Barbara and Bill Wellman hadn’t worked together since he’d directed her eight years before in So Big and The Purchase Price.
The script for F.O.B. Detroit was based on Wessel Smitter’s novel about the auto industry, the story of a lumberjack who takes a job in a car factory and dreams of returning to the north woods to start his own business.
Paramount had purchased Smitter’s novel for Wellman two years before to star Fred MacMurray and Robert Preston with Jean Arthur as the likely choice for the female lead. Wellman had wanted Jean Gabin instead of MacMurray, but the French actor was too expensive. Instead of Jean Arthur, Wellman was interested in Carole Lombard for the female lead, but Lombard was at RKO making Garson Kanin’s They Knew What They Wanted from the Sidney Howard play. Wellman settled on Barbara and McCrea.
Bob and Barbara went to see the Hollywood Stars play at Gilmore Field, as did Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Bill Frawley, George Raft, and Gail Patrick. Barbara and Bob had their regular seats, behind the netting back of home plate, a mere thirty-four feet away. Barbara wore the ruby and topaz bracelet Bob gave her to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.
This was the first season the Hollywood Stars were being televised in the West. Cameras were placed in boxes near first and third bases for the few hundred people who owned television sets within a thirty-mile radius of the station.
• • •
Bob, Mervyn LeRoy, Norma Shearer, Ilona Massey, and Ann Rutherford went to San Francisco to see Vivien Leigh and Olivier on opening night in Romeo and Juliet. Clark Gable wanted to go as well but was filming Boom Town. Leigh and Olivier planned to give the proceeds of one night’s performance to the Finns, who were in great need of aid.
Waterloo Bridge previewed at Grauman’s Chinese and opened in mid-May. Reviewers called it Bob’s strongest performance. Barbara thought it his best picture and that he and Vivien Leigh looked beautiful together.
• • •
Bob and Barbara nightly talked about the war. Often they ate dinner as fast as possible to get to their favorite newsreel theater in time for the first show each time the bill changed, sitting last row center.
Bob went back to see the newsreels again and again. He was ready to go to war. Of course he wanted to do his job six days a week, play golf on Sunday, and spend every evening with his wife. He had no more use for war than the next guy, but he was ready to fight to keep America “a country where the little guy has a break; to keep America a democracy,” he said.
“We think of ourselves as a nation too big and too powerful and too far away for any aggressor to tackle,” he said. “We’re big all right. Most of Europe would fit inside Texas. We have all kinds of room here, all kinds of natural resources, all kinds of wealth. But we’re not too far away to tackle, not if they can get control of the seas, not if they can get a foothold south of us.
“I don’t like war,” said Bob, “but if we have to go to war, I’m enlisting.”
In April, Nazi troops crossed the Danish border and invaded along the Norwegian coast. A month later Hitler launched his blitzkrieg against the Low Countries. Neville Chamberlain resigned; Winston Churchill became the new head of England’s wartime coalition government.
The question plaguing America was war or peace; should the country help the British, or should it send aid and remain aloof from the war overseas? The British had fewer than nine hundred fighters to the Luftwaffe’s almost two thousand bombers and twelve hundred fighters.
There were those Americans who wanted an immediate declaration of war against Germany and others who wanted us to help European democracies while staying neutral. The playwright Robert Sherwood took out an advertisement saying that whoever thought the Nazis would hold back until America was ready to fight was “either an imbecile or a traitor.”
The isolationists included the Irish and Germans, college students, and the Republican Party. The America First Committee, made up of midwestern businessmen like Robert Wood of Sears, Roebuck and Jay Hormel, the meat packer, believed there was a Jewish-British-capitalist-Roosevelt conspiracy to get America into the war and that it was much more prudent to learn to do business with Hitler. Charles Lindbergh said that accommodating Germany “could maintain peace and civilization throughout the world as far into the future as we can see.”
Churchill went before the House of Commons and appealed to the United States in a speech that made clear what had been accomplished at Dunkirk and paid tribute to the young airmen of the Royal Air Force who’d fought the German air forces: “Every morn brought forth a noble chance/And every chance brought forth a noble knight.” Churchill promised his country that they would “prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
In the speech he sent a message to Roosevelt and America: “We shall go on to the end . . . we shall never surrender, and even if . . . this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
Hollywood did what it could to help, donating money to various causes. Cary Grant gave his salary of $62,000 from The Philadelphia Story to the American Red Cross war relief, as did Myrna Loy and William Powell their earnings of $10,000 from Lux Radio Theatre. Walt Disney’s premier showing of Fantasia in New York raised money for British War Relief to be used for rolling kitchens to feed the homeless, firefighters, and rescue crews in bombed areas of Britain.
The newly organized Theatre Guild of Southern California put on a Bundles for Britain benefit production of Noël Coward’s series of nine plays, Tonight at 8:30, with the proceeds going to the British War Relief Society. Constance Bennett, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Rosalind Russell, Binnie Barnes, and others made up the casts; the plays were directed by George Cukor, Edmund Goulding, and Margaret Webster. A production of Cavalcade premiered at Billy Wilkerson’s new club, Ciro’s, with the money being sent to the British Red Cross. Noël Coward went to see the productions and adored them. He had an eye for detail; on a stage with four hundred people, in a show set in 1900, Coward would spot the man with the watch that wasn’t of the day.
The English colony came together to make a picture to help British war charities from a story by Robert Stevenson. Edmund Goulding, Victor Saville, and Herbert Wilcox were directing; among those starring in the picture were Brian Aherne, Anna Neagle, Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Merle Oberon, and Claude Rains; the picture was being produced and distributed by RKO. Each week, the English colony sent a fully equipped ambulance to the British Red Cross; Robert Montgomery donated an ambulance and went to England to drive it himself.
On June 14, 1940, the German army formed a great ring of steel around Paris. The city was outflanked by German spearheads of tanks and men. More than a million and a half Parisians fled the city and hid in the Bois de Boulogne and the surrounding woods. The news that the German armies were inside the gates of Paris was broadcast over the radio. Swastika banners of Nazi Germany were raised over the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and Versailles, where, in the Hall of Mirrors, the First Reich was born and where it died a “shameful” death in 1919. It seemed impossible that Paris had fallen to the Germans. Eight days later France formally surrendered to Germany.
England’s ships, ports, and coastal towns were under attack from the Luftwaffe. It was suddenly made clear that America was vulnerable to foreign invasion. The United States had only 160 P-40 planes for the more than two hundred pilots waiting to fly them; it had no anti-aircraft ammunition. Most Americans wanted to stay out of war, but they were arming to defend themselves.
The California legislature organized a guard inspired by the Swiss Home Guards; Chicago rifle clubs formed a civilian army of modern minutemen; New York’s National Legion of Mothers of Amer
ica organized the Molly Pitcher Rifle Legion to shoot at attacking parachute troops.
The U.S. Army consisted of half a million men, including the National Guard.
In June, President Roosevelt signed the Smith Act that required more than three million aliens to register at local post offices and to be fingerprinted.
• • •
The feeling in many parts of America was, “What the hell’s the use of writing a column? Who gives a damn if so-and-so breaks her neck or marries a man with vegetable juice in his veins?” And in Hollywood it was, “Why kill myself making this scene. What can it possibly matter in a world gone mad?”
Bette Davis’s new picture, All This, and Heaven Too, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre the day newspaper headlines read, “Nazi Trap Closes on Paris.” Bleachers built around the circle were filled with crowds of people. Charles Boyer was there, sick from the news. The studio insisted Davis attend the premiere. Newspapers bannered headlines: “France Falls.”
As the picture started, a shudder went through the audience when, to set the scene of the nineteenth-century romantic drama, the words “Paris, France” appeared on the screen imposed over a view of a city that was soon to be overrun with Nazi soldiers.
For the first time in Hollywood since the Great War, something was happening that was more important to the industry than itself.
Bette Davis went back to work the day after her picture opened and said, “Your routine may not seem important. What is important is that we keep on going. If the British can do it with their world in literal ruins around them, then phooey to us for whining before we’re touched.”
• • •
Frank Capra asked Barbara if she would take a chance and make a picture with him without seeing a script.
“Is it an honest role?” she asked.
“I give you my word,” said Capra.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
Gary Cooper, Barbara, Spring Byington, Edward Arnold, James Gleason, and Walter Brennan all agreed to make Capra’s new picture before there was a script. Cooper, like Barbara, had said, “It’s okay, Frank. I don’t need a script.”
Capra’s picture was a chilling cautionary tale about the rise of Fascism in America and the endangerment of democracy. Each character was tailored to the actor. Capra was interested in characters that did what human beings do, or “would do if they had the courage and opportunity,” he said. He wanted his cast members to be, in real life, the nearest thing possible to the characters they were playing so that their performances required the least acting.
Capra was at work on the script with Robert Riskin, who’d written for Barbara before: Illicit, his first screenplay; The Miracle Woman, her second Capra picture; and Shopworn.
With Frank Capra during production of Golden Boy, visiting the set of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; both Columbia Pictures, 1939. Capra’s next picture, his first with Barbara in eight years, would be their fifth collaboration.
In each, Barbara was the hard-boiled girl, on her own, rich or poor, full of spirit, living outside convention, daring to break society’s hypocritical rules, toughing it out. Barbara took the high, low, and middle classes; they and Riskin were awed by her.
Capra and Riskin collaborated to make Barbara, in each picture, the girl who, as Capra said of Barbara herself, has “bounced off the floor and come back better each time, has never let herself down. It just isn’t in her to let anyone else down either.”
Barbara was to be a hardworking newspaper columnist, an ambitious girl who’s worked her way through with the “courage to crusade for a good idea and with enough intelligence to spoof those that aren’t.” She’s been fired by the paper, and she dreams up a stunt to keep her job and hold on to her salary. Like Barbara, Capra said, “Ann Mitchell has humor, a sense of news and human understanding, a bit of idealism for things worthwhile and loyalty to friends. She has beauty and charm and likes pretty things.”
In the picture, Mitchell goes for the money and through her cynicism becomes the instrument of a windfall plot to help an oil magnate, trying to crash national politics, circumvent the principles of American democracy and double-cross his way into the White House—until she is called up short and sees what she is truly fighting for. Barbara saw Capra’s picture as a “social history of our times, about an Everyman—caught in the web. Doesn’t know what it’s all about—no more than the rest of us.”
Of the actresses with whom Capra liked to work—Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck—he thought Barbara “the most interesting” and “the hardest to define,” he said. “She’s sullen, she’s somber, she’s the easiest to direct . . . she could suffer from her toughness and really suffer from the penance she would have to pay.”
Capra admired Barbara’s honesty; he saw her as earnest, simple, real. Barbara had a capacity for honesty and discretion but not necessarily for gentleness. A flippant remark by her could be misunderstood, and she might spend the day worrying about it. She rarely said yes when she should say no. She was not an indecisive woman—fluttering, coy, flitting from one uncertainty to another. She knew her mind and spoke it.
The only make-believe Capra saw in Barbara was what she projected in her art. She was a brave enough actress to let her audience see her think, something Capra had taught her from their earliest picture together, Ladies of Leisure.
Barbara was so excited about starting The Life of John Doe that she was “not of this earth”; she could “hardly contain herself,” she said.
She took nothing for granted, neither poverty nor plenty, talent or ambition. Plenty could be taken from her at any time; poverty she’d overcome with hard work. She didn’t believe in taking bad breaks for granted. If she did, she might stop fighting for the things she had it in her to accomplish. She didn’t believe that life should be lived easily and softly or that people should crave the easy way. She’d made her own breaks and knuckled against the hard times and didn’t regret it. She’d grown up in a world of loneliness that had forced her to create her own world. She’d built it of her dreams and hidden it jealously from everyone and learned to lose herself in it. For a long time, it was the only home she felt she had.
• • •
The Fourth of July came and went with quiet fanfare. To Barbara hard work with the prospect of rich reward was the American way. “If any country was ever developed by harder work, I don’t know what country it could possibly be,” she said. Bob Taylor said about democracy and the fight for it, “Any other set-up [system of government]—no matter what you call it—puts the power in the hands of the few. The little guy has to obey laws that he had no hand in making. If he’s hauled into court, he has no guarantee of justice, because he doesn’t get a trial-by-jury. If the heads of state don’t want him going to church, assembling with his fellows, he can’t go to church. “I’m a little guy but I’m free to enjoy the life God gave me. I live in America.”
In Frank Capra’s new picture, Barbara was playing a character who is almost undone by an industrialist press lord manipulating the goodwill of the people to ride to power and undo the democratic state.
“America was developed by blood, sweat, and tears,” said Barbara. “And now it is blood, sweat, and tears, which will keep America alive.”
After the holiday weekend, Barbara went into Warner Bros. for makeup tests. Production on The Life of John Doe began four days later.
• • •
Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent was released during the height of the summer. It was about a young newspaper crime reporter (Joel McCrea; Hitchcock originally wanted Gary Cooper for the part), chosen because he isn’t a foreign correspondent, “somebody who doesn’t know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo, a good honest crime reporter; that’s what the Globe needs; that’s what Europe needs. There’s a crime hatching on that bedeviled continent.” The reporter is chosen in the hope that he will be able to get some facts, any kind of facts (the paper’s editor—Harry Davenpo
rt—says, “There must be something more going on in Europe [in August 1939] besides a nervous breakdown”), and he is sent off by the paper’s editor to a Europe about to blow up.
The young man is drawn into a “fifth-column plot” that takes him from London and Amsterdam and back again as he chases down Nazi agents, kidnappers, and spies, tracking the assassin of an international political leader, a keynote to the European situation, fighting for peace in Europe, a man who knows too much as the world is closing in and who fights to keep the terrifying darkness at bay.
The final explosive scene of Foreign Correspondent is Hitchcock’s rallying cry to America.
Joel McCrea as the small-town crime reporter is broadcasting from a London radio station: the Nazi plot has been uncovered; the love interest fulfilled . . . Hitler’s planes are in the skies over London; additional German bombers are on their way . . . everyone has fled. The station microphone is still live, but the lights have gone out in the building. McCrea is speaking “off the cuff” because he can’t see to read his speech. The city is going up in flames . . .
“All that noise you hear isn’t static,” he says. “It’s death coming to London. Yes, they’re coming now. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out. Hang on a while. This is a big story and you’re part of it. It’s too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come. It’s as if the lights were all out everywhere—except in America. Keep those lights burning there. Cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello, America, hang on to your lights. They’re the only lights left in the world!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have helped in the writing of this book, some directly, some in an offhand way. As an editor, I have spent most of my adult life reading manuscripts—and authors’ acknowledgments, not truly understanding how important those are who have given assistance in the writing of a book. I now know what that generosity of spirit means.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 96
