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

by Victoria Wilson

  Leisen admired Barbara. “She’s a perfectionist if ever I saw one,” he said.

  She was up in the gallery talking to the electricians when Ted Tetzlaff, Leisen’s cameraman, called up to the crew to tell them how he wanted the lights adjusted. “Down a litte,” he said. “Turn it to the left, turn that one to the right.” Over and over. Finally, Barbara, hands on hips, called down, “For Christ’s sake, Ted, make up your mind!”

  • • •

  Barbara and Fred were great friends, though they hadn’t worked together in a picture.

  From Remember the Night, 1940. In the midst of the New Year’s Eve barn dance scene. Left to right: Elizabeth Patterson, Beulah Bondi, unidentified cast and crew, Barbara with Fred MacMurray, Ted Tezlaff, Mitchell Leisen, and unidentified child.

  She teased MacMurray for being shy about filming love scenes. Everyone on the set dreaded having to shoot the scene at the end of the picture. Barbara handled it by saying to the crew, “This is really going to be something, I am supposed to be kissed passionately by Fred.” She kidded Fred about it, as did the crew. When the day arrived, MacMurray gritted his teeth, determined to show them he wasn’t such a bad lover, and did the scene perfectly.

  MacMurray had appeared in twenty-four pictures as a leading man. He made actresses look good without stealing their scenes, and actresses asked to work with him because of it. His modesty, reserve, and affability made real the lightest romance.

  MacMurray worked repeatedly opposite several actresses: Claudette Colbert in three pictures (his screen debut in The Gilded Lily, The Bride Comes Home, and Maid of Salem); Carole Lombard in four (Hands Across the Table, The Princess Comes Across, True Confession, and Swing High, Swing Low); and Madeleine Carroll in two (Cafe Society and Honeymoon in Bali). By the time he made Remember the Night, he’d starred opposite Hollywood’s top actresses, including Ann Sheridan (Car 99), Katharine Hepburn (Alice Adams), Sylvia Sidney (The Trail of the Lonesome Pine), and Irene Dunne (Invitation to Happiness).

  With Mitch Leisen (left) and Fred MacMurray in the final scene of Remember the Night, 1940. When making Honeymoon in Bali, MacMurray mumbled to the director, “Let’s do the love scenes first. I can’t work for weeks with that hanging over me.”(COURTESY OF DAVID CHIERICHETTI)

  MacMurray wasn’t temperamental; he didn’t blow up or get excited. He spent hours at home oiling and polishing his guns. He and Claude Binyon, a Paramount writer, liked to shoot doves together.

  At the end of the picture, after the Stanwyck character has pleaded guilty and is about to be taken away by the matron, she and MacMurray are in a catacomb. In the scene MacMurray was to say how much he loved her.

  MacMurray was shy and reserved, particularly with women. Leisen thought his lack of ease with women “pitiful.” Leisen was drawn to both men and women; he was married with a mistress and flaunted his homosexuality.

  He couldn’t get the scene with Fred in the catacombs, and then MacMurray disappeared. Leisen asked his assistant where Fred was and was told he was behind the set. Leisen went around to the back of the set, and MacMurray was crying.

  “I’ve never said that to anybody in my life,” he told Leisen. “I just can’t.”

  “You must have loved a dog, or your mother,” said Leisen.

  “I’ve never said, ‘I love you’ to anybody. I just can’t say it.”

  Leisen did away with the line, and MacMurray got through the scene.

  The picture’s producer, Al Lewin, suddenly left the studio. Leisen became the picture’s producer and could do what he wanted with Sturges’s script. He shaped the script to fit Barbara’s and Fred’s personalities. He cut MacMurray’s longer speeches since the actor had difficulty with his lines, and the story became more the girl’s picture. Unlike Barbara, who could do anything and pace herself according to what was needed—and does in this picture—MacMurray was a slow and gentle actor. Leisen used MacMurray’s natural flair for comedy and sense of timing and the actor’s leisurely pace to help build Sargent’s character.

  Sturges was on the set and resented that so much of the dialogue was cut. He felt the cuts were unnecessary. Had Sturges directed the picture, he would have made the pace faster and would have made it, as he’d written it, more John Sargent’s story with a different emotional quality.

  • • •

  Leisen took Barbara into the projection room one day after shooting to look at the picture. It was still rough in spots, still minus the musical score. Barbara watched it all and said, “God help me. After all these years. I’m turning into a first class ham.”

  • • •

  Remember the Night was budgeted at $634,000 and came in at $588,000, $46,000 under budget. Barbara was paid $67,500 for forty-eight days of work; MacMurray, $60,000. Beulah Bondi was paid $5,000 for two weeks of work; Elizabeth Patterson, $2,500; Sterling Holloway was paid $750 a week. Sturges, $47,000; Leisen, $50,000.

  When Leisen directed women, he dominated them in a masculine way and was attracted to them, and it shows on-screen. MacMurray took on Leisen’s look—literally wearing Leisen’s clothes—but Leisen was able to direct women, flirt with them, draw performances out of them because he admired women in a male way. Barbara never looked more beautiful, more luminous, than she does in Remember the Night.

  In the end of Sturges’s script, “love reformed her and corrupted him, which gave us the finely balanced moral,” said Sturges, “that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, or caveat emptor.”

  In Remember the Night, Barbara is both classy and shopgirlish. Sturges was a loner, as Barbara had been before Bob came into her life. Sturges, like Barbara, was wary of people in the industry. Both were possessive of those around them.

  In the picture it is acknowledged that her character, Lee Leander, is hot, that she knows about sex, that she’s not a good girl, and yet she’s not vulgar or tainted or soiled or bitter. She is sexy and good-hearted and smart. Sturges allows her to be all of these things, and somehow it brings Barbara’s own persona together in a way that is light and appealing, buoyant and still full of substance.

  The combination of Sturges’s nuanced writing and comedy released Barbara. Her attraction to melodrama had become her signature, though in ways it confined her. With Sturges’s brilliant writing, she was freed up. On-screen she is a person with weight and power, and comedy lightens her. Sturges was able to write with tone and color, and Barbara was able to play the nuance.

  In previous work, Barbara, playing full-out vulgar, full-out tragedy, full-out noble, put all her power into it and at times could get overloaded. In the hands of Sturges and Leisen, the pace is light and up. Barbara is full of vitality and quick on her feet, and she blazes.

  Barbara operates on many levels in Remember the Night: she is a believable crook; believably vulgar; believably sensitive and vulnerable; rebellious (in the scene with her mother, it is clear her defiance is bonded to her mother’s take on her). What Sturges gives Stanwyck is her longing for roots, her longing to go home for Christmas, the way it comes up when she hears “Back Home Again in Indiana.” She melts at his mother’s house because he has everything she’s ever wanted and she basks in the warmth of it, allows herself to be corseted, and becomes noble.

  Sturges’s best lines are simple, colloquial, sayings that people use all the time, but because of circumstance and character they resonate.

  The morning after Niagara Falls they are in a cab on their way to the New York courthouse, where he is about to prosecute her and send her to jail. He is all goofy from the night before because he’s inexperienced; she has taken on the role of being the sensible one because she’s experienced. She insists on going to jail so he won’t be tainted and so that their relationship will be evenly weighted. If she had allowed him to get her off, she would have been indebted to him (“If you still want me afterward,” she says to him, “I’d be all squared”), and it would have falsified everything between them. Their pact is not at all superficial; it is quite deep. “Whe
n you make a mistake,” she says, “you’ve got to pay for it, otherwise you never learn.”

  The combination of Barbara and MacMurray works: he is light and a good egg; she is breezy, grounded, larcenous, with a heart of gold and a yearning for home, like Sturges himself, who had such an uprooted childhood.

  “As it turned out,” said Sturges, “the picture had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz and just enough schmutz to make it box office.”

  It was Leisen’s best picture to date and Barbara’s best performance.

  • • •

  After Remember the Night, Leisen wanted Barbara to star in Night of January 16th, based on the Ayn Rand Broadway courtroom hit of 1935–1936. For each of its more than two hundred performances, the play drew its jury from the audience and had alternate endings depending on the jury’s verdict (“Elaborate melodrama,” wrote Brooks Atkinson of Rand’s play. “Routine theater with the usual brew of hokum”). Ayn Rand was working at RKO as an extra and wardrobe woman when, at the age of twenty-eight, she wrote the play, modeled on the death of the Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger, the “Match King,” this after Rand worked as an extra at age twenty-two in DeMille’s The King of Kings. Rebecca West had written a play in the 1920s about Kreuger and the financial scandal that shook the world. Nothing came of West’s play until she lent it out to an old friend, an American who used it to produce his own play.

  RKO bought the rights to Rand’s play with Claudette Colbert and Lucille Ball in mind to star as the accused, lover of the swindler who has stolen millions from investors and, facing bankruptcy and ruin, falls, or is thrown, from a New York skyscraper to his death. Paramount took over the rights from RKO as a picture for Don Ameche and Barbara.

  • • •

  The Paramount publicity department came up with two stunts to help promote Remember the Night. The first was to have Bob Taylor sue the studio because he didn’t want Barbara doing a scene in a corset. The second was to have Barbara pose for photographs hugging a cow.

  “I must be lousy in the picture if you can’t sell it any other way,” said Barbara. The studio pressed her about the promotional ideas; she rejected them out of hand, saying simply, “They’re phony.”

  SIXTEEN

  Darkening Lands

  Bob loved to design jewelry for Barbara, such as a pair of matching gold bracelets set with sapphires, which he then had made at Bill Ruser’s store on Rodeo Drive. Bob’s chief hurdle was to get Barbara to wear the pieces—she preferred not to wear jewelry.

  Bob began production on a picture called Remember?, written and directed by Norman McLeod, who directed the Topper features for Hal Roach. Starring with Bob and Lew Ayres was Greer Garson, who’d been on the London stage for three years and was considered one of the most promising young British actresses of her generation. She’d been brought to Metro eighteen months before by Louis B. Mayer. Garson didn’t think she was particularly photogenic; Mayer told her there’s no one who can’t be photographed. Garson negotiated her contract and got $500 a week, the biggest salary ever paid a beginner in pictures.

  Garson was Scots Irish (“Greer,” the Irish contraction of the Scottish “McGregor”). Her green eyes, red hair, and alabaster complexion resembled a Burne-Jones painting. At the University of London, which Garson completed in three years on full scholarship, she was described as “a unique blend of La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; her beauty was rich and kind. Garson’s friend Noël Coward said to her, “You’re lucky, you have the best possible mask for an actress—everything goes up—it should.” There were those in London who called her “Ca-Reer Garson.”

  Joan Crawford and Robert Young were to have starred in Remember?; then Margaret Sullavan. Crawford instead was put into Rachel Crothers’s Susan and God, which Greer Garson had asked to do when she found out that Gertrude Lawrence, star of the Broadway production, wouldn’t be reproducing the role on the screen.

  Louis B. Mayer had originally brought Garson over and groomed and tested her for months, looking for the right vehicle for her. Nothing came of it; Garson became depressed. She lived on work, and the limbo, combined with a deep loneliness, caused her to stay indoors for months.

  Two weeks before her MGM contract was to expire, Garson was assigned to play opposite Robert Donat in Metro’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips since Myrna Loy had left the studio for 20th Century–Fox.

  It was a small part. Garson was angry that she’d been offered a supporting role; she saw the character as a “sparrow,” but she took the part in order to get away from Hollywood and get back to London. She soon came to see the part of Mrs. Chipping as a “dove,” a woman in love whom every man would like to marry.

  “If anything glowed through Mrs. Chips,” said Garson, it was the actress’s own deep delight that “after fifteen months of miserable, humiliating idleness,” she was finally working. Garson left for London for four months to make the picture and had no intention of returning to Hollywood; the place had broken her.

  It was clear that Goodbye, Mr. Chips was about to be a hit. And Greer Garson a big star.

  Garson was seen as the epitome of the dignity and beauty of mature womanhood. Mayer wanted her back at Metro and asked her to return. She wired back, “I will gladly come and make a picture with you when you have one ready for me. A repetition of the past eleven and a half months I spent in Hollywood would kill me. All I have to show for it is eighteen thousand miles of travel, a few tests, and an almost infinitesimal part in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Now that I am fortunate enough to be away, it would take wild horses to drag me back.”

  Garson’s contract was renewed and her salary increased. She was given a new dressing room, and while she returned to Metro triumphant, she still was made to wait months for another part.

  • • •

  The picture Remember? was a comedy with a good deal of slapstick, which Garson enjoyed. “I’ve always wanted to jump into the water fully dressed,” she said, “but never dared to.”

  Garson had come from London, where gas masks hung in every home and were present at the studio. Each afternoon at 4:30 she invited Bob and Lew Ayres and others to tea (two bags; the cream in first).

  Remember? was the hardest work Garson ever did. She knew the picture was bad and that she was bad in it, but somehow she got through it.

  During the production Bob was given a surprise party on the set for his twenty-eighth birthday that was attended by Eddie Mannix, Benny Thau, Bill Powell, Myrna Loy, and Woody Van Dyke.

  Lew Ayres, Greer Garson, and Bob, Remember?, 1939. (PHOTOFEST)

  • • •

  Metro wanted Bob to appear in one of the starring roles in a remake of the 1912 Italian silent epic Quo Vadis? The novel, a best seller published in 1896 by Henryk Sienkiewicz, tells the story of the religious conversion of a noble Roman warrior set against the emperor Nero’s persecution of the early Christians. It had been made into one of the most ambitious pictures of its time, running twelve reels—almost three hours—and paved the way for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. When Quo Vadis? came to America, shortened to eight reels, it was a sensation; it opened at the Astor Theatre in New York and ran for an unheard-of twenty-two weeks. The remake, with Hunt Stromberg as producer, was to be Metro’s big spectacle for the 1939–1940 program.

  Bob and Barbara had made a date for Bob’s twenty-eighth birthday. On Barbara’s July 16 birthday Bob had had a 7:00 a.m. call to reshoot scenes for Lucky Night and hadn’t been able to put together a party for her.

  For Bob’s birthday, Barbara and Bob decided to have a candlelit dinner, just the two of them. They went out to a restaurant and got back to the house early. Bob told Barbara to go upstairs and put on her prettiest nightgown.

  The lights in the house were off. Barbara went up to the bedroom, changed, and then stood at the top of the stairs. “Here, Dad,” she called down to Bob. “Come and get it.”

  The lights went on. A roomful of people looked up at Barbara and yelled, “Surpr
ise! Happy birthday!”

  Barbara stood there naked, a birthday present for Bob. She ran into their bedroom and locked the door. She refused to speak to Bob, who tried to apologize. “I didn’t dream . . .” he said.

  “Well, I didn’t dream there were going to be people there.”

  • • •

  A week after Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a nonaggression pact, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west; Soviet Russia invaded from the east. More than a million German soldiers—thirty-two divisions—crossed the borders of Silesia, East Prussia, and Slovakia into Poland and overran an army of half a million Polish soldiers.

  England and France announced they were at war against Germany; the British liner Athenia, with more than a thousand passengers on board, two hundred of them Americans, was attacked by German torpedoes off the Hebrides.

  The headlines in the Los Angeles Times read: “Three Nations War on Hitler”; “Liner Torpedoed—1400 Aboard”; “British Planes Bomb Nazi Fleet.”

  President Roosevelt addressed the nation over the radio: “Tonight my single duty is to speak to the whole of America . . . I had hoped against hope that some miracle would prevent a devastating war in Europe and bring to an end the invasion of Poland by Germany . . . This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”

  Roosevelt proclaimed a state of “limited national emergency,” safeguarding and enforcing the United States’ neutral position. All U.S. military forces were told to increase enlistments; reservists were called to active duty.

  America was neutral, but Hollywood had been making pictures for the past year that led audiences to feel they were as much at war as Europe was.

  Metro’s pacifist picture Idiot’s Delight with Clark Gable and Norma Shearer was about the imminence of war. Thunder Afloat with Wallace Beery was about German submarines invading America’s coast. Warner Bros. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released in the spring, months before the start of the war in Europe, was about the dangers of the Nazi-run German American Bund and how it threatened to overthrow the American government. The picture’s message: Wake up, America! Blockade, originally called The River Is Blue from a script by Clifford Odets, written ultimately by John Howard Lawson, was about the Spanish Civil War and the resistance, about Loyalists and Fascists; it starred Madeleine Carroll and Henry Fonda, who asks the audience directly into the camera, “Where’s the conscience of the world?”