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

by Victoria Wilson

  The Del Mar track was a boon for Marwyck. More and more Hollywood people were getting involved with horse breeding and racing. Crosby was president of the Del Mar Turf Club with stockholders who included George Raft, Wesley Ruggles, Oliver Hardy, and Harry Cohn. Bob Taylor owned eight Thoroughbreds and had just bought his ninth. Spencer Tracy and his wife, Louise, had more than half a dozen horses, as did Wallace Beery.

  For the track’s opening day on July 3, Harry Cohn’s horses, Best Bid, En Masse, and Papenie, were running, as were Constance Bennett’s Rattlebrain, and Sam Briskin’s Lady Florine and Gertie. Finer horses were running there as well: King Saxon, two-time winner of the Excelsior Handicap; Grey Count, winner of the Louisiana Derby; and Lloyd Pan, which won the $10,000 Catalina championship for California-bred horses at Santa Anita.

  Opening day at Del Mar, July 3, 1937.

  Barbara and Bob went to Del Mar’s opening with Zeppo and Marion Marx and were given an ovation by the crowd. Gail Patrick was there with Bob Cobb, as were Lucille Ball and Lee Tracy, who left his boat at the Coronado Yacht Club; Oliver Hardy; George Jessel; the Jack Warners; the Pandro Bermans; Walter Connolly and his wife, Nedda Harrigan. Walter Connolly loved horses and was interested in having them bred at Marwyck.

  Crosby, unshaven and in work clothes, opened the gates of his new racetrack and served as ticket taker.

  • • •

  Barbara was to start A Love Like That, working again with Al Santell, who’d directed her in Internes Can’t Take Money. RKO had hoped to get Bob for A Love Like That, but Metro was starring him, at $3,571 a week, in one of its new productions to be made in England. Barbara and Bob were about to face a big moment: a four-month separation.

  They had been together every day, every evening, for the past two years. They weren’t sure whether they could live happily without each other.

  “Perhaps it is the best thing that could happen to us, this separation,” Barbara said. Bob was leaving for England in mid-August to make A Yank at Oxford after the opening of his new picture, the lavish Broadway Melody of 1938. Barbara believed that friendship was more powerful than love, that when one reached the heights of romantic love, there was no place to go but back, but with friendship there was a goal that could never be completely attained. It could be built upon by years of devotion, but it was always possible to intensify it; friendship grew with the years, “while love can only lose,” she said. She believed her friendship with Bob could withstand the inevitable loss of the passionate nature of their love. “If you could fall in love with your best friend,” she said, “I suppose such a marriage would come as close to perfection as marriage can come.”

  • • •

  The issue of Barbara’s marrying was a sore one. She had petitioned the court for an order of a division of property that she’d acquired with Frank Fay—five parcels of Brentwood Heights land that were considered community property. She wanted to sell the property and divide the proceeds. Fay in response filed a $31,364 suit against her claiming that she had relinquished all rights to the property, stating that because she’d failed to pay income tax in 1932 and 1934, Fay’s property had been attached for that amount and he’d countersued for a half-share claim of $40,000 in community property and $7,500 in personal property in her possession when they separated.

  Barbara was wary of marriage, even in her present state of happiness. Bob’s idea of marriage was based on his memory of his parents’ love for each other. He wanted a married life to be as happy and loving as theirs had been.

  “I’m finding it a little difficult,” said Barbara, “to keep from being skeptical that such marvelous happiness can last—but I’ll try not to tempt Fate.”

  • • •

  A Yank at Oxford was the first of Metro’s four international pictures. MGM British Studios announced it intended to produce “quality” pictures in England with British subject matter. Each of MGM’s four pictures was to be produced by Michael Balcon, former partner of Victor Saville and head of Gainsborough Pictures as well as the former head of Gaumont-British. The forty-one-year-old Balcon, from a “respectable but impoverished” Jewish Birmingham family, was a first-generation Englishman. Balcon was modest and quintessentially English, as were his films. From the age of twenty-seven, he had produced almost 150 pictures, including Woman to Woman, about an amnesiac British army officer whose dark past is revealed to him, A Gentleman of Paris, and The Constant Nymph. He’d discovered the young art director Alfred Hitchcock and produced The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Secret Agent.

  Balcon was finishing up a four-month tour in Hollywood observing MGM’s production techniques and was to sail back to England.

  A Yank at Oxford was a big production for Metro with a budget of $800,000. Both the studio and Balcon had chosen Jack Conway, director of Metro’s A Tale of Two Cities and Libeled Lady, to direct the picture.

  The story of A Yank at Oxford had been suggested by John Monk Saunders, who, after winning a Rhodes scholarship, was himself a Yank at Oxford. Twenty-three writers worked on the script, among them Sidney Kingsley, Charles Lederer, Joe Mankiewicz, Gottfried Reinhardt, Hugh Walpole, and a depressed Scott Fitzgerald under a six-month Metro contract (“Very few lines of mine are left,” Fitzgerald wrote. “I only worked on it for eight days, but the sequence in which Taylor and Maureen O’Sullivan go out in the punt in the morning is mine, and one line very typically so—where Taylor says, ‘Don’t rub the sleep out of your eyes. It’s beautiful sleep.’ I thought that line had my trade mark on it”). George Oppenheimer received final screen credit along with Malcolm Stuart Boylan and Walter Ferris.

  Louis B. Mayer was going to London to personally launch Metro’s new enterprise, whose other planned pictures included Finishing School by Tennyson Jesse, And So—Victoria by Vaughan Wilkins, and Good-Bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton. At home, Metro’s roster for the four months Bob would be away included W. S. Van Dyke, in preproduction for Rosalie; Clark Gable, scheduled to make Test Pilot; Robert Montgomery in Under the Flag; Spencer Tracy and Joan Crawford in Mannequin.

  • • •

  Comedies such as My Man Godfrey, Marry the Girl, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town were the mainstay of pictures at the moment.

  Barbara saw A Love Like That as a respite. Comedy to her was like “a vacation,” she said. Irene Dunne, considered by Hollywood the first real lady the town had seen, went from playing difficult emotional character roles that spanned from youth to old age (Magnificent Obsession; Show Boat) to playing comedy. The “dignified” Miss Dunne wanted to do something besides look cool or cry. She wanted to laugh and show her crazy sense of humor. Comedy to Dunne was easy, “very natural,” and to remind herself to keep it natural, she repeated over and over to herself before shooting a scene, “Corned beef and cabbage.” Dunne believed that comedy, with the right director, could be a “hilarious occupation.” To Barbara, it was “relaxation.” She was “playing. Not working.”

  Critics and audiences were getting their fill of comedies going toward farce, hence the success of David O. Selznick’s Star Is Born.

  “I couldn’t possibly have followed Stella with another emotional role,” Barbara said. “It had run the gamut. I had to let down and give the boys a chance.”

  Breakfast for Two, the final title of A Love Like That, struggled to be in the style of the current cycle of screwball comedies. It was called a comedy romance, sparkling, full of wit and high sophistication, involving an untamed oil heiress from out west and a spoiled shipping magnate whose reckless boozy ways have brought his ancestral company to receivership. The picture promised ventriloquism, a boxing match between heiress and playboy (her glove is rigged with a doorknob but so is the choreographed fight to make Barbara’s character flail helplessly like “a girl” and Herbert Marshall, playing the weary “he-man,” who waits her out at arm’s length; the final KO belongs to the heiress), a black-and-white Great Dane called Pee-Wee, an English butler called Butch (Eric Blore), and a wedding ceremony with a gi
ddy gold-digging actress in which bride and groom can’t seem to clinch their vows and the officiating justice of the peace (Donald Meek) is interrupted by everything from a persistent window cleaner scraping against glass and a fainting bride, to a surprise (forged) marriage certificate listing an altogether different intended.

  Al Santell said of Barbara, “[She] is all things a performer should be. She arrives on the set ready and equipped to do her chores. And she does them.”

  “I do very little in Breakfast for Two,” said Barbara. She saw it as “practically Herbert Marshall’s picture.”

  Marshall, at forty-seven, looked elegant as the charming idler, though he appeared somewhat ragged and puffy from alcohol.

  As the urbane leading man—reserved, unaffected, slightly melancholy—Marshall had appeared in a string of pictures opposite the biggest stars in Hollywood: Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise opposite Kay Francis; von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (“quite adorable,” Marshall said of Dietrich); Riptide with Norma Shearer; Maugham’s Painted Veil opposite Garbo (“a very nice lady”); The Flame Within with Ann Harding; If You Could Only Cook with Jean Arthur; A Woman Rebels with Katharine Hepburn.

  Marshall had served in the Scottish Rifles in the Great War and suffered the loss of his right leg. He was comfortable wearing a prosthesis, it was only barely detectable, and in the picture with Barbara he was willing to do physical humor—pratfalls, knockouts, boxing, ducking a marshmallow cake aimed at his face—using a stand-in. Production would be stopped to allow Marshall to rest. His artificial limb would be removed, the stump massaged and powdered, and then he went back to work.

  Santell shot Breakfast for Two in sequence exactly as a stage production. He called it a “swing” production since the actors “got the swing into their parts each day.” Marshall and Barbara ate lunch together daily, and he drove her home each evening. Marshall had come from a theatrical family in London and graduated from St. Mary’s College in Harlow. He’d worked as a chartered accounting clerk—he vowed never to go on the stage—until he joined a stock company in Brighton and made his debut in 1911 at the age of twenty-one. In 1929 he went to Hollywood to star opposite Jeanne Eagels in The Letter.

  While Barbara and Marshall looked right together on the screen, their pairing didn’t work for what was supposed to be a zany comedy. Despite Marshall’s cultivated, polished air—he was wry, lean, wistful—he didn’t have the lightness for comedy. The intensity of Barbara’s yearning for him, while believable from her, seemed misplaced given Marshall’s surface demeanor and sallow elegance.

  A week after production started, Barbara and Bob went to a preview of Stella Dallas at the Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre. Uncle Buck joined them. Bob parked the car while Barbara and Buck waited in front of the theater. Barbara was shy of people and didn’t want to be recognized. She turned up the collar of her plaid jacket and pulled down her hat to cover her eyes. A crowd of two thousand fans waited. By the time Bob got to the theater, a mob of women surged toward him. Bob and Barbara and Buck began to make their way into the theater, but the crowd had Bob. He pushed and shoved his way through the lobby, past the special studio police Goldwyn had hired to keep order and protect the actors. Barbara held on to Bob’s coattails as he made his way through the jam.

  One of the cops saw a woman pulling on Taylor’s coat and said, “Oh, no you don’t. None of that stuff.” The six-foot cop grabbed Barbara and pulled her away, shoved her through the doors and out onto the street. She tried to pull away from the cop’s grip, but he held on, roughing her up.

  Bob was unaware of what was happening. He continued through the mob until he turned around and saw a strange girl with him instead of Barbara. He heard Barbara’s voice and pushed his way back through the crowd to Barbara who was weeping and disheveled and trying to free herself from the cop’s hold. The cop weighed more than 200 pounds to Barbara’s 105.

  Bob went at the officer and threatened to punch him in the jaw. The cop, one of ten hired by the Goldwyn Studio for the night, let Barbara go. The other police and studio people cut in and broke up the skirmish.

  After the preview, a doctor treated Barbara for bruises on her arms and shoulders. Bob wanted her to file charges against the cop. Barbara refused. Goldwyn said, “[The officer] did what he was paid to do.”

  Later, Buck said to her, “Are you crazy? Why didn’t you tell him who you were?”

  “Well, who am I?” she said.

  Barbara was terrified of crowds and felt suffocated around them. The incident only intensified her fears. She was sure it had been a publicity stunt arranged by the Goldwyn press department that went awry, but no one would own up to it.

  After the Stella Dallas previews, telegrams of congratulations were sent off to Goldwyn from Norma Shearer (“I have never seen a more touching picture”), Gary Cooper (“Congratulations on a fine picture that has something to say”), Charles Boyer (“A credit both to Samuel Goldwyn and to the entire industry”), and Sophie Tucker (“Stella Dallas has everything. I loved every minute of it”). Barbara had put everything she had into the picture and was proud of it, a luxury she’d never before permitted herself.

  It was said to be Vidor’s best picture: eloquent; memorable; an inspiration; retaining the power of the book and the silent picture released more than a decade before; a picture that Goldwyn was bold enough to make despite its being a remake of a silent-era hit and a tearjerker, and at a time when crazy comedies were the vogue. It was the kind of role that Barbara Stanwyck had long needed but had never been given; it was being talked about as the best work of her career.

  The picture opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall two weeks after its previews.

  It was a smash. The Herald Tribune saw Vidor’s consummate staging as a “personal triumph of one of the few really great directors.” Other papers declared Stella Dallas “as great a picture today as it ever was”; “a triumph both artistically and as a potential moneymaker . . . utterly simple in structure and without a single descent into banality or dramatic trickery.”

  At Radio City, when Barbara appeared on the screen in Stella’s outlandish clothes, the audience burst into laughter. But they loved the picture. Barbara’s work was called “courageous,” “outstanding,” “superb” (“By innumerable little touches she creates in two hours the character of an entire class of society . . . hers is a delineation of a caste system that exists despite the tenets of freedom and equality of which we in the United States are so proud”; “tops in Miss Stanwyck’s screen repertoire; she makes the sordid sublime”). Anne Shirley’s performance was called “remarkable,” “flawless”; Alan Hale’s, “outstanding.”

  Frank Nugent, in The New York Times, saw all of the weaknesses of the Prouty novel and the silent version. “On the practical surface,” he wrote, “we cannot accept Stella Dallas in 1937. She is a caricature all the way. [But] even that realization is no insurance against a blow to the heart. Mother love and sacrifice are durable dramatic commodities, as irresistible and compelling today as they were in 1923. “Vidor’s Stella Dallas is the most satisfactory of all remakes the screen has attempted.”

  • • •

  Barbara had turned thirty just as shooting started on Breakfast for Two. After ten years in Hollywood and twenty-nine pictures, she was being recognized as a major actress of big emotions, an actress of range and courage. She’d done what was necessary to survive and had taken her sorrow, rage, and fear and compressed them into one winning, forceful, controlled performance after another. Her audience admired her, feared her, and rooted for her, and she held them at her command, enthralled.

  SEVEN

  Bull in the Afternoon

  Bob didn’t see himself as an artist. “To my mind,” he said, “you need years of experience before you can even think of yourself as a great actor. There are plenty of people in it really for art’s sake. It is their life, and every word in every part is vitally important to them. But I’m not an artist. How can I be?”

 
Bob was mobbed by women and cast opposite one glamour queen after another. Women moviegoers found him irresistibly handsome and romantic, the epitome of physical perfection: handsomely poised, handsomely dressed, handsomely scrubbed and polished. Bob was called “Pretty Boy” and “Beautiful Robert Taylor.” It began to show at the box office. He was desperate to be in something other than a young-lover role.

  The studio hoped A Yank at Oxford would turn around the public’s perception of him. The idea was for Taylor, playing a midwestern American football hero who falls for a coquette, to be seen as physical, rugged, mussed up, doing something besides being attentive to Janet Gaynor, Joan Crawford, or Greta Garbo.

  To squelch the image of Bob as a beautiful effeminate man, MGM released stories about him as ranch owner, avid hunter, fight fan, as rival to Clark Gable. Gable dismissed the idea of a competition and said, “No good actor is a rival, he’s an asset. Everyone has his own individual way of doing things and I never felt I had something that no one else had.”

  Gable was grateful Bob was at Metro. For a long period, Gable and Bob Montgomery were the only leading men on the Metro lot. Gable, from the first, hadn’t the “faintest notion” of ever becoming a star. “Such a possibility never entered my head,” he said. “My looks, romantically, weren’t worth a nickel. I didn’t even think I could even be a leading man. The studio didn’t think much of stage actors then. They’d rather have a good-looking doorman or a truck-driver,” he said. If it hadn’t been for gangster pictures, “I’d never have got my foot in at all,” said Gable. “All that saved me was that I could look tough. I was lucky to get anywhere.” He went on, “We were kept going from one woman star to another.” When Bill Powell went to Metro and then Spencer Tracy, the leading men numbered four; Taylor’s arrival at the studio made five.