Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  “God never saw fit to give me a son,” the boss sighed. “He gave me daughters, two beautiful daughters, who have been a great joy to me. They’re now married to fine, successful fellows, top producers, Dave Selznick and Billy Goetz. If He had blessed me with a son, I can think of nobody I’d rather have wanted than a son exactly like you.”

  After more of the same monologue, Bob left the office in a daze.

  “Well,” asked his agent, “did you get the raise?”

  “No,” the actor replied, “but I got a father.”

  In another version of Taylor’s asking for a raise, Mayer imagined himself the father lucky enough to have a son like Bob. Misty-eyed, he said, “And if that son came to me and said, ‘Dad, I am working for a wonderful company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and for a good man, the head of the company, who has my best interests at heart. But he’s only paying me $75 a week, dad. Do you think I should ask for a raise?’

  “Do you know what I’d say to my son, Bob? I’d say, ‘Son, it’s a fine company. It is going to do great things for you—greater things than it has already done. It is going to make a great star of you. It is going to give you a wonderful career. You’ll be famous! That’s more important than a little money. Don’t ask for a raise now, son.’”

  BARBARA WAS IN TURN OVERPOWERING AND DISMISSIVE WITH BOB. And not much better with Dion. Going on six, the boy was handsomely strawberry blond, but not living up to her expectations. Perhaps because her childhood had been miserable, she seemed at a loss as to how to make her own and Dion’s life happy. All she could think of was to make sure he wouldn’t grow up spoiled. She kept him at arm’s length emotionally. Uncomfortable with physical displays, she never kissed or hugged him and justified her reserve by telling herself too much attention would ruin him. She despised weakness and didn’t know how to handle a child’s tears. To satisfy his need for attention, the boy veered between cloying sweetness and angry provocation, only strengthening her determination not to pamper or indulge him. Gifts had been few and far between in her own childhood so birthday and Christmas presents to Dion were limited to five, and any gift over that number was taken away from him and sent to orphanages. Only once did she take him to see her on the screen. The film was Banjo on My Knee. She was deeply offended when he said he’d liked Joel McCrea’s fight. When she asked whether he had liked her; he said, “Well, your dress was pretty.”

  She accompanied Dion on his first day of kindergarten—Joan Blondell was bringing her son Norman to the same school, and together the mothers waited until the boys’ first momentous day was over. Ordinarily, Barbara saw Dion only at breakfast and not at all if she went on location.

  Work—and Bob’s diffidence—kept their relationship on a relaxed, if mannered, dating basis. As a follow-up to Camille, MGM made him Jean Harlow’s leading man in Private Property and RKO offered Barbara the female lead in an ambitious John Ford movie. Bob still shuddered thinking of how women had thrown themselves on him in Honolulu, but there were times when he had to go out. Howard Strickling not only kept a close watch on MGM’s “most admired matinee idol since the late Rudolph Valentino,” but demanded he be seen as a man about town.

  Rather than take Barbara or a studio-mandated date dancing at Palomar’s or the Cocoanut Grove, Bob liked to come out to Northridge on a Saturday night, go for a dip in the swimming pool, and throw steaks on the barbecue for everybody. To putter with the charcoal while the setting sun turned the Santa Susana Mountains cobalt blue and Barbara’s “hands” led the thoroughbreds to the barns and a stable boy blew a tune on a harmonica was “real,” like Nebraska.

  There were people around, of course. Dion could stay up a little later on Saturdays, and Bob tried to throw him a ball. The child wasn’t very coordinated—he squinted, maybe he needed glasses—but he was polite. Uncle Buck was there, always, in charge of the stable hands. Some people thought it odd that Barbara had her sister’s onetime lover living with her. To Bob it made sense. He was sure Barbara could take care of herself, but, nevertheless, the ranch was somewhat isolated. A lady needed protection. Her former husband continued to make trouble. Frank was drunk, touchy, and abusive on the telephone. When Barbara refused to speak to him, he demanded to talk to his son, who beyond a timid “Hello, Dad” didn’t know what to say.

  Barbara turned thirty that summer. She had no regrets. She liked the life she was making for herself, the sprawling acres that were hers, the porch and the view of the valley below. Her pleasures were largely solitary: to slip into jeans and sneakers all day, to watch the brood mares or break a pair of yearlings to saddle, to pack a picnic for the beach, curl up with a book.

  Serenity, however, was short-lived.

  THE SUMMER OF 1936 HAD PROVIDED A SCANDAL so JUICY, so loaded with names, so intimate, so far beyond anything journalists had ever turned up—and right out in court where the press was immune to libel—that Hitler’s Berlin Olympics and the Spanish Civil War were knocked clear off the front pages. It also gave Frank Fay ideas.

  George S. Kaufman and Mary Astor were the center of the uproar. Barbara knew them both, the playwright since Burlesque, Astor since their Warner Brothers days. Astor had literary aspirations and Barbara could easily have imagined Mary keeping a diary, perhaps even imagine her making notes of her intimate life. Barbara was shocked when, a year after the affair had ended with Kaufman returning to his wife, Bea, and Mary agreeing to a divorce, the actress contested the divorce. Astor had her lawyers sue to gain custody of her daughter from her husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe. To prove Astor an unworthy mother, Dr. Thorpe tried to have his former wife’s diary entered as evidence. The scandal reached a fever pitch in August while Mary was filming Dodsworth for Samuel Goldwyn and Barbara’s His Brother3 Wife came out.

  Without quoting directly from the diary, the August 17 issue of

  Time said Miss Astor’s record of sexual events contained references to “thrilling ecstasy” and described Kaufman’s powers as such that his amorous trysts reached twenty a day. Other papers published the actress’s Top Ten list of lovers with Kaufman leading the list.

  Barbara could only thank her lucky stars that Frank Fay’s detectives had never unearthed anything on her.

  When Kaufman failed to appear as a witness, Judge Goodwin J. Knight issued a bench warrant. What followed was out of a Marx Brothers script. When sheriff’s deputies came looking for him at Moss Hart’s rented house in Palm Springs, Kaufman fled through the bushes. MGM had him smuggled to Catalina island, the playground for tony film people. Judge Knight, who had been Frank Capra’s classmate at Manual Arts High School, felt the movie industry was making a national fool of him, and sent deputies to Catalina. The chase continued on the high seas.

  After another stay at Hart’s house and another early-morning police visit that drove Kaufman to hysteria, friends managed to ship him out of California and, temporarily at least, out of the judge’s reach. With the press jeering and cheering the “Public Lover No. 1,” Kaufman reached New York. When reporters caught up with his wife, traveling in Europe with Edna Ferber, Bea said, “I’m not going to divorce Mr. Kaufman. Young actresses are an occupational hazard for any man working in the theater.”

  The end of the trial was a dud, with Judge Knight ruling in favor of joint custody.

  Did Frank Fay think he could grab comparable headlines?

  Barbara might be “seen” with Robert Taylor, but she was duly divorced. Even the one-year interlocutory of California divorce law, designed to give people pause before rushing into new marriages, had expired. Of course there was Dion.

  Fay went to court in 1937, claiming Robert Taylor was his former wife’s “consort” and that for the past sixteen months Barbara had denied Frank the right to see their adopted son “so that the child would become accustomed only to Robert Taylor.” Fay claimed his former wife was in contempt of court for violating their 1935 divorce decree that allowed him to see their son. The contempt-of-court charge was filed as A Star Is Born started filming. To b
e sure the romantic melodrama starring Fredric March and Janet Gaynor was not caught up in the Fay-Stanwyck case, David Selznick took the extra precaution of having Ben Hecht rewrite the much rewritten story.

  Fay believed the luck of the Irish was smiling down on him when the presiding justice was none other than Judge Goodwin J. Knight. Stanwyck’s first day in court was inauspicious. It came on December 27, 1937, after a Photoplay article told how she was planning a special Christmas for her little boy, while the daily newspapers reported how she and Bob were seen at the Santa Anita racetrack on Christmas Day.

  “Is it true you spent most of Christmas Day at the races instead of at home with your child?” asked Philip Klein, Fay’s attorney.

  She could only nod.

  The cross-examination centered on Frank’s charge that she was trying to alienate Dion’s affection. “Wasn’t it a fact that you were having Mr. Taylor to your house frequently so that the child could forget Mr. Fay?”

  “Mr. Taylor was at the house frequently, but it was not so the boy would forget his father,” she answered.

  Judge Knight objected when Frank’s lawyer brought up a $50 check that Bob apparently had made out to Dion and signed. “I don’t care how many times Mr. Taylor came to her house,” the judge ruled. “This is her personal life and has nothing to do with this proceeding.”

  Barbara’s lawyer was Charles Cradick, who had defended her in her losing fight with Harry Cohn and in the Elizabeth Curtis “private nurse and companion” suit in 1934. On the stand, Fay testified that he had not seen his son in sixteen months, that since the divorce he had been permitted to see the boy only four times. Cradick asked the indignant father to specify the amount he contributed to the child’s support. Fay answered that he did not contribute to Anthony Dion’s support because Miss Stanwyck had never asked.

  Cradick had Barbara tell the court that if she was keeping Dion away from his father she had her reasons.

  “In the summer of 1935,” she testified, “beside the pool of our Brentwood home, Mr. Fay was quite provoked because I had dinner the night before at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Marx and then we had gone to Minsky’s burlesque in Hollywood. He struck me with his fist on the chin and I fell over a chair to the ground. It upset the baby. When my son was three years old, Mr. Fay was wandering about the house and his condition was not too good. I was in my room and the nurse was downstairs. I heard the nursery door bang. I went outside and saw Mr. Fay leaving the boy’s room. He was drunk. I went into the nursery and found the carpet beneath my son’s crib on fire from a smoldering cigarette stub.” She accused Frank of neglecting the child and being opposed to his adoption, but asserted that when guests were at their home he would make a great show of his affection for the boy.

  Cradick got Fay on the stand and asked, “Do you recall an incident at your home in Brentwood when you were gathered at the side of the swimming pool with the nurse and baby? Did you ask the nurse to place the baby in the water, but she protested that the child was scared of water and you picked the child up and tossed it into the pool?” Fay was not permitted to answer on a technicality, although Judge Knight ruled he would be required to relate the incident if recalled for direct examination.

  In its December 30 edition, the Los Angeles Examiner splashed the Story on page five: BARBARA STANWYCK HURLS SENSATIONAL CHARGES AT EX-MATE. TELLS OF FIRE BY CRIB; SAYS SON’S LIFE TWICE IMPERILED. A tWO-column photo showed Barbara on the stand, wearing a wide-brimmed, tucked-down man’s hat and tweed suit. A four-paragraph story on the same page named Frank Fay as a target of an Internal Revenue Service lien for nonpayment of $9,573 in income taxes.

  When the case resumed after New Year’s, Barbara demanded a psychiatric evaluation of Frank Fay. Charging her former husband with being of “unsound mind” and submitting ten affidavits to support her allegation, she said Frank was someone who mingled prayers and profanities: “When he passed a church, Frank would remove his hands from the wheel of a car and pray, endangering the lives of others … He’s an unfit guardian for the child. He drinks too much. He fell into Dion’s crib once and fell asleep keeping the boy awake with his snoring. As far as I’m concerned he loves his new store teeth more than his son.”

  Judge Knight ruled in Frank’s favor, giving him the right to visit his son twice a week on alternating Saturdays provided he was completely sober and always in the company of the child’s nurse, who was required to report his conduct to Stanwyck.

  Barbara told Cradick to appeal.

  THE HEADLINES NEVER MATCHED THE ASTOR-KAUFMAN SCREAMers, but on January 18, 1938, Fay, his lawyers, and a horde of reporters drove in pouring rain to Barbara’s ranch. With attorneys Philip Klein and Hy Schwartz waiting in a car, Frank marched past the KEEP OUT—PRIVATE sign to the gate telephone and announced he had come to see his son.””

  “His face dropped,” wrote the Los Angeles Times reporter. “Then he added, ‘Whose orders are those?’”

  Frank went back to the car and conferred with his attorneys. It was obvious, Klein explained to the press, that Stanwyck was continuing to refuse to let Frank see the boy.

  Four men, described by the Times as “taciturn cowhands,” and a Doberman pinscher peered out from behind the gate. Nobody, said the foreman, was getting through the locked gate. Under a picture of Fay, in trenchcoat and visored cap, at the gate, the next day’s TIMES headline read: BARBARA STANWYCK’S GUARDS BLOCK FAY’S VISIT WITH SON.

  14

  STELLA

  EVEN BEFORE FRANK FAY FILED CONTEMPT-OF-COURT CHARGES, Helen Ferguson thought Barbara needed to explain her marriage and ongoing custody battle on her terms. For the first time in her career Barbara Stanwyck would be available for an exclusive in-depth, Helen told Photoplay. The magazine was interested and assigned freelance journalist Dixie Willson to do the piece. Thoroughly vetted by the Helen Ferguson Agency, Willson came to stay with Barbara at the ranch. It was indeed the first time Barbara—ever so cautiously—opened up to a writer, the first time she let someone explore her life. Perhaps she also wanted to distance herself from Bob because Photoplay’s subheadline of Willson’s published piece read, “A fine searching story about the Stanwyck girl herself which doesn’t ask her to bask in the shadow of Bob Taylor’s—or anybody else’s—glory.”

  The writer was sensitive to the situation of the movie star trying to make sense of her life. Courage was what mattered, Barbara said. She was going to bring up her son to learn to face hurts without crying. Tears never helped. “Perhaps I’m cruel to talk to him of things like that when he’s so little, but I wish I had had someone to help me learn not to cry. I had to find that out by myself.”

  Willson divined a lot of hurt behind Stanwyck’s brave front and, in the confessional celebrity-profile prose, said as much: “Of one thing you may be sure; her name is not spelled in letters of lights in exchange for merely looks or luck or imitation of drama as she imagines it, or life as she has read about it. It has taken tears more real than those of glycerine and camphor.”

  The writer got the facts about Barbara’s early years, but nothing about the present circumstances or the whereabouts of Barbara’s sisters and brother. To Willson’s question of whether the teenaged Ruby Stevens had planned to study dancing, Barbara answered, “Oh no, we were really very poor. I knew that after fourteen I’d have to earn my own living. But I was willing to do that. I’ve always been a little sorry for pampered people … and of course, they’re very sorry for me.”

  Willson saw Dion take riding lessons, and sketched the end of a day at the ranch, the “boys” bedding stalls for the night, the crack and smell of a log fire, and Barbara sitting on her porch:

  The distant mountains were turning from gray to cobalt blue. In dusty boots and grass-stained jodhpurs, knees locked in her arms, this girl of the husky, lazy voice sat on the flagstone floor, her eyes straying often from the paddock to the terrace where small Dion struggled with the balance of bright new stilts.

  “What do I like best… and
least, about Hollywood?” Barbara Stanwyck said, repeating my question. “Best, that it gives me a place which is home. Least, the fanfare and ballyhoo that seems to be part of pictures. I really don’t know why there should be fanfare for people who play in pictures are not incredible human beings. And I never quite know why the foremost impression of Hollywood should be glamour because glamour actually has nothing to do with pictures at all. Glamour is a separate thing altogether. Still, of course, there’s my good friend Joan [Crawford] who just can’t help being glamorous. But when I go with her into a restaurant or a shop and hear a little ripple of admiration and attention that follows her everywhere, I’m sure it isn’t entirely Hollywood. I’m sure she is just the dynamic sort of person who would be glamorous anywhere.

  Stanwyck was serene and successful, wrote Willson. Her existence was well ordered; she had few regrets: “Of course, I’ve always had a burning desire to be the best of all, and, though I know most things you dream of pass you by, I’ll go on working with that same desire till the last role I play.”

  Photoplay ran the profile in its December 1937 issue with photos of Stanwyck under a huge straw hat, a head shot of Dion, and Barbara and Joan with their arms around each other.

  ~ ~ ~

  FOR A WHILE FAY TOOK ADVANTAGE OF HIS VISITATION RIGHTS. Anything to get back at Barbara. Not that she was much better. Concerned with scoring points against a former husband she wanted completely out of her life, she proclaimed, through Helen Ferguson, both that she wanted her son to feel secure at home and, to make sure he didn’t grow up a spoiled Hollywood child, that she intended in the near future to send him away to military school. Frank’s court-ordered alternating Saturdays with Dion dwindled to once-every-other-month visits as he lost interest in the boy. By the time Dion was six, he was of little interest to either of his parents.