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

by Victoria Wilson

  Jean Arthur announced that she was retiring from the screen, or Cohn planted the story in the press as part of his attempt to win Arthur back to Columbia. She was “completely worn out,” she said, “more mentally than physically,” from the six pictures she’d made in a year, one right after the other, including Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Ex–Mrs. Bradford, DeMille’s Plainsman, and Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night. “Three too many,” she said. She was bushed from her yearlong legal battle with Columbia over Cohn’s bullying picture assignments for her. She was “physically numb” from her fight with Cohn.

  Instead of retiring, Arthur signed a new three-year contract with Columbia that allowed her to make only two pictures a year for Cohn and gave her the right to make one film a year with another studio. Most crucial of all for Arthur, her new contract stipulated that she would not be required to talk to the press or make public appearances for any of the pictures.

  Rouben Mamoulian didn’t want Jean Arthur for the part of Lorna Moon. He wanted Barbara Stanwyck. Barbara could much more project Lorna Moon, cynical and sexual, “a tramp from Newark” rescued by Tom Moody, fight manager (“He loved me in a world of enemies,” says Lorna, “of stags and bulls. He stiffened the space between my shoulder blades. Misery reached out to misery”). Jean Arthur was cast in Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings.

  Mamoulian saw in Barbara “the essence of a personality. The capacity to stir the imagination of the audience, to make them feel that there is much more to the actor or actress than meets the eye and the ear.”

  • • •

  Mamoulian, like the members of the Group Theatre, was drawn to the techniques of Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, to realism and naturalism in acting. As he directed on the stage, he came to see, as did the Group, that though dramatic plays like DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy—Mamoulian’s first production in New York—were realistic (the play was acclaimed as a triumph of realism), what gave the production its feeling of realism was highly stylized, even choreographed. Mamoulian came to see that stage poetry, rhythm, integration, and style were much more effective than stage realism. What was important was the inner truth, not the logic of life.

  Harry Cohn had wanted Mamoulian to come to Columbia for some time. He had directed ten pictures, among them The Song of Songs with Marlene Dietrich; Queen Christina with Garbo, with whom he’d had an affair; and Becky Sharp, the first Technicolor picture, starring Miriam Hopkins. His last picture had been High, Wide, and Handsome, and he’d recently finished directing the West Coast stage production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Cohn wanted Mamoulian to direct a story called The Gentleman from Montana by Lewis R. Foster about a young man who goes to the U.S. Senate and sees the stuff of American politics at work. The Production Code thought the picture an “unflattering portrayal of our system of government . . . [that] might lead to being a covert attack on the democratic form of government.” As a result, Cohn changed his mind about wanting to make the picture; Capra had seen the Montana script and turned it down, but when he learned that Mamoulian was going to make the picture with or without Cohn’s backing, Capra read the script again. He decided he liked it after all and wanted to do it.

  Rouben Mamoulian, circa 1939.

  Mamoulian went to Cohn and said, “The one thing I like here is Golden Boy.” Capra decided to trade Mamoulian the Odets play for The Gentleman from Montana.

  Mamoulian had enormous charm; he was old-world, an Armenian from Tiflis, Georgia, a theatrical country. He was sent to the University of Moscow to study law and instead studied writing, rehearsing, and directing with the Moscow Art Theatre studio; he learned music and spoke Russian, Armenian, Georgian, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and English. He understood and talked easily of electronics, painting, botany. At twenty-seven, he was invited by George Eastman to come to America and organize and direct an opera company at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York.

  In Golden Boy, Mamoulian, whose two heroes were Napoleon and Buffalo Bill, wanted to show the savagery of those who attended boxing matches, more so than the people who boxed.

  • • •

  Odets’s plays were an indictment of America and were about the underdog. Odets wrote for actors; his dialogue had power and urgency. It was sharp and ungrammatical, full of jargon and imagery, natural and easy for actors to speak, not at all the kind of language that was heard from most playwrights; there was a rhythm in it. The dialogue was stylized, written to be played with speed and energy. The trick was for the actor to throw away the lines, not hit them; otherwise they would sound phony.

  Odets wrote in his notebook the words heard in the streets of half-educated Jews, Italians, and Irish and made them unique. He found something “elevated and poetic,” he said, “in very common scenes in the way people spoke.”

  Clifford Odets in Sidney Kingsley’s first play, Men in White, directed by Lee Strasberg, 1933. As an actor, Odets was “strictly stock, as though in a straitjacket,” said Franchot Tone. But Odets watched the director work on Men in White, made suggestions about how the play could be reshaped—and Strasberg incorporated the actor’s notes.

  Odets was originally a stock company actor who felt he should have been a composer (his conversation was punctuated with arias; he improvised on the piano, often in the middle of the night; a bust of Beethoven sat over his writing table). As an actor, Odets was barely adequate on the stage; “too tense,” he said, he couldn’t relax. He was one of the original members of the Group Theatre, a theater collective inspired by Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre that used an ensemble approach to produce plays that were emotionally true and more realistic than anything being produced in America. Stanislavsky had said, “The whole theatrical business in America is based on the personality of the actor.”

  Those in the Group Theatre made up a permanent company of actors; there were no stars. Each was trained in Stanislavsky’s technique. Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and the others created a new kind of theater where the actor expressed true emotional life onstage and where the play’s lines no longer carried him.

  From the Group’s beginning, Odets was taken on as an actor despite the misgivings of the Group’s heads, Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. Clurman said of Odets at the time, “Something is cooking with him. I don’t know if it’s potato pancakes or what, but what’s cooking has a rich odor. Something will develop from that man.”

  Two seasons into the Group’s existence, Odets, in the background as an actor, began to write plays in a large kitchen closet, “crouched over his typewriter,” said Kazan, “like a lion over prey, pounding away, accompanying himself with roars and grunts and snatches of dialogue—he spoke the actors’ roles as he wrote them.” Odets wrote his plays for the Group and for its method of acting, its ensemble idea; all the parts were important to him. He wrote as an actor and a director.

  Odets’s plays went unproduced for two years until the Group put on Waiting for Lefty and followed it with his Awake and Sing! and Till the Day I Die. He had three plays on Broadway and a fourth about to be produced—Paradise Lost. He was celebrated as the most promising young playwright in the country—his own kind of “cockeyed wonder”—who was as well a radical, a revolutionary. He was written about, sought after, courted by Hollywood, where he soon went (“with a sense of disgrace,” he said) and wrote The General Died at Dawn to earn enough money—$2,500 a week—to send back half to the Group.

  He appeared on the cover of Time magazine, was hailed as the most exciting playwright since Eugene O’Neill, and was compared to O’Casey and Chekhov.

  Within three months Odets was not the same young man he’d been before: the parties to which he was invited, the people who took him up, the noise of it. He wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of fame (“Well, who doesn’t want to be famous? Who doesn’t want to be successful?” he asked. “But you want it on your own terms”). Odets said of his boyhood growing up in the Bronx: it was “ordinary
, middle-class”; everything about it was “typical, typical, so typical.”

  Odets was the spoiled Jewish boy whom everyone expected to do great things. Stella Adler once said to him, still a minor actor in the Group, “Clifford, if you don’t become a genius, I’ll never forgive you.” The choice for Joe Bonaparte is, will he be a great violinist or a champion boxer? Golden Boy in part is a male fantasy of choice, of virtue, of filial devotion, of success.

  Odets said of the society that embraced him, “Is this all? Stendhal kept asking,” said Odets, “ ‘Is this all?’ How well I understand that question!” He saw the acclaim as empty, even harmful; it “blunted his impulses,” he said, took away his “appetite and zest.” “I could be a better and broader man if I were not known, if I could wear a mask or change my name.”

  Accolades isolated Odets and cut him off from the things he was trying to get to. “He wanted to be the great revolutionary playwright of our day,” said Harold Clurman. “And the white-haired boy of Broadway. He wanted the devotion of the man in the cellar and the congratulations of the boys at ’21.’ ”

  In Hollywood Odets worked on a screenplay for Lewis Milestone about the Spanish Civil War. Milestone took him to his first prizefight to see the great boxer Tony Canzoneri fight Lou Ambers for the lightweight title. Canzoneri was a two-time champion by the age of twenty-two, considered the best fighter in the world, winning in one year the lightweight title in sixty-six seconds and the junior welterweight championship and beating the reigning lightweight champion, the dazzling Cuban two-handed puncher Kid Chocolate.

  From the preliminaries of the Canzoneri-Ambers fight, Odets avoided looking at the ring and spent the fight—Canzoneri lost to Ambers—writing in his notebook, which he was never without. Milestone complained that the tickets had been expensive and that Odets should write at home; the playwright said, “You have just given me a very fine play and what’s more it will make money for the Group,” which was then about to fold from financial difficulties.

  Odets’s play, originally called The Manly Art, or Golden Gloves, then A Cockeyed Wonder, and finally Golden Boy, was about how to live and unify the soul in an indifferent—American—society, its artists, seen through the corruption of a young musician—Joe Bonaparte—who wants to be a concert violinist. “With music,” he tells Lorna, “I’m never alone when I’m alone—Playing music . . . that’s like saying, ‘I am man. I belong here. How do you do, World—good evening!’ When I play music nothing is closed to me. There’s no war in music. It’s not like the streets. When you leave your room . . . down in the street . . . it’s war.”

  Bonaparte feels compelled to choose between his music and the bare life of a serious artist (“I don’t like myself, past, present, and future,” Bonaparte says to his immigrant father. “Do you think I like this feeling of no possessions?”), and the shattering brutality of the fight ring (“I’m out for fame and fortune, not to be different or artistic! I don’t intend to be ashamed of my life!”). Bonaparte is fighting for his soul, but he wants both his art and big success, and when he destroys his musician hands, he shouts, “Hallelujah! It’s the beginning of the world!” When he murders his opponent, the Baltimore Chocolate Drop, in the ring, he yearns to clear his head and in the play kills himself and Lorna in his high-powered Duesenberg, the car that’s poisoning his blood, the symbol of his American dream come true (“When you sit in a car and speed,” Bonaparte says to Lorna, “you’re looking down at the world. Speed, speed, everything is speed—nobody gets me!”).

  John Garfield, then on Broadway in Arthur Kober’s Having Wonderful Time, had been led to believe by Odets that he would play Joe Bonaparte. Odets had written the part with Garfield in mind, but the playwright realized, watching Garfield in Kober’s play, that the actor didn’t have the complexity for the part and thought it should go to Elia Kazan. Instead, Clurman gave the part to Luther Adler; Garfield played the minor comedy part of Siggie, a fast-talking taxicab driver, desperate to own his own cab, who is married to Joe Bonaparte’s sister. Siggie is described by Odets as “the Halvah king of Brooklyn.” At his son’s bar mitzvah party, Siggie prominently displays a bust of his son in halvah.

  Holden (center) with Harry Cohn (left) and Lee J. Cobb, 1939. (PHOTOFEST)

  Rouben Mamoulian wanted Odets to write the script for the picture; Odets refused, not because of his marital troubles with Luise Rainer, but because Mamoulian was the only director Odets “loathed” and refused to work with. Many commented that Odets and Mamoulian looked alike.

  Years before, when Mamoulian was directing Capek’s R.U.R. for the Theatre Guild, Odets had been hired to do a walk-on. Someone had suggested during the course of rehearsals that Odets be given a few lines. Mamoulian dismissed the idea and said, “He is no good.”

  Harry Cohn hired Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, a husband-and-wife writing team, to write a draft of the script of Golden Boy before Mamoulian had been hired to direct the picture. Mamoulian hated the script and told Cohn he couldn’t possibly work from it and went to the Bureau of New Plays playwriting course, financed by the studios, in the hope of finding new talent.

  The course was run by Theresa Helburn, who, with Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall, had founded the Theatre Guild. Mamoulian hired two students from the course to write another draft of the script as a team: Daniel Taradash, twenty-five, just out of Harvard Law School, and Lew Meltzer, twenty-six, both there through scholarships at the Bureau of New Plays. Mamoulian hired them to write the script as a team. Each was signed to a seven-year contract, with six-month options, getting paid $200 a week. When Harry Cohn heard about Mamoulian’s new writers, he screamed over the phone, “You’re out of your God damned mind. Forget these kids. Find a five thousand dollar a week writer!” Cohn referred to the writing team as “Hector MacArthur” and “those f——ing Theater Guild writers.”

  Mamoulian took Taradash and Meltzer to Yucca Loma Ranch in the desert for a month and came back with a finished script.

  Mamoulian was not Harry Cohn’s kind of director. Mamoulian disliked Cohn, and Cohn sensed that the director had no respect for him. Where politics was at the center of Odets’s play, Mamoulian couldn’t have been less interested. Art was his god. Mamoulian was known for using the camera at odd angles in his pictures. “In Frank Capra’s pictures,” Cohn said to Mamoulian, “you don’t see a camera coming out of somebody’s ass.” (Capra thought of a picture as an electric current that must not be broken; once the audience was more conscious of the photography than the actors, the current was snapped.)

  • • •

  Shooting for Golden Boy began in mid-April 1939.

  Barbara was up at 5:30 each morning to get to Columbia, get her makeup on, be on the set in time. Bob didn’t have to leave until 7:30. They never had breakfast together, seldom ate lunch together, though occasionally Bob would rush over to the studio to have lunch with Barbara, and seldom saw each other before nine at night.

  Odets’s play ended with Joe and Lorna dying in a car crash; the picture ends with them going home to the Bonapartes and Joe embracing his father. “It was a phony ending,” said Daniel Taradash. “We had to leave the audience happy, or at least happier with some kind of feeling that life is good.”

  For Golden Boy, Holden spent three hours a day learning how to bow and finger a violin from Julian Brodetsky and how to box from Cannonball Green. Holden had been living at home in South Pasadena, but he was far too busy to commute between there and Hollywood. Columbia took a room for him at the Hollywood Athletic Club and moved a voice coach in with him.

  Each morning Holden got up at 5:30 to get to the studio at 8:00 and have his hair curled. He arrived on the set feeling less than sure of himself. After each day’s shooting, interviews were set up with the press for him to talk about having been “discovered.” Holden was working seventeen hours a day and calling his mother every few hours for help in calming his fears. He reassured himself by asking, “What would Fredric March do? What would
Gary Cooper do?” They and Spencer Tracy were his heroes.

  Holden trained to fight with James Cannonball Green, then twenty-two years old, from Cape Town, who also played Chocolate Drop in the picture. (CULVER PICTURES)

  Holden turned twenty-one at the end of the first week of shooting. He was ready to quit the picture—and the studio was ready to fire him. Barbara went to Harry Cohn and persuaded him to call off Holden’s interviews and close the set to visitors.

  The tension needed for the character of Joe Bonaparte was in Holden; he was at odds with himself: he wanted to be the good boy, the choirboy as his mother had taught him, but he moved toward danger. In his hometown of O’Fallon, Illinois (population seventeen hundred), Holden was considered a wild man riding on his motorcycle at high speeds, standing in the saddle, both hands aloft. He was an expert horseman and rifle shot and a trained gymnast like his father, an industrial chemist. Holden, by the age of eight, could tumble like a circus performer.

  While he was fearless in certain situations—walking on his hands along the outer rail of Pasadena’s “suicide bridge” with its 190-foot drop—on the first day of shooting of Golden Boy he was pale with fear. At moments his terror of appearing before the camera was so great he had to drink to show up for work. He found acting an emotional drain; this picture was his big break, and he couldn’t afford to blow it. The most demanding part of it was keeping up the level of his performance.

  Beedle, now Holden, becoming Joe Bonaparte, Golden Boy, 1939. (CULVER PICTURES)

  “If audiences don’t like my characterization of Golden Boy,” Holden said, “I’ll go back to choir singing on Sunday, the chemistry ‘lab’ [he studied at South Pasadena Junior College], and little theaters. I won’t earn much, but it will be fun.”