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

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A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 72

by Victoria Wilson


  Barbara and Anne had spent so much time together, “studied our lines in my dressing room. Got to understand one another, really, instead of being just acquaintances on the set. You must, you know, to play such a friendship.” Barbara thought that Anne played “the exquisite Laurel very sensitively.”

  When production closed, Barbara inscribed a photograph to her Laurel that said, “For Anne, whose loveliness helped so much during Stella Dallas. My love, always, Barbara.”

  Olive Higgins Prouty felt Anne Shirley’s “interpretation of the shy sensitive Laurel was exactly as she had written her.”

  • • •

  Joseph Breen begrudgingly approved the picture. He wasn’t happy that the Christmas scene in Stella’s apartment with Ed Munn drunk with a raw goose under his arm couldn’t be cut because of its importance to the story. The Breen Office certificate of approval was granted only with the assurance that the shot of Alan Hale squeezing Barbara’s thigh had been removed from the picture. Breen wasn’t happy with any part of the scene. “May I not say again that [it] . . . is at best, a border-line scene, with respect to the resolution of the Board of Directors of this Association, condemning unnecessary or excessive drinking and drunkenness. We regret that this particular scene was not toned down.”

  Stella Dallas grossed more than $2 million; Goldwyn’s profit was more than $500,000.

  Vidor found Goldwyn a warm, appreciative friend who could be unpredictable, impulsive, difficult. After making Stella Dallas, Vidor wrote a note to himself and put it in a desk drawer: “No more Goldwyn pictures.”

  Goldwyn said, “The trouble with directors is that they’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.”

  • • •

  Olive Higgins Prouty was unhappy about what had become of Stella Dallas. It “has been crammed and jammed into so many different mediums,” she wrote, “and has been mauled over by so many producers, playwrights, script-writers, tragediennes and would-be tragediennes that she has been worn pretty thin . . . and I for one, shall thank heaven when she no longer exists even as a memory or a by-word. I feel about Stella Dallas a good deal as Gillette Burgess [spelling OHP’s] felt about his Purple Cow when he wrote in despair,

  Yes, I wrote the Purple Cow,

  I’m sorry now I wrote it,

  But I can tell you anyhow

  I’ll kill you if you quote it.”

  —Gelett Burgess

  FOUR

  “Clean Labor Unionism”

  1937

  There’d been talk for months of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild to win a guild shop contract from motion picture producers. Actors, meeting in weekly small gatherings, were asked to pledge to support a strike. More than 98 percent of those asked had said yes.

  The actors willing to strike had little to gain and everything to lose; they had contracts with major studios; by walking out, they would be in violation of their contracts and open to lawsuits. Many were former stage actors, members of Actors’ Equity, who benefited from the power and influence wielded by Equity-negotiated contracts that had set fair wages, hours, and working conditions. Soon after its full recognition as the bargaining agent for actors eighteen years before, in 1919, Equity had tried unsuccessfully to unionize Hollywood. The union had since recognized the Screen Actors Guild as the legitimate representative for screen actors.

  Actors’ Equity, during its 1919 strike, had called on—and received—the support of the stagehands’ union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada, the most powerful trade union in Hollywood.

  The International Alliance had come to the support of Hollywood actors and pledged its undivided support of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1935, the guild also joined the American Federation of Labor. Two years later, more than a thousand members of the Screen Actors Guild had agreed to support a strike. Some who opposed a strike were silent-film actors who’d survived the transition to sound; others were opposed out of loyalty to the heads of the studios (“MGM and Louis B. Mayer have been very good to me. I’m not going to do this to him”); still others feared that they, and everyone striking, would be banned from the industry.

  There were those who’d held out against joining the Screen Actors Guild altogether: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery. Barbara had resisted as well; she didn’t believe in organized labor. If the guild voted to go on strike, Barbara would have to cross the picket line (“Work was work,” she said), just as she’d crossed the hairdressers’ and makeup artists’ picket line to show up for work each day on Stella Dallas. Other actors and actresses—Garbo, Jean Harlow, Bing Crosby, Herbert Marshall, and Jack Benny, among them—had passed through picket lines as well.

  Barbara had been invited to join the Screen Actors Guild seven months before, an invitation she’d ignored. When the guild threatened to have her expelled from Actors’ Equity if she didn’t join the fledgling union, she relented and became a member.

  Gary Cooper said, “I’ve been figuring and I think we should belong. Maybe we don’t need a Guild, but a lot of those who haven’t been so lucky as us, do. We should help them out.”

  Guild members, the heads of the studios, and the entire country had watched six months before as the United Automobile Workers of America, in mid-November 1936, had challenged the National Labor Relations Act and waged a series of sit-down strikes against General Motors to win recognition as the sole bargaining agent for GM’s workers. The strike had started at a Fisher Body plant in Atlanta and spread to GM plants in Kansas City, then Cleveland; two days later, a Fisher Body plant was struck in Flint. By January 1937, 135,000 men from thirty-five cities in fourteen states were on strike against General Motors; 90 percent of GM’s factories were shut down because of parts shortages. GM’s president was against the union, but the company’s vice president, William Knudsen, recognized that collective bargaining had arrived and that the UAW had to be reckoned with.

  During the weeks that followed, riots ensued; four thousand National Guardsmen were ordered to Michigan; the autoworkers called in reinforcements to help defy a court injunction; GM threatened to withhold food deliveries to striking workers; the workers threatened hunger strikes in retaliation. Finally, in early February 1937, General Motors recognized the UAW as the sole bargaining agent for GM’s employees and agreed to a contract guaranteeing a thirty-hour workweek, a six-hour day, with time and a half for overtime, and a minimum rate of pay commensurate with an American standard of living.

  • • •

  The screen actors’ fight to win union recognition and a union shop contract from producers had been ongoing for three and a half years. The Screen Actors Guild had allied itself with the newly striking Federated Motion Picture Crafts, made up of fifteen unions, among them hairdressers, makeup artists, scenic artists, plumbers, engineers, molders, boilermakers, machinists, blacksmiths, and sheet-metal workers. After Federated voted to strike, twenty-five hundred hairdressers, makeup artists, scenic artists, draftsmen, art directors, and painters walked out; a thousand workers were on picket lines in front of the studio gates of twelve companies. While strikers picketed, the major movie production plants were rushing out more pictures than in any spring in the last four years.

  Members of the Screen Actors Guild, meeting at Legion Stadium to discuss the striking motion picture craftsmen, May 1937. Top row: Warren William; Fredric March; Larry Steers (bending down, mostly obscured); Donald Woods (SAG board member); Robert Young; Aubrey Blair (Guild staff member who oversaw extras’ issues); Frank Morgan (in background); and Robert Montgomery. Bottom row: Joan Crawford, who often knitted at meetings, with husband, Franchot Tone.

  Paramount was in production with Angel with Marlene Dietrich and Souls at Sea with Gary Cooper; Metro was at work on six pictures, including Madame Walewska with Greta Garbo and Saratoga with Gable and Harlow. Warner was in the midst of making seven pictures, among them The
Life of Emile Zola with Paul Muni and Varsity Show with Dick Powell. RKO had four pictures in the works, including Vivacious Lady with Ginger Rogers; Columbia had five, and United Artists was five weeks into production with Stella Dallas.

  Twenty-four hours after the strike began, the costumers’ union, the second-largest group in the Federated Motion Picture Crafts, withdrew from the strike in an effort to independently negotiate with the producers.

  The Screen Actors Guild called a mass meeting at the Hollywood Legion Stadium for Sunday, May 2, to consider whether its members should join forces with the eleven striking unions of the fifteen that made up Federated Motion Picture Crafts. If the guild vote was to strike, British Actors’ Equity from across the Atlantic pledged to support the action and would ask its members to refuse to work at any of the Hollywood studios.

  The night of the May 2 meeting, the stadium’s weather-beaten hall was jammed with four thousand guild members, who listened to Robert Montgomery, the guild’s third president after Ralph Morgan and Eddie Cantor. Montgomery was one of Metro’s leading romantic male stars, often cast as the glib society rebel, the restless man-about-town on-screen, but deadly serious off, in his efforts on behalf of actors. Montgomery spoke to the crowd and laid out the guild’s plan of action: the producers had one week to recognize the Screen Actors Guild and agree to a guild shop contract. If the Association of Motion Picture Producers failed to reach an agreement with the guild within six days, its sixty-five hundred members would strike.

  The vote to support the guild’s plan was unanimous.

  The next five days were frantic with meetings; during the days the negotiating committee met with those representing the Association of Motion Picture Producers: Joseph Schenck, president of 20th Century–Fox; Eddie Mannix, production manager of MGM; Hal Wallis, production manager of Warner Bros.; and Sam Briskin, production manager of RKO. Following its meetings with producers, the guild’s negotiating committee reported back late in the evenings to the guild board at the homes in Beverly Hills of Frank Morgan, Chester Morris, and Jimmy Cagney. Countless hours were spent, until three or four in the morning, planning the following day’s strategy with the producers.

  In addition to Robert Montgomery, the negotiating committee for the Screen Actors Guild consisted of Kenneth Thomson, the guild’s executive secretary and veteran actor from the mid-1920s who appeared in more than sixty pictures; and Franchot Tone, scion of an industrialist fortune, who’d fled his privileged upbringing for the stage to become the handsome, genteel leading man of the Group Theatre. Tone decided to leave the stage for a year when an offer came from Hollywood; the other Group Theatre founders were heartbroken to see him go; they believed Tone had the makings of a great stage actor. Twenty pictures later and with a long-term contract with Metro, Tone was married to one of the studio’s—and Hollywood’s—most glamorous stars and had himself become the ultimate of urbane movie idols. Tone, ever ambivalent in his choices, saw his defection from the stage as a fall from grace.

  Advising the committee was Willie Bioff, head of IATSE, which represented ten thousand studio technicians and thirty thousand projectionists.

  By the end of the week, producers and the guild had failed to come to an agreement. In addition to fighting for guild shop recognition, the guild was fighting for better wages and working conditions for extras and bit players. Fifty percent of the actors, excluding extras, had earned less than $2,000 in 1936.

  Robert Montgomery called for another mass meeting at Legion Stadium on Sunday, May 9, this time to vote on a walkout that would send the sixty-five hundred members of the Screen Actors Guild out to join the striking Federated Motion Picture Crafts unions against the nine or ten major studios and paralyze the industry.

  A walkout by the actors would shut down the major studios—Paramount Productions, Inc., RKO Radio Pictures Corporation, 20th Century–Fox, Warner Bros.–First National, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia Pictures Corporation, United Artists Studio, Hal Roach Productions, and Universal Studios. The night before the Legion Stadium rally, the guild’s board of directors held a special meeting at Frank Morgan’s and formally elected as guild senior members Greta Garbo, Luther Adler, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Dolores Costello Barrymore, Alice Faye, Constance Collier, and others.

  A strike by the actors seemed inevitable.

  In an effort to head off the walkout, Willie Bioff arranged for a last-minute meeting between the guild’s Montgomery, Tone, its business manager, Aubrey Blair and the studio heads Louis B. Mayer and Joe Schenck at Mayer’s beach house. The meeting began on Sunday morning and continued through the late afternoon.

  From there the guild’s negotiating committee met with the board at Fredric March’s and formally elected Jean Harlow, Frances Dee, and Joel McCrea as senior guild members.

  • • •

  Five thousand actors filled Legion Stadium—character actors, bit players, and stars, representing millions of dollars in annual salaries—among them James Cagney, Carole Lombard, Boris Karloff, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Miriam Hopkins, and the Metro actors Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, Robert Young, William Powell, and Bob Taylor.

  Among those on the rostrum were the guild board members Joan Crawford, knitting at a fierce clip, her husband, and Frank Morgan.

  Montgomery opened the meeting. The crowd was braced to hear the latest word on the committee’s progress with negotiations and to take a vote to strike. Kenneth Thomson, the guild’s executive secretary, came before the thousands of seated actors who were fully prepared to strike the major studios on Monday and go on picket duty at 8:00 the following morning.

  Thomson began to read a statement: “ ‘After a number of conferences with the committee appointed by you and with Mr. William Bioff, of the I.A.T.S.E., we wish to express ourselves as being in favor of Guild [union] Shop . . . We have also conferred with Mr. Briskin of R.K.O., Mr. Zukor of Paramount, and Mr. Harry Cohn of Columbia and assure you that they are in entire agreement. We expect to have contracts drawn between the Screen Actors Guild and the studios before expiration of this week . . . Very Truly.’ Signed Louis B. Mayer and Joseph M. Schenck.”

  The crowd in Legion Stadium went wild. The guild had been fighting for this moment for years. Robert Montgomery came forward and warned those in the stadium that the guild shop agreement had not been signed by all studios and that the audience should still take a vote on whether to strike in case a contract was not forthcoming. (Montgomery had come from a fallen moneyed family back east; his grandfather had lost his fortune, as did his father, who killed himself when Bob was sixteen.) The vote was taken; 99 percent were in favor of a walkout. The board now had the power to call a strike if necessary.

  Montgomery announced that extras doing “mob stuff” would be earning a minimum of $5.50 a day instead of $3.20. The audience shouted its acclaim. Montgomery went on: extras getting $7.50 to $15 a day would get a 10 percent increase, and the records of the Central Casting Bureau would finally be open to the guild. The audience rose in spontaneous cheering to thank the guild’s negotiating committee for what Ralph Morgan called “honest, clean labor unionism.”

  Newspaper war-size banner headlines in Los Angeles read: “Actors Win! AFL Guild Wins!”

  Extra players and bit players received the biggest gains from the agreement. The new agreement provided for minimum pay of $50 a week for stock players and an increase from $15 to $25 a day for bit players. All actors were to be paid for travel to locations; stand-ins won an increase from $20 to $33 and a daily wage of $6.50 a day plus overtime.

  The makeup artists, hairdressers, and painters of the Federated Motion Picture Crafts were still on strike. Now that the Screen Actors Guild had come to a separate agreement with the Association of Motion Picture Producers, the striking crafts’ unions were without the power of the guild’s participation.

  Hundreds, including longshoremen, supported the eleven striking units of the crafts’ unions and picketed outside movie theaters in Los An
geles and Hollywood, including the Warner Bros.’ Pantages and Egyptian.

  Some in the guild were angry that it had abandoned the crafts’ unions.

  Charles Lessing, business agent for the Federated Motion Picture Crafts, said to the press, “I’ve learned never to depend on an actor. It was a sellout. The heat is on tomorrow. I’ll break every star who passes through the picket lines.”

  Federated was not to be undone by the actors’ pact with producers and called on the support of the CIO and AFL unions in the East. Federated announced a nationwide boycott in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Paul of theaters showing films produced by the major Hollywood studios. Unless Federated’s demand for a union shop was met, more than 300,000 men and women were expected to go on picket lines. If the strike continued, Federated threatened to extend the boycott and involve more than 2 million pickets.

  Within the next few days each of the individual unions began to talk to the producers.

  FIVE

  Starry Skies Above

  Making Stella Dallas had been an exhausting two months for Barbara. The part was emotional, and the work was made more strenuous by her having to wear so much padding in the sweltering heat. As a result, she had lost 20 pounds during the course of production and weighed 103 pounds.

  For her next picture, Barbara wanted to do something different, a farce comedy, “something diametrically opposed to Stella Dallas,” and agreed to make a picture for RKO—A Love Like That—and be directed again by Al Santell. She had three weeks off between Stella Dallas and A Love Like That and was under doctor’s orders to rest and go on a strength-building diet to gain fifteen pounds.

  Barbara had made nine pictures since her separation from Frank Fay in August 1935, one right after the other; Stella Dallas was the toughest and almost brought her to the breaking point. She’d already committed to her next picture after A Love Like That; 20th Century–Fox’s Wife, Doctor, and Nurse with Loretta Young and Warner Baxter from a story by the Fox writer Kathryn Scola, who’d written Baby Face and the script for A Lost Lady.

 

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