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

by Victoria Wilson

  The wedding party ate a buffet supper in the Whelans’ living room overlooking San Diego Bay. Twenty minutes after midnight, Judge Phil Smith married Barbara and Bob in a room filled with roses from the Whelans’ garden.

  Barbara was thirty-one; Bob, twenty-seven.

  Marion Marx was Barbara’s matron of honor; Uncle Buck gave away the bride and acted as Bob’s best man. “Who’d figure Spangler Brugh and Ruby Stevens?” said Buck. “Seeing that pair like I do, you’d know as a team they’re a solid act. No valentine patter, maybe, but they back each other up all the time.”

  During the ceremony Judge Smith was so nervous he kept clearing his throat and almost lost his voice.

  Bob was equally nervous; he wasn’t sure he was in love and mumbled his responses in a husky voice. Barbara was cool and clear. Bob put a wedding band on her finger. It was a thin gold ring surrounded by rubies, similar to her engagement ring made up of heart-shaped rubies; both rings matched the bracelet Bob had designed and given Barbara for Christmas.

  At a press reception at the Victor Hugo Restaurant, newly married and just back from San Diego, April 14, 1939. “Here I am married today,” said Bob, “and tomorrow I’ve got to be back at work making love to another woman, Hedy Lamarr.”

  Bob loved jewelry—gold, rubies, sapphires, emeralds; he disliked the coldness of diamonds and platinum—and often designed pieces that Bill Ruser, a jeweler in town, made up for him.

  Bob had asked Barbara if she would like to give him a wedding ring to put on his finger. She happily put a gold band on Bob’s finger to go with the cabochon ruby ring she’d given him for their engagement.

  Barbara’s steely tones in accepting the wedding vows belied her emotions. She was full of sentimental feelings about Bob. She’d marked every one of their anniversaries: the day they’d first met three years before; the music they’d first danced to; the flowers Bob had first sent her. She felt secure in her happiness, safe, not hell-bent as she had been with Frank Fay to overlook his drinking to make the marriage work.

  After the ceremony, Barbara and Bob called their family and friends.

  William Holden sent a telegram that said, “Gosh, what a blow!” and signed it “Golden Boy.”

  Ninety minutes later the wedding party drove back to Los Angeles. Barbara and Bob took a few days off before going back to work—Barbara to Golden Boy, Bob to Lady of the Tropics. Husband and wife appeared at a press reception at the Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills and posed for pictures.

  On her first day back at work on Golden Boy after being married, the crew put up a sign on the door of her portable dressing room, which she stuck upside down and put on a shelf.

  Barbara returned to Marwyck.

  Bob went to see his mother; it didn’t help that it was Mother’s Day. He knew Ruth would be heartsick about his marriage. Barbara and Ruth had disliked each other from their first meeting. Ruth didn’t like the woman who’d won her son’s heart, didn’t know what to make of her. Barbara wasn’t any more receptive to Ruth. Barbara knew that Bob was a mama’s boy and didn’t like it. She wanted Bob to “stand on his own two feet” and “get some balls.”

  When Bob walked into his mother’s house, Ruth buried her face in her hands and sobbed. He tried to reassure her nothing would change because of his marriage.

  Ruth said she felt sick, and weak, and asked Bob to stay and check her heartbeat every now and again during the night, “just to make sure.” As he had during childhood, Bob spent the night in bed next to his mother, holding her to make sure her heart was pumping and making sure that she didn’t die of a heart attack.

  Ruth was so distraught by Bob’s wedding that she refused all food. Her doctor gave her a sedative and warned her that if she didn’t eat, he would hospitalize her.

  At Bob’s ranch after being recently married, 1939.

  Bob and Barbara spent a few magical days together at Bob’s ranch, and then Barbara went back to work on Golden Boy, where a wedding party was held on the set. Later she and Bob went to the season’s opening day of Hollywood Park racetrack, owned by Jack Warner, and watched Bing Crosby’s horse Don Mike outrun Louis B. Mayer’s Main Man in the feature race.

  • • •

  Barbara wrote to DeMille to thank him for “my beautiful nickels. If they bring me as much luck as the others,” she wrote, “everything will be alright. I am still counting the time until I work for you again and always I shall be grateful to you for your kindness. Devotedly, Barbara.”

  If Barbara adored DeMille, she was not as won over by Rouben Mamoulian. He was not her kind of director. “Technically,” she said, Mamoulian was “fine, you couldn’t ask for more, but there was no affinity there, no joy. To me, the essence of a good director is not to say, ‘Walk to the table, then turn around and face to the left.’ The good director will walk you through gently and give you some air . . . I had to have the feeling that the director was with me because I sure as hell was with him.”

  • • •

  Barbara was busting to feel free again. She was free from her contract with RKO and Columbia and didn’t want to be tied down to the responsibilities of the ranch. “I don’t want us to settle down,” she said. “That settling down business is more dangerous for men, than for women.

  “We want to go places and do things,” said Barbara. “I don’t know what places, specifically, or what things. We just want to be near, to be in everything.”

  Barbara and Bob were making no plans; they didn’t know where they were going to live and didn’t have a permanent home to live in. They drove around Beverly Hills looking at houses to rent but didn’t find one they liked. They made no plans for a family or to adopt another child. “I know that if you make plans and they don’t work out,” said Barbara, “they break your heart. The only plan we have calls for our being together as much as possible. Plan for nothing and be prepared for everything, that’s the Taylor motto.

  “I’m so thrilled, so absolutely happy right now, I’m not concerned about the next hour or the next day.”

  FIFTEEN

  Ain’t She a Peacherino

  Now that Barbara and Bob were married, Uncle Buck assumed it was time to move on. Barbara wouldn’t hear of it. Buck was family to her, and she insisted he stay. He loved Dion and continued to look after him.

  Eddie Mannix sent flowers to the newly married Mrs. Robert Taylor. Barbara wrote to thank him the same day (“I do appreciate your kindness to me. I sincerely hope I shall please all of you as much as I know Bob has”). Nick Schenck gave the Robert Taylors a silver coffee service. Emily Post wrote to Barbara from Edgartown, Massachusetts, over the Fourth of July to tell her how much she hoped Barbara’s “new found happiness” would be “as complete and enduring” as Barbara so “richly deserved.” “Mrs. Post” added that it was her first fan letter. Moss Hart wrote to tell her he was sending Barbara a Picasso for a wedding present. The package arrived, and Barbara quickly opened it. She was stunned for a moment. It was the white Picasso Harlequin. Barbara didn’t know what to expect, “but it certainly wasn’t that,” she said.

  Barbara and Bob found a large house to rent in Beverly Hills at 1101 North Beverly Drive. Colleen Moore had built it for her mother ten years before. The house was white brick with weathered oak trim and protected by a wall around the property. Inside, a large stairway was on the immediate right. Bob liked to slide down the winding banister. A step-down living room ran the length of the house. Off the entryway of the living room were the breakfast room, pantry, and kitchen. Off the dining room was a den with built-in bar, bookcases, and a place for Bob’s gun case, which was filled with his rifles. Opposite the bookcases was a fireplace.

  Upstairs on the right, over the garage, was Dion’s room with a bath. Uncle Buck’s room was to the left of the staircase. Barbara and Bob’s bedroom was at the front of the house.

  Bob’s twenty-eighth birthday given by Barbara at the Victor Hugo restaurant, August 5, 1939. Seated (left to right): Ann Dvorak, Barbar
a, Fred MacMurray. Standing: Bob and Jack Benny.

  A large covered patio extended out to a grassy area and tennis courts, where a fifteen-year-old Budge Patty would be giving Barbara tennis lessons. Beyond the courts was an expansive lawn that surrounded the house.

  Barbara didn’t know how to cook and didn’t care about learning. “I gave up fooling around with recipes,” she said, “when I came home and found the cook pasting paper on the shelves with my rice pudding.”

  They planned to move from Northridge before leaving for a trip abroad and packed each night after they got home from the studio.

  • • •

  Being a stepfather was a new role for Bob. He was not fully comfortable with children, but he was kind to Dion. “He couldn’t have been nicer and more loving,” said Barbara’s son.

  Bob tried to teach Dion about baseball and football. On Sundays, Bob often drove Dion from Marwyck in his black woody station wagon to the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. On their way to church one day, Dion got out of the car to open the wooden gates at the back of the Marwyck driveway and, as he got back in the car, caught one of his fingers in the door.

  Bob with Dion, then age seven, 1939. (COURTESY TONY FAY)

  Bob comforted him and didn’t lecture him the way Barbara did. In private, Bob defended the boy against the way Barbara was raising him. He saw Dion’s sadness and believed that he should be at home with his family instead of being sent away to school.

  But Bob was not at ease with most children. When Barbara’s nephew Brian came to the ranch, Bob was curt with him until Barbara walked in the room. Brian didn’t like Bob and didn’t like being at the ranch. He was often there without his parents and didn’t feel comfortable. He had nothing in common with Dion, who was five years older. Barbara would send Brian off to play with the horses, but he often felt stuck out at the ranch and found Barbara and Bob cold.

  During Dion’s first year at Raenford Academy, his class would go into town on weekly Saturday excursions to the movies. After the picture, Dion would spend time in the Reina drugstore waiting for the bus to take them back to school. On a lark, one time, Dion pocketed a cigarette lighter. One of the other boys told on him. Barbara was furious and made Dion go back to the drugstore and apologize for taking what didn’t belong to him.

  At seven years old, Dion would have preferred to be home at Marwyck for the summer. But no sooner had Dion come home from school at the end of the semester than he was packed off with new clothes for camp, driven by Uncle Buck to Terminal Island, south of Long Beach, where he was put onboard a canvas-canopied boat—his first boat ride—and taken with thirty other children and camp personnel to an island with cliffs and beautiful sand at Howland’s Landing.

  Catalina Island Boys Camp had football and baseball fields, archery, swimming, spearfishing, boating. Meals were cooked on the beach and eaten under an old shade tree. Dion collected shells and driftwood and slept with the other boys under the stars.

  Each was given the responsibility of caring for a horse for the duration of the summer. Dion was considered one of the better riders at the camp and won a black kerchief for his riding skills along with merit badges for other activities. For those campers who could handle a horse, there was a trip on horseback around the island.

  Dion was on his own, but he felt cared for by the three men who ran the camp, Al Madden, Gloomy Gus Henderson, and Arnold Eddy. They were kind to the boys; each was made to feel important, something Dion didn’t get from either his school or Barbara.

  • • •

  Bob had grown up on a farm and still loved to hunt and fish. He, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper, Andy Devine, and Morgan Maree often hunted together. Barbara was afraid of guns and hated the idea of hunting; it gave her the shudders, and she refused to go along.

  Bob and Gable went to the skeet fields at the Los Angeles–Santa Monica Gun Club, half a mile south of the Douglas airplane plant on Ocean Park Boulevard, and were joined by Devine, Cooper, and Robert Stack. Skeet shooting, originally designed to simulate upland game hunting, was practice for quail and pheasant hunting. The hunter walked through the field with the gun down, and clay targets were thrown in the air.

  The Los Angeles–Santa Monica Gun Club had been around since the turn of the century and now belonged to Harry Fleischmann, the black sheep of the Fleischmann family, whose fortune came from butter and yeast. Harry Fleischmann was the best shot in town and taught most of the stars how to shoot: Gable, Bob Taylor, Fred MacMurray, Fredric March, Michael Curtiz, Cooper, Jack Conway, Jack Holt, Victor Fleming, Frank Morgan, Gene Raymond, and Ginger Rogers.

  Fleischmann also ran a duck-hunting club near Bakersfield, where he, Gable, Bob Taylor, Jack Conway, and others would go for the weekend.

  Bob Stack, at twenty, was an expert shot and had been since boyhood, when he was accepted by Fleischmann for the California five-man team. At seventeen, Stack was one of the five best shots in the world, winning in 1936 the national 20-gauge crown and the Del Monte pistol championship and holding the world’s long-run skeet record with 364 straight hits. Stack’s grandfather had won the 1910 Los Angeles blue-rock championship, breaking 58 targets without a miss.

  Stack, whose father died when he was nine, met Clark Gable skeet shooting, and Gable became one of his surrogate fathers. Through Harry Fleischmann, Stack met Gene Raymond, Howard Hughes, Hemingway, and others. To the teenage Stack they were just a “bunch of older guys” whom he could “whip with a shotgun.”

  Stack got to know Bob Taylor before he began to date Barbara and thought him one of the nicest guys. “A country boy,” said Stack. “A small-town guy and a darned good actor.” Stack thought Taylor “probably the handsomest man alive, and the least actorish actor, without any feeling about being a matinee idol. What he looked like was not who he was. He was just a guy who looks like a god with a widow’s peak.”

  Soon Taylor was seeing Barbara, and she and Stack came to know each other. “She had no bullshit about her,” said Stack.

  He thought Barbara was not an obvious beauty but a “nifty” actress with “boundless energy.” She had “banked fires” in her, he said. To Stack, she had “second level.”

  Stack and Barbara and Bob had Helen Ferguson in common. Helen was a friend of Stack’s glamorous mother, Betzi, and took Stack on as a client when he was nineteen. Helen helped Stack project his career, advising him that he was driving the wrong kind of car: Bob drove souped-up hot rods and held the record for four-cylinder poppers. “If you get a more sedate car,” Helen said, “the studios will take you more seriously.”

  Ferguson was like family to Stack, as well as to Barbara and Bob, Loretta Young, Anita Louise, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, Gene Raymond, and Jeanette MacDonald and to her other clients, including Lew Ayres, Fay Wray, Irene Dunne, and Franchot Tone. Helen was considered loyal—devoted—to those she represented. She was aware of details, “all of which had nothing to do with getting a job in pictures,” said Stack, and he followed her motherly advice. He and Helen spoke regularly on the phone for at least half an hour a call with one earring (always) clipped to Helen’s dress.

  Bob Taylor, Bob Stack, and Andy Devine one day were shooting doves in El Centro. It was a hot day, and they’d been drinking beer. Bob Taylor and Andy were peeing. Devine looked down at Bob and said in his cracked drawl, “I don’t know. For the world’s biggest, greatest lover, that doesn’t look like a helluva lot to me.”

  Bob said, without hesitating, “Don’t tell my wife. She thinks they’re all the same size.”

  • • •

  From DeMille’s Irish postmistress at end of track to Clifford Odets’s world-weary “tramp from Newark,” Barbara, in her next picture, was to play a seen-it-all, light-fingered jewel thief on trial in New York for shoplifting a blindingly sparkling bracelet.

  Mitchell Leisen, one of Paramount’s leading directors, was assigned the picture. Each of Leisen’s fourteen pictures had been a box-office success. Leisen was in great
demand with actors. He was Paramount’s answer to George Cukor. If Leisen snapped his fingers, he got what he wanted. And he wanted Barbara for the part of Lee Leander, jewel thief. He felt the part was written for her.

  Fred MacMurray was to be the hard-driving assistant district attorney prosecuting the case who, instead of sending her to jail, falls in love with her. Leisen thought MacMurray a good-looking actor—with a beautifully built body and great legs, six feet four, tall and lanky—but MacMurray was quiet, genial, modest, and inexperienced. Carole Lombard, who believed all the actors in a picture had to be good or it wouldn’t matter how good she was, worked with Leisen and MacMurray in both Hands Across the Table and Swing High, Swing Low. MacMurray had made only four pictures before Hands Across the Table—and didn’t project much sex.

  For one scene in Hands Across the Table, Lombard was to walk in, kiss Fred, and then walk out of the frame. She walked in, kissed Fred, walked out past the camera, looked at Leisen, and shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “So what?” MacMurray had an appealing reticence, projecting small-town boy making good in the big city, which is exactly what he was. While making Hands Across the Table, MacMurray was living with his mother in a little apartment in Hollywood and, as he was able to move up and rent a rambling house, lived with his mother, grandmother, aunt, and uncle.

  Before Leisen was assigned the picture, Ray Milland and Franchot Tone had been suggested to Preston Sturges, whose script it was, for the part of the district attorney.

  MacMurray in his early pictures with Leisen was shy and afraid to try anything. He didn’t presume he was acting; he just did what he was told. Leisen helped him along and tried to draw out the actor. Lombard’s way of getting MacMurray to relax in front of the camera was to kick him in the shins, grin, and yell, “Loosen up, you big ape! It isn’t going to hurt.”