Judge Knight called for order and suggested both lawyers stay away from personalities.
Fay’s attorney continued with his cross-examination.
Barbara admitted that when she and Fay went through an elaborate church wedding on their seventh wedding anniversary, she hadn’t loved him. “He promised to quit drinking and live a different life if I would remarry him in his church,” said Barbara. “His church seemed to mean so much to him that I agreed to give up the Protestant faith and remarry him in a church ceremony. We were married on a Friday in Sierra Madre. On Monday he came home drunk. I saw that it meant very little to him after all, so I left him.”
“Was he celebrating his wedding, perhaps?” asked Fay’s attorney.
“I hardly think so,” said Barbara. “The wedding was on Friday and he waited until Sunday to start drinking.”
She was asked if it was true that she owned fifty racehorses and if she’d spent most of Christmas Day at the races instead of at home with her child.
Barbara lowered her head and nodded.
Fay was the final witness. He took the stand and told the judge he hadn’t had a drink until he was twenty-one; that he’d been drunk “about fifteen times in my life. But, Judge, I have been absolutely ‘on the wagon’ for the last year.” He admitted he prayed over cigarettes but said he “always held on to the cigarette so nobody could snatch it while” he was praying. As to the question of throwing Dion in the pool and almost drowning him, Fay said, “Even Man Mountain Dean couldn’t drown under those conditions. [Dion] was a big, husky, overweight kid, big enough to push me in. All I did was to fix him in one of those contraptions so he couldn’t sink and put him in the water.”
Judge Knight handed down his decision days later. Fay was given the right to visit Dion at Barbara’s house each Tuesday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and was given custody of the boy, who was to be accompanied by his nurse, one weekend each month from 9:00 a.m. Saturday until 5:00 p.m. Sunday. If Fay had liquor on him “externally or internally,” he was not to see the child, nor was he to have any friends present who had been drinking.
Frank Fay at Marwyck, showing that he is attempting to gain entrance to see his son, 1937.
Fay was all smiles. “I won everything I asked for,” he said.
Barbara showed no emotion.
Her lawyer filed an appeal with the state supreme court on uncontradicted evidence offered in court that Fay had planned to kidnap Dion and take him out of the state. Cradick thought the appeal would keep Fay away until it was heard. Judge Knight issued Fay an official order granting him the right to visit his son. Cradick advised Barbara in writing not to comply with the court order to let Fay see Dion, saying, “The appeal automatically nullifies the order.”
Dion was to be brought to Fay’s house for a visit at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. The time came and went without Dion’s arrival.
One of Fay’s lawyers said that after the weekend they would go to Barbara’s house and demand to see the “child in accordance with the court order. If we are refused there,” said Hy Schwartz, “we will demand that the appeal he dismissed and seek a contempt of court citation against Miss Stanwyck.”
Barbara received thousands of letters and wires from supporters telling her that her court fight with Fay would not hurt her at the box office. Other well-wishers drove to her ranch and dropped letters in her mailbox.
A few days later, Fay and his attorneys traveled to Northridge and appeared at the gates of Marwyck. They got as far as the barn; a servant had been ordered not to let anybody in and told Fay he couldn’t enter the grounds. Fay stood outside the Stanwyck property, blocked by its surrounding wall.
In addition to losing the custody battle for Dion, Barbara was still on suspension for refusing to make Distant Fields (released as Married and in Love). Her argument was with Jesse Lasky.
“It was the difference of opinion of an artist and a producer,” said Barbara. The script was too similar to “the aging woman role” of Stella Dallas. “The two roles would tend to type me,” she said. “I understand they’ve already got someone else to play the part.”
RKO wrote off the cost of developing Distant Fields for Barbara—more than $34,000.
“I am really the loser,” said Barbara. “They have taken me off the payroll temporarily and I am being disciplined for not obeying orders.”
TEN
Wins and Losses
Somebody told me the other day,” said Barbara, “that Bette Davis and I were the most suspended people in pictures, and wanted to know why we argued so. I don’t know about Bette, but the reason I argue is because I believe in myself.”
Davis, just finished shooting Jezebel, was eager to make a picture about the legendary nineteenth-century French actress Rachel from a Jean Negulesco script already at Warner. Davis had won an Academy Award for Dangerous. She was being critically recognized and celebrated, with large box-office receipts, though she’d been described as “loaded with ice-cold New England sex.” Davis was about to turn thirty. She’d had it with “haggling” over scripts and money.
A week after Davis finished Jezebel, Hal Wallis sent her a script for a Busby Berkeley picture, Comet over Broadway, about a small-town girl married to a garage owner who, to help her husband, becomes a Broadway success. Davis was incensed. “I know that every star has her night,” she said, “but I wasn’t prepared to kill myself off in one fell swoop.” She refused to make the picture. Kay Francis took the part. Warner next sent Davis a script for another Berkeley production, this one called Garden of the Moon, about a girl who works as a secretary for a nightclub manager and is caught between the manager and an unknown bandleader whom she hires and who soon becomes famous.
The second Berkeley script was enough for Davis to prepare for a good fight. She’d just returned from a six-week unpaid “rest period,” actually recovering from an abortion; it was William Wyler’s child. Their affair had ended, and he had married. The script for Garden of the Moon was sent back to Wallis, and Margaret Lindsay was cast as the girl. Davis went into combat with the studio, combat that she viewed as “damn good character development.” She appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but rather than help her cause, Wallis put her on suspension the day after the magazine hit the newsstands.
Warner Bros. took out a full-page ad in Motion Picture Daily for Davis’s new hit picture, Jezebel. Next to it was another full-page ad from Warner Bros. that read, “Bette Davis Suspended.” Wallis appealed to the Screen Actors Guild to intervene; it refused. Davis remained on suspension for four weeks until she was sent a script for The Sisters, originally bought for Kay Francis, to be directed by Anatole Litvak.
Barbara would have loved to have played the lead in Jezebel. She saw Davis in it and called Warner and said to the operator, “This is Barbara Stanwyck. I know it doesn’t mean anything to Bette Davis but I want to tell her how much I admired her in Jezebel.”
The operator rang Miss Davis’s room and came back on the line and said, “So sorry, Miss Stanwyck. Miss Davis is sleeping and can’t be disturbed.”
Barbara called the studio the next day and again asked to speak to Miss Davis. Again she was told, “Miss Davis is sleeping. Miss Stanwyck, do you care to leave a message?”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Barbara said. “Miss Davis is evidently rehearsing for Snow White.”
Barbara, still on suspension, sent Holly on vacation to a dude ranch. Barbara was desperate to work. She had to work to keep happy. “They could work me every day and I’d love it,” she said. Barbara knew what parts were right for her and what weren’t, what she could do and what she couldn’t, and she “wasn’t afraid to say, ‘Wait a minute, this stinks.’ ”
• • •
The Santa Anita racetrack, in addition to the $10,000 San Juan Capistrano Handicap, added a new feature, the Marwyck purse, a grade D allowance event. As a result the six-furlong training track at Marwyck was being remodeled; sand-soil was being used, the same kind of soil being used at the
new two million dollar dream track in Inglewood, Hollywood Park.
• • •
A Yank at Oxford previewed toward the end of January. Bob and Barbara were there, as were his mother and grandmothers.
The lead was a new kind of role for Bob. In place of the beautiful, sophisticated lover, Metro presented Bob as the exuberant, virile young man—a brash, boyish athletic American from the Midwest who runs, rows, and fights and who blunders, Stars and Stripes, into the tradition-bound world of ancient Oxford. Reviewers who formerly, but politely, dismissed Bob as a mere beauty now talked about his work seriously and called his portrait of the cocky American athlete abroad “disarming.” Howard Barnes wrote, “Judging on this performance, it is my suspicion that Mr. Taylor may be an actor.”
Bob started work on Three Comrades.
Less than a week into production, Hitler’s long-feared Anschluss took place as his army forces massed along the German-Bavarian frontier, preceded by thousands of uniformed Nazi storm troopers, exiled Austrian Nazis, and other Nazi Party workers, who took control of village after Austrian village. Hitler installed an Austrian Nazi cabinet and a new minister of the interior, who announced, “Austria free and independent.” Austria ceased to exist and was merged with Germany. Jubilant Viennese Nazis by the tens of thousands shouted, “One Reich—one Führer.”
In December, when the script for Three Comrades was being written, Joseph Breen received a letter from Dr. George Gyssling, consul of Germany: “As [Three Comrades] deals with conditions as they allegedly existed in Germany after the war and during the ‘inflation period,’ I would be grateful to you if you would give this matter your attention, so that future difficulties might be avoided. With my best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year, I remain . . .” Early in January, Breen wrote to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer saying, “The story, while dramatically sound and entertaining is, inescapably, a serious indictment of the German nation and people and is certainly to be violently resisted by the present government of that country.” The scenes about anti-Semitism were removed from the script, as were any portrayals of Nazi brutalities and the lines “Here is one country where a Jew is not homeless—where the Fatherland belongs to him as well as to the others. For that I am proud and happy.”
The picture was set a year or two after the Great War rather than in 1930. Breen suggested the Communists be the heavies instead of the Nazis; Nazi uniforms were not to be shown, nor was the swastika; the script was not to mention Felix Mendelssohn, whose music had been banned in Germany by the Nazi regime by virtue of his being Jewish. Metro’s longtime cameraman Joe Ruttenberg, an American, replaced Karl Freund. Franz Waxman, who scored the picture, asked to have his name omitted from all publicity for “personal reasons.” Despite the request, his name remained on the picture’s credits.
• • •
Bob, under Barbara’s tutelage, turned to radio: she for the work; he to be showcased. Barbara appeared on NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, then in the title role of Anna Christie and a week later in O’Neill’s early play The Straw, inspired by his six-month stay in his early twenties at a tuberculosis sanitarium. O’Neill agreed to sell for $500 the rights to a ten-minute excerpt of the play—the first time he ever granted radio broadcast rights. The show’s advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, guaranteed the playwright that it would use Barbara for the young woman.
The Straw was about a girl at a TB hospital who falls in love with a writer there (Don Ameche) who does not return her feelings. She wastes away after he is cured and leaves, and when he returns he gives her one straw of hope for life: the promise of his love as he sees that he does indeed love her.
Barbara was powerful as the consumptive Irish girl.
Bob Taylor hosted the Maxwell House–Metro program called Good News of 1938, a showcase for Metro actors and actresses. Other Metro stars, such as James Stewart and Robert Young, rotated as the show’s host. Each week the show featured the dramatization of a new Metro picture with its stars. Jack Benny appeared one week and stole the show from everyone else (“This show needs all the help I can give it,” Benny said as part of the gag). Bob did bits with his Yank at Oxford co-star, Maureen O’Sullivan, and director, Jack Conway. Allan Jones sang “My Heaven on Earth,” and Fanny Brice was Baby Snooks.
Other actors were appearing on radio as well. Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Tyrone Power, Claire Trevor, and Rosalind Russell appeared on consecutive weekly shows. Bette Davis, Eleanor Powell, Randolph Scott, and Olivia de Havilland were on The Campbell Playhouse; Frances Farmer, Gary Cooper, Joan Bennett, and Robert Montgomery appeared on Lux Radio Theatre; Leslie Howard on Texaco Star Theatre.
Radio didn’t really hold much interest for Bob; he had no desire to become “a radio personality,” he said, “like a Jack Benny or a Don Ameche.”
Bob appeared at a fund-raiser at the Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre in honor of the late comedian Ted Healy, who had died December 21, 1937. In the show were Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Al Jolson, Roy Bolger, Fanny Brice, Martha Raye, Spencer Tracy, and Jack Benny. Healy had been named in the custody suit against Barbara; a few years before he’d become irritated by Fay’s behavior over his set of brand-new teeth and punched Fay so hard that Fay’s uppers and lowers were knocked out of his mouth. Fay and Healy had stopped fighting long enough to look for Fay’s teeth. Despite the fracas, Fay was one of the pallbearers at Healy’s funeral.
• • •
Barbara’s suspension at RKO was finally over. It had cost her more than $75,000, her salary per picture. Her new RKO contract, in conjunction with Fox for five additional pictures, was to go into effect in March 1938. She was to make two pictures for Fox during the first and last three months of the year and one picture for RKO in between. Fox paid RKO $55,000 for the first picture, $60,000 for the second, and $65,000 for the third.
No sooner did Barbara go off suspension than her house at Marwyck was robbed of almost $10,000 worth of jewelry, furs, and clothing.
“Those seven months away from the studio I didn’t know what to do with myself,” said Barbara. “But if the same argument came up tomorrow, I’d probably go on another suspension.”
Barbara was to be one of the stars in The Saint in New York, from the Leslie Charteris novel about a celebrated rogue, Simon Templar, a.k.a. the Saint, foe of criminals and the law, “a twentieth-century privateer,” whose clear idea of justice inspires him to pilfer from the rich to help the poor.
In the novel, Templar comes to New York to bust up a criminal organization protected by corrupt politicians. Charteris—Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, the son of a Chinese father and English mother, who grew up in the British Crown Colony of Singapore—like Simon Templar, was forever the outsider. The Saint in New York revealed a darker, more violent Templar.
The story had originally been bought for Fredric March. The role of the girl had been built up by Charles Kaufman and Irwin Shaw. Kaufman had worked uncredited on the script of Barbara’s previous picture, RKO’s Breakfast for Two.
• • •
For the first time in her eight years in pictures, Barbara was nominated for an Academy Award for her work in Stella Dallas. The nomination by the academy was vindication of the work she’d put into the picture and of her triumph over her childhood and the years she’d defied Hollywood’s indirect dismissal of her.
Marion and Zeppo Marx gave a party in honor of his client Moss Hart, in town for the opening at the Biltmore Theatre of his comedy You Can’t Take It with You. Hart was in Los Angeles to see if the company needed a rehearsal after its three-thousand-mile trek following a fifteen-week run in Boston. It didn’t; the cast was giving a “flawless performance,” he said.
For the Marxes’ party, Hart brought along his movie camera and asked people to act scenes: Carole Lombard and Gable, Phyllis Brooks and Cary Grant, Barbara and Bob.
Hart and Barbara talked about her nomination, about awards and plaques.
“You won’t get one,” he said to Barbara.
&nbs
p; “I won’t? How do you know?” she asked.
“Because you make things look too easy.”
She did make it look easy; it was her skill as an actress, her ability to tell the truth. She knew that honesty was her draw. She was able to use her shoals of loss and regret, her feelings of being an orphan, the outsider, her big emotions—highs and lows always, as she said—her sexual tension and control, a lifetime of defiance and daring, her need to connect and deliver perfection, and focus these things, adapt them, to create women on the screen whom audiences admired and knew to be true.
As Capra said, when she turned it on and went into an emotional scene, she carried others along like specks on a wave; actors blew their lines and watched her; grips and electricians stopped what they were doing and teared up.
Barbara was the favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Actress against the other nominees: Janet Gaynor for A Star Is Born; Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth; Greta Garbo in Camille; and Luise Rainer for The Good Earth. Gaynor, thirty-one, Greta Garbo, a year older, and Barbara were all of an age. Dunne was at the extraordinary age for a romantic ingenue of thirty-nine; Rainer, the youngest, was twenty-eight.
Gaynor had been nominated and won ten years earlier in 1929—the first year of the academy’s awards—for her performance in Seventh Heaven. Irene Dunne had been nominated in 1931 for the epic saga of the Oklahoma land rush Cimarron; Marie Dressler had taken home the statuette for Min and Bill. Garbo had just won her second New York Film Critics Circle Award for Camille. Luise Rainer had received the Academy Award for Best Actress the previous year, at age twenty-seven, for playing Anna Held, the legendary musical-comedy star, in The Great Ziegfeld.
The scene that won Rainer the award in her second American movie was one in which she is on-screen alone, talking on the telephone with her former husband, Florenz Ziegfeld (Louis B. Mayer found the scene “dreary” and tried to cut it). Rainer had seen Cocteau’s play La voix humaine, in which a woman talks on the telephone for the entire one-act, and used it to rewrite the scene, telling the director, Robert Z. Leonard, to “do it in one take.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 78
