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

by Victoria Wilson

  The garage and servants’ quarters were still being built.

  Flagged promenades and porticoes surrounded the compound with grassy terraces that sloped away. An ornate sixty-foot swimming pool was being put in. Zeppo and Barbara supervised the replanting of giant trees that had been hauled great distances and would grow to forty or fifty feet; the area dug out for each tree was large enough for a swimming hole.

  Bob called Barbara across the Atlantic and the continent every Sunday morning. She hadn’t put in a phone yet at Marwyck; she hated the telephone—couldn’t stand it ringing and always picked it up after the first ring. If the phone on the set of Breakfast for Two happened to ring and Barbara was studying her lines, she answered it. If it rang and she was shooting a scene, it made her so nervous the phone was finally removed altogether. In town her friends knew that if the phone rang twice, Barbara wasn’t home. Barbara, like Crawford, changed her telephone number every few weeks to keep away salesmen and fans and those actors and crew members trying to forge a friendship Barbara didn’t want.

  The only way to reach Barbara by phone at Marwyck was to call the stable office a half mile from the house. The stable hands were given strict instructions not to bother Barbara unless the call was an emergency or to phone Zeppo Marx, who lived a quarter of a mile away.

  Barbara rarely went out when Bob was away. For the most part she stayed at the ranch, only sporadically going into town. She held a wedding at Marwyck for one of the stable boys and happily agreed to be a bridesmaid.

  Between Sundays, when Bob called, he wrote letters and sent Barbara flowers. Uncle Buck noted that “she missed him pretty bad.” Bob repeatedly asked Barbara to join him in England. “Can you imagine what would happen if I went?” she said. “It’s bad enough here alone with reporters. We wouldn’t have a moment’s peace.”

  When production on A Yank at Oxford was stopped because of bad weather, Bob called Barbara and asked her to marry him. She thought he should experience more before he settled down. She understood how important it was for him to remain single for his career, how marriage might damage his standing with the moviegoing audience. At the heart of it, though, the lure of marriage and its promise of happiness and contentment seemed remote to her.

  “Lux presents Hollywood! . . .” For Lux Radio Theatre’s Stella Dallas, left to right: Anne Shirley, John Boles, Barbara, and Cecil B. DeMille, October 11, 1937.

  • • •

  Barbara appeared on the third-anniversary show of Lux Radio Theatre performing Stella Dallas with most of the cast (minus Alan Hale; Ed Munn was played by Lou Merrill).

  Cecil B. DeMille was the host. John Boles, Stephen Dallas in the picture, was performing again with Barbara, as were Anne Shirley and Barbara O’Neil. Boles had appeared on the first Lux Radio Theatre presentation that aired three years before. DeMille congratulated Lux on its third birthday and the players on their year of success: Boles for his busiest and most successful year on the screen; Anne Shirley for her newly acquired stardom and husband, John Payne; and Barbara for “at last coming into her own through her magnificent performance as Stella Dallas.

  “I know of no one in Hollywood,” said DeMille to the theater audience and to listeners at home, “who merits success more than Barbara Stanwyck.” DeMille described her rise and how “Barbara, now on top, can indulge a lifelong ambition. She’s purchased a farm in the San Fernando Valley and will spend her off-screen life raising horses.”

  • • •

  Following Breakfast for Two, Barbara had been waiting for a script revision from RKO for a picture called Condemned Women. The picture was originally intended for Sally Eilers; it was about a former nurse in prison for larceny who falls in love with a doctor who performs psychological experiments on the women prisoners. Barbara was to make the picture with Anne Shirley following their success together in Stella Dallas. When Barbara finally read the script for Condemned Women, she wasn’t happy with it and turned down the project.

  Radio Pictures was about to remake Holiday, the 1930 Pathé release that had starred Ann Harding and for which she’d been nominated as Best Actress for an Academy Award. Barbara wanted the Ann Harding role of Linda Seton, the rebel sister.

  Harding hadn’t wanted to do the original picture, because it was a comedy role; she’d practically been forced into it when Ina Claire, for whom the screen rights of the play had been bought, began to film a remake of the 1925 silent The Awful Truth from Arthur Richman’s Broadway play in which Claire had starred.

  Linda Seton, in Holiday, is the misfit younger daughter of a financier who rebels against the family’s “reverence for riches,” its solid conservative standing, and its relentless pursuit of things conventional and deadening, and she sees in her older sister’s fiancé a kindred spirit. He is an up-from-under young man, “a man of the pee-pul,” at work since the age of ten. He is about to make a small killing of his own, becomes engaged, and discovers, after the fact, that it is one of the Setons he is to marry. He says from the outset he isn’t interested in “all this luxe”; he doesn’t want “too much money”; he wants to “retire young, and work old” to save part of his life for himself, “the young part.” He wants to take the money he makes and go off on an extended holiday until he’s spent every penny he’s earned to find out who he is and what he is about, to dream his dreams, see the world, and find out “what goes on and what about it.”

  In the original picture with Ann Harding were Mary Astor as Julia Seton, the older sister, and Robert Ames as the young man, Johnny Case. RKO had acquired the rights to Holiday in 1930 when the studio absorbed Pathé for $5 million, along with its library, its trademark, and its contracts with Helen Twelvetrees, Constance Bennett, and Ann Harding.

  At the heart of Philip Barry’s play: two rich girls, sisters, each the mirror image of the other. The older, Julia, appears to be the unconventional one who returns from a winter holiday having fallen in love with an unlikely young man without background or breeding (his “mother wasn’t even a Whoozis”). What Julia loves in him is that she thinks he can become just like her father. Julia Seton is the good girl, seemingly appealing, womanly, and playful on the surface; underneath, she is tradition-bound, deeply hard, soulless.

  The younger sister, Linda, is rebellious and brusque but at heart is soft, empathetic, human, fragile. She wants out from the money, her father’s stuffiness and plutocratic view of the world, but doesn’t quite have the guts to take the leap. She wants to save the young man from her family, from the fate he is being seduced into. Out of loyalty to her sister, whom she adores, she holds herself back from warning the young man that to enter into her family is to be stunted humanly. Along the way, Linda realizes she’s fallen in love with him.

  The person who gives away the truth of the family is the brother, a broken man caught between his two sisters. The more sympathetic and likable the brother, the more frightened the audience is for the fiancé, who, starry-eyed and sincere, doesn’t see what he is getting himself into.

  The picture asked: What is human quality? What is class?

  Barbara was excited about Holiday. She had enormous admiration for Ann Harding, the passion, the fire, the freedom in front of a camera, the naturalness of her work. Holiday was considered Harding’s best work on the screen. Barbara was drawn to Philip Barry’s writing—elegant, light, playful, comical. It had a melancholy about it under the surface; it was charming and heartbreaking at every moment. The misfit aspect and gallantry of the Linda Seton character suited Barbara.

  She had played upper-class women but as the interloper, as was Philip Barry himself, born an outsider of Irish Catholic descent in Rochester, New York. Barry came to inhabit the worlds of the rich and wellborn, though he remained wary of the type and used what he saw of his adopted society as the setting in his plays. Barbara admired Holiday, which Barry wrote as a drawing room comedy for Hope Williams and which Barbara’s champion Arthur Hopkins directed on Broadway.

  RKO wasn’t happy with Barb
ara for turning down Condemned Women and put her on suspension. The remake of Holiday was set to bring together again Irene Dunne and Cary Grant and to be directed by Leo McCarey. Instead, George Cukor was directing the picture and hired Katharine Hepburn for the part of Linda Seton. Irene Dunne was heartbroken that she didn’t get it.

  “A lot of times,” said Barbara, “a studio knows better than a star whether or not a picture will be a success.” Barbara insisted on going with her instincts. “Sometimes I’ve been wrong,” she said, “but more often I’ve been right.”

  RKO and Fox had both raved about two pictures they wanted Barbara to do. “They were rabid about these ‘great’ pictures,” said Barbara, who had no intention of making either.

  The roles coming to Barbara were too similar. Condemned Women said it all. If Barbara continued to play small drab, respectable roles of resignation and reverie, there would only be more like them ahead of her. To rear up now was going to cost her a contract and a fortune in lost salary, but she had to take the stand. If she didn’t, varying roles wouldn’t come to her and her career would be over.

  Barbara had no backlog of savings. She had to earn money somehow while on suspension and not receiving her salary.

  Danny Danker, who oversaw Lux Radio Theatre, assured Barbara not to worry, that she was welcome in radio, and that he would cast her in the Lux shows. She was profoundly grateful to him for giving her the work. Danker hired her right away, and she appeared on Lux Radio with Mary Astor in These Three with Errol Flynn.

  • • •

  Breakfast for Two opened the day before Thanksgiving in Los Angeles at the Paramount and in New York at the Palace. The picture, of “the intermediary classification,” had enough zany antics and screwy situations to hold its own against the string of other comedies just out, from LIVE, LOVE, AND LEARN with Robert Montgomery, Rosalind Russell, and Robert Benchley to True Confession with Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, and John Barrymore.

  “Cunning . . . clever . . . and good entertainment,” said the New York Herald Tribune, which described Barbara’s work as “cocky and demure, assured and sorrowfully frustrated.” The New York Times was baffled by the audience’s explosive laughter and called the picture a “drab little comedy.”

  The screen comedy of the season that outdid the others with comic spins, wit, and slapstick fun was Leo McCarey’s remake of The Awful Truth with the radiant, irrepressible duo of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant.

  NINE

  Charges of Contempt

  1937–1938

  With Bob out of town, Frank Fay was circling Barbara. In October she had petitioned the court for a division of property—five parcels of Brentwood Heights land—that she’d acquired with Fay. Barbara wanted to sell the property and split the proceeds. Fay saw the court petition as an opening.

  In the first week in December, a process server tried unsuccessfully to deliver court papers to Barbara. When the server rang the bell at 615 North Bedford Drive, the door was opened slightly. The server was told that Barbara was not at home; that she was, or was not, out of town; that she may, or may not, be coming home for dinner. The process server left his card and asked Miss Stanwyck to call him on her return. The server went to RKO and was told that she wasn’t working at the studio but could be found at home. During the next few days the server tried unsuccessfully to deliver papers to Barbara at North Bedford Drive and at RKO.

  Fay had been trying to see Dion, as spelled out in Barbara and Fay’s divorce agreement, which stated that he was to see his son at least once a week. After Barbara learned of Fay’s plan to take Dion out of California as a ploy to make her go to him, she put a stop to Dion’s Bristol Avenue visits.

  Finally, at a loss, the server called Barbara’s lawyer, Charles Cradick, who said he would not help make arrangements to have the papers served.

  Barbara was being charged with contempt of her divorce agreement. Fay had waited until Bob was out of the country to set the court challenge in motion and have his lawyer draw up papers.

  • • •

  A Yank at Oxford finished shooting, and Bob had wanted to see something of Europe—it was his first time abroad—before returning to Hollywood. MGM gave him a big private plane, and Bob went to Paris for the weekend.

  “Each time we arrived somewhere the pilot circled around several times before landing,” he said. “And I could never figure out why so many people always collected. Then I discovered they’d painted a damn great MGM lion under the belly of the plane with my name in huge letters beside it.”

  After four months away in England, Bob sailed for New York on the Queen Mary and arrived in mid-December. Several reporters were allowed to go on board to Taylor’s stateroom for a brief interview. Taylor was asked about the British press in relation to the American press.

  “[British reporters] don’t grab you on the street or interrupt you while you [are] eating dinner,” Bob said. “And they weren’t allowed on the set.”

  Bob joked with reporters about how the U.S. press had predicted the end of his career. “Don’t think I don’t remember reading your releases about my trip to England and how I was ‘through’ in the movies. You boys buried me. Maybe I was dying a slow death,” said Bob. “But you could have given me one last chance,” he said, referring to A Yank at Oxford.

  As reporters left Bob’s stateroom, they saw Lionel Barrymore, walking slowly with the use of a cane. Barrymore had also made the crossing on the Queen Mary and was asked about his health, and about Bob Taylor. Barrymore’s response: “I haven’t had a drink in a long time. And it’s not Bob’s fault he’s so handsome. Good day, gentlemen.”

  Bob disembarked from the boat with Barrymore. Barrymore got into a car and was driven off. Bob was surrounded by more press who shouted questions at him: “Hey, Bob, do you still think you are beautiful?” “Who was the hairdresser who created your widow’s peak?” “How does it feel to be more beautiful than Garbo?”

  Bob answered in rapid succession: “I resent that question.” “It runs in the family.” To the Garbo comment, he finally got annoyed: “For God’s sake, that’s ridiculous and I’ve said it a hundred times, how can you compare me to Garbo or any other woman, for that matter? If we have to continue this, get off the subject of my face and my chest and I know God damn well you’ll get around to that. Why the hell don’t you ask me how the voyage home was—or about Yank at Oxford?”

  When a reporter tried to pull down Bob’s sock and photograph the hair on his legs, Bob said, “That’s enough, damn it to hell. I have a train to catch.”

  On the train west, he told a friend from Metro, “I shave twice a day because I have to. I don’t wear my mother’s dresses when she’s not at home. I ride a horse better than Gary Cooper, and shoot straighter than Randolph Scott. I like to get laid and can screw better than Errol Flynn. Trouble is I can’t act as good as Spencer Tracy or drink as much as Bogart.”

  Louis B. Mayer told Bob that he had seen the rushes of A Yank at Oxford and assured the actor that the studio would do everything it could to publicize the picture. “Nothing happens overnight, son,” said Mayer, “but you will see a change, not only in your fans, but in yourself.” Mayer told Bob that he was now “a man.”

  • • •

  Barbara was at the ranch. Bob couldn’t wait to see her. They hadn’t seen each other in months.

  He asked her to marry him, this time without an ocean or continent between them. Barbara felt they should wait but agreed to be secretly engaged. Bob gave her a charm that read, “Luck to you from Lucky Me.”

  Bob had missed her, as well as his mother and his friends. And he missed his car, a stripped-down racer without fenders and with specially braced wheels, a red exhaust pipe, and no floorboard. Back at the studio, Bob was clapped on one shoulder by Gable and by Tracy on the other. Jimmy Stewart yanked Bob’s hair; Tyrone Power hulloed to him; Reginald Gardiner made welcome-home noises; Myrna Loy, Sophie Tucker, Rosalind Russell, Fanny Brice, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Ju
dy Garland blew him kisses. He had missed the studio prop boys and carpenters and electricians. “I wasn’t homesick,” he said. “I’m not the homesick type. I adjust easily and happily to any environment. I’m the adaptable kind who could be equally content in a hovel or in a palace, in Paris or Peoria. Doesn’t matter a hoot in hell to me where I live.”

  • • •

  Barbara had been ordered to appear at city hall in Los Angeles Superior Court. Judge Goodwin Knight, a superior court judge for two years, had a caseload that ranged from the mundane to overseeing Hollywood weddings and divorces, including the scandalous Mary Astor custody case. Knight had called for Miss Astor’s diary, in which she described in ecstatic detail her love life while married, including her affair with the playwright George S. Kaufman (“the perfect lover,” she’d written of him).

  The Astor/Kaufman case took on larger ramifications.

  The heads of the studios were terrified the contents of Astor’s diary would wreck the careers of those mentioned in it and destroy the movie industry. Will Hays fought to make sure the diary was not presented as evidence. After four hours of reading the two hundred pages of entries from beginning to end, Judge Knight ordered the diary, written in lavender ink, sealed and impounded with the court. George Kaufman was subpoenaed to appear before Judge Knight’s court but fled California and was smuggled to New York. A headline in The New York Times read: “Warrant Out for Kaufman.” Judge Knight said, “I’ll put him away for a while to cool off . . . He could write quite a play about life in jail.”

  It was arranged with the court that Barbara did not have to appear when Fay was present. Hy Schwartz, Fay’s lawyer, tried to have Barbara brought into the courtroom to settle who would have Dion on Christmas Day. Fay went before Judge Knight and asked that Barbara be held in contempt for refusing to let him see their five-year-old adopted son.