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

by Victoria Wilson

  Harriett Coray, circa 1939. She grew up in Chicago and went to convent schools. When she started to work for Barbara she was living in a segregated Los Angeles neighborhood, on East 54th Street, with her husband, Simon, and six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Barbara would read ten books a week and pass them on to Harriett, who, after reading each, would take them to the Motion Picture relief home. (COURTESY MICHAEL CORAY)

  • • •

  Barbara arranged for her brother, By—screen name, Bert—Stevens, to get a bit part in the picture as one of the patrons in a Cheyenne gambling tent.

  Robert Preston, at 21, was hired to play Brian Donlevy’s fast-talking, slick gambling partner at odds with his old war pal Jeff (McCrea); they had fought, bled, and “died” together as Union soldiers; each is in love with Mollie Monahan.

  Preston had worked in the Pasadena Community Theater for two years, where he appeared in more than forty productions, including Idiot’s Delight, which had helped to bring him to Paramount.

  Preston was new. No one had heard of him, but he was sure of himself. He’d been told by a character actor, “Whenever you’re acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch and you pull it down around your shoulders.”

  • • •

  Just before DeMille was to start shooting the picture, his prostate acted up, and he underwent an emergency operation. It didn’t stop him, though, from going forward with the first day’s shooting. The day following the operation the fifty-seven-year-old director was brought to the set with a fever of 102. Barbara, Joel McCrea, and Robert Preston rehearsed while DeMille directed from a stretcher. For ten days, DeMille’s stretcher was fixed to the camera boom, and he swung with it up in the air and down to check camera angles.

  With DeMille, shooting on Union Pacific. He returned to the studio, against doctor’s orders, the day after his emergency operation from a prostate flare-up that had caused him to collapse, seen here directing from a stretcher with a fever of 102, January 10, 1939.

  Preston believed that DeMille only understood the spectacular crowd scenes, that as soon as those shots were finished, DeMille didn’t know what he was doing. “In the small interior shots,” said Preston, “DeMille would yell, ‘Cut! Print it.’ And that was it. No direction. No retakes.”

  For more than two weeks of shooting, Barbara and Bob Preston were alone in a boxcar. “Because there were no crowd scenes, no special effects, just two people acting,” said Preston, “you’d never have known the old man was on the set.” DeMille believed that making a picture was not “an acting school.” He hired an actor because he trusted him or her to be “professional. Professional.” He said, “When you do something wrong, that is when I will talk to you.”

  • • •

  DeMille thought Barbara was one of the most sensitive, least temperamental artists that he’d worked with. “She is a human being as well as a great artist,” he said of her.

  With Robert Preston, Union Pacific, 1939. DeMille was described by Evelyn Keyes as “a tyrant . . . a despot in his own world, perched high above on a giant boom, [giving] his orders through a microphone whose projection filled every corner of the stage.” (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  There was never a “better workman.” DeMille believed that no woman could be an actress until she’d had her heart broken.

  He expected his actors and actresses to act with courage and to be willing to do whatever the role required without “squalls of temperament or temper” and to do it well; Barbara was the most willing, the least actressy; he could count on her to do “her work with all her heart.” DeMille was equally impressed with how, in making Union Pacific, Barbara willingly exposed herself to danger to do the most extraordinary stunts: leaping from railroad cars; lying on her back in a boxcar while sulfur and molasses spilled over her.

  DeMille never allowed his actors to read the script. “It only confuses them and they get their ideas mixed up with mine.” He outlined each scene as the actors came to it, explained the business, gave them their lines, and rehearsed the action. “The first thing every one of them has to learn is to do exactly what they are told.” This was the way other silent directors worked—John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Henry King, and the others—who survived sound. John Ford’s advice for a director setting up a scene: “Don’t look at the fucking script. That will confuse you. You know the story. Tell it in pictures. Forget the words.”

  • • •

  While Barbara had proved she could do light comedy, Bob’s railroad picture, Stand Up and Fight (“for the muggs more than the dames,” said Variety), once again set out to show moviegoers that Robert Taylor was all man (“another two-fisted role for Taylor and a smash hit for MGM”).

  In the picture, which opened early in 1939, Bob was transformed into Clark Gable; he walked like Gable, talked like Gable, smiled like Gable, even looked like Gable.

  Bob’s next picture was a light comedy, this time with Myrna Loy, called Lucky Night.

  Myrna Loy viewed picture making as “a tiresome necessity in a chaotic world,” and she thought Lucky Night was “a lame bit of whimsy.” Loy was supposed to first make a new Thin Man with William Powell, so Bob left Los Angeles for New York to see as much theater as possible. No sooner had he arrived at Grand Central than Metro called him back to the studio. Bill Powell was being operated on because of an intestinal obstruction. The Thin Man Returns was postponed; Lucky Night was to start shooting right away.

  Myrna Loy thought Bob somewhat stuffy. The first day on the set Loy put on some Cuban records to fill the hours between shots. Bob approached her and said, “Do you have to play that sexy stuff all the time? It’s the dirtiest music I ever heard.”

  “Oh, brother,” Loy said to herself.

  Myrna and Bob got on during the picture, but she was further put off when Bob tried to “cook up a little triangle” to make Barbara think Myrna was interested in him. Holly Barnes asked Myrna’s maid, Theresa, about Myrna’s interest in Bob, and she assured Holly that it wasn’t true.

  “I’m not sure Barbara believed that,” said Myrna. On the last day of shooting “Barbara came by in a limousine,” said Loy, “and whisked Bob off.”

  • • •

  The final scene of Union Pacific showing the driving of the golden spike joining the track-laying teams and completing the transcontinental railroad was shot in Canoga Park, near Hollywood. DeMille was at the helm. The actual golden spike of the 1869 ceremony—removed from a special vault in the Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco—was used in the picture. The two trains were perfect replicas in every detail. The Chinese and Irish laborers flung their hats to the wind and cheered to the tune of the locomotives’ whistles.

  With Joel McCrea, Union Pacific, 1939. As photographed, they embodied DeMille’s vision of the men and women who worked, fought, and suffered to make the American dream come true.

  As they were setting up the shot, DeMille told his assistant to have the Indians lined up along the track. “Their lands have just been sequestered, progress and civilization are triumphant,” said DeMille. “And this scene is symbolic of their plight. So they should look sad.”

  The scene was shot. The Indians sat quietly by the side of the tracks amid all the hoopla, looking sad-eyed. The sadness was real; two steel rails lay across the breadth of their once holy hunting grounds like dead black snakes, and the fire-breathing “iron horse” that slithered along would soon forever chase away the buffalo.

  DeMille shot much of Union Pacific in Cedar City. The location work with McCrea and Barbara was shot in Sonora and at Woodland Hills in the western area of the San Fernando Valley, including the scene with the Indians tearing down water tanks and the scene with the golden spiking. Some of the picture was shot in an icehouse in Los Angeles. Much of it was shot on soundstages at Paramount; the studio had no back lot, and DeMille used process shots.

  DeMille shot 200,000 feet of film on a $1 million budget.

  Barbara was get
ting $7,500 a week (actresses, though not Barbara, often worked with “the great DeMille” at half their salary for the privilege of working with him and the chance at stardom; Claudette Colbert, making Midnight at the same time, was getting $15,000 a week); McCrea, $5,000; Preston, $250; Akim Tamiroff, $1,000 per picture.

  • • •

  Barbara was on location for five weeks, eating cookhouse food, going without hot water, sleeping on a cot. “Just trying to re-create our history, to the best of my ability, was more than enough job for me,” she said. She felt as if she were a part of the American past.

  From her days as a child in Brooklyn, watching the fearless Pearl White—the modern Joan of Arc—jump off bridges, cliffs, railroad trains, yachts, doing her own stunts in the serials, Barbara respected stunt people, understood how hard they worked, and marveled at what they could do, and she was determined to do most of her own stunts. Pearl White had been Barbara’s model: a woman without temperament who worked ten hours a day, disliked flattery, was frank, with plain common sense, and regarded her acting more as work than as art.

  To make Union Pacific, Barbara stepped out of the Park Avenue gowns of The Mad Miss Manton into the dust-covered boots and britches of Mollie Monahan. Her glamorization didn’t stop from one picture to the next. As scruffy as she was, done up to look like the postmistress at “end of track,” the refinement of Barbara’s beauty and her burgeoning radiance on-screen were there to see. Her thick brogue softened her edgier self; she played Mollie Monahan with the spirit of an innocent and the wisdom of an experienced soul. At last, she was the girl “with the boys” in an epic saga of the American West, and she reveled in it.

  FOURTEEN

  Champion of the “Cockeyed Wonder”

  Where do you come from? You look like you don’t have parents.

  —Joe Bonaparte to Lorna Moon, Golden Boy

  No tricks, Miss Moon.

  —Eddie Fuseli, Golden Boy

  Dream lover, fold your arms around me

  —“Dream Lover,” from the film The Love Parade (1929)

  (Clifford Grey/Victor Schertzinger)

  January started off with Hollywood spinning from the aftershocks of a Photoplay article that revealed the names of those movie couples who were living together in unwedded bliss. The exposé was on the stands weeks before Christmas.

  The article, “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives,” struck dumb Will Hays, the former postmaster general under Warren G. Harding and guardian of motion picture movie morals. His code of movie “don’ts and be carefuls” had been devised to limit sex on-screen, banish scandals off, and keep the government out of filmdom’s business.

  The article caused havoc with the studios and with those whose living arrangements were openly written about for the moviegoing public.

  “Nowhere has domesticity, outside the marital state, reached such a full flower as in Hollywood,” said the article by Kirtley Baskette. “Nowhere are there so many famous unmarried husbands and wives.”

  The Hays Office issued a statement calling the article “pretty bad. The title is even worse than the story itself but it’s all bad.” The article described the intimate details of the living arrangements of Hollywood’s biggest names: Carole Lombard and Clark Gable; George Raft and Virginia Pine; Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard (no marriage certificate existed to prove they were husband and wife); Constance Bennett and Gilbert Roland (“in a perfect design for living,” said the article, “with a titled husband in Europe and . . . her devoted slave [Roland] in Hollywood”); and Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor.

  The article described how most of the couples could not marry since one or both were already married. These “unwed couples . . . go everywhere together; do everything in pairs. No hostess would think of inviting them separately, or pairing them with another. They solve one another’s problems,” the article went on, “handle each other’s business affairs . . . build houses near each other . . . father or mother each other’s children . . . Consider the results,” it said, “strictly out of wedlock.”

  Of Barbara and Bob, the piece described how “they’ve been practically a family since Bob bought his ranch estate in Northridge and built a house there . . . No coincidence can possibly explain his choosing that site . . . right beside Barbara Stanwyck’s place . . . [W]itness how quickly their interests—deep and expensive, permanent interests—merged after they slipped into the unique Hollywood habit . . . Just as Dad gives Mother an electric icebox for Christmas and she retaliates with a radio, Bob Taylor presents Barbara Stanwyck with a tennis court for her birthday, with Barbara giving Bob a two-horse auto trailer for his!”

  Following the publication of the piece, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer insisted Bob and Barbara get married.

  Newspapers ignored the article, but within a few weeks Clark Gable and Carole Lombard announced they were to be married as soon as Gable’s divorce came through from his second wife, Rhea Langham, and Barbara and Bob publicly announced their engagement. Bob had given Barbara a diamond and ruby engagement bracelet for Christmas, along with a Saint Christopher medal engraved, “God Protect Her Because I Love Her.”

  Barbara and Bob had been seeing each other for three years. Barbara knew she was in it for the long haul and in certain ways knew that marrying Bob was going to be tough. Barbara was attractive, but there were many other women in Hollywood who were far more beautiful. She knew she was going to have to vie for Bob’s attention, and “how in hell am I supposed to do that?” she said.

  The Los Angeles Examiner banner headline, December 14, 1938, soon after the Photoplay article “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives” appeared on the stands, creating an industry-wide scandal. (LOS ANGELES EXAMINER)

  When Barbara and Bob had started to see each other, she was much more experienced sexually than he. She taught him about making love, as she taught him everything she’d learned about Hollywood; coached him with his roles; advised him in his dealings with Metro; sent him to her publicist, Helen Ferguson, and to her financial managers, Morgan Maree of Miller Marx, headed by Marion’s brother, Alan Miller.

  Morgan Maree had taken over Barbara’s finances and investments after Zeppo became her agent. She and Maree had become friends, as he set about undoing the web of chaos created by Fay’s schemes and dealings, from which she was still trying to get free. Barbara thought Maree an astute businessman and gave him the latitude to invest her money in long-term plans as he saw fit. Barbara required a business manager “just to stop all silliness” and plan for the future. Money was important to Barbara, but security was more important; she didn’t want to be dependent on anyone.

  Once Barbara and Bob were married, the plan was to have Bob and his horses and Great Dane, Hager, move to Marwyck while they looked for a house in town. Bob was selling his eight-room cottage made from rock and his twenty-eight-acre ranch. With it were a two-car garage, dog kennels for twelve dogs, a mile-long practice track, and thirty acres. The racers Barbara had given him were to be moved to a stable in town; he would find good homes for all the other horses, and he was hoping to buy a 160-acre ranch near Chatsworth.

  Barbara had put her share of Marwyck up for sale: the house, tennis courts, pool, and ten acres. The rest of the ranch the Marxes would keep.

  Barbara had owned Marwyck for three years. The farm had thirty-nine racehorses—each from celebrated bloodlines—Brief Moment, Irish Broom, Little Shower, among them. The Nut, by Mad Hatter from Afternoon by Prince Palatine, had won more than $100,000 and was from the family of Top Flight, Spot Cash, Candy Kid, Whisk Broom 2nd, Crusader, and Fayette.

  They’d sold one horse called Mad Sue to Mervyn LeRoy and another, Co Step, to Harry Warner. As a breeding farm, Marwyck was a success. It was a profitable year for the ranch. “We haven’t made a lot of money,” said Barbara, “but probably about as much as we could have got in interest from the banks. And look at the fun we’ve had.”

  Barbara had spent afternoons with Dion by the pool, looking ou
t over the fields and marveling at how “wonderful [it was] that we own this? When I was a child,” she said, “if I’d had a pool like this I’d have thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I thought a squirt from a garden hose was wonderful.”

  Dion wasn’t as thrilled about it as Barbara was; he’d grown up with it. Barbara felt she’d been too extravagant with him.

  Their ranch house was simple, unpretentious, comfortable, with a lived-in feeling. Its only extravagance: her bathroom with its large marble tub. Barbara had always wanted a fancy bathtub. She’d only found out what a bathtub was when she was an older child. To make up for the times when she’d toured on the road staying “in tank town boarding houses” and bathing in awful tubs, she’d given herself a bathroom the size of a movie set.

  The ranch was too far out of town for friends to visit. The long drive to and from the studio was too much for Barbara. Before she’d started to see Bob, she’d disliked socializing. Now she’d come to enjoy it, and several nights a week she and Bob were out at parties, premieres, and nightclubs. She still suffered from shyness and the feeling that she didn’t measure up. She would arrive at the Trocadero or Ciro’s in an evening gown, her hair done up, and would see Claudette (“looking divine”) or Dietrich (“looking like something out of this world”) or Hedy Lamarr and feel awful about herself, like a shopgirl. “It’s no use,” Barbara would say. “I know what I look like. I like comfort too well to fix and fuss.”

  Barbara and Bob had permanent ringside seats for fight night at the Hollywood Legion Stadium and went regularly to Hollywood Baseball Park to watch a game and eat hot dogs and peanuts, often taking Dion with them.