• • •
The summer months of 1938 came to a close with Hollywood being targeted by Washington for political fodder, with Bob, among others, at the center of the controversy.
Professor James B. Matthews, director of research of the three-month-old Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives in Washington, came before Martin Dies’s panel—made up of Dies, Arthur Healey of Massachusetts, John J. Dempsey of New Mexico, Joe Starnes of Alabama, Harold G. Mosier of Ohio, Noah Mason of Illinois, and J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey—and presented a list of actors and actresses in Hollywood who had lent their names “unwittingly” to Communist propaganda.
With Bob and Dion at a horse show, part of the San Fernando Valley Fiesta, Northridge, June 1938.
Matthews was a former Methodist missionary who’d covered the spectrum of radical life—as pacifist, socialist, Trotskyite, Wobbly, and Communist. A few years before, he’d made clear that big business, the government, and liberals were paving the way to Fascism; now he was before the panel warning that labor unions, the government, and liberals were making a path to Communism.
The new committee had been the idea of Martin Dies, an anti–New Deal Democratic congressman from Texas. Its mandate was to investigate subversive activities on U.S. soil, including German-American involvement with Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, and American Communism; its intent was to protect what Dies called “Americanism” and restore “Christian influence” in America.
Despite the specter of being “investigated,” the Ku Klux Klan sent a telegram to Chairman Dies saying, “Every true American, and that includes every Klansman, is behind you and your committee in its effort to turn the country back to the honest, freedom-loving, God-fearing American to whom it belongs.”
Roosevelt called Dies’s committee “sordid, flagrantly unfair and un-American.” In Nazi Germany and in Fascist Spain and Italy, Martin Dies was hailed as a hero who would rid the United States of “Pres. Rosenfeld, the Communist Jew.”
The committee’s investigator accused the First Lady, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, of helping to spread Communist propaganda by speaking before the American Youth Congress at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Among the Hollywood actors Matthews accused of being the dupes of “Reds” were Clark Gable, James Cagney, Bette Davis, and Miriam Hopkins. The name at the top of Matthews’s list: ten-year-old Shirley Temple. Also named by the committee was Robert Taylor, just as he was to start filming Metro’s Give and Take with Wallace Beery.
The list was from a French newspaper, Ce Soir, that had featured greetings in its anniversary issue from each of the actors Matthews named. The investigator claimed Ce Soir was under Communist control. The various studios responded by issuing statements that the actors were unaware the paper was owned by the Communist Party, though it turned out to be owned by a group of Paris bankers who supported the French government.
A week earlier, the Dies Committee had leveled charges against Hollywood itself, saying that actors and writers were financing “communistic” activities. Among those named were Luise Rainer, Gale Sondergaard, Joan Crawford, and the screenwriter Morrie Ryskind.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer responded to the attack against its actresses by saying, “No one has anything to say.”
Donald Ogden Stewart, co-founder and chairman of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, responded on his own, calling the charges that actors and writers were supporting “communist organizations” “fiction” and stating that the charges came from “all the Hollywood rumors collected from the various anti-labor, anti-Roosevelt sources, especially those provided by the efficient Los Angeles police intelligence bureau, or, as we call them, the ‘used-car squad.’ I am only sorry that the story failed to include one additional and equally true rumor, which is to the effect that when Hitler has taken over Czechoslovakia, [the committee’s investigator] is coming secretly to Hollywood to play the part of Scarlett in Gone with the Wind.”
Robert Taylor was anything but a Communist supporter, socialist, liberal, or Democrat. A former member of the Boy Scouts of America and the Order of DeMolay, Taylor, foursquare Republican and “patriot,” like Barbara, was anti-Roosevelt and anti–New Deal, raised a Nebraska heartland Methodist from a long line of Methodists and German Baptists and, like his mother, didn’t trust Catholics, Jews, or Italians.
• • •
Bob’s next picture, Give and Take, produced by Mervyn LeRoy, was to be directed by W. S. Van Dyke, their fourth picture together. Both Beery and Bob had been set to make Northwest Passage until production was delayed and then each was assigned to Give and Take, another picture in which Bob would be showcased as the virile, rough-and-tumble man.
At the heart of Give and Take was the fight between the railroads pushing west through the Alleghenies and the already established stagecoach lines. The script was by James M. Cain, Laurence Stallings, Jane Murfin, and Harvey Fergusson. Murfin had been around the picture business for almost thirty years; she’d written Come and Get It, Alice Adams, and What Price Hollywood?, among fifty other screenplays going back to 1918. Fergusson had written a couple of novels.
Bob announced to the press that he’d felt “limited” in the parts he’d played and wanted to do a Western if he could. “I want to get parts where I can wear overalls, leave my hair uncombed and unbrushed, forget to shave for a few days.” To make Give and Take, Bob stopped going to a barber and, like Barbara, who didn’t like to wear wigs, grew his hair so it could be tied back in a pigtail in the look of the 1850s.
Bob’s mother heard the title of the picture, now called Stand Up and Fight, and said out of concern, “O, dear God, dear God.” Bob assured her the picture had nothing to do with boxing. “I’m gonna play the part of a guy who just wants to build a railroad. Mr. Mayer picked me, Mother, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Anyway, so far he’s kept us out of the poorhouse.”
Barbara had agreed to make Falling Star for Zanuck from a script, similar to A Star Is Born, by Richard Sherman. Sherman had adapted Alexander’s Ragtime Band for Zanuck and had just finished writing The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Warner Baxter was to play the down-and-out movie star.
Barbara and Bob were planning a holiday in South America after finishing their current pictures. Bob loved to travel; Barbara was not as enthusiastic about it. Mayer had suggested a story that MGM was already planning as Bob’s picture after Give and Take. Hands Across the Border was about a fifteen-year competition between hockey teams representing West Point and the Royal Military College of Canada, in which Bob was to co-star with Jim Stewart. Bob’s new contract with Metro, to go into effect with the New Year, increased his salary to $5,000 a week and guaranteed him two holidays: one a month long; and the other for two weeks. Bob had just been named the sixth most popular box-office star by the Motion Picture Herald exhibitors poll; the previous year he’d ranked third on the list.
• • •
The Mad Miss Manton opened at the Pantages in Los Angeles and at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Reviewers had had their fill of the string of wild comedies about giddy Park Avenue heiresses and cynical newspapermen and had hoped they’d seen the last of that kind of picture. Despite that, The Mad Miss Manton’s madcappery (“screwball comedy and screwball murder mystery,” said Time) surprised and (begrudgingly) seduced the critics who were disarmed by Leigh Jason’s light, adept direction, Barbara and Fonda’s comic work, and the cavorting whimsy of Melsa Manton’s posse of Junior League sleuths. It was Philip Epstein’s clever script, Sam Levene’s zealous theatrics, and Hattie McDaniel’s perfect timing and delivery that stole the picture.
Moviegoers didn’t want to be buoyed by films that showed up the rich and that made clear, through zaniness and giddy hoopla, how Park Avenue types needed the common touch to be made part of the human race. The desperate times of the Depression had been supplanted by uncertainty and danger, and what audiences wanted on the screen was real emotion.
At President Roosevelt�
��s suggestion, Germany, England, France, and Italy had met in Munich to decide the fate of Eastern Europe, in an effort to stave off a second world war. It was agreed that Germany would take over Sudetenland with 3.5 million Sudeten Germans, enlarging the Nazi empire in the Danube valley; that German troops would occupy the most German areas; and that Hitler, in exchange, would become part of a new European concert of nations. The less German areas would hold a plebiscite to decide if they wanted to remain a part of the Reich. The agreement nullified the Versailles Treaty that had ended the Great War and created Czechoslovakia.
Dorothy Thompson, syndicated columnist, said, “Czechoslovakia was disposed of by four men who in four hours made a judgment of the case in which the defendant was not even allowed to present a brief or be heard [neither Czechoslovakia nor its protector, the Soviet Union, was asked to the meeting] . . . What ruled that conference was Nazi law.”
Newspaper headlines and radio commentators fed a mood of fear. The hope was that things would turn out all right just as long as the United States didn’t get mixed up in it.
Now that Washington had turned its attention to Hollywood, Lela Rogers and her daughter, Ginger, gave a party for J. Edgar Hoover, who was visiting Los Angeles. Irene Dunne was there, as was Jack Benny. The Rogerses ended the evening by showing Hoover and his associates from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Barbara’s new picture, The Mad Miss Manton.
• • •
Barbara and Bob’s trip to South America was postponed. With Give and Take, Metro had tried to rush out the picture about the battle between the railroads’ westward expansion and the stagecoach lines ahead of what the studio knew was coming: Cecil B. DeMille’s epic new picture about the building of the country’s first transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific.
Barbara was signed to play the lead opposite Joel McCrea.
DeMille’s picture was to be the “titanic story of the American empire builders who found their way to destiny conquering mountains and deserts . . . savage red men and ruthless white, forging an iron road built on stout hearts and reckless courage.”
Barbara saw the Western as honest and true with simple story lines. To her the people of the West were “America’s ‘royalty.’ Sure there were the good guys and the bad guys,” she said. “But didn’t the royal families have the same? You bet they did! Those marvelous men and women and, yes, even children broke the trails through unbelievable hardships to conquer the land for all of us. It is a wonderful history to read and even more wonderful to be given the opportunity to recreate it on film.”
• • •
The day before Halloween, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air put on an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Welles, twenty-three years old, wrote the show as a news broadcast with break-ins to dance music; the news bulletins told of a Martian invasion taking place near Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. The broadcast was periodically interrupted with disclaimers that listeners were not hearing actual news bulletins, but many who tuned in between announcements thought they were hearing news accounts of an invasion from Mars, just as they’d recently heard other regularly scheduled broadcasts interrupted to report real-life developments concerning Czechoslovakia. Police, radio stations, and newspapers coast-to-coast were flooded with calls about an invasion from outer space; thousands fled their homes.
The next day the Los Angeles Times’s headline read: “Radio Story of Mars Raid Causes Panic.” H. G. Wells said he had not given permission to turn the novel into a news broadcast.
In the New York Herald Tribune, Dorothy Thompson wrote, “All unwittingly, Mr. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air . . . have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create a nation-wide panic. They have demonstrated more potently than any argument . . . the appalling dangers and enormous effectiveness of popular and theatrical demagoguery . . . Hitler managed to scare all of Europe to its knees a month ago, but he at least had an army and an air force to back up his shrieking words. But Mr. Welles scared thousands into demoralization with nothing at all.”
Since the early radio days in New York when Barbara had read poetry over the WHN airwaves, she’d understood the power of radio and the actor’s voice.
• • •
The state supreme court’s long-awaited decision came down regarding Barbara’s appeal to prevent Fay from seeing Dion. The court had ruled in Fay’s favor. Barbara was adamant that Fay not be permitted to see the boy at her house—or at Fay’s. Cradick, her lawyer, made clear that her stance was for the “welfare of the child.” The court had believed Fay when he said he hadn’t had “a drop of liquor, including beer or cider,” since November 1936. Barbara’s statement to the court that she didn’t think Fay was unfit to see Dion right after she and Fay had separated, combined with her having entered into a property settlement that said that as long as Dion lived near Fay, the boy would be taken to visit with Fay once a week, worked against her appeal. Barbara’s charge in the appeal that the court was acting on the “pleasure of the defendant and not the welfare of the child” had not worked. Her appeal to prevent Fay from seeing Dion was denied. In addition, she was ordered to reimburse Fay and the court for charges of the appeal.
Dion was away at school, and Fay was getting ready to return to Broadway after the New Year to do straight vaudeville: ten acts with Elsie Janis as his star and Eva Le Gallienne making her debut in vaudeville doing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. For Fay it was back to seven nightly shows with a Saturday matinee. He had leased the Hudson Theatre; it was not by accident. In his own way, he was still trying to seduce Barbara back to him. Twelve years before, Barbara had had her first big success at the Hudson Theatre when, at nineteen, she’d opened on Broadway in The Noose.
• • •
The idea of making a picture about the empire builders who conquered mountains and deserts to forge an iron road to the West came to DeMille while traveling by train from Hollywood to New York. For two days he watched vast stretches of America flash by him. He thought of the building of the railroad and was overwhelmed with the courage, vision, and hard work of the men and women who, some seventy years before, had made the dream of spanning the continent a reality. The idea for the picture came to DeMille in Omaha, Nebraska, where the Union Pacific began its route west to Sacramento. In Cleveland, DeMille telegraphed the Paramount office in Hollywood: “Story of building of Union Pacific railroad to be my next work.”
• • •
DeMille, in 1938, was as powerful a man in the film business as D. W. Griffith in 1918. No director was able to command the money DeMille could to make the movies he wanted to make.
DeMille, a quarter of a century before, in 1913, with Jesse Lasky, a disappointed gold seeker from Alaska and cornetist (the first white man in the Royal Hawaiian Band), and Lasky’s brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish, a glove salesman, formed Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company to produce feature-length motion pictures. DeMille went west to make The Squaw Man and ended up in Hollywood, a town of orange and lemon groves and dust-covered roads, rented a barn on Vine Street, and made the movie, one of the first five-reeler motion pictures.
DeMille was made the director general of Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company in 1914. He wrote and directed his own pictures and oversaw the company’s productions. He wore a holster and gun and rode a horse to and from the studio; there were no banks, and checks were cashed at Hall’s grocery store on Hollywood Boulevard.
Three years later Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players to form Famous Players–Lasky, which distributed pictures through Paramount Pictures Corporation, and then took control of Paramount. DeMille was still director general. Eight years later, in 1925, DeMille set up his own company at the former Thomas Ince Studio in Culver City; three years later he went to Metro, and in 1932 he returned to Paramount. By 1938, DeMille had produced and directed
more than sixty (mostly) action-crammed pictures in twenty-five years, including The Buccaneer, The Plainsman, Cleopatra, The Sign of the Cross, The Godless Girl, The King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, Manslaughter, The Affairs of Anatol, Male and Female, Joan the Woman, The Cheat, The Warrens of Virginia, and The Squaw Man.
His pictures educated moviegoers about the rich, class divisions, marriage, etiquette, history, God, sex, the Bible, and the life of Christ. DeMille’s father was a lay Episcopal minister; his mother was from an Orthodox Jewish Liverpool family. Motion pictures to DeMille were the universal pulpit.
The forces that shaped DeMille as an artist—his father’s Episcopalianism and his mother’s Jewishness and heritage, which the family denied—were at odds with each other. DeMille made pictures on a large canvas, and when the moment came to choose between art and commerce, the scholarly William, DeMille’s older brother, chose art; Cecil, like his mother, who converted to the Anglican church, chose practicality and commerce.
DeMille’s pictures were dismissed by critics as pandering to the masses. DeMille would say, “Nobody likes me but the people”; he knew what they wanted, and his pictures were considered easy to watch. Like Griffith’s, they moved; they were alive, beautifully designed, and well cast with memorable faces. They were exciting, rich in detail, and directed with gusto. DeMille could create viable drama out of mundane material. He said of D. W. Griffith, “He taught us how to photograph thought”—a sign in DeMille’s office said, “Say it with props”—which “enabled us to tell stories in a new way and not just by action. Up to that time pictures had been all motion; after Griffith, we could photograph the soul and the mind, and that opened the gates that gave us the world.”
From DeMille’s days on the road as an actor, where he’d met his wife, Constance, and where he often had to dig ditches for the funds to get home (“I dug more ditches than anyone else west of the Mississippi,” he said), he got a feel of and for America. “That America is still there,” said DeMille, “and now it goes to the movies.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 83
