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

by Victoria Wilson

  • • •

  With Europe at war, Hollywood stayed home for the Christmas holiday. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard ate turkey. Barbara, finally free from the splint on her arm, and Bob had their first open house on Beverly Drive.

  Ronald Colman and Alan Mowbray, president of British War Relief of Southern California, and Charles Boyer of French War Relief organized a Franco-British war relief dinner dance at the Cocoanut Grove with the help of Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, Edgar Bergen, Basil Rathbone, Mary Pickford, and Norma Shearer.

  W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” caught the tone of the time:

  I sit in one of the dives

  On Fifty-second Street

  Uncertain and afraid

  As the clever hopes expire

  Of a low dishonest decade:

  Waves of anger and fear

  Circulate over the bright

  And darkened lands of the earth,

  Obsessing our private lives;

  The unmentionable odour of death

  Offends the September night.

  “You can’t put blinders on and refuse to see what’s happening,” said Bob Taylor of the war across the ocean. “You can’t plug up your ears and refuse to hear what’s happening. You’ve got to stop, look and listen and ask yourself, ‘What kind of part do I want to play in all this?’ ”

  SEVENTEEN

  On the Brink

  1940

  And if ever I’m left in this world all alone

  I shall wait for my call patiently

  For if heaven be kind

  I shall wait there to find

  Those two eyes of blue

  Come smiling through . . . at me . . .

  —Arthur Penn, “Smilin’ Through”

  Barbara started the New Year with an appearance—her first—on The Jack Benny Hour. His was among her favorite radio shows, along with Information Please, Orson Welles’s dramatic series on Sunday nights, and the music of Andre Kostelanetz.

  Barbara was close to both Mary and Jack Benny. She thought Jack the dearest man in the world. He wasn’t particularly funny off the radio, but nevertheless the way he would tell her about something that happened to him would have her “falling off her chair,” she said.

  Jack was equally crazy about Barbara. “For my money,” he said, “along with all the nobler virtues, such as loyalty and integrity, Barbara has the greatest sense of humor in Hollywood.” Her friendship was invaluable to him.

  In photographs, Mary Benny and Barbara resembled each other, with similar hairstyles and a similar cast to the face. Barbara often sent her hairdresser, Holly Barnes, to Mary Benny’s to do her nails. Holly still did Barbara’s nails every Sunday and answered her fan mail. The first time Holly went to Mary Benny’s, Barbara felt Mary hadn’t paid Holly enough and called Mary to tell her so. To make amends, Mary gave Holly one of her jeweled evening bags.

  Mary Benny was beautiful, glamorous, and fun. She was down-to-earth, amusing, strong, the kind of woman Jack was drawn to, women like Barbara, Ann Sheridan, and Carole Lombard.

  Mary and Jack were uneducated, but Jack, like Barbara, read and wanted to learn. For Mary, being Mrs. Jack Benny was the be-all and end-all. What interested Mary was learning to buy the right silver, the right jewelry (the bigger, the better), the right clothes (she shopped incessantly). Mary had taste, but most of it was copied from Edie Goetz, older daughter of Louis B. Mayer and one of the leading hostesses of Hollywood.

  Mary was Sadie Marks, a shopgirl from Seattle with no credentials and little sophistication. She strove to be a great Hollywood hostess like Edie. Mary wanted to be Edie Goetz (when the Goetz cook died, Edie’s response: “How could she do this to me?”). If Edie Goetz fired her butler, Mary fired hers.

  Mary could be cruel and unpredictable; at times she threatened to send her adopted daughter back to the orphanage, and Joanie Benny found it difficult to relax around her mother.

  The Bennys lived in a Georgian mansion in Beverly Hills with roses and pansies lining the front walk and a large swimming pool and playhouse in the rear. Mary would look at their spiral staircase and say, “Joan will look lovely coming down those stairs, a bride.”

  The Bennys’ parties, particularly their New Year’s Eve celebrations, were lavish, filled with people who to Mary were the right crowd: Barbara and Bob; Frank and Nancy Sinatra; George Burns and Gracie Allen; Jimmy and Gloria Stewart; Ray and Mal Milland; Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; Errol Flynn; Gary and Rocky Cooper; the Humphrey Bogarts; the Robert Montgomerys; the Ronald Colmans; Ann Sheridan; Bob and Dolores Hope; and others.

  • • •

  The Jack Benny Hour, sponsored by Jell-O (“Jell-O again,” Jack would say at the opening of each show), had aired on Sunday nights at seven since 1934.

  Benny had created a radio family that seemed real to his listening audience. His comedy was sophisticated and childlike. Jack was the butt of most of the comedy situations, the guy the others picked on. Benny’s style of comedy had been influenced by Frank Fay; each had headlined at the Palace in New York. Like Fay, Benny sauntered onstage, without props or funny suits or a stooge. Like Fay, Jack didn’t tell jokes but told stories around events of the day that seemed ad-libbed. And like Fay, Benny took his time and never rushed the punch line; his humor, like Fay’s, was put across by his voice, its inflection and pauses.

  The Jack Benny Hour, by 1937, had forged ahead of Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour and was the No. 1 show in the country; more than thirty-seven million American families tuned in each week to listen to Jack and Mary, Phil Harris, Dennis Day, and Mel Blanc. Benny was earning $400,000 a year from radio and pictures, a far cry from his first act in vaudeville as “Ben Benny—Fiddleology and Fun,” in which he told jokes and sang “After the Country Goes Dry, Good-Bye, Wild Women, Good-Bye” and “I Used to Call Her Baby but Now She’s Mother to Me.”

  The Jack Benny Hour was the first to spoof best-selling novels, hit plays, and motion pictures, starting with Grind Hotel. The Benny show did a takeoff of The Crowd Roars with Jack in the role played on-screen by his good friend Bob Taylor. In the Benny script, Taylor’s father says, “And don’t forget your toupe, son.” Jack answers, “I won’t, Pa. I’m going to wear it on my chest so everyone will know I’m a man”—a play on the press’s teasing Taylor about his questionable manliness. Benny hesitated about getting a laugh at his friend’s expense, but Taylor called Jack after the show to tell him how much he’d loved it.

  The Benny show with Barbara as Jack’s guest centered on her new picture, Golden Boy. Jack had promised the audience the week before that he would present a sketch based on the just-released picture.

  The show begins with Mary Livingstone explaining to the announcer Harry von Zell, filling in for Don Wilson, that Jack won’t be doing Golden Boy after all, much to Jack’s denials, embarrassment, and pooh-poohing.

  Mary explains how she and Jack had run into Barbara Stanwyck a few days before at the Wilshire Bowl. The music signals a flashback to the Bowl . . .

  “You know Barbara Stanwyck?” Mary asks Jack when they spot Barbara sitting at a ringside table. “Of course I know her,” says Benny. “And say, Mary, I’ve got a great idea . . . as long as we’re doing Golden Boy on the show, wouldn’t it be marvelous if I could get Barbara to play her original role on the program?”

  Jack, full of confidence and open affection, approaches Barbara’s table and gives her a big “Well, well, hello, Barbara” as if they were the best of chums.

  Barbara gives Jack a clipped “Hello” and goes on talking with her dining companions.

  Benny interrupts again. “Where’s Bob [as if they too were great pals] and will he be joining you?” Barbara barely answers. Jack, eager to engage Barbara Stanwyck in conversation, and ever the stooge—with nothing really to say, except to ask her to appear on his show—asks again about Bob.

  Finally, Barbara asks Benny, “Are you working here?” as if he is the waiter.

  Barbara int
roduces him to her friends as “Ben Bernie,” confusing him with the vaudeville comedian. (Jack had changed his name from Benny Kubelsky to Ben Benny. He and Bernie were often confused for each other, much to Jack’s annoyance. Bernie’s most famous hit, “When Polly Walks Through the Hollyhocks,” led the way, months later, for Nick Lucas’s hit song, “Tip Toe Through the Tulips.”)

  Jack asks Barbara to dance and, while he is tripping over her on the dance floor, says, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me tonight. I’m generally very graceful. In fact, I got medals for dancing.”

  “Well, take them off. They’re tearing my dress,” she says.

  Jack ignores Barbara’s snarl and talks her into appearing on his show. They make a plan to rehearse the play. Tuesday afternoon, three o’clock, at Jack’s house . . .

  The day arrives; Jack is excited. A new brown suit for the occasion; tea sandwiches made by Rochester from the “Thanksgiving turkey they’d served for Christmas.”

  Mary Livingstone comes for the event (“Jack, you ought to take that sign down in front of your house,” she tells him. “It looks awful. The one that says, ‘Today in Person, Barbara Stanwyck’ ”).

  When Barbara arrives, Jack introduces her to Mary.

  “How do you do, Miss Livingstone.”

  “I knew Bob Taylor before you did,” says Mary.

  Jack apologizes for her: “Pay no attention to her. She’s always like that.”

  “I know,” says Barbara. “She used to sell me hose at the May Company.” (Before Mary was Mrs. Jack Benny, she worked in the department store behind the hosiery counter.)

  Barbara tells Jack that she has selected the scene from Golden Boy for them to rehearse in which Lorna Moon pleads with Joe Bonaparte to give up fighting and go back to his violin.

  “I see. And I’m Joe.”

  “Unless you’d rather be Lorna,” says Barbara.

  Benny is endearing and funny as the desperately bad wannabe actor who reads Joe Bonaparte’s lines with a tin ear, an effeminate inflection, and the voice of a high-pitched Groucho Marx. Barbara holds her own as the straight man: serious, dutiful, doing her best as her acting partner hams it up, causing the studio audience to burst into laughter while she ignores how hopelessly inept he is as an actor.

  Joan Benny, age six, with Richard, the Benny’s chauffeur; Dion, age seven; and Henrietta (Joan called her ‘Henny’), Mary Benny’s personal maid, Palm Springs circa 1940. (COURTESY JOAN BENNY)

  Barbara can’t help herself and progresses steadily into the character of Lorna as she pleads with Joe (“I didn’t care whether you lived or died or what happened to you . . . I didn’t care if I ever saw you again . . . Joe, you must listen to me”) while Benny, in monotone, punctuates her pleas with his one line, “I’m going, Lorna.”

  Barbara gets more heartfelt, more emotional. Benny, bored with saying his one line the same way, finally says, “I’m going, Lorna?” with the emphasis on the question mark.

  They go on until Barbara tells Jack the scene is hopeless (“Believe me, Jack, rehearsing won’t help any”). Jack pleads with Barbara to stick it out with him. There’s no point, she tells him. On the way out the door, Barbara says, “Oh, by the way, Jack, you can take that sign down now.”

  Barbara refused to be paid for the show, and Benny, who adored her, gave her a sable coat.

  Barbara and Dion—then called Skip—often stayed with the Bennys in Palm Springs. Their daughter, Joan, was impressed that Barbara sunbathed nude on the roof of their house. Joanie Benny played with Skip and the two went to the movies together, learned to ride two-wheel bicycles around the same time, and rode off toward the mountains to explore the desert. Joanie thought Skip’s blond hair and freckled face cute. He was her first romance. Dion talked at home about Joanie and told Barbara and Uncle Buck that he was going to marry her. Barbara told Uncle Buck that Skip couldn’t marry Joan. “She’s Jewish,” Uncle Buck reported.

  • • •

  Remember the Night opened in mid-January. It was Barbara’s thirty-fifth picture.

  “Barbara Stanwyck at her magnificent best.” The critics were unanimous in their praise.

  The reviews were equally celebratory about the picture: “Memorable; the best picture of 1940,” Frank Nugent in The New York Times; and about Leisen’s direction: “Its character drawing is splendid and in splendid proportion”; Sturges’s script: “Simple, eloquent,” NY Times and the cast, “Not a false note; not a bad performance,” said Hedda Hopper; “Fred MacMurray gives one of his best performances; Barbara Stanwyck is thoroughly Grade A,” Archer Winston in the New York Post.

  The picture’s first week at New York’s Paramount Theatre took in the record amount of $45,000.

  • • •

  Barbara and Bob took stock of industry salaries for 1939: Joan Crawford was paid $305,000 for the year; Clark Gable, $272,000; Robert Montgomery, $209,000; Ginger Rogers, $208,000; Irene Dunne, $405,000; Jean Arthur, $136,000; Claudette Colbert, $125,000; Lionel Barrymore, $136,000; Spencer Tracy, $212,000.

  Barbara had earned $117,000 in 1939. She thought a lot about fame, staying power, and the craft of being an actor or actress. “Fame is a wonderful sensation,” she told Bob. “The attention you get in Hollywood can be a very heady thing. It can make you believe audiences are interested in anything you do, no matter what—if you don’t know better. It’s a thrill to look at a marquee and see your name in electric lights. But the real thrill lies in being able to say, ‘Well, I think I earned it. It wasn’t all luck. I’ve served an apprenticeship, learned my trade.’ ”

  Too many, Barbara felt, wanted to get into pictures who didn’t have any great drive to learn their trade; their thoughts were on the fanfare, the luxuries, the limousines, the pretty clothes. “That’s all very nice,” said Barbara. “But you can’t appreciate it without earning it. And you can’t hang onto it without earning it.”

  Frank Capra had been an important teacher for Barbara, as were Frank Fay, Willard Mack, and Arthur Hopkins before him. No matter what she was taught by others, learning was something that had to be done alone, following head and heart.

  Barbara and Bob, soon after they met, were one night looking up at a marquee of the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Taylor’s name was in lights for the first time—“ROBERT TAYLOR AND LORETTA YOUNG” in Private Number, with his name first. Bob was impressed with it all. “Don’t let it go to your head,” said Barbara. “Loretta has been working for years to get her name up there; you’ve been at it for six months. The trick is to keep it up there.”

  Barbara learned that in the theater she couldn’t kid herself about her ability to interest an audience. “You’ve got to be good—or else. And you’ve got to be good on the first take because there isn’t a second. You have two weeks of tryouts, and then the opening night—and that’s it. You have to sell yourself as a performer.”

  In Hollywood, it was done differently. Before a picture played a single theater, everyone in the picture was sold to the public as being interesting. If the picture was good, the fans flocked to it.

  “Popularity befalls popularity,” said Barbara. “And when that happens, youngsters who aren’t trained as actors don’t stop and wonder how much of their popularity they owe to publicity, and how much to their performances. They rush headlong into the assumption that they must be good. They’re bolstered in that belief by their long-term contracts. Even if their next pictures are flops,” said Barbara. “For a time they’ll still keep their jobs. And still draw their salaries.

  “In the theater, you get your salary only as long as a play runs. You have a job only if you’re good.”

  Barbara knew that without stage training, she would have been lost in the movies. It was important to have a “thorough understanding of the business of acting,” to start at the bottom and build up. She believed that Flaubert’s observation to de Maupassant about writing was true about acting: “Talent is long patience.” A career was a battle of wits; those who w
ere educated about acting and the business had the advantage. Real acting to Barbara wasn’t based on spontaneity. It was based on craft and the solidity of a foundation; it developed inside by growth of that talent, by working on it, thinking about it, doing it, and studying it more and more.

  • • •

  In a poll of the most popular stars of Hollywood, Bob fell from sixth place and was no longer listed among the top ten. His next two assignments were important pictures for him and important parts; in his sixth year of stardom, he needed both. Metro had put him in Stand Up and Fight, a good script and a picture that made money for the studio but one that “conked me on the head to the count of nine,” he said. Lady of the Tropics, Lucky Night, and Remember?, all bad pictures, were equally bad roles for Bob.

  He was set to appear opposite Vivien Leigh in Metro’s remake of the romantic tragedy Waterloo Bridge and then to star with Metro’s queen of the lot, Norma Shearer, in Escape, from Ethel Vance’s just-published best-selling suspense thriller about Nazi Germany.

  Mervyn LeRoy finished producing the lavish Wizard of Oz, his first picture at Metro as (unofficial) director, stepping in between stints of the picture’s four directors: Richard Thorpe, who was fired; George Cukor, who was reassigned; Victor Fleming, following in Cukor’s wake to take over Gone With the Wind; and King Vidor, who came in at the last. LeRoy was brought over to MGM as head of production following the death of Irving Thalberg in 1936 and the departure of David Selznick in 1935 to start his own company. LeRoy, after eleven years of directing at Warner Bros., was to direct Metro’s Waterloo Bridge and Escape.

  “Be versatile” was Barbara’s rule. She’d learned firsthand that those actors who varied their acting experience were “the only ones who stood a chance of being remembered.”

  “People won’t forget Bette Davis,” said Barbara that winter. “She didn’t become memorable without any training. She put herself through the long, hard school of experience. She learned her trade.”