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

by Victoria Wilson

  And varied the roles she undertook.

  Barbara had settled into a groove only once, from 1933 to 1934, under contract to Warner Bros. playing a series of parts that were alike: poor, suffering women living under shabby conditions who rise up any way they can, in such pictures as Ladies They Talk About, Baby Face, and Gambling Lady. She had refused to make similar pictures and paid a heavy price, but it was worth it to break free. Warner Bros. put her on suspension when she could ill afford it, and later the studio dropped her as her marriage fell apart. After Eddie Small’s Red Salute at Reliance, Barbara broke through to play Annie Oakley in the kind of picture she’d been dreaming of for a long time, a Western.

  • • •

  Bob was assigned the lead in Waterloo Bridge only weeks before it went into production. He was to play an aristocratic officer from one of Britain’s finest regiments, scion of an old Scottish family who, on the eve of his departure to France to fight in the Great War (with overtones of the present war in Europe), falls in love with a young ballet dancer he meets by chance on Waterloo Bridge. Their whirlwind courtship causes her to lose her position in the ballet company, and he is called to the front before they can marry.

  Bob and Vivien Leigh, Waterloo Bridge, Leigh’s first picture after Gone With the Wind, 1940.

  She reads he has been killed in battle, and she, unable to find work and in desperate straits, resorts to prostitution to survive. A year later, he returns to London and sees her at the train station, where she regularly picks up soldiers. He assumes she has come to meet him and, seeing her only as the girl he loves, takes her home to his family estate. When she realizes her past can only destroy him, she flees and is drawn back to Waterloo Bridge and to the tragic end that seals their doomed love.

  The role of the officer was one Bob could easily have turned down; the captain at first seemed only a stooge part: uncomplicated and another in the string of juvenile roles from which Bob had been trying to escape. He took the part knowing that Vivien Leigh, at twenty-six the biggest movie star in the world, would turn the film, her first since Gone With the Wind, into a sensation. Bob was going through the painful experience of “slipping.” “I went up in a rocket, exploding and coming down like a stick,” he said. He needed Waterloo Bridge to break the jinx on his career and his four previous pictures.

  Metro had bought the rights to Waterloo Bridge, the Robert Sherwood play, from David O. Selznick.

  S. N. Behrman and Mervyn LeRoy worked on the script for more than a year and a half with help from Gottfried Reinhardt, Hugo Butler, Claudine West, Hans Rameau, and George Froeschel. The script of Waterloo Bridge was still being revised weeks before the picture started to shoot. The final result was different from both the Sherwood play and the 1931 James Whale picture from Universal that had adhered to Sherwood’s play and had starred Mae Clarke and Kent Douglass.

  “The only part that was [left intact],” said LeRoy of the script, “was the bridge.”

  Included in the deal between Selznick and MGM was Vivien Leigh. The New York Times had said of her as Scarlett, “She is so beautiful she hardly need be talented, and so talented she need not have been so beautiful; no actress was as perfectly suited for the role.” Leigh had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

  Vivien Leigh could have done anything for her next film, but she was drawn to the love story of Waterloo Bridge. She was about to be granted a divorce from her present husband, Leigh Holman, and would be free to marry the man she adored, Laurence Olivier.

  Selznick was lending Leigh to Metro as a way of paying Mayer back for his help with Gone With the Wind. Leigh was intent on following Scarlett O’Hara with a theatrical twenty-week tour of America with Olivier in Romeo and Juliet, much to Selznick’s dismay and displeasure. She would be one of the youngest Juliets of her time.

  Leigh’s previous contract with Alexander Korda at London Films allowed the actress the freedom of stage work. Selznick believed motion pictures were much more important than theatrical productions and argued against the Romeo and Juliet tour. He was hoping Waterloo Bridge would equal the success of Gone With the Wind.

  Metro originally wanted Michael Redgrave for Waterloo Bridge, but the studio had offered him the lowest amount of money possible, and he’d turned it down. Leigh wanted Olivier to co-star with her in the picture. Olivier was about to make Pride and Prejudice, also for Metro, and he wanted Vivien to be his Elizabeth Bennet instead of Greer Garson. Sidney Franklin, producer of Waterloo Bridge, also wanted Olivier for the part of the British officer, and the actor agreed to do it. Mayer would not hear of it. He was adamant that Olivier appear with Greer Garson in Pride and Prejudice.

  Bob had worked with Vivien three years before in Metro’s first picture made in Denham, England. In A Yank at Oxford, Bob was the twenty-six-year-old star. Vivien, in a supporting role, had agreed to make the picture to win attention in America and the role of Scarlett O’Hara.

  Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, and Bob on the MGM set of Waterloo Bridge, 1940.

  Before shooting started on Waterloo Bridge, Vivien Leigh wrote to her then husband, Leigh Holman, “Robert Taylor is the man in the picture and as it was written for Larry, it’s a typical piece of miscasting. I am afraid it will be a dreary job but I won’t think about it, and just concentrate on Romeo and Juliet.”

  Vivien spent her lunch hours on the picture working with Dame May Whitty, soon to be the nurse in the forthcoming Romeo and Juliet, who was helping Vivien with her voice.

  Despite Vivien’s feelings about Bob as the lead in the picture, she was generous and gracious to him. Their different sensibilities were summed up in their birthplaces: she was born in Darjeeling, India; he, in Filley, Nebraska.

  Between scenes Vivien got Bob to play Chinese checkers and battleships. When Olivier came to visit, she served both men tea in her dressing room. Vivien’s easy, friendly manner helped Bob. On the set, he was neither stiff nor self-conscious and could calmly think about his character. In their scenes together, “Vivien didn’t have to help,” said Bob. “She would have been a help even if she hadn’t wanted to be.” Bob thought she was one of those rare workers, like Garbo, who knew what she was doing every minute.

  Mervyn LeRoy had Bob grow a mustache for the picture for verisimilitude: English officers of the Great War wore mustaches; at the picture’s end, Bob appears middle-aged. Barbara had been telling Bob for three years that he would look good with a mustache, that it might take away from some of his beauty, give him some authority, and make him seem more real, less perfect. Now that he had grown a mustache, he liked the look of it, as did the studio.

  • • •

  LeRoy’s final whispered comment to his actors each time before he shot: “Now let’s have a nice scene with a lotta feeling.”

  While shooting Waterloo Bridge, LeRoy got the flu and was laid up for five days. Woody Van Dyke stepped in. Bob was working late and asked Barbara to visit him on his set. She had never been on one of Bob’s sets. She hesitated and said, “Miss Leigh might not like it.” Bob assured her that Vivien wasn’t like that, that it would be fine. Barbara agreed to have Bob drive her onto the Metro lot. She had Bob park his car a short distance from the soundstage where he was shooting. At the last minute Barbara thought it better for her to stay in the car and read a book while Bob worked.

  Barbara was an insomniac and read throughout the night. When not working, she spent days combing the shops for books. She subscribed to book clubs, looking for stories that would make good movies for her. The managers of the bookstores in town knew Barbara’s taste and sent her the latest books, which she read, one a night, and then sent on to friends.

  When Barbara wasn’t working, she still got up early each morning to see Bob off at the front door. She didn’t join him for breakfast, sensitive to how annoying it would be for her if she was on her way to the studio and had to converse when she was in a hurry and preoccupied with the day’s work.

  • • •

&n
bsp; Barbara’s appearance on Lux Radio Theatre in late March was her first job in two months. She reprised Remember the Night with Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson, and Sterling Holloway. A week later Barbara and Bob were on The Gulf Screen Guild Theater. The script was about a couple who take a cab ride and forget to stop at their church for their own wedding before taking the boat on their honeymoon. Franklin Pangborn appeared on the broadcast. They rehearsed at the Earl Carroll Theatre from 11:00 on a Sunday morning until the show went on the air that afternoon at 4:30 and donated their salaries to the Motion Picture Relief Fund.

  Barbara, Bob, and Clark Gable; photographed by Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, summer 1940.

  • • •

  Barbara was learning to play golf. She didn’t much like the game, but Bob had asked her to take it up. She bought all the paraphernalia—clubs, clothes, shoes. They practiced every day.

  Barbara was trying to do what Bob liked: joining him on his Sunday expeditions with the Moraga Spit and Polish Club; riding on the back of Bob’s motorcycle, despite the pain it caused her from old back injuries.

  Bob enjoyed playing golf on Sunday, but he didn’t want to play without Barbara. She thought Bob a fairly good player, “not bad; not bad at all.” He played in tournaments with Gable, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Eddie Mannix, and other MGM actors, executives, and workers.

  Barbara knew she was never going to be much of a golfer. She seldom hit the ball and didn’t really care. Her pro kept telling her to keep her head down and her eye on the ball, but she constantly lifted up her head.

  She hit bucketfuls of balls. Bob was patient with her, but after six solid days at a driving range Barbara told Bob that she just wasn’t the type, that work was play to her and play, work, and that he should play golf either alone or with someone who would be as intent as he was on cutting down his score. Her scores, she said, read like the “national debt and, like the debt, were getting higher and higher.” She thought bowling might be more for her; “a high score is something to work for there.”

  While in production on Waterloo Bridge, Vivien Leigh received the Academy Award for Best Actress for Gone With the Wind, winning against Bette Davis in Dark Victory.

  The awards ceremony, held on February 29 at the Ambassador Hotel, was being filmed for the first time by Frank Capra, the academy’s outgoing president; the overseeing cameraman was Charles Rosher, who filmed the twelve hundred guests. Vivien Leigh arrived at the Cocoanut Grove on the arm of David Selznick; also with her was Laurence Olivier, nominated for Best Actor for Wuthering Heights. The Hollywood Reporter described the couple—Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and Olivier as Heathcliff—as being, “for the moment, just about the most sacred of all Hollywood’s sacred cows.”

  Bob Hope was introduced as “the Rhett Butler of the air waves” and made his debut as the evening’s master of ceremonies.

  Gone With the Wind won eight Academy Awards—for best picture, direction, screenplay, actress, supporting actress, photography, art direction, and editing—and two special awards, with Selznick receiving the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award and the late Douglas Fairbanks Sr. being honored as the first president of the academy. William Cameron Menzies received a special plaque for his outstanding work in the use of color on Gone With the Wind.

  The evening’s biggest excitement was Hattie McDaniel’s winning the award for best supporting actress for her role as Mammy against Olivia de Havilland’s Miss Melanie. The audience cheered. Olivia de Havilland fled from the Selznick table to the kitchen and burst into tears. McDaniel was the first “of her race to receive an Award,” said Variety, and the first “Negro,” the paper reported, “ever to sit at an Academy banquet,” though McDaniel and her escort were put at a table for two in the rear of the Cocoanut Grove.

  • • •

  Ethel Vance’s novel Escape took place in an unnamed—but recognizable—totalitarian country: Germany (“We meet in an evil land/That is near to the gates of Hell”). It was a novel about a people caught up in the war in Europe desperately trying to get to freedom; its story involved the rescue from a concentration camp of one of Germany’s stage idols by her American son and their perilous attempt to flee the country.

  Bob found the notion of the book “a little ironic,” he said. “There isn’t a place in the world today where anyone can go and escape what’s happening.”

  The war in Europe was intensifying: the British were rationing food; German planes were shot down over England; the Soviet Union had invaded Finland and was expelled from the League of Nations; the United States repealed the arms embargo in favor of a cash-and-carry policy.

  Louis B. Mayer’s concern about what was happening to the Jews in Europe overrode his desire to hold on to the German market, and MGM was rushing Escape into production. The studio was concerned that peace might happen before the picture would come out and undercut its timeliness.

  George Cukor had been intrigued by the prospect of directing Escape and by the complex nature of the actress at the book’s center, a woman both noble and vain (after she comes out of the concentration camp, her first request is for her makeup case). Lawrence Weingarten, the picture’s producer, didn’t think Cukor right for the picture and offered it instead to Alfred Hitchcock, who wanted to work with Norma Shearer. Hitchcock was wary of Metro’s interference with his work and turned down the offer. Weingarten, much to Cukor’s disappointment, offered the picture to Mervyn LeRoy, who Cukor thought a “melodramatic” director.

  • • •

  Escape was Ethel Vance’s debut novel. It had sold more than 200,000 copies in its first three months of publication and was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Metro had bought the film rights to the book knowing that Ethel Vance was a pseudonym. Those who speculated on her identity rightfully assumed it was a woman who’d taken another name to protect some relative or friend living in Germany. Among those thought to have written the novel were Erika Mann, Dorothy Thompson, and Rebecca West. Ethel Vance was Grace Zaring Stone.

  The novel’s timeliness made its portrait of Nazi Germany more terrifying. As Hitler’s troops marched across Western Europe, Vance’s novel seemed eerily prophetic, though Escape ends in hopeful triumph and there seemed to be no end to Hitler’s reign of terror.

  • • •

  L. B. Mayer had appealed to Norma Shearer’s sense of public duty to make Escape; she’d just finished shooting The Women and before that Robert Sherwood’s picture Idiot’s Delight, with Clark Gable, about the last gasp of frivolity and the imminence of war. Shearer had mistakenly turned down the starring role in the film version of Rachel Crothers’s Broadway hit comedy, Susan and God, in which Gertrude Lawrence had given a virtuoso performance onstage and which Joan Crawford had tried with relentless gusto to re-create on film. Shearer decided to follow Mayer’s urging and agreed to play Countess von Treck in Escape.

  Shearer, a widow of thirty-eight, had, at the insistence of L. B. Mayer, ended her romance with twenty-year-old Mickey Rooney, who, as Andy Hardy, was Metro’s balm to a scared and vulnerable America in need of reassurance and buoyancy now that Britain alone stood between the United States and Hitler’s Third Reich.

  Two months before production started on Escape, Metro was trying to get Laurette Taylor for the part of the legendary German actress Emmy Ritter. Blanche Yurka campaigned for the role. After twenty years on the stage, Yurka had become a star in a 1928–1929 production of The Wild Duck and made her film debut six years later as Madame DeFarge. Instead of winning the part of Emmy Ritter, Yurka was cast as the sadistic concentration camp nurse who tortures the actress. Alla Nazimova was tested twice for the role of the celebrated actress at the center of Escape and was signed for the part two weeks before production started. Nazimova, of the Moscow Art Theatre, who brought Ibsen and Chekhov to America, was an acclaimed silent star and discoverer of Rudolph Valentino. Judith Anderson was tested for the part as well but was felt to look “too sinister” and “too Jewish.”
“That tickles me pink,” wrote Nazimova, “considering [Anderson] hasn’t a drop of it.” Escape was Nazimova’s first talking picture.

  • • •

  Barbara and Bob appeared together for the first time on Lux Radio Theatre. They performed Smilin’ Through from a play by Allan Langdon Martin, a pseudonym for Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin.

  Smilin’ Through—a haunted love story of two generations set in England during the world war—had been made into a picture in 1922 with Norma Talmadge and Harrison Ford and remade ten years later by MGM, starring Norma Shearer, Fredric March, and Leslie Howard. In the Lux Radio broadcast, Barbara and Bob played the double parts, both young and old lovers.

  After the performance, Barbara and Bob were called onstage together to chat. The subject of discussion was the Hollywood Stars, then playing at Gilmore Field. “Keep your fingers crossed for us stockholders,” said Barbara. “We may have a pennant winner.”

  • • •

  Barbara was referred to as Miss Stanwyck, never Mrs. Taylor. She’d gone through that once when she’d insisted on being called Mrs. Frank Fay. Bob introduced her as Miss Stanwyck. She was Miss Stanwyck to her servants. Dion referred to her as “my mother, Barbara Stanwyck.”

  Barbara had been waiting to make Night of January 16th. In the end, Don Ameche refused to make the picture—he didn’t want to play the unlikable financier—and the project fell apart. Paramount had borrowed Ameche from 20th Century–Fox and claimed its deal with Fox didn’t give Ameche the right of script approval. Paramount filed suit in superior court against Ameche for $170,000 to cover the costs of script, sets, and costumes, until he agreed to appear in Paramount’s Kiss the Boys Goodbye with Mary Martin from the Clare Boothe Luce hit play, and the suit was settled.

  At a Hollywood Stars game, Gilmore Field, circa 1940.

  Barbara decided to make two pictures with Bill Wellman at Paramount—F.O.B. Detroit, re-titled first The City That Never Sleeps, then Reaching for the Sun, and another picture called Pioneer Woman. Joel McCrea was to star opposite Barbara in both pictures.