In the scene, Held desperately hopes for and believes that Ziegfeld’s phone call will lead to a reconciliation; instead, she learns that their life together is over. Rainer, ever wistful, with enormous haunted eyes, played it with a frenetic stillness like the dying Odette from Petipa’s Swan Lake. (“I never acted,” Rainer said. “I felt everything.”) Audiences wept, as did the jaded studio electricians on the soundstage catwalks at Metro who watched Rainer shoot the scene.
Rainer had fled Vienna in 1935, at the age of twenty-five, with the rise of the Nazi Party, despite having been given the special title Honorary Aryan (she’d instructed the brown-shirted soldier-stagehands to get rid of their “blasted boots and [wear] slippers as stagehands normally do”). Rainer had been in America only two years before winning the Academy Award for her portrayal of Held (“I never dreamed of becoming a movie actress,” she said).
She mystified Hollywood; she defied simple analysis. At sixteen, Rainer left behind her upper-middle-class bourgeois family (her father was an oil and soybean importer-exporter) to become an actress—“a low and vulgar profession,” her father had called it—and she’d flourished in Max Reinhardt’s repertory company “playing something else every night surrounded by great artists.”
The academy’s award, Rainer claimed, was of no interest to her. (“In Europe we did not need these accolades,” she said.) Her interests lay elsewhere. She wanted good scripts and better parts, though to her, acting in pictures was not acting.
Capra, as president of the academy, had dissolved its nominating committee of fifty men and opened the vote to all members of the guild, whether they belonged to the academy or not. For the first time, the Screen Actors Guild was actively involved with the proceedings; in addition, extras were allowed to vote for Best Picture, Best Acting, and Best Song. Instead of a vote of eight hundred, the awards were to be voted on by fifteen thousand, and it was impossible to predict how they would cast their ballots.
The academy’s banquet awards ceremony at the Biltmore Bowl was originally set for Thursday, March 3. The evening was postponed due to severe storms that caught many involved with the ceremony in the floods, among them Capra, who was marooned in Malibu. The banquet’s hundreds of dollars’ worth of flowers were donated to hospitals.
A week later, on the evening of the awards dinner at the Biltmore Bowl, extras stood outside the affair due to the exorbitant cost of tickets at $15 per couple; inside, the eighteen hundred seats were filled.
Mrs. Spencer Tracy was there to represent her husband, recuperating from appendicitis at Good Samaritan Hospital. Tracy was nominated for outstanding performance for his role in Captains Courageous, Metro’s most financially successful picture of the year and Photoplay’s most popular. Fredric March, nominated as Best Actor for his performance in A Star Is Born, was east, recuperating with his wife, Florence Eldridge, from their aborted Broadway run of Yr. Obedient Husband.
Paul Muni, nominated for outstanding performance for The Life of Emile Zola, made sure to be out of town. He’d won the Academy Award the year before for best performance for The Story of Louis Pasteur and wanted to steel himself against the inevitable. “It will be less embarrassing for everybody,” Muni said, “if I’m in Palestine or Greece. Nobody wins two years in a row.”
Greta Garbo was absent from the proceedings, traveling abroad; she’d spent Christmas in Sweden with her family on the thousand-acre estate outside Stockholm that she’d bought for her mother and brother. She had then traveled to Rome to join Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, for a month together in Ravello at a villa overlooking the Bay of Salerno. “No, no—I will not marry Mr. Stokowski,” Garbo had told the press before leaving America.
• • •
As for performances that the academy had overlooked, Carole Lombard’s in the antic Nothing Sacred was among them (“You wanted comedy,” Selznick had wired to Jock Whitney. “Boy you’re going to get it, and be it on your own head”). Lombard was nominated the previous year as the screwball sensation of My Man Godfrey and had lost to Luise Rainer.
Comedy and comic actors and actresses were rarely recognized for their work by the academy. Lombard saw comedy as more difficult than heavy roles. “In a straight role,” she said, “you react as you would in life—in comedy, you have to do the unexpected.”
Cary Grant’s work in The Awful Truth—his first real shot at comedy in pictures—was also overlooked, though the movie received six nominations, among them Ralph Bellamy for Best Supporting Actor, Viña Delmar for best-written screenplay, and Leo McCarey for Best Direction.
McCarey had preceded The Awful Truth with another picture made earlier in the year for Paramount called Make Way for Tomorrow, a film much closer to the director’s heart. The McCarey pictures were opposites in every way except for their humanness; each was from a screenplay by Viña Delmar in collaboration with McCarey. For The Awful Truth, McCarey had his actors improvise, invent bits of business, and rewrite scenes.
McCarey, at thirty-nine, had directed eighty-odd pictures, including Six of a Kind with W. C. Fields, Duck Soup with the Marx Brothers, and Belle of the Nineties with Mae West, as well as more than three hundred shorts for Hal Roach (McCarey had brought together Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as a comedy team). He was considered one of the funniest directors at work, writing each day’s shooting on the set after playing ragtime for an hour or two. He was an irresistible storyteller who liked a “little bit of the fairy tale” and thought that someone else “should photograph the ugliness of the world.”
Make Way for Tomorrow was an exception, a labor of love for McCarey: his father had just died when he made the picture, and the director took a cut in salary to make the film. It was about “old folks” and the burden they become for their children. The elderly couple was Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi (at forty-eight and athletic, Bondi was far from the elderly, frail woman she’d made a career of playing for two decades).
In the picture, Ma and Pa are forced to live apart (she with their daughter; he with their son). Pa refuses to accept that he can no longer find work and support his wife. Their adult children are torn between their love and sense of duty for their parents and their need to have their own families.
Ma and Pa meet one last time: she is being sent away to the old-age home; he to California to live with another daughter. They meet in New York City at the same hotel where, fifty years before, they’d spent their honeymoon. When they say good-bye at the train station—Pa promising to get a job and send for Ma—they know it will be the last time they see each other.
The picture was called “one of the finest films to come out of Hollywood in years.” It was hailed for its “three qualities rarely encountered in the cinema: humanity, honesty and warmth.” Orson Welles said of it, “My God, it’s the most moving picture; a stone would cry.”
Despite its critical acclaim, it did little business at the box office, and Paramount bought out McCarey’s contract. He was out on the streets until he was hired by Columbia to make The Awful Truth.
• • •
Robert Montgomery was in attendance at the academy banquet in two guises: as a nominee for best performance in Emlyn Williams’s suspense thriller, Night Must Fall (Louis B. Mayer had objected to the project from the outset, saying, “We make pretty pictures”; despite that, Night Must Fall received two nominations); and as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.
King Vidor was representing the Screen Directors Guild; Dudley Nichols, the Screen Writers Guild.
Under Capra’s leadership, the academy had voted for a new charter that removed itself from any further involvement with labor-management disputes; as a result, Nichols agreed to accept the Oscar for The Informer that he’d turned down two years before.
The first part of the awards evening—the banquet—ended at 10:30. The awards ceremony followed. Bob “Bazooka” Burns, the Arkansas Sage, filled in as master of ceremonies for George Jessel, who was sick.
Fran
k Capra introduced Cecil B. DeMille, one of the academy’s original founders ten years before and a director of the board, who announced that the academy was “free of all labor struggles” and continued to speak for the next thirty-five minutes.
For the first time, the names of the winners of the twenty-one awards had been kept secret from those guests seated in the packed Biltmore Bowl. Some learned who the winners would be from the reporters and newspapermen in the audience who had been told at 8:35.
A new award was to be presented, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, in honor of the late producer. The award, a bronze bust of Thalberg mounted on a marble base, was to be given for “the most consistent high quality of production achievement by an individual producer, based on pictures he has produced during the preceding year.” Those in the running were Darryl F. Zanuck, Hunt Stromberg, David O. Selznick, Pandro Berman, and Samuel Goldwyn.
Zanuck had made fifteen pictures for the year, including In Old Chicago and Wee Willie Winkie as well as Barbara and Bob’s This Is My Affair. Stromberg crashed through with Maytime and Night Must Fall. Selznick had A Star Is Born, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Nothing Sacred. Pandro Berman, Stage Door, A Damsel in Distress, and Shall We Dance. Samuel Goldwyn had released Dead End, The Hurricane, Woman Chases Man, and Stella Dallas.
The Thalberg Award committee was chaired by Capra and included Lionel Atwill, Jean Hersholt, Henry King, William Wellman, Robert Riskin, Leo McCarey, and Douglas Shearer. Capra wanted Zanuck to receive the award. Zanuck was head of 20th Century–Fox and, more immediately important, head of the producers committee negotiating with the Screen Directors Guild; Zanuck’s receiving the award might make him sympathetic to the directors then negotiating with the producers.
Hal Wallis, head of production at Warner Bros., wanted the award for himself, but if he wasn’t going to get it, as a loyal Warner employee he certainly didn’t want it to go to Zanuck; nor did Wallis’s boss, Jack Warner, who was still sore about Zanuck’s walking out of the studio in protest over the way the brothers had handled the 1933 salary crisis.
Despite Warner’s objections, the Thalberg Award committee voted to give the award to Zanuck, and it was presented to him during the awards ceremony by Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
The Life of Emile Zola, Warner’s most successful picture of the year, won as outstanding production; Spencer Tracy won for Captains Courageous. Louis B. Mayer accepted the award and said, “It is a privilege to be the stand-in for Spencer Tracy. Tracy is a fine actor, but he is most important because he understands why it is necessary to take orders from the front office.”
Capra presented the Best Director Award and said, “A director must strive always to make great pictures and think of something besides their salaries.” The award went to Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth. McCarey, still wounded by the fate of Make Way for Tomorrow, accepted the award and said, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”
Two special comedy awards were given: a miniature wooden statuette to Edgar Bergen “for his outstanding comedy creation,” to which Charlie McCarthy, in tuxedo, said, “Carved out of wood! A bit of sarcasm, I suppose . . . Well, thanks, even if it isn’t gold. But if you’ve got a gold one leftover at the end of the night, I’d like to have it”; W. C. Fields presented Mack Sennett, comedy producer, with a standard-size gold-plated statuette as “the master of fun, discoverer of stars, comedy genius . . .” Sennett was each of these things, but his kinds of pictures had passed out of fashion, and the “comedy genius” was out of work and broke.
Joseph Schildkraut, nominated as Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola, had been told by his agent not to bother attending the academy banquet, he didn’t have a chance; the race was between Ralph Bellamy in The Awful Truth and H. B. Warner in Lost Horizon. Schildkraut beat out Bellamy and Warner and won for best performance by a supporting actor. Alice Brady won the award for Best Supporting Actress for In Old Chicago.
The award for best performance by an actress was being presented by C. Aubrey Smith. Barbara sat there smiling, “her heart pounding in her mouth.” Smith announced that the award was to go to Luise Rainer for The Good Earth.
The audience was stunned.
No one had ever received the academy award two years in succession. A German Jew as a Chinese peasant, and without much make up, which Rainer had insisted on. Her face on-screen, as still and resolute as the soul of the woman she played, made clear O-Lan’s every thought and feeling (“I became Chinese,” Rainer said).
When the winner of best performance by an actress was announced, Barbara showed little emotion; she’d steeled herself against another loss. “Human emotions don’t change,” she’d said, “only situations.”
Barbara had experienced too many losses to count on winning the academy’s award for her work. She was merciless with the character of Stella, going all the way playing her. She was naked, honest, disturbing. It took courage to go that far with her.
The academy’s vote for Rainer was Hollywood voting for its lofty notions of itself, made even more ironic given Rainer’s dismissal of movie stardom and what it stood for. (“They call me a Frankenstein that will destroy the studio,” she said. “It is more important for me to be a human being than to be an actress.”)
Luise Rainer as O-Lan and Paul Muni as Wang Lung in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s three-million-dollar epic The Good Earth, 1937. The long-anticipated picture had its premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre, which was done up for the event in thatched huts, fish ponds, and great bronzed Buddhas. Rainer, anxiously awaiting her next part, said, “To have a car, and money, and to do nothing is un-normal.”
Rainer had sat at a Metro luncheon next to Bob Taylor and asked him what his ideas were, what he wanted to do, and was stunned when he told her he wanted “ten good suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds.” Rainer’s Hollywood society was made up of European refugees living in Los Angeles—Thomas Mann and Erich Remarque—as well as George Gershwin and Harold Arlen.
Her indifference to movie stardom (her costume for The Good Earth had cost $1.89), to money, and to Hollywood gave her power as an actress, but it antagonized Metro (Louis B. Mayer had asked her, “Why do you not sit on my lap when we talk contracts, like my other stars do?”) and provoked the press. Rainer was written about as being “difficult,” “mercurial,” “a great artist,” “The Girl Who Hates Movies”; she was talked about as “a shrewd, phony, fake, temperamental lady with big eyes and an exaggerated opinion of herself.”
Rainer’s award was as well a vote for Thalberg’s legacy and the production he lovingly oversaw until his sudden death. The Good Earth had been in the works for almost eighteen months, using the talents of twenty writers and three directors (the first director committed suicide; the second succumbed to illness; the third stepped in and somehow prevailed). The picture cost $2.5 million (100,000 feet of film were shot in China) and involved five thousand extras, the planting of real farms, and a carved replica of a Chinese landscape with the Great Wall. On the release of The Good Earth, it was hailed as “a real cinema epic; one of the great pictures of all time.”
Barbara’s independence from the studios came at a price. Warner and Metro had more employees in the academy than any other studio, and it was reflected in the winners.
Luise Rainer, nominated as Best Actress for The Good Earth, at the tenth Academy Awards ceremony with her husband, Clifford Odets. The Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmore Hotel, March 10, 1938. (PHOTOFEST)
Rainer, a few days before the ceremony, had taken her husband, the Group Theatre playwright Clifford Odets, to San Francisco to show him the city she loved (he’d not fallen under its spell), and they’d just driven back the afternoon of the academy banquet.
At six that evening Rainer and Odets had a two-hour drive from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. Odets viewed his wife as “the Thomas Mann of actresses” and told her to forget the awards dinner; he couldn’t stomach the commercialism of actors. He and Raine
r were written about as “two lonely, shy, music-loving intellectuals [who] spurn the usual glitter of Hollywood nightlife.”
Rainer knew that she had to show up at the Biltmore and drove home fighting with Odets the entire time about going to the awards ceremony. Odets was the passion of her life, though he’d said of their idyll, “We married so that God could witness our fights.”
Rainer was in jeans and sneakers when the academy committee phoned to tell her she’d won another Oscar. She quickly put on a gown—after arguing with Odets for hours, she felt miserable—and, with Odets in business suit instead of black tie, left for the Biltmore Bowl. They arrived in the rain; Luise was too upset to go in, and with Odets she walked around the hotel four or five times before entering the building.
A smiling, brown-haired, awkwardly dressed Rainer, with little makeup, stood before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and murmured in broken English a frightened, wispy “Thank you very much.”
The ceremony ended at 2:00 in the morning.
“My heart’s blood was in that film,” said Barbara of Stella Dallas. “I should have won.”
• • •
The day following the academy’s ceremony, Sidney Skolsky’s column was all about Barbara: about how she was under contract to two studios, and had been suspended by each; about how she hadn’t permitted success to keep her from being herself; about her best friends, Zeppo and Marion Marx and Joan Crawford (and the jeweled cigarette case given to Barbara by Joan); about her devotion to her son, Dion (it didn’t mention that she saw his weight as problematic); about Marwyck; Bob Taylor; about her sleeping habits (her difficulty falling asleep and reading into the night for hours); about her large bedroom, where she had on display photographs of Taylor, Dion, Marion Marx, and Joan Crawford.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 79
