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

by Victoria Wilson

  ELEVEN

  Golden Influences

  1938

  Barbara was to report to Fox the first week in April but refused to go. The studio announced that she was to make I’ll Give a Million for Zanuck. He’d decided musicals were dead at the box office and canceled the Ritz Brothers’ next musical, Straight, Place, and Show. He planned instead to star Barbara with Warner Baxter and Peter Lorre in a Depression fairy-tale version of The Prince and the Pauper, in which a millionaire rescues a bum from attempting suicide, takes his clothes, and, pretending to be a tramp, tries to give away a million dollars. It was from an Italian script, adapted for Zanuck by Niven Busch.

  Barbara wasn’t interested in the story. Zanuck suspended her contract.

  A week later, after reading a script by Kathryn Scola and Edith Skouras, Barbara was offered the lead in Always Goodbye, a remake of a 20th Century film from four years before.

  Always Goodbye, to be directed by Allan Dwan, was a story of mother love and sacrifice with a twist that harked back to Barbara’s third movie with Frank Capra, Forbidden: the mother is unwed and gives up her baby for the sake of the child. In its theme of noble mother love, Always Goodbye was similar to Stella Dallas, something Barbara had wanted to avoid for her first serious picture after playing Stella, but the Scola and Skouras screenplay, from the original story by Douglas Doty and the character actor Gilbert Emery, was without moral punishment and redemption and had an interesting angle. Instead of the mother’s life becoming dark and poverty-stricken after she gives up her illegitimate child, she becomes a successful, glamorous woman in the haute couture business and rises up from suicidal unwed mother to fully expressed career woman. Her happiness and satisfaction with her life are made only more complete when she accidentally meets her little boy in the lobby of an elegant hotel in Paris and determines to get him back as her son.

  The sympathy remained with the movie star even as unwed mother who gives up her child, unlike Stella Dallas, where the mother—poor, alone, outside life—gives up her child and the audience roots for her to do so. The script had an unexpected ending as well: the man (Herbert Marshall) who at the start of the picture saves the young mother from drowning is a brilliant surgeon done in by drink and botched dreams. He starts her on her career, and she in turn helps him find himself anew to take his rightful place in his field of medical research. She is in love with him, but he’s not the man she marries. Instead, she marries her son’s adoptive father, Ian Hunter, whom she does not love.

  Scola had written the botched script of A Lost Lady; she’d written as well the sharp, clever Baby Face, and Barbara trusted her as a writer.

  There was nothing predictable about the picture’s resolution: the man she loves is a wanderer who travels for years at a time, a periodic drinker, a dazzling scientific researcher with the soul of an artist who has just enough money to get by and more than enough love for her to reclaim his life; by marrying the man she doesn’t love, she becomes rich, is the adored object of his genuine affection, and becomes once again—the excuse for the disingenuous choice—the mother of her son.

  If there was a moral cost, it was that romance must be forfeited when it comes to mother love.

  Stella Dallas and Always Goodbye were different enough, but with each the message was clear: virtue is associated with class and money; poverty, with sex and sin.

  Barbara needed the income. She was eager to get back to work and agreed to make the picture.

  • • •

  She appeared regularly on the Lux Radio Theatre beginning in 1936 with the show’s second season. She was on Radio Theater’s Main Street, Stella Dallas, and These Three, and the producers continued to ask her back.

  Barbara was interested in doing a dramatization of Dark Victory from the George Brewer and Bertram Bloch play that had had a monthlong run on Broadway in 1934. (“A curious stew of mixed vegetables,” is how Brooks Atkinson described it.) Tallulah Bankhead was the spoiled, headstrong socialite diagnosed with a brain tumor who marries her doctor and learns by accident that her illness is fatal. The play’s demise was due to its weak third act.

  Lux Radio Theatre, since its move from New York to Hollywood, had never before presented a play on the air that hadn’t been made into a movie. Barbara was intent on doing Dark Victory first on radio and then on the screen.

  She hoped that the radio broadcast would persuade RKO or Zanuck to buy the rights for her. A society woman dying of brain cancer wasn’t an easy idea to sell to any studio; in addition, it was not a Zanuck or RKO kind of picture.

  Zanuck made few pictures that were carried by an actress. Those that did featured a nine-year-old Shirley Temple. The last Zanuck picture that a woman had carried had been five years before, with Barbara starring in Baby Face, where the woman, desperate to escape the poverty of her childhood, seduces her way to the top, destroying a string of men in her wake (“She climbed the ladder of success—wrong by wrong,” said the picture’s teaser line), and at the end is redeemed by love. Each of Zanuck’s recent historical dramas had a hero who triumphed over self and adversity, certainly not one felled by physical infirmity and helpless in the face of it.

  As for RKO, its contemporary pictures were breezy, sophisticated, carefree; they were musicals, backstage dramas, or comedies. The studio had announced at the start of the New Year that it had two of the best comedy scripts, The Mad Miss Manton and Love on Parole, with Pandro Berman, the leading producer on the RKO lot, overseeing the former.

  Irene Dunne was originally to have made Miss Manton, as a follow-up to Theodora Goes Wild, to be co-starred with Herbert Marshall, after her great success with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth. Dunne left RKO for Universal to make Madame Curie, and The Mad Miss Manton went to Katharine Hepburn as a logical next picture after Bringing Up Baby. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who appeared with Hepburn in her Academy Award–winning Morning Glory, was cast opposite her. Lucille Ball was to play one of the sleuthing society debutantes, as was Anne Shirley.

  The Mad Miss Manton was written by Wilson Collison from a comic whodunit about a spoiled society woman who turns detective and sets out to solve a murder with her gaggle of flighty society pals.

  • • •

  It would be tough in the midst of RKO’s comedy capers to get the studio to make a tragic story about a dissolute society woman who gets cancer, turns valiant, and dies. In addition, no writer had been able to solve the problem of the play’s weakness, and the project had been shelved.

  Barbara knew that the character of Judith Traherne was a great part, and she was determined to get it. She went to J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency for Lux, the show’s sponsor, and got it to agree to acquire for her the play’s broadcast rights. She thought for sure that performing the play on the radio was the way to get the part in the picture. A contract between the agency and Barbara stipulated that it would do everything to obtain the rights at a reasonable cost. Barbara was to be paid $4,000 for the broadcast. If the agency failed to secure the rights, Barbara’s commitment to Thompson for that airdate was to be canceled.

  Several years earlier, Jock Whitney had backed the Broadway production of Dark Victory and had urged David Selznick to acquire the movie rights, which he did, in 1936, in an effort to beat out Katharine Hepburn. Barbara told her agents to do anything to get the picture from Selznick, who in turn wanted Dark Victory for Garbo. He thought it “the best modern women’s vehicle since . . . A Bill of Divorcement” and wanted Garbo to do it as her next picture following The Painted Veil rather than have her make the “heavy Russian drama she was intent on making on the heels of so many ponderous similar films.”

  Selznick wanted Philip Barry to write the script and George Cukor to direct. Garbo wasn’t interested in Selznick’s ideas about her career, or Dark Victory. She was intent on making Anna Karenina. Cukor didn’t want to direct another period costume picture and returned to RKO to make the modern-day Sylvia Scarlett.

  Selznick continued on with Dark Victory
, which he was now preparing for Merle Oberon. Four drafts later, the problem with the play’s third act was still unresolved, which left Ben Hecht to remark, “The only way to save [the play] is to make it a comedy.”

  Over the years Selznick had been approached by Warner Bros. with offers to buy the rights to Dark Victory, prompted by Casey Robinson, a Warner screenwriter whose wife had breast cancer. When Hal Wallis asked what the play was about and Robinson answered, “A woman who dies of cancer of the brain,” Wallis had turned pale.

  Robinson was an experienced, deft screenwriter and had figured out how to fix the problems of Dark Victory. He’d written the titles for ten silents and the scripts of more than twenty pictures, among them Captain Blood, It’s Love I’m After, and Tovarich. He saw that once the character discovers she is going to die and courageously accepts her end in the second act, there was nothing left to resolve in the play’s third act. “There had to be in the middle of the piece,” Robinson said, “a period of great rebellion against fate, of anger, . . . mixed up with her love for the doctor . . . and the anger that she hadn’t been told” the truth that she was dying.

  Robinson saw the role for Bette Davis; she, to Robinson, was the key to the picture: her vitality, her restlessness, her unpredictability.

  Selznick had consistently rebutted Warner’s offer to take over the rights of Dark Victory until Radio Theatre offered to pay $500 for broadcast rights for Barbara. Selznick was by then on to other projects: the just-released Adventures of Tom Sawyer; the completion of the Carole Lombard and Fredric March picture, Nothing Sacred; the casting of The Young in Heart; the painstaking script revision, with Sidney Howard, of Gone With the Wind.

  The night of the Radio Theatre broadcast of Dark Victory, its host, Cecil B. DeMille, was recuperating from an operation and was replaced by Edward Arnold, who introduced Barbara as Judith Traherne and Melvyn Douglas as Dr. Frederick Steele.

  Douglas was the Park Avenue doctor about to retire to a country practice who agrees to operate on the selfish, high-flying Judith Traherne. He realizes that her condition will recur and that it will be fatal.

  Brilliant, serious doctor and flamboyant, spoiled patient fall in love and marry; he knows that the end may come for her at any time and protects her from knowing the truth. When she accidentally learns of her “death sentence” and doesn’t reveal to him that she knows she is doomed, her triumph comes with her ultimate acceptance as she gallantly, stoically braves the end alone. Traherne: “It must be met beautifully, and finally . . . nothing can limit us now. That’s our victory; our victory over the dark.”

  The former MGM associate producer David Lewis, who helped Thalberg produce Riffraff and Camille, had been at Warner Bros. for a year. When he first arrived, Jack Warner had said to him, “You won’t find the stars here that you worked with at Metro. Our Gable is Humphrey Bogart; our Garbo is Bette Davis.”

  Lewis had been the associate producer of four Warner pictures, including Bette Davis’s last, The Sisters. He’d worked with Casey Robinson on Four’s a Crowd, and Lewis and Robinson had spoken about Dark Victory. The producer admired Robinson but wasn’t interested in the picture. “It’s just a story about a woman who’s going to die and finally does so,” said Lewis. But he began to see in the play what Robinson saw, and together they worked out how to shape the script.

  Soon Lewis was also pushing Wallis to buy the rights to Dark Victory. “Christ, not that again,” Wallis said.

  Finally, Lewis went off on his own and approached Selznick at the right moment; Selznick agreed to sell Lewis the rights to Dark Victory for $15,000. Warner ultimately took over the picture. Lewis and Robinson adapted the script for Bette Davis; she was “the only person to play [Judith Traherne],” said Robinson. Hal Wallis bought the property for Miriam Hopkins, who needed a picture; she’d been promised We Are Not Alone, but the part had gone to Jane Bryan.

  Robinson tailored the part to Davis.

  Barbara might be asked by a screenwriter about a character he or she was working on, but she could never answer questions about the character until she was playing her. She trusted, though, that writers looked at the work of an actor or actress and “knew a certain part of you,” she said, “and they wrote for that.”

  Warner “didn’t want trouble from [Miriam] Hopkins,” said Lewis, “but Davis was more of a threat.”

  Lewis and Robinson had discussed the part with Davis and prevailed on Wallis to give her the role. Wallis had some ideas about the script himself. He wanted to change the doctor from a New England type to someone French and to use Charles Boyer, referred to by one director as the “Japanese Sandman.” Boyer, though, had another commitment. The French doctor went back to being a New Englander, and George Brent, whom David Lewis thought a “cold, black Irishman and a predator with women,” was assigned the part.

  A few days after Barbara appeared as Judith Traherne on Radio Theatre of the Air, Warner announced it was making Dark Victory as a picture with Bette Davis. The very English Edmund Goulding, director of Queen Kelly and Grand Hotel, among others, was to direct. Goulding, invariably attired in scarves and blue blazers, was thought of as a genius—extravagant, bold.

  Barbara was furious.

  She was paying the price—again—for not being under contract to one studio that would have steadily built her up picture after picture. Bette Davis, at Warner Bros. since 1932, had risen up through more than thirty Warner pictures, from supporting ingenue to the studio’s “top rank female star,” particularly once Hal Wallis had lost faith in Warner’s other top star, Kay Francis. Eight months before, the thirty-three-year-old Francis had sued Warner Bros., claiming that she’d been defrauded by Jack Warner into extending her contract with the promise of being given the starring role in Tovarich. When the part went to Claudette Colbert, borrowed from Paramount for the lead, Francis took Warner Bros. to court. She was fed up with the roles being submitted to her and was willing to terminate her contract and forgo her $3,000-a-week salary. The case was settled; Francis remained under contract to Warner Bros., but the best roles—The Sisters, Dark Victory—were going to Bette Davis. And Davis had since broken through with Jezebel.

  At Radio, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers were the stars the studio had built up over the last few years. Ann Harding, under contract to Radio, accurately described an actor’s choice: “If you’re under contract . . . you may get the plums, but they [the studio] own your soul. If you’re not under contract, you have to take your chances.”

  Barbara’s next picture for RKO, a screwball murder mystery—The Mad Miss Manton—had been purchased with Irene Dunne in mind and then passed on to Katharine Hepburn. Barbara’s next picture for 20th Century–Fox, Always Goodbye, was one for which Zanuck had first envisioned Myrna Loy.

  • • •

  Bob Taylor’s picture A Yank at Oxford opened in London and was regarded as the most solid British picture ever made. It brought in more than $40,000 its first week at the Empire Theatre, the kind of box office that was equivalent to a Garbo picture and was exceeded only by Mutiny on the Bounty and The Broadway Melody.

  When Eleanor Roosevelt visited Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in mid-March, it was Robert Taylor she asked to see first. Metro announced that it planned to make Ivanhoe for its new season with Clark Gable, Bob Taylor, Myrna Loy, and Luise Rainer. In the midst of all the flurry, Bob was busy planting two hundred citrus trees on his newly acquired thirty-acre ranch.

  Barbara was to start production on Always Goodbye for 20th Century–Fox. Sidney Lanfield, who directed her three years before in Red Salute, was to take Allan Dwan’s place as the picture’s director.

  On April 15, three days before Barbara was to show up for work on Always Goodbye, she was informed by RKO that the government had seized her salary for back taxes amounting to $61,689.02. “All property, rights to property, moneys, credits and/or bank deposits now in your possession are hereby seized and levied,” read the letter from the Internal Revenue Service to RKO. If something wa
sn’t worked out, the IRS would take her weekly paycheck until the amount was paid off.

  RKO owed Barbara $4,400 after tax deductions. Twentieth Century–Fox was paying her $55,000 for Always Goodbye. The sale of Bristol Avenue was discussed as a way to pay off some of the taxes. It was mortgage-free, but Fay’s finagling had further embroiled Barbara in a deeper financial mess. There were twelve liens against the house, each with the Internal Revenue Service, for more than $35,000 of unpaid income tax over a five-year period, from 1932 through 1937.

  Fay’s house could bring in $75,000 with its swimming pool, tennis court, and large grounds, not to mention its gold bathtubs. In addition to the government liens against 441 Bristol Avenue, the Bank of America was after the property.

  Fay and Barbara were named in a suit, along with the United States of America, in an attempt to foreclose on the property. Four years earlier, in 1934, Fay and Barbara had signed a promissory note with the Bank of America against Bristol Avenue for $4,250. Half of the money had been repaid a year later. In its suit, the Bank of America spelled out how the defendant used “fictitious names whose true names are unknown to plaintiff,” and the plaintiff “prays that when the true names of said defendants are known and discovered this complaint may be amended accordingly.”

  Neither Barbara nor Fay appeared in court. The court issued a foreclosure on Bristol Avenue for $2,171.75 plus interest of $146.96, attorney fees of $118.90, and expenses of $27.50. The IRS had issued a lien for more than $60,000 against Barbara’s house on Devonshire Boulevard. She needed the money from Always Goodbye to pay the government.

  Part of the allure for Barbara of Always Goodbye was that she was remaking Gallant Lady, a picture that had starred Ann Harding. There were few actors or actresses whose work on-screen absorbed Barbara enough for her to be drawn away from studying the technical aspects of a picture and become immersed in the story. Ann Harding was one of those actresses.