by Axel Madsen
As soon as Night Nurse was finished, MGM put Gable into Sporting Blood with Madge Evans and Marie Prévost. Nineteen years later, when Stanwyck teamed with Clark in To Please a Lady; she would tell how Gable’s next picture came out a few days before Night Nurse. Confusing Sporting Blood with China Seas, a picture Gable made in 1935, Stanwyck would remember how, back in March 1931, people went from Gable-conscious to Gable-crazy: “Our dandy little opus hit Broadway the first day billed as Ben Lyon and Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse. The second day it was Ben Lyon, Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Gable in Night Nurse. And the fourth day all you could see were black letters three feet high which simply said ‘Clark Gable’ and left poor Ben and me out completely.”
When Bright Lights didn’t do well, Frank drowned his disappointment in drink. The blow to his ego was compounded by his wife’s soaring popularity. Tensions mounted. The press sniffed marital trouble. In March 1931, the Fays denied they were separating. Frank referred questions to his wife. Barbara tried to make light of it. She was in the middle of baking a cake, she told reporters phoning for her comment. “Does this sound like we’re separated?” she asked. “Would any wife do that much for a husband she was mad at?” Fay and Zanuck couldn’t agree on Frank’s next picture. In June, Warners canceled Frank’s contract.
Barbara faced the press alone. Her husband had not liked the scripts the studio proposed, but had offers from two major companies “and will sign with one or the other.” She asserted that Warner Brothers had almost killed him with poor material and tried to be cynical about her own success. “I’m a star now,” she said, “but give me one or two bad pictures and Hollywood will consider me a flop again. Frank did a couple of bad films, but so what? The same thing could happen to me. I’ve been through it.”
She insisted her husband was responsible for her success. As proof she told reporters how Frank’s rushing her screen test to Capra had resulted in her getting the starring role in Ladies of Leisure. Yes, she had to admit he would prefer if she didn’t work. “He’s old-fashioned. He thinks that a woman’s place is at home. But he wants me to be happy and he knows I am happier doing something.”
She fibbed when she said two other studios were making overtures to Frank. Nobody wanted to sign him. Ego and survival instinct made him decide to return to New York. The stage was where he belonged. He insisted that she follow. She didn’t refuse, but reminded him that she still owed Harry Cohn another picture. She’d retire once he reestablished himself on Broadway, and in any event, she’d come as soon as possible. Perhaps to keep an eye on her, Frank had his father move in with them in Malibu. Francis Donner had given up vaudeville the year before and was happy to move in with his son and daughter-in-law. Before Frank boarded the Santa Fe Super Chief, he told his wife to tell Cohn she needed a vacation.
THE ACADEMY SNUB OF LADIES OF LEISURE STILL RANKLED CAPRA. To show he was a first-class director, Capra wanted to do a prestige picture starring Barbara Stanwyck. Illicit not only proved a smart follow-up to Ladies of Leisure for Barbara, it made Robert Riskin a hot writer. At Capra’s urging, Cohn bought Bless You, Sister, the controversial 1927 Broadway play Riskin had written with John Meehan, in which Alice Brady had starred.
Bless You, Sister was inspired by the Aimee Semple McPherson scandal. “Sister” Aimee had packed the five-thousand-seat Angelus Temple near Glendale Boulevard and showed the Midwesterners who filled the Los Angeles tract homes that worship could be fun. She and her flock praised the Lord with music and dance. In her famous throw-out-the-lifeline number, the former Ontario farm girl had a dozen imperiled maidens cling to a storm-lashed Rock of Ages while special effects men worked heroically with thunder, lightning, and wind machines. Just when all seemed lost, Sister Aimee in an admiral’s uniform appeared and ordered a squad of lady sailors to the rescue. The Angelus Temple boasted a huge choir, a brass band, and a pipe organ. A “miracle room” at the Glendale Boulevard temple displayed crutches, wheelchairs, and braces abandoned after faith cures. A radio station broadcast the Foursquare gospel.
Aimee’s apparent suicide by drowning off the California coast in 1926 was a mystery; her reappearance thirty-seven days later a national sensation. Stumbling out of the Arizona desert, she claimed a trio of kidnappers had taken her to a shack in the Mexican desert. Los Angeles gave her a tumultuous welcome, and her flock greeted her as someone risen from the dead. Had she not insisted on bringing her alleged abductors to justice, the affair might have blown over. Police found notes in Aimee’s handwriting showing she and the operator of her temple’s radio station had enjoyed many a tryst in hotels and that they had spent the five weeks she was kidnapped in a seaside cottage together. Aimee set out on a rehabilitation tour. In cities where crowds had thronged to hear her, the halls were now empty. Capra believed an exposé of a woman evangelist fleecing the faithful was a daring career move and that Stanwyck would make a helluva Aimee.
Cohn was jittery, but gave Bless You, Sister the go-ahead on condition Dorothy Howell help Riskin write the script. Her levelheadedness, Cohn figured, would keep the satire in check. Riskin didn’t want to have anything to do with the project. He warned Cohn, Capra, and Howell that if Broadway’s sophisticates had found it offensive, what would Bible Belt moviegoers say?
Capra got his way. With Jo Swerling and Dorothy Howell, he wrote an opening scene that was nothing if not powerful: A congregation that has already decided to replace its aging, old-fashioned preacher with an up-and-coming “modernist” minister gathers for one last sermon by the old man. Instead of the outgoing minister, it is his daughter, Florence Fallon, who mounts the pulpit to announce that her father has just died in her arms. She lashes out at the worshipers, telling them that they killed her father. “For thirty years he tried to touch your stony hearts with the mercies of God—and failed. Why? Because you don’t want God.” As they flee the church, she shouts, “And you’re right! There is no God.” Here director and screenwriters lost their nerve.
What Capra originally had in mind—and Broadway audiences had objected to—was a lady evangelist milking the faithful. The script was softened by introducing a con man, a carny promoter who manipulates Sister Florence into becoming the big-money revivalist, and a good guy, a blind war veteran who is saved from suicide by her preaching on the radio.
Director and star worked smoothly, and Barbara knew how to illuminate both Sister Fallon’s early cynicism and her pangs of conscience when she realizes not only the promoter’s lack of scruples but the amount of deception in her own preaching. On the script level, however, Sister Fallon’s motivations are neither clear nor persuasive.
Because Capra had seen a Lon Chaney movie about faith healing in 1919 called The Miracle Man, the picture was released in July 1931 under the title The Miracle Woman. It was a failure. In his memoirs, Capra would blame himself. “I weaseled,” he wrote. “I insisted on a ‘heavy’ to take the heat off Stanwyck the evangelist. He cons her into it. He gets wealthy. She becomes his flamboyant stooge. Did she or did she not herself believe those ‘inspiring’ sermons delivered in diaphanous robes, with live lions at her side? I didn’t know. Stanwyck didn’t know, and neither did the audience.
The next six months were sheer hell. On the long-distance telephone, Frank Fay thundered that she was Mrs. Fay first, an actress second. At the studio, the long-engaged Frank Capra told her to divorce the bastard and marry him. A smarmy “plant” with a newspaper columnist called Barbara Stanwyck “one movie star who is happily married” and quoted Capra’s coy rejoinder that “she was so pleased with her last wedding that she can hardly wait for the next one.”
Capra wanted to do another film with Stanwyck. “Confession” or “cry” pictures about good girls gone astray, unwed mothers, and love that cannot end in marriage were big box office. Universal had bought Fannie Hurst’s 1930 bestseller Back Street for Irene Dunne. Capra figured he could beat Universal to the punch. In Forbidden Stanwyck would sacrifice everything for her married lover and their illegitimate
baby.
Practically the entire Columbia writing staff worked on Forbidden, although Swerling got the screenplay credit and Capra gave himself the original story credit. They invented a barking city editor, a suave district attorney, and Lulu Smith, who loves the D.A. but marries the editor. Adolphe Menjou was cast as the district attorney and father of Lulu’s child. They can’t marry because he won’t leave his crippled wife (Dorothy Peterson). To give the illegitimate daughter a home and a future, Lulu gives up her baby girl to Menjou and his wife. Lulu marries Al, the editor, played by Ralph Bellamy, and becomes the tabloid’s writer of advice to the lovelorn. Al discovers his wife’s secret and makes the downfall of the district attorney his sole ambition. To save the reputation of the father of her child from Al, Lulu shoots her husband. Menjou is elected governor and pardons her. He is taken ill and on his deathbed hands Lulu a will that admits their affair and leaves her half his estate. In the fadeout, Lulu destroys the will. Nobody will ever know.
THE TWO FRANKS KEPT TEARING AT BARBARA. HER HUSBAND’S long-distance demands that she get herself to New York matched
Capra’s entreaties that she stay. She was his inspiration, the director told her; they would top Ladies of Leisure with this one. Barbara went to Cohn. She needed a breather. She needed a little time off so she could go to New York and appease her husband. Cohn wouldn’t hear of it. He was paying her $2,000 a week, but only when she was working. Frank apparently needed the Western Union money orders she sent him every week more than he needed her wifely presence. He relented temporarily and Forbidden was set to start in late April 1931, then delayed to mid-May.
It was not a happy shoot. A photograph of Lulu murdering her husband shows Barbara, haggard and distant, in the doorway limply holding a gun. Barbara asked Cohn to let her make a quick trip to New York. Life would be so much easier, she told Cohn, if she and Frank could spend their third anniversary together. Cohn refused, convinced the real motive was to get Barbara away from Capra, that once in New York Fay would delay his wife’s return to California.
Barbara shifted tactics. Cohn might yield, she decided, if she made a sufficiently outrageous demand. She had received $12,000 for Ten Cents a Dance and $16,000 for The Miracle Woman. She telephoned the studio and said she wouldn’t work unless she got $50,000 for Forbidden. Cohn offered her $20,000. She said in that case she could not report to work. On July 17, 1931, the trade press reported she had “failed to put in an appearance at the Columbia studio” and that production was suspended.
Charles Cradick, her lawyer, decided he should go public while she remained in seclusion. Everybody agreed Stanwyck had signed a contract to do three films for Columbia, Cradick told a news conference. Where the disagreement came in was over which one was the third. The studio claimed Forbidden was the last picture; Barbara considered Illicit, the “loan picture” she had made for Warners and for which she had been paid $35,000, the third and final commitment of her Columbia contract.
“The trouble is,” Cradick said, “that while Miss Stanwyck’s pictures, those made for Warner Brothers under arrangement with Columbia, and those made for Columbia, have all been tremendously successful, and while Columbia has seen fit to exercise all its options on my client’s services, the concern has not seen fit to give her any added compensation. This she feels is unjust.” In a play for journalistic sympathy, the lawyer told how, after a fall during the shooting of Ten Cents a Dance, Stanwyck had been required to return to work while still suffering.
Cohn’s answer came in the form of a court petition demanding that she be barred from working anywhere until she honored her Columbia contract. To make sure she understood the gravity of her situation, the studio first told the press Forbidden was canceled, then announced the existing footage of Stanwyck might be reshot with Helen Hayes in the lead. The papers Barbara was served demanded that she go back to work on Forbidden and asked the court to issue an injunction barring her from fulfilling whatever contracted arrangements she had made with Warners. Fay rushed back to Los Angeles to escort his wife to Superior Court.
Columbia lawyers told Judge Douglas L. Edmunds the studio was “incurring $8,000 a day losses while Miss Stanwyck withholds her services.” Cradick countered that she considered Illicit, the “loan” film she had made for Warners, the third and last picture of her Columbia contract. Pending trial, Judge Edmunds issued an injunction forbidding Stanwyck to work for Warners, or anyone else, until she completed her Columbia Pictures contract.
Four days later, Cohn and Stanwyck kissed and made up.
Once she knuckled under and reported to work, Cohn called her in to talk things over. He offered her more money, and the studio publicity department laid on flattering interviews. “You didn’t argue with him,” she would recall. “He was a bully toward everybody, or tried to be.”
Forbidden resumed, but Capra was furious. During the three-week court fight, Cohn had put him to work on Platinum Blonde, a Riskin-Swerling-Dorothy Howell programmer that established Jean Harlow’s stardom. The tension on the Forbidden set could have been cut with a knife. Frank Fay showed up on the stage, belligerent and suspicious. “I can remember vividly how the crew would separate and make way for him,” Bellamy would say. “He was a very unpopular guy—and worked at it. Barbara told me afterward that he thought I was having something to do with her.”
Fresh disasters struck. Horseback riding didn’t come natural to a Brooklyn street kid. Barbara was not comfortable on horses, but managed to ride one. On October 4, she and Menjou galloped through the surf in a night scene near Laguna Beach when her horse reared at the glare of a suddenly turned on reflector. Barbara’s head hit the horse’s. A second later, the horse threw her. In panic, the animal kicked her before falling on top of her. Somewhere, Capra shouted, “Cut!” Assistants came running and, with Menjou’s help, pulled Barbara unconscious from under the horse.
When she came to, she said they’d have to finish the scene immediately because her legs were getting stiff. Capra ordered an ambulance. She refused to go to the hospital. To clear her head for a retake, she walked into the surf, followed by Menj ou, came back, and fainted again. Crew members carried her to a nearby cottage. She woke up in the hospital, where X rays showed her tailbone had been dislocated.
Sprained legs kept her hospitalized for several days. To complete the filming, doctors allowed her to be released during daytime hours. She returned to the hospital after each day’s shooting to spend the night in traction. The crew built a slanted board so she could rest her back between takes. “It hurt,” she would say in 1984. “It still hurts.”
The Fays were at a party three weeks later when Frank’s father called from Malibu to say the beach house was on fire. Fanned by an onshore breeze, the flames had started two beach houses away, destroyed Joseph Santley’s house next door, and torched theirs. When Frank and Barbara got there, the house was a smoking ruin. Among the losses were almost all of the photographs of Barbara’s childhood and early career.
Forbidden wrapped in late October, and Capra decided to take a long vacation, his first since 1927. To his biographer, Joseph McBride, Capra would suggest the reason he went to Europe was to sort out his feelings for Lu and Barbara. Before he left in mid-December, Lu asked when they were going to get married. He avoided a direct answer, but once in Paris panicked when she informed him by telegram that she had decided to marry someone else. Two weeks later Capra was in New York marrying Lucille. Barbara wired her congratulations and when they returned thought they made a handsome couple. “Those people were clones,” she would say.
Beating Universal’s Back Street to the box office by seven months, Forbidden was Columbia’s top moneymaker of 1932.
SHOPWORN WAS COLUMBIA’S NEXT STANWYCK VEHICLE. WHILE Swerling and Riskin finished the hard-luck waitress story, Cohn allowed Barbara to go to New York—after all, he didn’t pay when she wasn’t working—for Fay’s two-week engagement at the Palace. Hollywood’s columnists and celebrity reporters didn’t like mo
vie stars who had anything but Hollywood on their mind, but Barbara was too busy trying to save marriage and career to court the press. Fan magazines complained that Barbara Stanwyck wasn’t seen at the social centers where film celebrities gathered. The reason, Photoplay announced, was that she believed the industry had given her husband a raw deal. “She just doesn’t like the town, nor the people, not the climate, not anything about it. Maybe you don’t like olives—well, Barbara doesn’t like Hollywood. As a result she is called temperamental and hard to manage. But that’s only because she is indifferent.” If she didn’t mingle the reason was that she feared Frank would humiliate them. She watched a string of celebrity suicides and was particularly affected when Jeanne Eagels killed herself with a deliberate overdose of heroin. What was happening to Frank and her?
At the Palace, Barbara joined Frank in a skit. To help boost the box office, she added scenes from Ladies of Leisure, Miracle Woman, and Forbidden to the repertoire. If she had limited herself to doing slapstick onstage with her husband, nobody would have objected. Advertising her screen career on the stage was considered very poor taste.
Her name on the marquee increased the box office. Frank took all the credit. Photoplay dispatched its East Coast correspondent to critique her in Christmas, a playlet written and directed by Frank. The review was devastating:
Let us draw a kindly charitable veil over the next ten minutes. It is Christmas in a department store, and Babs has been caught snitching tin soldiers for her “little crippled buvver.” Stanwyck labors on—it is like setting Lionel Barrymore to play a conventional English butler named Meadows. And so the afternoon wears on—paper thin. Fay holds the stage for half an hour with the aid of assistant buffoons, but it is easy to sense he is not gripping and mowing down his audience as he did when he was Crowned Prince of Seventh Avenue, ere the Hollywood gold fields lured him away. And Barbara? She darts on and darts off—displaying the rich Hollywood wardrobe at Frankie’s laughing behest. The bill winds up with a Grand Afterpiece in which the gorgeous one is surrounded by eight clowns, counting Fay, in outlandish states of undress, red noses and fake mustaches. Alas—it is as funny as a plane crash.
