During the day Davis shot her scenes for So Big as a bohemian artist and at night played a flapper in the drawing-room comedy The Rich Are Always with Us (“I never knew who I was,” she said). Starring in The Rich Are Always with Us was Ruth Chatterton in her first picture for Warner. Chatterton had her choice of stories and was being paid $8,000 a week, and Davis, under her new twenty-six-week contract with Warner, was earning $400. The young Bette Davis thought that Chatterton, “the First Lady of Hollywood,” “was magnificent . . . She was a star from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.” Davis modeled her acting after Chatterton.
Near the end of production of So Big, Barbara wanted to give Dickie Moore a gift. She knew he loved dogs and that his mother was Irish and took great pride in it. Barbara suggested she give the six-year-old boy an Irish terrier. “No, no,” Dickie said. “I don’t want a dog, thank you. It might fight with my cat.” Instead, she gave the young actor a small rectangular gold wristwatch with an inscription on the back that read: “To Dickie Moore, my favorite picture son, in appreciation for his grand work in ‘So Big’ from BARBARA STANWYCK FAY.”
Production for the picture was completed in early February and cost $228,000.
Edna Ferber’s millions of readers were eager to see her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel up on the screen. The studio had sold Cimarron as Ferber’s epic of American manhood; So Big was her “monument of American womanhood.” The script re-created the large moments of the novel, and as Ferber herself said, there weren’t many. The novel was too beloved for the picture to veer away from the book’s big scenes; the price of sticking to the novel was the inability to develop the characters cinematically and to capture the grittiness—without sentimentality—that gave Ferber’s book its truth and simplicity.
• • •
Barbara and Fay were about town, attending the premiere of Gene Fowler and Joe Laurie’s Union Depot, directed by Alfred Green, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Blondell. James Cagney acted as master of ceremonies to the regal audience that included Fairbanks and his wife of two years, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Marie Dressler, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Pickford, Howard Hawks, Laurence Olivier, and William Wellman.
Barbara’s wardrobe for all occasions—clothes were of little importance to her—continued to be in Fay’s preferred color scheme for her: black and white. She dressed quietly, neatly, comfortably and didn’t enjoy getting into evening clothes. She liked to buy clothes and to look at them, but she had no interest in glamorizing herself.
Studio photographers saw Barbara as uncooperative when she was called upon to pose for sittings. She was not comfortable with the idea of being a glamour girl or a movie queen; lavishly designed clothes that were delivered to the house for her to pose in were sent back to the wardrobe department in favor of her own clothes. “Save those other things for somebody who’s got the style,” Barbara said. “I just haven’t and I know it.”
When Barbara wasn’t working, she wore no makeup, only red lipstick set against her red-gold hair, no powder or rouge offscreen. She claimed her face didn’t take makeup well. “When I put rouge on my cheeks, invariably it spreads itself down to my chin. It just happens that make-up won’t stay on my face. This sounds absurd but it’s the truth,” she said. Besides, Fay didn’t want her to wear makeup or to use mascara against her deep violet eyes and fresh-scrubbed skin. “I don’t want people to say,” said Fay, “ ‘she’s a good actress but she never takes off her make-up.’ ” He also didn’t want Barbara to wear red nail polish on fingers or toes. She didn’t.
Barbara’s desire was still to please Fay. She noticed, though, that in addition to drinking, her husband was beginning to behave in odd ways. Reading a newspaper or book, he might cry out, “Lord help us,” “Oh God Amen,” “Lord, have mercy on us.” Just as suddenly he might begin to swear. He couldn’t help himself. If Barbara asked him why he was praying one minute and violently swearing the next, Fay got angry and didn’t see a problem with what he was saying. “I can do as I please,” he would say.
For as long as Barbara had known Fay, he had crossed himself when he passed a church. Now, if he and Barbara passed a church, he bowed his head, closed his eyes, raised his right hand to his hat, lifted the brim up and down several times, and muttered sounds as if in prayer. If Barbara and Frank were in a car and he was driving, Barbara would warm him to watch out, that he’d get in an accident. “No harm will come to me while I’m praying,” he would say. “God will protect me.”
Often when driving, Fay would be in the midst of railing against someone until he saw a church. Then he would stop talking and begin his ritual of bowing his head, closing his eyes, raising his right hand to his hat, lifting the brim up and down, and muttering sounds as if in prayer. As soon as he’d passed the church, he continued with his vicious rant.
Frank wanted to return to New York. Barbara was determined to be with him despite his drinking, violent outbursts, and curious ways. They’d decided to bring the act that they’d put together the previous December to Fay’s old theater, the RKO Palace in New York, ignoring the criticism they’d received about Barbara’s unseemly onstage acrobatics when the show opened in Los Angeles at Christmas.
The Fays left for New York to make arrangements for their two-week appearance as Barbara was being mentioned for the lead in First National’s Week-End Marriage, from the Faith Baldwin novel, which was set to go into production at the beginning of April. Two other Warner stars, Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis, were also mentioned as possibilities for the starring role; Loretta Young got the part.
The Fays were being jointly paid $8,500 a week at the Palace. Frank needed the money. His first (and second) wife, Frances White, had attached his Palace salary of $4,000 per week in favor of the $25 a week Fay had been paying her for thirteen years.
Performers on the circuit like Eddie Cantor, Maurice Chevalier, and Ed Wynn were making twice what the Fays were earning. Cantor was being paid $8,800; Chevalier, $10,000; Ed Wynn, $7,500. Those being paid in the Fays’ range included Morton Downey ($4,500), George Jessel ($4,000), Beatrice Lillie ($4,500), and Ruth Etting ($4,500).
Barbara insisted Fay receive top billing over her on the Palace marquee.
• • •
Back in Los Angeles, Fay premiered A Fool’s Advice. As he and Barbara were leaving the theater, he saw a Warner executive standing in the lobby. “Nice of you to come over,” Fay said.
“Nice little picture, Frank.”
“Very nice little picture my hat,” said Barbara. “It’s a great picture. Now what do you think of that?”
“Barbara, your tact and diplomacy astound me,” said Fay, all the while amused by her advocacy of his work.
It tickled Fay to see Barbara shock people with her outbursts, particularly when they were on his behalf; she didn’t care who heard them. Barbara had no patience for evasion or conceit. The angrier she was, the more well-mannered and cool Fay appeared. Barbara put Fay forward with the press. When the Los Angeles Examiner asked her about her hopes and ambitions, Barbara answered, “You tell them, Frank,” which he did and then talked about her pedigree.
“Well, Miss Stanwyck was one of the Virginia Stanwycks and was—”
“You mean the Brooklyn Stevenses,” Barbara interrupted.
He arched an eyebrow at his wife and continued.
“She was raised in seclusion and went to a very exclusive private school . . .”
Barbara said, “Yes, they called it the Everglades Café—and there were only six girls—all dancers.”
Fay could be playful and loving with Barbara, but he could be equally possessive and jealous. He decided who their friends would be in the way that he was instrumental in Barbara’s calling off her long-standing close friendships with Walda Mansfield and Mae Clarke. He argued as well with Barbara about whom she saw or talked to. Barbara was described in the press as someone “whose name spells box office wherever it is flaunted on a theater marquee, who is pretty, attracti
ve, charming,” yet who doesn’t have many close friends in the industry. She was written about as “one of the mysteries of Hollywood; more mysterious in her way than Garbo.”
Just before Barbara and Frank were to open in New York, Barbara approved her second picture for Warner Bros. It was based on a 1932 novel by Arthur Stringer called The Mud Lark, originally published as a short story in The Saturday Evening Post.
Hal Wallis was the producer. It was Barbara’s third picture with Bill Wellman. He enjoyed working with her and requested her for his pictures. He liked how spirited Barbara was, how much she was like a “tomboy”—one of the guys—at the same time that she was so feminine. Barbara was the rare actress who created the kind of presence on the set that Wellman wanted. She joked with the men on the cameras and mikes, the electricians and grips, and took an interest in their lives.
Barbara admired them; there was nothing fake about them. “They know a lot about making pictures,” she said. “They know more about this business than a lot of people sitting in the front offices. They’re closer to it. You can learn something from every one of them.”
• • •
Barbara and Fay took the train back to New York and were met at the station by the press and photographers. Those who called out to Barbara as “Miss Stanwyck” were told, “Please, I am Mrs. Frank Fay off-screen.” Fay was delighted by her admonishment. The Fays went to the Waldorf Astoria, where they were staying for the run of the show.
Broadway’s Favorite Son was back on the stage of the Palace. Fay was where he belonged, onstage for thirty minutes, twice a day as master of ceremonies as well as performing a whole new set of bits: his Boris Karloff–like Frankenstein’s monster as an audience scarer; a comedy newsreel that showed former president Coolidge in a series of miens supposedly gagging in colloquial language about going to see Frank at the Palace; film clips of Mahatma Gandhi and Hindu followers with sound effects and Yiddish interpolations praising Fay’s talents. Fay was picking up on Gandhi’s having been arrested months before by the government on the eve of a new civil disobedience campaign and the outlawing of the Indian National Congress.
At the Waldorf Astoria, New York City, February 1932.
He included in the evening a fourteen-minute playlet for Barbara that he wrote and directed and set in a department store during Christmas in which Barbara is picked up by two store detectives for shoplifting tin soldiers. The manager is irate until it is revealed that she’s stolen the toys for her baby brother, who is crippled, and she is given the toys—and a job.
The main part of Fay’s act involved three fireman stooges, and in a bit that opened the second half, Fay, in a double-breasted tuxedo, teased Barbara about how he had given her an extensive cast for the Christmas skit that closed the first half of the show—“a million actors, lighting effects, a rich Hollywood wardrobe that she keeps changing each time she reappears onstage, a fancy stage set”—and, Fay goes on, would she now let him do his own act onstage in peace?
The show was to have included Benny Rubin and Jack Haley, but each was in a dispute with RKO, and neither was willing to appear. A grand afterpiece had Barbara surrounded by eight clowns, including Fay, in different states of undress, each with a red nose and fake mustache, with Barbara once again playing a stooge to Fay’s comedy.
Variety said, “[The show] is ragged and punctuated by marked let-downs. Overboard on hoofing in the fore part . . . lightweight on everything in the second half. The Final stanza merely comprises Irene Bordoni and Fay doing a solo act with the aid of Miss Stanwyck and a flock of stooges. Fay’s torch patter is strong lyrically, the straight vocalizing is rather blah.”
Other critics said, “Miss Stanwyck is being badly handled for a nonvaudeville actress in a vaudeville show.” “The most promising young star in pictures . . . in active practice, [is] deliberately playing ‘stooge’—foil—butt—for a vaudeville comedian who she trustingly adores,” said Photoplay. “Helping him with her name, talents, her young beauty.”
Following the show’s opening, Barbara and Frank went to the launching of the Pierrette Club with Billie Dove, Pola Negri, Eddie Foy, Basil Rathbone, Jimmy Walker, and Barbara’s former guardian, Anatol Friedland. After the late-night supper Barbara and Frank went back to the Waldorf. Frank’s upset with the audience’s cool response to his act was made worse by the enthusiastic applause Barbara had received, and soon they were in the midst of an argument until Frank left to get drunk and didn’t return.
Reviews for their two-week run were generally negative.
Newspapers and readers were preoccupied with the story of the kidnapping, the night before Barbara and Frank’s opening, of the twenty-month-old Lindbergh baby from the family’s farm near Hopewell, New Jersey. State troopers, detectives, and police were on a massive hunt for two men in a dark sedan with New York license plates who, the day of the kidnapping, had stopped a man in Princeton, New Jersey, ten miles south of Hopewell, for directions to Colonel Lindbergh’s farm.
• • •
The second day of the Palace run, Barbara went onstage alone and told the press that her husband had dropped out of the show because of a cold. Fay’s name was taken off the Palace marquee.
She was furious with him but told reporters, “My marriage means more to me than anything else. Frank comes first with me and always will.”
When one reporter suggested that it might not be wise to place all of one’s happiness on one man’s love, Barbara said, “Well, what about movie fame? In pictures I’m a success just as long as people like me. When they stop coming to see me, I’m just a failure. It isn’t that way with love. You may lose some one’s love, yes, but it’s something you never quite get out of your heart once you’ve known the real thing.”
Fay was back the next day, but the Palace booking office had hired Gus Van for Fay’s slot and paid Fay for two days’ work. When Fay went back into the show, he and Barbara were playing to half-full houses. Variety said, “The show’s second week [at the Palace] wasn’t any better than the first. Fay is again a disappointment.”
Barbara was rated in Variety, as were other female performers appearing onstage at the Palace and the State, on, among other attributes: “Modishness”—8 points; “Neatness”—10 points; “Make-up”—8 points; “Coiffure”—9 points; “Personality”—10 points; “Applause”—9 points. Her total: 80 points out of 100. The overall comment: “Submerges her own ability in back chat with Frank Fay and contributes sincerely and movingly to a badly written sketch.” This despite a fall Barbara sustained, slipping backstage and once again injuring her spine.
Fay dropped Barbara’s “Christmas” skit from the show for another that he’d written for her called “The Interview.” In it he had to resort to something Barbara wanted to avoid: reenactments of scenes from two of her pictures. He also changed one of his bits that was to center on his being in bed with a young woman under the sheets, using blackouts to punctuate their commingling.
“Something has happened to or with the Palace’s ex–best m.c.,” Variety said in its review the second week. “Fay, who used to have Palace audiences eating out of his hand, now has to struggle to keep them interested. Or maybe nothing has happened to Fay, and that’s what’s wrong.”
Columbia Pictures was not making headway booking A Fool’s Advice. Fay was thinking of staying behind in New York in an effort to sell the rights to the picture but decided instead to travel west with Barbara, who was due to return to Hollywood to go to work on The Mud Lark.
Money had never been an issue for Fay. Whether he had it or not, he spent it as if it were a constant. He’d made light in the press about how he could lose $5,000 worth of clothes a year, leaving overcoats in restaurants or other people’s homes, losing trousers and countless pairs of gloves, misplacing four rings and seven wristwatches in washrooms. His absentmindedness and seeming indifference to possessions and the value of money belied a more serious problem: he could drink himself into a stupor and stay that way for we
eks.
On the way back to Los Angeles, Barbara and Frank planned to stop over in St. Louis, where they’d married four years before during Fay’s stint as master of ceremonies at the Missouri Theatre.
The just-released Shopworn was playing in St. Louis at the Ambassador Theatre. Barbara and Frank were booked to make an appearance at the theater. One reviewer called the picture’s plot “shopworn,” (“It belongs in the bone age of the silent drama. It is about as sophisticated as servant-girl fiction in the middle 90’s”). Variety called the picture “the clumsiest kind of literary hoke, trashy in the last degree but somehow made fairly endurable by the curious knack of Barbara Stanwyck for investing even the most theatrical roles with something of earnest sincerity.” In the same paper, one columnist wrote, “Barbara Stanwyck’s temper will never atrophy from disuse. Since it was discovered Miss Stanwyck is what’s known as an ’Emotional actress’ her pictures have always contrived somewhere to have her make a scene. Miss Stanwyck’s low combustion point in Shopworn may be the inside on how she became a world famous actress. Temper and dramatic temperament have always been closely allied in the public mind.”
The Fays told the press when they left New York that they were returning to “the Coast by way of St. Louis because we were married there” and would have a second honeymoon there.
The promotional ad for Shopworn and the Fays read: “Hello, St. Louis. We’re coming back to the city that holds the happiest memories in our lives.” The billboard advertised in large type: “In Person, Frank Fay, Barbara Stanwyck.” Below, in much smaller type, it read: “The Gifted Screen Beauty with Her Popular Husband.”
SEVEN
Prophets of a New Order
Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 34