Harding’s work on-screen was characterized by a dimensionality and ease. At the core of her softness and calm was an immutable strength, a reserve that combined with her winsomeness and patrician beauty to give her a dignity and size and a golden luminosity.
Harding (Dorothy Walton Gatley) was the daughter of a colonel, a West Point graduate, and the foremost authority on artillery fire in the U.S. Army. Harding had withstood with equal strength her father’s unyielding condemnation of her choice to make a living as an actress (“Such a step is the straight and inevitable road to Hell,” her father had said. Her “painted face” on-screen was there “for harlots and perverts to gape at”). George Grant Gatley disowned his daughter, and she, at eighteen, was even more determined to act onstage.
The discipline, self-confidence, and courage that made Harding’s father a brigadier general of the U.S. Rainbow Division in France during the Great War were present in her temperament, on-screen and off. Harding found army life “a narrow prison cell for a woman” that forced her to “restrict [her] thoughts,” she said, and to “fold her wings.” She recognized the truth of military life and set off to find her own way. Once in New York City, she went from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a Dictaphone operator to Greenwich Village and George Cram Cook’s Provincetown Playhouse to Jasper Deeter’s Hedgerow Theatre company in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania.
Harding’s cool, standoffish demeanor on-screen seemed the opposite of Barbara’s. The strength, energy, and anger that drove Barbara’s performances were made human, familiar, by a softness from deep down and a hurt that combined to give Barbara her stature, her honesty, her likability; they made her knowable, admirable. The stillness and taut passion of the two actresses made them similar.
Harding, RKO’s answer to MGM’s Norma Shearer, once said, “Perhaps I am that unfortunate creature known as a high-brow.”
Barbara didn’t see Harding that way. She’d admired Harding since their stage days in New York. Harding became a Broadway star the same season as Barbara, though they came from opposite ends of the theater world: Barbara as a dancer from revues and clubs; Harding from the stock companies of “the Provincetown Players little theatre” and Rose Valley’s Hedgerow Theatre. Harding became a star in The Trial of Mary Dugan, which opened on Broadway in September 1927, within a few weeks of Burlesque. Co-starring in Mary Dugan, opposite Harding, was Rex Cherryman, one of Barbara’s early loves. Barbara saw Harding’s work in the play and, through Cherryman, came to know her.
Her life and Harding’s followed a similar track. Each actress went to Hollywood in 1928 and each because of her husband’s theatrical career, when talking pictures were coming into vogue; each thought of the theater as her rightful world and resisted the lure of motion pictures. Harding, because of her golden beauty and rare voice (once compared to the sound of temple songs), as well as her eight years of New York stage experience, was put under contract immediately (at Pathé). With her first picture, Paris Bound, from the Philip Barry play, Harding was a sensation; a year later, years before Barbara, Harding was a full-fledged movie star, earning, in 1929, $3,500 a week. By 1931, with a new contract from RKO/Pathé, she was earning what she called “a fair salary,” more than $250,000 a year, enough to order her own plane—a Bellanca Skyrocket—to appease her husband, the actor Harry Bannister, who soon got his private pilot’s license. The plane’s custom-built cabin and fittings matched the gold of Harding’s hair. One side of the plane’s exterior said, “Ann Harding”; the other, “Mr. Bannister.”
Harding’s acting and being had a big influence on Barbara. Harding thought of herself as an actress rather than a star; on-screen she wanted to look “like a person,” she said, “not an actress.” Long before Barbara became a star, Harding was written about as brilliant, superior, forthright, “with a natural reserve of super-intelligence,” someone with character and grit who hates sham and ostentation. Harding had beautiful skin; on-screen she barely used greasepaint. Offscreen she was known for wearing no makeup, just lipstick. Harding was hardworking, no-nonsense, thoroughly a member of the company. She knew studio workers by their first names and knew the names of their children. Harding’s generous acts for others were legion and inconspicuously rendered. When interviewed, she invariably mentioned the name of Jasper Deeter, director of the Hedgerow Theatre, who’d taken her in hand, educated her about acting, and given her her start as an actress.
Ann Harding, 1934. “Work in Hollywood,” she advised, “but keep away from Hollywood when you are not working . . . if you must be in Hollywood seek seclusion . . . Fight, fight, always, to avoid becoming a formula star, one who is ever the same type. Seek to be yourself at all costs. Live, laugh, and play, but do it away from the place where movies are discussed, exploited, and proclaimed about morning, noon, and night.”
Barbara, in interviews, often mentioned Willard Mack as the man who taught her how to act. Harding had decided what mattered in life, and she was determined to maintain it at all costs. Finally, she was concerned with the business of being an actress, a good actress.
Though her childhood and Barbara’s were diametrically opposite from one another—Harding, as a daughter of the regiment with much social activity, was nomadic and spoiled, competing in horse shows and, with her own uniform and pony, riding to maneuvers and never missing reveille—both were subjected to an endless number of schools (Barbara to more than ten Brooklyn public schools in eight years; Harding to exclusive private schools along the Eastern Seaboard—thirteen in all—and then a year at Bryn Mawr). Where Barbara made friends with difficulty, Harding learned a superficial adaptability, the value of friendships, and the necessity of making friends quickly.
Each stayed in a situation until it could no longer be endured, and then finally, when the tie was cut, it was abrupt and permanent.
Barbara went to the movies and watched camera angles and studied the placement of lights and how it affected this or that actor’s face. When she watched Ann Harding, she was mesmerized.
“Miss Harding is so entirely natural at all times,” said Barbara, “that she makes me believe in her and what she is doing. I have always hoped that my own work showed the same degree of sincerity. When I see an Ann Harding picture nothing but her work and the story interests me. I am really able to lose myself.”
Harding had retired from pictures in 1936 after a bitter court fight with her husband over custody of their eight-year-old daughter. Barbara had followed the trial closely; the parallels between her marriage and Harding’s were unmistakable. Harding’s husband, Harry Bannister, a stage actor, much older than Harding, like Fay and Barbara, had failed to establish a successful career in Hollywood and became known as “Mr. Ann Harding.”
During the Harding-Bannister marriage, they, like Barbara and Frank Fay, had built a rambling house with rolling gardens in a modest village twenty miles outside town to separate themselves from a Hollywood Harding refused to be part of and as a way to protect her marriage. Ann, like Barbara, rarely gave an interview without talking about her husband’s inspired acting and how much better he was at it than she would ever be. The house the Bannisters built, like the Fays’ at Bristol Avenue, which was meant to insulate their happiness, became more tomb-like as their marriage disintegrated. During the Harding-Bannister custody case, Bannister, like Fay, tried to kidnap their child.
• • •
Always Goodbye was about mother love, but Barbara played the part as differently as she could from that of Stella Dallas. Her portrait of the woman who, following the accidental death of her fiancé, gives up her baby for adoption and becomes a big success as a dress designer, accidentally meets her son five years later, and marries the adoptive father in order to become the mother to her child that she was meant to be was played for strength, gaiety, and glamour. The studio’s style expert—Royer—created more than twenty costumes for Barbara. Her Margot Weston was as lighthearted and beautiful as her Stella Dallas was beset and full of feeling.
Harding in the original role of Margot Weston (Sally Wyndham) was moving, dignified, and sexy, simple and real. Gallant Lady had been directed in 1934 by Gregory La Cava and co-starred Clive Brook. Harding’s work in the picture had been called “splendid” and “radiant.”
She created a character who was serious, haunted, and, when she reveals her sense of fun, irresistible. When the moment comes for her to give up her baby for adoption just after having given birth, the feeling of loss is overwhelming. Later, when Harding is with her son (Dickie Moore), now five years old, her playfulness and banter with the boy is fresh and beguiling as she combines the easy authority and fulsome pleasure of a parent.
Barbara had told Pan Berman, executive producer at RKO, that she wanted to make a picture with Gregory La Cava, Gallant Lady’s director. La Cava had recently come to RKO along with Leo McCarey as a producer-director, as had George Stevens before him.
Barbara knew how inspired and brilliant La Cava was as a director. She saw it in his work with Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey. She knew how assured La Cava was; he knew exactly what he wanted.
La Cava, however, didn’t like to work with a finished script. He worked each day with two or three pages of script that he would type out the night before and give to the actors the day of shooting. It was an odd choice of director for Barbara, who didn’t like to veer away from a script and who, from the first day of production, knew the script—every part—letter-perfect.
When La Cava directed Stage Door, he’d had a secretary write down the off-camera talk among the actresses and used it throughout the picture, rewriting scenes daily to get a feeling of intimacy among a group of girls boarding together. Ginger Rogers thought La Cava “masterful” as a director; Pan Berman was “amazed” by him but aged a hundred years each day from the chaos La Cava created from “not knowing where we were going, what we were doing tomorrow, how the script would turn out.”
The work was tailored to bring out the actor. If something didn’t fit, La Cava changed it without going to the writers. The actors improvised, as did Ann Harding and Dickie Moore in the scene in Gallant Lady on the transatlantic Ile de France in which she tells her little boy the exquisitely improvised story of how the elephant got its trunk; the child interrupts at every turn, and Harding, never getting ruffled or impatient, answers every one of his questions as if mother and boy were gliding in tandem on skates.
La Cava encouraged overlapping dialogue and gags (he’d started out as a cartoonist and animator for Walter Lantz on the Katzenjammer Kids series), but Barbara didn’t enjoy improvisation.
Pan Berman liked the idea of Barbara working with La Cava. His next picture needed someone to be a Secret Service–type agent, and, Berman told Leo Spitz, RKO’s president, Barbara would be “good in this type of part.” He saw it as a good way “of bolstering up the picture from the name angle” without RKO’s having to add to its commitment; if the studio used Barbara in the picture, it wouldn’t have to “go outside to buy” another star.
A few weeks into production of Always Goodbye, Hollywood was stunned by a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter taken out by the Independent Theatre Owners Association of New York, with a headline that read, “Wake Up! Hollywood Producers.” The ad, framed with a red border, attacked producers for paying stars huge salaries on long-term contracts that didn’t return on the investment. The copy went on to say, “This condition is not only burdensome to the studios and its [sic] stockholders but is likewise no boon to exhibitors who, in the final analysis, suffer by the non-drawing power of these players.”
Many of Hollywood’s top stars were listed: Mae West, Edward Arnold, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Kay Francis, and Marlene Dietrich, among them, and were called “box-office deterrents”; these high-salaried performers, it said, “take millions out of the industry and millions out of the box-office.”
It was a bombshell dropped on moviemakers, at the expense of those actors and actresses named in the ad, and it ordered the producers to do something about the situation.
Instead of “surrounding a $5,000 a week star with any sort of vehicle,” said the fifty members of the association representing 240 theaters in New York City, producers should concentrate on making good pictures. The exhibitors were in favor of “series” pictures”: “the Jones Family pictures, the Mr. Motos . . . the Charlie Chans, [and] Judge Hardy pictures.” The association was “not against the star system, mind you, but we don’t think it should dominate the production of pictures.” The statement concluded by saying, “Sound judgment and good business sense are valuable assets in an industry that is far from being an art.”
Lawyers and managers of those singled out in the ad conferred at the offices of the Artists’ Managers Guild. It was agreed that the ad was libelous, but the actors were unable to sue because of their contractual agreements with the studios.
Of the producers, Harry Cohn had the most at stake; two of those named as “box-office deterrents” were under contract to Columbia. The studio had just completed making Holiday with Katharine Hepburn and had signed Marlene Dietrich—after Paramount bought out her contract for $250,000—to star as George Sand in a picture about Chopin.
Cohn, with his policy of hiring those actors and actresses on their way up or down, issued a statement saying that all of those mentioned in the Theatre association’s ad would be welcomed at Columbia.
Exhibitors had long complained about the Hollywood system of placing strong box-office names in bad pictures and then relying on the star’s drawing power to bring in big receipts. They argued that those players who had saved the studios for years had been destroyed by the same system, one of the reasons that Barbara made sure she was never under contract to one studio.
TWELVE
Mother Love at Home and Abroad
Bob Taylor was in training for The Crowd Roars, an exposé of the fight game, in which he was to play a prizefighter who rises up from the slums, a choir singer who sells his soul to a racketeer to become a contender for the light heavyweight title. It was a story indirectly inspired by Clifford Odets’s hit play Golden Boy, which had opened the Group Theatre’s seventh season in November 1937 and was running on Broadway with Luther Adler, Frances Farmer, Morris Carnovsky, Jules Garfield, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, and Robert Lewis.
For the part of the young boxer in The Crowd Roars, Bob didn’t want to just go through the motions of being a fighter, the old left right. He wanted to know something about the tricks of being a boxer. Metro arranged for him to be coached by the former fighter Johnny Indrisano. Indrisano had never been a champ, but he’d beaten champions in nontitle matches.
Barbara also hired an ex-fighter, Tommy Herman, to be her physical trainer, and to give Dion boxing lessons in the ring she had put up near her swimming pool.
Bob was training from nine to six, fourteen days in a row, punching bags, doing roadwork, jumping rope, shadowboxing, and learning to duck, weave, watch his footwork, lead with his left, and take the offensive. He was also training with Patsy Perroni and Mickey McAvoy. During one training fight, McAvoy broke the actor’s thumb. “His head got in the way of my thumb, or vice versa,” said Bob, who thought his thumb was sprained and kept on fighting.
Metro was once again presenting Bob as rugged. To show how much of a man’s man he was becoming, the studio released Bob’s body measurements and compared them with his body of 1935, including the measurements of his thighs (20 inches in 1935; 23 inches in 1938); wrists (6½ inches in ’35; 7 inches in ’38); and neck (14 inches in ’35; 16 inches in ’38).
In training for The Crowd Roars, 1938.
Bob’s previous picture, Three Comrades, opened to bad reviews (“There must have been some reason for making this picture,” Variety said, “but it certainly isn’t in the cause of entertainment . . . despite the draught of the star names, it’s in for a sharp nose dive at the box office”). Though Metro tried to gloss over what was happening in Germany and set the story in the 1920s instead of
ten years later, reviewers called the story dated and said that that period had no relation to the “Reich of today.”
• • •
Metro had extended Bob’s contract and began negotiations on his next. He consulted a financial manager, Morgan Maree, Barbara’s accountant, a partner of Alan Miller, Marion Marx’s brother.
Bob still feared financial insecurity, despite his success with Metro. His new home, which he called a gentleman’s ranch, in the San Fernando Valley near Barbara’s Marwyck, was set up so that ten of the thirty acres were for his house, lawn, and paddocks with the other twenty being used to grow and sell alfalfa. Bob was considering whether to put up a storage barn and get $20 a ton for alfalfa or sell it immediately for $12.50 a ton. He’d bought government bonds and annuities, but he didn’t yet have the kind of cash that allowed him to buy a real cattle ranch, the eight-hundred-acre ranch he’d seen in the hills with oaks and sycamores and a year-round stream that flowed through the Barley Flats.
Others had followed Barbara and the Marxes to the San Fernando Valley: Francis Lederer, Gene Autry, Wallace Beery, Will Hays, Al Jolson, and Ruby Keeler. Each was within a ten-mile area of the other with farms that were between twenty and two hundred acres, laid out for fruit or feed or, as with Mae West, used for a trotting track.
• • •
The day after Barbara finished Always Goodbye, she and Bob went to a preview of Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band, which starred Tyrone Power and Alice Faye. Twentieth Century–Fox held the evening at the Carthay Circle Theatre, which had been dark since the end of a two-day run of Snow White. Barbara wore an accordion-pleated white chiffon with a square-shouldered cape of white fox from Always Goodbye.
With production completed on the picture, Barbara appeared on The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Don Ameche was the host; Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, the comedy regulars; Ameche and Dorothy Lamour, the musical entertainment. Barbara and Ameche did a shortened version of Magnificent Obsession; Barbara was powerful as Helen Hudson. Later in the show she did a skit with Charlie McCarthy about his teaching her to swim, and together they drew their quota of laughs from a bit about lifesavers and then segued into a duet of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 81
