the picture, Barbara said she was “scared to death.” She even blew up in one scene, “went all to pieces,” she said, “and had to go home. That’s not like me. I usually can take a lot. But when the time came for me to give up my daughter Laurel, I couldn’t go through with it. Not that day. Neither could she.” Barbara had no mother who fought or sacrificed for her; she knew no mother love; she was unable to have children of her own.

  Anne Shirley had worked for sixteen years to become a star and make her mother happy. Mrs. Harry Paris had changed her name to O’Day when her daughter did. When Mrs. O’Day married her second husband and became Mrs. Quirk, she still went by the name Mrs. O’Day so she would be recognized as Dawn O’Day’s mother. When Dawn became Anne Shirley, her mother changed her own name to Mimi Shirley. During the early years, daughter and mother struggled and were “dreadfully poor.” After the success of Anne of Green Gables, Anne’s new five-year co
ntract with the studio gave her the means to have the home her mother had never given her daughter and the things Anne wanted. Anne’s devotion and loyalty now extended to RKO as well as to her mother. Her years of acting—the only life Anne knew—had all been for her mother.

  • • •

  During production, Anne and her close friend Phyllis Fraser went on a double date to the Trocadero. Anne’s escort was Lee Bowman. Phyllis Fraser, cousin of Ginger Rogers, had been invited by Anne’s mother to live with the Shirleys (it had been more than a year now) in the hopes of furthering Anne’s career; Ginger’s mother, Lela Rogers, was the head talent coach at RKO.

  Lee Bowman took Anne home early the following morning and invited her to a cocktail party he was having at his house later that day. Anne was set to go on a picnic with her friend Phyllis and didn’t think she’d be able to attend Bowman’s party. She slept until three that afternoon and decided to go to the party for a while, get to bed early, and be on the set Monday morning.

  At Bowman’s house, she saw John Payne putting records on the Victrola and went to sit next to him. Payne, at twenty-five, was an up-and-coming Warner leading man. He was six feet four, broad shouldered, narrow waisted, with the looks of a movie star. Both Anne and Payne liked the songs “Now” and “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” and continued to select records for a couple of hours. Payne invited Anne to the Tropics for dinner. She accepted. He called her several days later, and they went out again. Payne was a former Columbia University student at the School of Journalism who earned extra money as a male nurse, ran an elevator, operated a switchboard, and had been a boxer and wrestler—“Alexei Petroff, the Savage of the Steppes,” and “Tiger Jack Payne.” He was from a moneyed family and was raised on a former plantation outside Roanoke, Virginia. Soon Anne and Payne were engaged.

  • • •

  Barbara saw Stella as “a woman who cheated failure. One who eagerly paid the full measure for what she wanted from life.”