Through Bob Cobb, president of the Brown Derby, Barbara and Bob were part owners of the Hollywood Stars, a decades-old baseball team, originally the Vernon Tigers, that had joined the Pacific Coast League in 1909. The team had moved to San Francisco and become the Mission Reds, or the Missions.
In 1938, the Missions’ owner, Herbert Fleishhacker, brought the team back to Los Angeles, reclaimed its Hollywood name, and after one season sold the Stars to a syndicate of Hollywood and Los Angeles businessmen, among them Bob Cobb, who enlisted the energy and financial backing of Barbara and Bob, Gary Cooper, and William Powell, as well as the former silent actor and director Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street, Footlight Parade, San Quentin, and eighty-odd additional pictures) and others. Wade “Red” Killefer was the team’s manager.
For its first season, the Stars—the press called them the “Twinks”—had charity exhibition games with actors like Bob, playing against studio supporting players. The fans loved the games and filled the stands.
Bob threw the first pitch for the team’s debut game against the Chicago White Sox; Gary Cooper was catcher; Lloyd Bacon, umpire. Barbara, Bob, and Dion sat behind home plate. The Ritz Brothers sat nearby. When the Stars made a good play or a home run, the Ritz Brothers climbed the screen and put on their act for seven-year-old Dion, who was delighted with their antics.
The team’s financial backers soon recouped their investment and went out to hire serious players: Floyd Caves “Babe” Herman of the Brooklyn Robins; Bill Cissell; the Chicago “Black Sox” spitball ace Frank Shellenback; Bobby Doerr; and Vince DiMaggio.
With Franchot Tone and Joan Crawford at a polo match with actors and the Uplifters Club to benefit the Children’s Convalescent home, June 1936.
Barbara and Bob’s circle of friends was made up of Ty Power and Annabella, the Fred MacMurrays, the Bennys, the Marxes, the Wellmans. Dinner parties were on Saturday nights in rotation, at the Bennys’, Barbara and Bob’s, the Millands’, sitting around the fireplace or the patio after dinner, getting into arguments about pictures, listening to Jack Benny tell stories, or playing the Game, Tripoli, bingo, or geography. Barbara still had a horror of going to a party and not knowing anyone there, and if everyone was asked to get up and perform, she avoided it. She would leave the room to make a phone call or powder her nose. Barbara loathed parlor games, particularly when they were played so seriously. She played in order to be sociable and, when she did play, felt like “committing manslaughter.” She rarely knew the answers—the capital of Utah or the biggest city in South Dakota—and people would get annoyed with her for not knowing. Barbara had traveled with shows all over the United States. “But who knows where you are in shows?” she said. “All you’re interested in is counting up the house. I think you’re lucky if you know what state you live in these days.”
On other occasions the Bennys, Millands, Marxes, and MacMurrays went to the movies together.
Barbara gave Zeppo a party at the Cafe Lamaze for his thirty-eighth birthday. Bing Crosby sang, Bob Hope told jokes, Jack Benny played his violin, and Fred MacMurray played the saxophone. The press assumed Barbara would use the event to announce the date of her wedding; city desks checked in to see if there was any news. No announcement was made.
• • •
After Union Pacific was finished shooting, Barbara and Joel McCrea were called into DeMille’s office. He was preparing a script, North West Mounted Police, and wanted Barbara and McCrea to star in the picture. Barbara was thrilled, as was McCrea. When Gary Cooper became available—he was unhappy with the picture Warner Bros. had for him—DeMille wanted Cooper to star in the picture as well. McCrea and Cooper were both right for the same role. McCrea decided to bow out and let Cooper take the part. DeMille hired Preston Foster to replace McCrea, and he dropped Barbara and hired Paulette Goddard, then in the press for being the unwed, unofficial Mrs. Charlie Chaplin as well as one of Selznick’s final choices for Scarlett O’Hara, along with Jean Arthur and Joan Bennett until Vivien Leigh appeared as “the dark horse.”
McCrea advised Barbara not to be angry. “It’s just another picture,” he said, and reassured her there would be others.
“Well, he loved us until he could do better,” she said.
• • •
Moviegoers were staying at home, mesmerized by their favorite radio shows. Attendance at the box office was dropping off; double features weren’t drawing audiences the way they had. The average moviegoer was twenty-seven years old, earning $28 a week.
Barbara renewed her contract with the J. Walter Thompson Company for Lux Radio Theatre. She frequently used radio as a showcase for her work and asked a producer to tune in to her next broadcast.
Nothing lighthearted had come her way in a long time. Barbara wanted to prove that she could do something happy. She gave the lines everything she had. “The audience in the theater seemed to like it,” she said. “And I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing.” One of the technicians told Barbara that for the broadcast’s last forty minutes the show had been off the air in Los Angeles. “A week’s work shot to hell,” said Barbara. “The station has to break down just when I have a chance to prove I can do something besides woebegone mothers with fourteen children at their skirts, heading over the hill to the poorhouse.”
In that vein, Barbara performed So Big on Lux Radio Theatre with Preston Foster, Fay Wray, and Otto Kruger. At intermission, the show’s guests were Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president’s mother, and Edna Ferber.
Barbara appeared on The Chase and Sanborn Hour. With the host, Don Ameche, she did an adaptation of Universal’s 1936 hit Next Time We Love, which had starred Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. On the same show, Barbara did a comedy skit with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in which she marries Charlie so he can go to Niagara Falls (she’s honeymooning in London; they’re “modern”) on “the Twenty-Cent Limited” (“And they charged me $8.20 for a ticket,” said McCarthy).
• • •
Barbara signed a contract with Columbia to star in the film version of Clifford Odets’s hit play Golden Boy. The play was the Group Theatre’s greatest success; when it opened in November 1937 at the Belasco, The New York Times hailed the company as “our leading art theater.”
Golden Boy had the patina of “official art”: hallowed, reverential, self-important. It had the seriousness and the suffering of its moment.
Its subject: the working class, talent, family virtue; the conflict between artistic aspiration up against brute force and money; sexual suffering, political suffering, social suffering, exotic suffering.
The play ran for 250 performances in New York and was sold to Columbia Pictures for $100,000. Harry Cohn wanted it to be the studio’s biggest movie of the year. Columbia was still in search of its golden boy to be the lead. More than five thousand possible golden boys had been interviewed in three months; almost a hundred actors were tested, including Elia Kazan, Alan Ladd, Richard Carlson, and Tyrone Power.
Alan Ladd blackened his hair with mascara to look Italian for his test. It was a hot day, and the mascara and sweat ran down his face. Richard Carlson was on Broadway in the musical comedy Stars in Your Eyes with Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman; Fox refused to loan Columbia Francis Lederer, who’d starred in the West Coast company of Golden Boy.
Cohn wanted John Garfield for the role of Joe Bonaparte, but after Capra had picked Darryl Zanuck to be the first recipient of the Irving Thalberg award, Jack Warner refused to lend Garfield to Columbia for the picture.
Odets’s play was about Hollywood, about success and fame, about a musician fighting for self-expression; a prizefighter out to conquer (his name is Bonaparte); a first-generation American, son of an Italian immigrant, refusing to be kept down, fighting to get out, to be 100 percent American, and searching for his place in a world that ignores those without success and money. To have it all, he abandons his art, his intellect, his family, his soul.
Barbara was to play Lorna Moon, girlfriend of Tom Moody, f
ormer top fight manager around town who takes his 10 percent; he’s desperate to find a winner again who can turn things around for him.
Moody won’t divorce his wife and marry Lorna until he’s achieved a “resurrection.” (“I’ve been off the gold standard for eight years,” he tells Lorna. “Find me a good black boy and I’ll show you a mint.”)
Lorna Moon, like Barbara, is an orphan, but untouched by love. Odets saw in Lorna a “quiet glitter” despite her eyes that “hold a soft, sad glance”; she is feminine, vulnerable, alone in the world, but tough in her ability to take care of herself. She’s been reared by a father incapable of raising a child; she’s got by with no feeling.
She’s the girl over the river (“My father’s still alive, shucking oysters and bumming drinks,” says Lorna). Her side of life is lonely, abandoned; she’s “a lost baby,” Joe Bonaparte says of her. Odets took her first name from “forlorn” and “lovelorn.” She’s a drifter, brought up with the war in the streets; nothing can touch her. She understands cruelty; she had no dolls, no birthday parties.
Her last name is Moon. The moon is made of rock, lifeless. Lorna wants to marry Moody, though she doesn’t love him; she wants to be protected by him. Moody needs Joe Bonaparte to stop holding back with “his mitts” and fight with fists “mightier than the fiddle” and win. Moody’s partner says, “Bonaparte used to have a punch like dynamite; now even a mosquito stings harder.”
Without Bonaparte’s soul in the ring, he won’t win.
“It’s our last chance for a decent life,” Moody says to Lorna. “For getting married—we have to make the kid fight! He’s more than a meal ticket—he’s everything we want and need from life!”
Lorna goes on their behalf to stir Joe up. “I’m a tramp from Newark,” she reassures Moody about being able to seduce Joe into taking the fighting road. “I know a dozen ways.”
Lorna makes it clear to Bonaparte she’s a whore and doesn’t much like him; she doesn’t need anybody, unlike Moody, who tells Lorna how much he needs her. “Success and fame!” Lorna says to Joe as they sit alone one night on a park bench. “Or just a lousy living.” That sums it up for Lorna. Joe is complex and tough and proud. Lorna has never been protected by life and family; her world has no values; fame and success are the answers for her; she sees it the way society sees it—winning and losing—and she’s rooting for the fighter. Joe knows money won’t get him a soul or culture; he is literate, educated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica (“from A to Z”), with a desire to learn; he knows that fighting is brutal, that it tears down life.
Luther Adler as Joe Bonaparte with Frances Farmer as Lorna Moon, in the Group Theatre’s production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, directed by Harold Clurman; it played for two hundred and fifty performances, opening in November 1937 and closing in June 1938. In the cast were the Group’s actors Morris Carnovsky, Lee J. Cobb, Howard Da Silva, Jules Garfield, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Martin Ritt.
Joe has it all except for love. Bonaparte’s trainer says to him, “Your heart ain’t in fightin’—your hate is.”
Golden Boy was about to start filming, and Columbia still didn’t have its Joe Bonaparte. The studio was casting Bonaparte’s sister and sent for a test of a girl under contract at Paramount. Rouben Mamoulian, the picture’s director, watched the test and spotted in it a young man.
Harry Cohn sent for the actor. He was a twenty-year-old contract player, a member of Paramount’s Golden Circle of promising actors, who included Betty Field and Robert Preston.
Cohn asked the blond twenty-year-old William Beedle if he could act.
“I’m not sure,” said Beedle.
“Can you box?” Cohn asked.
“No.”
“Can you play the violin?”
“No.”
Nor had he ever studied an Italian dialect or been photographed with darker hair or had his hair curled.
Cohn asked, “Then what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m here because you sent for me,” Beedle said.
The actor was given a script on Thursday and told he would be tested the next day.
Barbara and Adolphe Menjou agreed to work with Beedle on the test Mamoulian was ready to direct.
Barbara saw that the young actor had a certain quality. She saw his dedication and thought he would be good as Joe Bonaparte. He was six feet tall with blue eyes and blond hair. She thought he had what it took to be a big star and pushed Mamoulian to hire the young actor.
On April 1, April Fools’ Day, Mamoulian took a big chance and agreed to give Beedle the part. Mamoulian told the young actor he had twelve days, when the picture was to start, to be made over into a boxer, a violinist, and an Italian. Beedle wondered why they hadn’t mentioned the acting.
The name William Franklin Beedle Jr. was changed to William Holden, an associate editor of the Los Angeles Times. (“I’ve got a boy here I’d like to use your name for,” said Terry DeLapp, the head of Paramount’s publicity department. “Will he get me into trouble?” asked the namesake. “I’ll vouch for him,” said DeLapp.)
Columbia bought out half of Beedle’s contract from Paramount. His salary, which he had negotiated himself, was $50 a week; Columbia was paying $25 of it. Beedle was making “less than a waitress at a drive-in,” he said.
• • •
Lorna Moon is the unattainable. Joe says to her, “You’re half dead and you don’t know it.” Lorna says later, “You make me feel too human, Joe. All I want is peace and quiet, not love . . . I don’t mind being what you call ‘half dead.’ In fact it’s what I like.”
Frances Farmer had starred as Lorna Moon in the original stage production of Golden Boy. At twenty-three, Farmer was under contract to Paramount and made a success in Come and Get It. She’d left Hollywood to go east on a leave from the studio to work in summer stock with the hope of becoming a more serious actress. Harold Clurman, directing the stage production of Odets’s play and head of the Group Theatre and one of its founders, and Clifford Odets were both drawn to Farmer’s perfect beauty and hired her for the part of Lorna Moon.
Elia Kazan, Odets’s best friend, who played Eddie Fuseli, the gangster who takes over managing Bonaparte’s career, said Farmer “had a special glow, a skin without flaw, lustrous eyes—a blonde you’d dream about. She also had a wry and rather disappointed manner, a twist of the mouth, that suited the part. She was a dramatic contrast to the dark up-from-under men she was going to play with.”
“You want your arm in gelt up to the elbow,” Lorna says to Joe. “You’ll take fame so people won’t laugh or scorn your face. You’d give your soul for those things. But every time you turn your back your little soul kicks you in the teeth.”
Lee J. Cobb (left) as Mr. Bonaparte in the screen version of Golden Boy (he played Mr. Carp in the original stage production) with William H. Strauss (silent picture actor as well as in The Public Enemy and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, among other sound films) as Mr. Carp. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Clifford Odets was drawn to women who would permit him to “combine the best features of both married and single life without the woman being unhappy about it.” Odets wanted it “hot and cold, north and south.” He believed a wife should keep house for him, cook for him, give him children and care for them, and, at the same time, look after and protect his genius. The character of Lorna Moon is there to serve as a mirror of male virtue, male aspiration, male sensitivity and conflict.
Most of the time is spent on the male characters, even the minor male characters: Lee J. Cobb; Adolphe Menjou; his partner, Sam Levene, as the brother-in-law. The daughter, Beatrice Blinn, has nothing to do except beg for her husband to go to bed with her. She admires him; she admires the father; the women are there to admire the men. The nuance and the character are in the men.
• • •
Odets wrote Fuseli as a predator on the hunt. “It is the background of the downtrodden Wop,” wrote Odets. “It develops a furtiv
eness . . . His homosexuality may be only partly conscious. He is a bird of prey. Eddie should be the most stylized performance in the play. The reason he is anxious to have a champ is that he would be Eddie’s boy to be proud of. He would have dominance over him.” Kazan said he played the part of the mobster, “circling the young fighter” that he wanted a piece of, “like a hawk then stooping to pick him up. I couldn’t take my eyes off Luther [Joe Bonaparte]; he was what I craved.” Kazan gave the part “an elegance of manner and dress” that he’d observed in top gangster figures. “I also made myself like a homosexual.”
“Don’t ask me which is worse,” Fuseli says, “women or spiders.” When Kazan looked at Frances Farmer onstage, he “felt this disgust,” he said. “I couldn’t understand what the man I wanted saw in her.”
Bonaparte finally erupts and says to Fuseli, “You use me like a gun. Your loyalty’s to keep me oiled and polished.”
Kazan played the part with passion; eventually, he took over the part of Joe Bonaparte on the stage, and Lee J. Cobb took on the role of the father that Morris Carnovsky had played. Cobb at twenty-six years old was playing the elderly Mr. Bonaparte.
“What Odets was trying to say,” wrote Harold Clurman, “was that the old world of money and power was fast becoming decrepit and desperate, while the new world of the future, which belonged to the mass of people, was, in America, still raw, unclear, undisciplined, mentally and morally clumsy.”
• • •
Frank Capra recognized himself in Joe Bonaparte and intended to direct Golden Boy as soon as he finished directing the picture of the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman Pulitzer Prize–winning play, You Can’t Take It with You. Capra had convinced Harry Cohn to buy the film rights to Odets’s play as a way to entice Jean Arthur back to Columbia, to star in You Can’t Take It with You (replacing Olivia de Havilland, whom Warner had decided not to loan to Columbia). Arthur was then to star as Lorna Moon, the blonde who would be the dramatic contrast to the dark up-from-under men Kazan spoke of.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 86
