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

by Victoria Wilson

  Fay told the judge how he had tried to make arrangements with Barbara to see the child. He’d phoned, written letters, and repeatedly called Barbara’s lawyer and presented to the court a returned letter as evidence. In it Fay had written, “I have been put off and put off and ignored and I have only stood for this treatment because of my great love for the boy and my desire not to involve him in any publicity or to confuse his young mind, but I do not intend to permit anyone to cause him to forget me.

  “You subjected me to every indignity and humiliation by making me phone through a theatrical switchboard agency office,” Fay wrote. “I have spent amounts ranging as high as $100 a week to hear the boy say, ‘Hello, Daddy.’ It finally became so difficult and so unsatisfactory, not to mention the expense, that I gave it up for the time being.”

  Judge Knight postponed the hearing until after Christmas. Cradick assured the judge that his client would be there when the case resumed.

  • • •

  No sooner had Bob returned from England than he was helping Barbara transport Marwyck’s horses in a new trailer from the ranch to Santa Anita for the track’s opening on Christmas Day. Six horses were running under the Marwyck colors. After a few weeks’ rest, Bob returned to Metro, wiser about the world. His excitement about travel—and his understanding of affect—were evident.

  “When people mention the Champs Elysees I can look intelligent. When folks speak of the Place Vendome or the white cliffs of Albion I can adopt that bright expression of one who is in-the-know. I can act discriminating about roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. When the low fogs of California chase me off the tennis court, I can wave it away with dour comments about the pea soup fog of dear ole Lunnon. In other words, I can lie more convincingly now than I ever could before.”

  Bob’s next picture was to be from the Erich Maria Remarque novel Drei Kameraden, Three Comrades, which Remarque had written as part of a trilogy that began with All Quiet on the Western Front and continued with The Road Back.

  Three Comrades was about the lost generation of soldiers returning to civilian life in a shamed and defeated Germany after the Great War.

  Nazi Germany had condemned Remarque for “cultural internationalism and intellectual treason.” Einstein, Freud, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, even Bertha von Suttner, author of the pacifist novel Lay Down Your Arms, were among those blacklisted. Remarque had fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland, just barely escaping arrest. He was “without a country,” he said, “like an animal that gets nothing more to eat.”

  Two months after Remarque left Germany, his novels were burned as students from Wilhelm Humboldt University, participating in a national “Action Against the Un-German Spirit,” emptied the library’s shelves and hauled truckloads of books to Franz-Joseph-Platz for Säuberung, “public annihilation in the lambent flames of the all-purging Nazi fires.” In a torchlight procession, a chain of students passed books hand to hand and threw them on a pyre to burn as a band played marching songs and the names of those whose books were being burned were called out: “Erich Maria Remarque for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal . . . Sigmund Freud for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures.”

  Before a crowd of forty thousand Germans, Dr. Goebbels, Nazi minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, proclaimed the death of “the age of Jewish intellectualism . . . National Socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can again express itself. The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flames in our hearts . . . Our vow shall be: The Reich and the Nation and our Führer Adolf Hitler.”

  Throughout Germany—in pyres in Frankfurt, Munich, Breslau, Kiel—more than twenty-five thousand books were destroyed.

  The following day Helen Keller wrote in an open letter to German students, “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them . . .

  “Do not imagine your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit his Judgement upon you.”

  A hundred thousand marched in New York City in a six-hour protest that extended from Madison Square Garden to the Battery. Similar protests took place in Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities.

  Remarque was so despondent over leaving Germany that it took him four years to finish Three Comrades. The book, finally published in the United States in May 1937 by Little, Brown, had been sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ten months earlier.

  Three Comrades was to start shooting after the first of the year. F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on the script for six months with the picture’s producer, Joe Mankiewicz, who brought in Fitzgerald thinking that he would be able to summon up Germany’s postwar generation.

  The book was set in contemporary Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s—its cabarets and nightlife—a city about to erupt in political upheaval. It was about three friends, former soldiers together, who run a garage. “A slice of life of young people who have often sacrificed something and begun anew,” Remarque wrote, describing the novel. “People who have to fight hard for their existence. People without illusions who nevertheless know that comradeship is everything and fate is nothing.”

  Fitzgerald’s script was long and slow, and Mankiewicz hired Edward Paramore to collaborate and help shape the pages. Paramore’s first big writing job was on The Bitter Tea of General Yen. The collaboration between him and Fitzgerald was not a happy one (“Ted,” Fitzgerald wrote to him, “when you blandly informed me yesterday that you were going to write the whole thing over yourself, kindly including my best scenes, I knew we’d have to have this out”). Both Fitzgerald and Paramore received screen credit for the script. Joe Mankiewicz rewrote what became the final script. Fitzgerald, reading one of Mankiewicz’s changes, wrote, “This isn’t writing. This is Joe Mankiewicz. So slick—so cheap.”

  Bob Taylor’s comrades in the picture were to be Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart. Joan Crawford was to be in it as well but backed out, thinking that the male stars would overwhelm the picture; Luise Rainer was to appear in Crawford’s stead.

  • • •

  Metro announced that Bob was to star in Northwest Passage with Spencer Tracy; W. S. Van Dyke, who’d worked with Bob on three pictures—Broadway Melody of 1936, His Brother’s Wife, and Personal Property—was to direct.

  Bob had just been named the second most popular movie star of 1937 after Gable (and Myrna Loy) in a nationwide poll of fifty-five newspapers conducted by the Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate. Tyrone Power followed, with William Powell, Nelson Eddy, and Spencer Tracy bringing up the rear. After Loy came Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald, with Barbara, still on suspension from RKO, fourth in the poll. Sonja Henie and Shirley Temple followed.

  • • •

  As Christmas was approaching, Barbara and Bob saw friends. Bob didn’t like nightclubs, parties, “that hey-hey stuff,” as he called it. He liked to take trips in the car and ride horses. He and Barbara, with Zeppo’s clients the Fred MacMurrays and the Ray Millands, spent evenings playing Quotations, the most popular game in Hollywood. The player would take a quotation, a slogan, or a title and act it out for his or her team. Bob, one night, was on the same team as Barbara and was having trouble with a difficult quotation. “What’s the matter,” said Barbara, “can’t you act?”

  With Bob and his mother, Ruth Brugh, circa 1937. (PHOTOFEST)

  Four days before Christmas, Barbara was served with a subpoena by the sheriff’s office. It was an order to appear at city hall before the Los Angeles Superior Court on December 28 to show why she had violated her custody agreement of 1935 or face contempt charges.

  It wasn’t Dion Fay wanted to see; he was determined to get to Barbara and implicate Bob Taylor in a public scandal. Barbara knew Fay was trying to see Dion to “harass and annoy” her into changing their property settlement.

  Her response: “I’ll fight him all th
e way.”

  She was determined not to allow Dion to be a “little emotional football tossed about this way and that. I can’t,” she said.

  Barbara went on with her Christmas plans as scheduled.

  Bob gave his mother a Christmas present of a trip to Idaho Falls to spend the holiday with relatives. Barbara referred to her as a “miserable old bitch” and started arguments with Ruth who didn’t know what to say or how to respond.

  Ruth often complained to Bob that she was frail and sickly; she controlled her son through her constant illnesses and the threat of her imminent death. Before she left for Idaho, Ruth and Bob and Barbara had Christmas dinner and unwrapped presents around the tree. Among the presents Bob gave Barbara was a cow that mooed when its tail was pulled. Barbara gave Bob a set of magic tricks. On Christmas Day, they went with Marion and Zeppo to the fourth annual Christmas Stakes at the Santa Anita racetrack on the old Lucky Baldwin ranch. Dion stayed at home with Nanny, as he usually did.

  The Santa Anita track was considered the most luxurious and, since its opening, had attracted the country’s best horses: Cavalcade, Time Supply, Top’s Boy, Equipoise, Twenty Grand, Seabiscuit. The track was the talk of the country. Santa Anita was the place to be on Christmas: Spencer Tracy, Jeanette MacDonald, Gene Raymond, Anthony Quinn and his new bride, Katherine DeMille, were there, as were Edward Arnold and his son; Virginia Bruce and her husband, the writer and director J. Walter Ruben; George Raft and Virginia Pine. Also watching the Christmas Stakes were the Leo McCareys, the Ernst Lubitsches, the Darryl Zanucks, and the Clarence Browns.

  Loretta Young was giving a Christmas party for the Sisters of Nazareth Orphanage—she’d decorated the tree herself—and wasn’t at the track.

  Bing Crosby’s High Strike won the opening race—the $5,000 Christmas Mile—as forty-eight thousand fans cheered on. High Strike was now in the company of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s High Glee, who’d taken the prize the first year of the Christmas Mile; Bert Baroni’s Top Row and Goldeneye had won it the two succeeding years.

  One of Marwyck’s horses came in first, and Barbara, still on suspension at RKO, said, “I’m glad someone in the family is working.”

  Myron Selznick was there with Ginger Rogers to watch his horse Pasha run in the sixth race. Pasha was scratched, but He Did, who’d triumphed in the 1936 Santa Anita Derby, led the field practically all the way and won by a length and a half.

  • • •

  Three days after Christmas, Barbara went down to city hall, accompanied by Marion and Zeppo Marx. Marion and Barbara looked so much alike spectators mistook Marion for Barbara.

  Barbara entered Judge Knight’s courtroom to defend herself against charges by Fay that she had refused to permit him to visit their son. Barbara was sick with a cold and headache and was exhausted from lack of sleep, pacing the floor throughout the night and falling asleep only hours before she had to get up. The courtroom was overflowing with spectators. Barbara sat in the last row wearing a black fedora, a mink coat, and under it a gray tailored suit and blouse.

  She listened as Fay testified: “I wasn’t in favor of a divorce in the first place, but . . .” Judge Knight cut him off. “That will do,” the judge said. “This hearing has nothing to do with the divorce case.”

  The judge asked Fay if it would be agreeable for him to visit the boy at Barbara’s house.

  “I think my presence in her house might be difficult for both of us,” said Fay. “I would like to have the boy brought to my Brentwood Heights home. I have everything fixed up so he could enjoy himself. I have a nursery and I would engage a nurse for him.”

  Then it was Barbara’s turn to take the witness stand. Fay’s lawyer asked her, “Isn’t the reason you are barring Mr. Fay from visiting the child because you want the boy to become accustomed to someone else—say Robert Taylor, for instance?”

  “No,” answered Barbara.

  “Wasn’t it a fact that you were having Mr. Taylor to your house frequently so that the child would forget Fay?”

  “Certainly not. Mr. Taylor was at the house frequently, but it was not so the boy would forget Fay,” she said.

  “Did not Mr. Taylor give the boy gifts on numerous occasions?”

  “Yes.”

  Fay’s lawyer asked her about a check for $50 that had been made out to Dion and signed by Taylor.

  The judge had the question withdrawn.

  “I was trying to show that a deliberate attempt was being made to alienate this boy’s affections from his father,” said Fay’s lawyer to Judge Knight.

  “I don’t care how many times Mr. Taylor came to her house,” said Knight. “This is her personal life and has nothing to do with this proceeding.”

  Barbara’s personal life was the sole reason Fay had brought the court order against her.

  Barbara testified before the courtroom that Fay was unfit to spend time with their son. She told the court about Fay’s drinking, about how he hadn’t wanted to adopt a child, that Fay had failed to show up in court for the adoption proceedings, and that she’d threatened to leave him if he didn’t appear with her in court for the legal proceedings. She testified how once they had the boy, Fay’s anger frightened the child; how Fay had pushed the boy so that he had fallen on the ground; that Fay used vile language in front of the boy and was “wandering around the house and his condition was none too good,” she said; and how she saw Fay leaving the nursery when he was drunk. “I found the carpet beneath my son’s crib burned from a cigarette stub,” Barbara testified.

  She testified about Fay’s bouts of violence, about how at the Trocadero he had accused her of drinking too much champagne and knocked her down. “I only had one glass of champagne,” she said.

  She told the court about how Fay had become upset because “she’d had dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Marx and then,” after she had accompanied “them to Minsky’s burlesque,” how Fay “had struck” her “with his fist here,” pointing to her chin. “I fell over a chair,” she testified. “The baby was much upset.”

  Then Barbara’s lawyer, Charles Cradick, asked Fay if he recalled an incident at his home in Brentwood when he was “gathered at the side of the pool with the nurse and baby.” He wanted to know if Fay had “asked the nurse to place the baby in the water” despite her protests that the child was frightened of water; if Fay had “picked up the child and tossed him into the pool.”

  Fay’s lawyer intervened, and through technicalities he was not required to answer the question, though he did say about Dion, “I just want to see the little fellow, and they can have the marines there if they want.”

  Fay hadn’t seen Dion in sixteen months. He blamed Barbara for their divorce; she’d insisted on it against his wishes. He said he hadn’t contributed to Dion’s support because Barbara hadn’t asked him to.

  Cradick proceeded to file ten affidavits with Judge Knight. There were sworn statements by Barbara, Dion’s nurse, Fay’s chauffeur and his wife, about Fay and Barbara’s marriage; about Fay’s erratic and violent behavior; about how he’d toppled onto Dion’s crib and shouted at the boy and frightened him; and about how, after the separation, Fay’s only interest in the child was to find out information about Barbara, whom she was seeing and what she was doing.

  Judge Knight called the charges against Fay serious. Fay’s attorneys protested. Judge Knight recessed the case until January in order to give Fay and his lawyers a chance to build a reply to Barbara’s charges against him.

  As a once motherless child, Barbara had said at different times that no one had been there, no one to fight her battles. She’d chosen to star in four pictures about mother love: the devoted mother in Forbidden protecting her illicit child; the mother in So Big struggling on a hardscrabble farm to earn a living for her son and build an empire for his future; a frantic woman willing to trade her body to find her lost baby in Internes Can’t Take Money; and, as Stella Dallas, a sacrificing mother willing to relinquish her daughter’s love for the child’s h
appiness.

  Sam Goldwyn had questioned Barbara’s ability to feel the part of Stella Dallas.

  Testifying before Judge Goodwin Knight in Superior Court regarding Fay’s visitation rights of Dion. January 1938.

  “Have you ever suffered over a child?” he’d asked her.

  “No, but I can imagine how it would be,” she’d answered.

  Now Barbara was locked in a real-life fight to protect herself and her boy.

  She and Bob were together for the New Year to welcome in 1938.

  When the custody case resumed days later, it was standing room only in the courtroom. Barbara took the stand. She testified that Fay was unfit to see her little boy, that he’d endangered the child’s well-being while they lived together. Her lawyer, Charles Cradick, requested that Fay be examined by a psychiatrist. Fay laughed in response. Fay’s attorney Philip Stein said, “We question Miss Stanwyck’s fitness to keep the child, and we think it would be a good idea to have a psychiatrist examine her.”

  Barbara testified that she didn’t believe Fay was insane when she was his wife. “And I don’t think he is insane now.”

  Barbara sat aloof and erect. She told the court, though, about Fay’s peculiar rituals when lighting a cigarette, of folding his hands, closing his eyes, and muttering a prayer; how he did the same as he passed a church, even when driving a car, frequently letting go of the steering wheel to pray and often narrowly avoiding a crash; how his newspaper reading was punctuated with profanity about murder stories and prayers over reports of death; how he had chased a doctor with a knife from their house; and how he’d been in and out of sanitariums.

  On cross-examination Barbara admitted that the many things she accused Fay of—throwing Dion in the pool and saying prayers over cigarettes—had happened while they were married.

  Fay’s lawyer said to the court, “Miss Stanwyck is being prompted in her answers by counsel.”

  Barbara’s attorney stood, his face flushed. “I just want to say, mister, that you are a liar.” Cradick was on the verge of hitting Stein.