Barbara was tired at the end of each day’s shooting, but she would say to Holden, “Okay, Golden Boy, get your ass into my dressing room. We’ve got to go over the scenes we’ll make tomorrow.”
She spent hours digging beneath the surface of scenes to drag out some experience of Holden’s that would help him. She taught him what she’d learned from Willard Mack about stagecraft and timing and made sure in their scenes together that Holden looked good.
Bob would sometimes come to the studio to pick up Barbara, but he waited as she rehearsed with Holden night after night and read lines with him for the next day’s scenes, helping him with his emphasis and timing and phrasing.
“She pulled me through,” said Holden.
Barbara knew he would be a star and believed he would have made it without her help.
• • •
Mamoulian shot the picture in sequence.
He worked first with a loose rehearsal, then another to tighten the scene; the third he called a take, but rather than waste film, he did the final rehearsal without film. To get the actors to give more, Mamoulian would sometimes tell them the camera was rolling when no film was being exposed. Mamoulian tried the ploy on Barbara. She gave a great take and found out no film had been exposed. “You ask me as a professional to perform for you,” Barbara told Mamoulian. She expected the director to behave as professionally. “Don’t tell me it is rolling when it isn’t.”
“He was a dedicated young actor,” said Barbara. “I sensed this when he first started.” (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
“She would never expose herself to a poor take,” said Holden. “Barbara’s so consistent, she rarely deviates from the level she’s set for herself. She would have whatever was awkward ironed out before. He lost a damn good performance.”
Mamoulian drove Holden—he was “bewildered, nervous, awkward,” said Mamoulian—and was pleased with the results. He used Holden’s irritability and exhaustion from long hours of work to shoot the tense scenes, and the director turned Holden’s faults into acting virtues. Holden’s sincerity came through.
Holden asked Barbara how she could be so calm on the frenzied set. “Don’t let me fool you,” she said. “I wear myself out keeping myself calm.”
During production of Golden Boy, with the Omaha world premiere of Union Pacific days away, April 1939.
Barbara’s lack of temperament on the set had to do with hating to be the center of attention. “I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t be temperamental even if I wanted to be,” she said. She was comfortable with people on the set when she was working and was unaware they were there. She was full of poise and confidence. Off the set, she was fearful and shy and still beset by a dread of strangers. A familiarity that she fostered at work was ended when she finished a picture. She invariably changed her telephone number and retreated.
Holden’s performance was awkward, but his intelligence came through. In the picture, as with Bob Taylor in Camille, Holden’s emphasis and the rhythms of his dialogue were Barbara’s.
Lorna Moon is the girl with the tough background, tough choices, tough exterior, heart of gold; the girl from the school of hard knocks, with a secret longing for refuge in home and family that she never had; the archetype of the character Barbara played. Mamoulian filmed her so that she looked much older than Holden; he was twenty-one; she, a decade older.
Barbara was playing the part from a Broadway hit that was considered art. As Lorna, she is earnest in a way that makes her heavy; the character is a persona with no reality except for the needs of the other characters and the plot. The kinds of color, nuance, and tone that Barbara is able to bring to a character aren’t here. Instead, she is walking on eggshells because of the stature of the piece. Her intensity is about the pleasure of being in a work of official art. Golden Boy was an “important picture,” not a commercial picture, and it saps the vitality out of her—the quickness and lightness on her feet. She was playing the part as written and doesn’t feel free, playing wet-eyed loyalty at face level.
Barbara as Lorna Moon, Holden as Bonaparte, Adolphe Menjou as Tom Moody, and Joseph Calleia as Eddie Fuseli, Golden Boy, 1939. (PHOTOFEST)
• • •
Paramount’s publicity department was gearing up for the world premiere of Union Pacific, which was to take place during a three-day celebration of Golden Spike Days in Omaha, Nebraska, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Union Pacific.
The picture’s premiere was to be held simultaneously in three first-run theaters in Omaha. Paramount joined forces with Union Pacific and was spending $50,000 on its advertising campaign.
Barbara and Bob were to be part of the celebrations.
For the premiere, Bill Jeffers had given DeMille a special Union Pacific train drawn by two engines: the railroad’s latest steam-electric turbine and its wood-burning Old 58, or General McPherson, from the railroad’s early days, which had been used in the picture. Old 58 was in perfect working order but had to stop every fifty miles to take on water.
The Union Pacific train was to stop at every major station along the route from Los Angeles to Omaha where there were to be parades or decorated platforms near the train set up for speeches. Those who gathered from the surrounding towns for the event and to celebrate the picture were expected to dress in pioneer clothes. Barbara and Bob were to meet up with the train in Omaha.
• • •
A week into shooting Golden Boy, Paramount’s publicity department suggested to Barbara that she and Bob get married amid the fanfare of Union Pacific’s publicity tour.
“You’re not going to make a three-ring circus out of our marriage,” said Barbara. She and Bob had planned to get married in six or eight weeks, after Golden Boy finished shooting. Bob had promised his mother a church wedding with bridesmaids.
At Metro, Bob had just started filming Lady of the Tropics with Hedy Lamarr. The studio was grooming Lamarr for stardom in an effort to make her into an exotic European. To that end, Louis B. Mayer was giving her the benefit of “the biggest stars, the finest writers, and the most talented directors.” Metro to Bob was “the campus”; even the seasons became semesters. “Only Garbo remained aloof,” said Bob. “Always arriving alone in her chauffeured Packard.”
There was nothing predictable about Metro to Bob Taylor except perhaps sunrises and L. B. Mayer, “and not necessarily in that order,” said Bob. “L.B. was the most important person” in Bob’s career, as he was in hundreds of others. “In his way,” said Bob, “he was a great man. Moreover, he was not a ‘desk jockey.’ He was consistently on the move around the lot—he knew every department. He knew everyone’s problems.” And he knew that while Bob was a big star, and that the studio had resisted the idea of Taylor’s getting married, following the publication of the Photoplay article it had reversed its position. The notion of America’s heartthrob living in “unwedded bliss” was untenable.
Mayer had put Hedy Lamarr in A New York Cinderella, written by Charles MacArthur, one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. Spencer Tracy, following his success with Boys Town, was in the picture as well and was unhappy with the script and working with Lamarr. A New York Cinderella, budgeted at $700,000, was in trouble, and months into it and $900,000 later production was stopped; the picture, now called I Take This Woman, was shelved.
Bob didn’t like the script for Lady of the Tropics, but rather than turn down the part, he figured it was his turn to support the newcomer. He remembered how the bosses had seen to it that he was given the breaks when he was new and was put into Small Town Girl with Janet Gaynor and The Gorgeous Hussy with Joan Crawford.
Hedy Lamarr and Bob, from Lady of the Tropics, 1939.
Hedy Lamarr had been named Glamour Girl of 1938, called the “Dream Girl of 50 Million Men,” all on the basis of one picture, Algiers, made on loan-out to Walter Wanger and United Artists. Lamarr, while shooting Lady of the Tropics, taught Bob how to kiss more convincingly for the cameras. “His usu
al kiss seemed much more like a school-boy’s when photographed in close-up,” she said.
The picture was directed by Jack Conway, Bob’s frequent coyote-hunting partner, and written by Josef von Sternberg, Jules Furthman, Dore Schary, John Lee Mahin, and Ben Hecht, with Hecht getting final screenplay credit.
The press exclaimed that Lamarr was more beautiful than Taylor. The two looked eerily alike and reflected each other’s beauty. Barbara wasn’t jealous of Bob working with Lamarr; she would have been jealous had he been working with Spencer Tracy in Northwest Passage.
• • •
The word on Union Pacific was that it was a “box-office winner; a socko spec,” said Variety, “surefire for big grosses right down the line.” The New York Times called it a “little opus . . . colorful, spectacular; easily the best DeMille has made in years.” And Time said it was “a full payload of first-rate screen entertainment.” It was Barbara’s last picture under her Paramount contract. The Mad Miss Manton had already made close to $600,000 worldwide.
Welcoming the Union Pacific train at Omaha’s Union Station for the three-day celebration. Large crowds had gathered along the train route to watch Old 58 traveling from Hollywood northeast to Nebraska. Barbara on the platform in Omaha is in dark hat, holding flowers. Evelyn Keyes, near her on the platform, is in white dress with white flower on hat. April 1939. (COURTESY: EVELYN KEYES)
The monthlong tour for Union Pacific was given a send-off with a party at Ouida and Basil Rathbone’s Bel Air estate.
On the Union Pacific train were DeMille, Akim Tamiroff, Lynne Overman, George Raft in McCrea’s stead, Madeleine Carroll, Lloyd Nolan, Betty Grable, Mrs. DeMille, Anthony Quinn, and dozens of reporters and columnists, including Ed Sullivan, Sheilah Graham, and Lucius Beebe. Evelyn Keyes, at twenty-two, who was under personal contract to DeMille, had just finished shooting her last scene for Gone With the Wind as Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister. Keyes was from Atlanta (DeMille described her as being “as beautiful as the South itself”). She flew eleven and a half hours, from Los Angeles to Omaha and, with a police escort, met the Union Pacific train for the tour just as the train pulled in to the station.
The first night out of Los Angeles, DeMille called Robert Preston into his private car and told the actor that as master of ceremonies at the Union Pacific events he knew everybody else on the train but didn’t know anything about Preston. “How will I introduce you?” asked DeMille.
The actor told DeMille that before Union Pacific he’d made three pictures.
“No before that,” DeMille said.
Preston said he’d been at the Pasadena Community Theater and had acted in more than forty plays in two years. DeMille didn’t seem interested in that either. The actor mentioned that he’d once been a parking attendant at the Santa Anita racetrack. DeMille introduced Preston to movie audiences by saying that he’d found the actor parking cars at Santa Anita and immediately put him into Union Pacific and made him a star.
To kick off the three-day commemoration of the Golden Spike Days, President Roosevelt pushed a key in his White House office and the city of Omaha erupted in festivities. The cast rode through the streets in carriages. Two hundred thousand people cheered them on; the confetti in the air made it seem like a New York ticker-tape parade. Bands played and people hung out of windows to see the passing spectacle, all in celebration of DeMille’s Union Pacific and the commemoration of the Golden Spike. Tribes of Sioux and Cheyenne who appeared in the picture were there for the premiere, and the parking area of Omaha’s Union Station had been transformed into an Indian stockade of seventy-five years before.
Omaha had built false fronts on one street to re-create a street of the 1860s. Parking meters were removed to make way for water troughs for horses. The courthouse lawn was turned into an Indian reservation for thirteen Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation. Men were in beards, string ties, buckskin jackets, and Prince Albert coats; they wore beaver hats and fringed gauntlets. Women dressed in bonnets and wore high-buttoned shoes and pantaloons under crinolines.
A special train from the East brought Averell Harriman, the chairman of Union Pacific’s board of directors, and other industrialists to the celebration. A banquet dinner at the coliseum for three thousand guests was served by more than five hundred Union Pacific waiters. DeMille spoke before his audience. “Union Pacific is a picture of events in American history that occurred 70 years ago,” he said. “But it is timely and has a message for us right now . . . it shows the ideal cooperation between capital and labor that built this country, and that this country should have today.
“It is not the supremacy of labor over capitalism,” he said, “nor capital’s uncontrolled tyranny over labor. It is the triumph of cooperation between the two.”
The premiere of Union Pacific at Omaha’s Opera House, April 27, 1939.
DeMille’s words had more to do with the present labor situation than they did the truth of the building of the Union Pacific Railroad.
In the midst of the dinner, Evelyn Keyes received a telegram from David Selznick recalling her to Hollywood to shoot an additional scene for Gone With the Wind. Keyes left the way she arrived, with a police escort that accompanied her back to the Omaha airport.
On the third day of the festivities another grand parade was held with more than eighty floats and thirty marching bands. Averell Harriman and William Jeffers were at the head of the procession. Barbara and Robert Preston were next, riding on the backseat of a convertible waving to the crowds.
Union Pacific had its grand premiere that night and was seen by ten thousand moviegoers. Two train car loads of flood, search, and klieg lights had been brought in for the premiere. The beams of light could be seen for thirty miles. DeMille and the cast were at each screening and said a few words.
Barbara didn’t get much sleep, but it was a trip she wouldn’t have missed.
The tour continued. Barbara and Evelyn Keyes, who had returned to Omaha after shooting her additional scene for Gone With the Wind, were on the same plane back to Los Angeles, seated together. Barbara didn’t say a word to Evelyn—at the airport or on the plane. The pilot invited Barbara, who hated to fly, to the cockpit. She accepted and stayed there for the duration of the trip.
Reviewers criticized Barbara’s brogue in Union Pacific as being incomprehensible. When she was panned in The Plough and the Stars for her on-again, off-again brogue as well as for her seeming to have confused Brooklyn with Dublin, Barbara went into a state of despair. She’d worked hard in The Plough and the Stars to perfect her accent in the early sequences. Her response to the criticism of her brogue in Union Pacific was to shrug it off with a laugh and say, “Oh, well, you can’t win.”
• • •
Barbara finished her publicity appearances for Union Pacific and returned to work on Golden Boy.
The admired cameraman Karl Freund had been assigned to the picture. Freund had been the cameraman on more than twenty pictures, from Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue to Camille and The Good Earth. After three weeks of shooting, Freund resisted setting up the lights as Mamoulian had asked and was replaced. “Karl, you are a great cameraman,” Mamoulian said. “And you have your own ideas, but this is not your picture.” Freund had directed eight pictures for Universal. “I don’t want pretty photography,” said Mamoulian. “I want something that to me fits the story I have, the cast I have.” Freund was replaced with RKO’s master cinematographer Nick Musuraca, who started as a cameraman in the early 1920s and whose harsh, dark low-key lighting setups produced a dramatic, stylized effect of blacks and whites with powerful shadows, an ominous expressionistic look of images set in geometric patterns of light and shadow.
Barbara was on call one Saturday afternoon for the studio. She waited at home all day. Finally, she telephoned Bob and suggested they plan to go someplace for the evening. Bob said, “Okay, let’s get married.”
Barbara and Bob had driven to San Diego three days before to take out a marriage license withou
t having any specific date in mind. The license was under their own names, Ruby Stevens Fay and Spangler Arlington Brugh, as a way to throw off the press. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had married six weeks before in Kingman, Arizona; Tyrone Power and Annabella, three weeks before in Bel Air. Louis B. Mayer’s secretary—and Bob’s champion from his earliest days at the studio—Ida Koverman was part of the wedding party.
Bob gave Barbara ten minutes to pick a dress for her wedding gown. Bob was wearing a brown business suit. Barbara conformed to sentiment. “Old shoes,” she said. Her crepe silk dress was new and blue; her hat was borrowed from Holly Barnes; Barbara was “the old couplet come to life,” she said.
Barbara and Bob met Zeppo and Marion for dinner that night at the Barclay Kitchen. Barbara barely touched her shrimp and steak. Afterward, they discussed what to do next. Bob suggested a movie. They searched the ads for a picture they hadn’t seen. Marion suggested they go to the Palladium. Bob and Barbara thought that was a good idea. At 8:30 they were still sitting and talking in the restaurant.
Marion said, “We’d better go or we’ll miss the show.”
They got into Bob’s car and set off.
After a few minutes Zeppo said, “Aren’t you heading in the wrong direction?”
“I just remembered,” said Bob, “I have an appointment with a man in San Diego tonight.”
“Are you kidding?” said Zeppo. “Why San Diego?”
“For this,” said Bob. “The man is going to marry Barbara and me.”
He took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Marion.
When Bob and Barbara first started to see each other, Zeppo and Marion would babble double-talk for hours in front of Bob. “He’d never met anyone like us,” said Marion. “He told Barbara he was sure I was crazy.” But Bob and Marion had become great friends.
Marion looked at the certificate and screamed.
They picked up Uncle Buck, Ida Koverman, and their friend the actor and musician Dalies Frantz and drove to the home of Thomas Whelan, a former San Diego district attorney who, as deputy county clerk, had issued Bob and Barbara’s marriage license a few days before.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 88
