Zanuck wrote six more Rin Tin Tin scripts, one a month.
By 1925 the dog was an international star, and the success of the Rin Tin Tin pictures was responsible for turning around the financial state of the Warner Bros. studio.
Zanuck didn’t write just dog adventures. He could write anything: a gangster comedy for Dolores Costello; a dual role for Montagu Love; a comedy about gold diggers (it took four days to write and reappeared as The Life of the Party and still later as Havana Widows). Zanuck adapted a melodrama about the Spanish-American War (Across the Pacific). He wrote about the San Francisco earthquake (Old San Francisco) and the first horseless carriage (The First Auto).
In one year Zanuck had written nineteen Warner Bros. features. His name appeared on the screen so frequently that a stockholder stood up at a meeting and asked Jack Warner about the expenses for the story department: “Why the hell do you spend so much money? You’ve only got one writer.” The studio had two or three other writers under contract, but Zanuck admitted he wrote “half of the pictures.” Jack Warner decided that he should write under different names. Zanuck came up with the names Melville Crossman, Mark Canfield, and Gregory Rogers—and put each under contract, increasing his weekly paycheck to $1,000. Crossman wrote class pictures (Tenderloin); Canfield, melodramas (The Black Diamond Express; The Desired Woman); and Rogers, comedies (Hogan’s Alley; The Midnight Taxi). Jack Warner referred to Zanuck as Three Charming Fellows.
Melville Crossman “became a star,” said Zanuck. “Every time his name was on a picture, it was a hit.” Louis B. Mayer offered “Crossman” a writing contract. “He isn’t available,” Zanuck said, “but I think I could get Darryl F. Zanuck for you. He’s just finished Old San Francisco, which I believe you saw at the sneak last night.”
“Not interested,” said Mayer.
• • •
For Baby Face, Zanuck’s secretary, Molly Mandeville, plump and motherly, sat at the side of Zanuck’s desk and took notes of everything he and Barbara discussed. Barbara thought it was important to establish the opening atmospheric idea of the mills, to show how the girl is forced to dance for a few shekels almost nude with the low-down characters of the mining town. The men give her money, which the father instantly takes from her. She and Zanuck thought the father should beat the girl and force her into a room where he knows a man is waiting for his daughter—and then turn the key in the lock after her.
As Lily Powers, “the sweetheart of the nightshift”; “the baby faced siren as fickle as the famed Helen of Troy,” . . . Lily’s teacher, an elderly German cobbler, advises her: “A woman, young, beautiful like you, can get anything she wants in the world. Because you have power over men . . . You must be a master, not a slave. Look here—Nietzsche says, ‘All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation.’ Exploit yourself. Go to some big city . . . Use men! Be strong! Defiant! . . .” (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Baby Face learns her ways from her father (“Yeah, I’m a tramp,” she says, “and who’s to blame . . . A swell start you gave me. Nothing but men! Dirty rotten men. And you’re lower than any of them”). He sees her beauty as a lure to attract the mill workers to his speakeasy, and she sees men as mere stepping-stones on the road to wealth, luxury, and security. She ruthlessly takes from each man in turn everything he has to give her, rapidly going on to the next, making sure that each succeeding man is more powerful than the last, leaving ruined and broken lives in her wake.
Beauty and charm are her sole stock-in-trade. Jealousy, murder, and scandal are her trademarks, until the survival of the bank is at stake. To avoid further scandal, and as a payoff, the devil-temptress is shipped off to Europe to work in the Paris office, where she instantly seduces the new president of the bank, marries him, and, when he is about to lose everything, realizes she’s fallen in love with him and gives him the one thing that means everything to her, her hard-acquired jewels: her way out should all else fail. She remembers her father and what he put her through and tells the banker in an impassioned scene that if she gives him the money, he will be sending her back to the hell from which she escaped and that without money she will be forced to “suffer the indignities of man’s bestiality.”
Together, Barbara and Zanuck worked out the idea of the girl newly arrived in the city, coming to the bank: the opening shot being the facade of the bank; the camera panning from the basement to the top floor, showing the majesty and imposing power of the institution.
Actress and writer/producer worked out the notion that Baby Face’s early affairs were to be played in a comedy vein. Once she’s in Paris and living with the banker, the tone was to shift and become more romantic in feeling to make it clear that she is falling in love.
Zanuck wrote the original story and for one dollar assigned all rights of Baby Face to Warner Bros. Warner had released the title of Baby Face to Universal months before and arranged with the studio to have the rights reverted.
Gene Markey, novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, was brought over from Paramount to work on the script. Markey had sold four stories to the movies and had written seven pictures, among them an adaptation of a Pirandello play, As You Desire Me, that starred Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. Markey had been in Hollywood for a couple of years and had recently married Joan Bennett.
The screenwriter, who was as well a witty caricaturist, was “thrilled,” Zanuck wrote to Barbara, to be working on “the picture.”
Zanuck wanted Barbara’s auburn hair to be dyed a flaming titian gold, but she refused. Each step up the ladder of men and money was supposed to be reflected in the way Lily Powers looks. Since Barbara wouldn’t allow her hair to be dyed, seven specially designed wigs were constructed, each the same color and texture but designed in different styles to reflect Lily Powers’ growing social position and accumulation of money.
Gone was the prison garb of Ladies They Talk About, the hopsack of The Purchase Price and So Big, and the flimsy dress Barbara wears throughout The Bitter Tea. For Baby Face, Orry-Kelly put Barbara in a series of extravagant dresses—twenty-five in all—velvets, clinging sheer materials, furs, and the latest in soft negligees, each among the most feminine Kelly had made for any star.
Gene Markey wrote the script of Baby Face with Kathryn Scola. He’s seen here with his new bride, Joan Bennett, 1932. Markey was a deft caricaturist (his portraits of literary figures were published by Alfred Knopf) as well as his being a novelist whose subjects included the jazz age (Anabel and Stepping High among them). (PHOTOFEST)
Kelly was able to show the character as a plain, illiterate little barkeep and “build her up, step by step,” he said, “until the climax shows her as a cultured, gorgeous, eminently smart woman.”
Barbara’s co-star was the dark, handsome George Brent. Brent was becoming a somewhat stodgy actor whose life before coming to Hollywood was one of surprising high-wire daring. He’d served in the British army and cast his lot, he claimed, with the Irish revolutionists after the Great War carrying dispatches for two years in the secret service of the Sinn Fein, from Dublin to Belfast and Glasgow, successfully eluding the Black and Tans as he traveled across the country. Now he was newly married to his frequent leading lady and star, Ruth Chatterton. In the picture as well was Donald Cook, Warner’s contract player, who’d set out to be a farmer rather than an actor and who went from the lumber business in Kansas City to being discovered by Mrs. Fiske, then touring in The Rivals. Warner Bros. put Cook in The Mad Genius and The Man Who Played God.
Also in Baby Face was twenty-six-year-old John Wayne, who’d appeared in a series of Westerns with Duke, his devil horse. Nat Pendleton, the former Olympic wrestling champion, played Stolvich, the cobbler who reads and preaches Nietzsche while he mends shoes and gives Lily the advice that shapes her life: it is the strong who take and the weak who give. It is the messianic cobbler who counsels Lily to use men to her advantage.
As Lily Powers with Henry Kolker as Carter,
first vice-president of Gotham Trust Company, Baby Face, 1933. “Here’s a drama for those who can take it—with the only woman on the screen who isn’t afraid to let herself go! . . . A picture that gives you everything—except their right names!”
Alfred Green, the director, was a former actor who two decades before had started out with the Selig Polyscope Company, maker of wild animal films; he had made more than fifty pictures, beginning in 1916, among them Little Lord Fauntleroy with Mary Pickford and Disraeli with George Arliss.
• • •
Barbara was the gold-digging baby-faced doll deluxe. Reputation and ethics have no place in her world.
“It is a new line of parts,” said Barbara. “A hard woman who wants everything and takes it whether it hurts somebody else or not.” She was “a little nervous over it. All my other roles have had sympathy. I hope the public likes me in it.”
With John Wayne as Jimmy McCoy Jr., an “under manager” whose infatuation with Lily helps her ascend at the bank until he is warned, “Wake up, kid, Baby Face is moving out of your class.” Baby Face, 1933.
During the weeks Barbara and Zanuck developed the script for Baby Face, President Hoover and Vice President Charles Curtis of Kansas were defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Speaker of the House John Nance Garner. Roosevelt and Garner carried forty-two states, receiving twenty-two million popular votes to Hoover’s more than fifteen million.
Barbara was dead set against Roosevelt. “Every time his name was brought up,” said her nephew Gene, “why, she was just up and down.”
Most studio heads had supported Hoover. Jack, Harry, and Albert Warner, “faithful Republicans,” had championed Roosevelt. Harry Warner had said to Jack, “The country is in chaos. There is a revolution in the air, and we need a change.” Jack Warner had organized a three-hour spectacular rally at the Olympic Stadium attended by more than seventy thousand people, twenty marching bands, a polo team, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, and the Warner stock company and was told by his brother Harry to persuade William Randolph Hearst, who’d initially supported Roosevelt’s running mate, John Garner of Texas, to support Roosevelt. Hearst reluctantly came around. Cecil B. DeMille, who’d given Hoover in 1928 the largest contribution he’d ever made to a political campaign, voted for Roosevelt for president for one reason: Prohibition, which, said DeMille, had brought “so many evils into American life.”
• • •
Weeks after the election, Barbara and Fay filed a petition in Superior Court of the State of California in Los Angeles for a formal hearing regarding Dion’s adoption. It was set for December 1. Barbara reminded Fay that the hearing was coming up and to make sure to leave the date free; she didn’t want anything to prevent him from being there.
On the morning the Fays were due in court, Frank told Barbara he wasn’t going. The adoption couldn’t be formalized without both parents present in the courtroom to testify and consent to it. When Fay refused to be there Barbara went without him.
In the courtroom with Barbara were Dion and his nurse; her lawyers, George Hooper and Charles Cradick; her brother, Byron Stevens; Ann Hoyt; and the lawyers from the Children’s Home Society. Barbara testified before the court. Judge Samuel R. Blake then called Fay to the stand. The judge was told that Fay wasn’t present and called a halt to the hearing, saying it would reconvene the following Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. with Mr. Fay in the courtroom.
Barbara was furious. During the next few days she made it clear to Fay that unless he went to court with her and consented to the adoption under oath, she was going to leave him.
On December 6, Barbara and Frank appeared before Judge Blake and testified that they wanted to adopt the ten-month-old baby John Charles Greene, whose name would now be Dion Anthony Fay.
The legally adopted boy would join a household that consisted of Barbara and Fay; Nellie Banner, the nurse; a cook; butler; chauffeur; two maids; an Irish terrier called Shanty Irish; and a Boston terrier called Punky.
• • •
Fay was starring as master of ceremonies in Felix Young’s extravagant “sophisticated musical revue,” Tattle Tales, and drinking steadily. The show was to open in Los Angeles at the Belasco on Christmas Day. It opened four days later, replacing the newly released feature film Mädchen in Uniform. Two shows of Tattle Tales were booked for New Year’s Eve.
Felix Young had great plans for his show and hoped its success would make it a national institution like Earl Carroll’s Vanities. To that end, he’d hired Howard Jackson, Leo Robin, Harry Akst, Eddie Ward, and Richard Whiting to write the music. Edward Eliscu was to write the lyrics, and the humorists Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, Moss Hart, Arthur Kober, and Edwin Justus Mayer were to write comedy sketches. Starring with Fay in the show were Janet Reade, torch singer and star of Ziegfeld’s Whoopee! and Hot Cha!, and the Broadway musical idol Guy Robertson. LeRoy Prinz staged the musical numbers.
Tattle Tales was a lavish production made up of 125 people, featuring vaudeville’s Miller and Mack—Uncle Buck, Millie Stevens’s old stage friend—and the Three Blazes. Also appearing was sixteen-year-old Betty Grable, who’d moved to Los Angeles two years before and appeared in the studio chorus line of Fox films and Goldwyn’s musical Whoopee!, starring Eddie Cantor. Grable had then been hired to work in Norma Talmadge’s Kiki.
Barbara’s twenty-two-year-old nephew, Al Merkent, was dancing in the show and performing with the orchestra. Al had played trombone, saxophone, and clarinet with Fred Waring’s orchestra.
Putting a revue together, said Felix Young, “requires the balance of a goldsmith’s scales.” Young had produced The Marriage Bed and Top o’ the Hill before Tattle Tales. “You need the judgment of the best managing editor in the world, and 100 percent imagination . . . The experience is worth everything, but like anything that’s valuable, it must be earned at tremendous cost.”
Part of the “tremendous cost” for Young was having Frank Fay as his “chief nonsense dispenser” and main box-office draw. Tattle Tales previewed in Santa Barbara at the Lobero Theatre three days before the show’s Los Angeles opening.
Fay made his way home drunk from Santa Barbara to Bristol Avenue and went to Dion’s nursery. Nellie Banner heard Fay come in, and just as he was about to fall across the baby’s crib, she rushed in and whisked Dion out from under Fay’s dead weight. Dion was frightened and couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
Nellie Banner had quickly come to worship Barbara, but she didn’t believe in drinking or carousing, and she didn’t like Mr. Fay. He frightened her.
• • •
The opening night for Tattle Tales was a hit. The show was “bulg[ing] with talent”; Fay was “comedy plus,” “worthy of a lot of attention.”
Frank Fay and Felix Young got into an argument. Arguing with producers was not unusual for Fay. A few years before, he had set out to produce his own show in New York called Frank Fay’s Fables. The revue had been in rehearsal for weeks when it was time for Fay to put down deposits for scenery and costumes; it turned out that he had no money or credit. Two men who had seen the show in rehearsal were willing to back Fay’s Fables on the condition that they received 51 percent of the revue. Fay refused to give up control and turned down the offer.
Fay then had to court potential investors and would meet with them in the rehearsal hall, with a borrowed camel hair coat belonging to his tenor draped over his shoulders, thinking it would make him appear more prosperous.
When the actors in the show asked to draw some money to get something to eat, Fay gave out cans of corn and tomatoes that had been given to him by a grocer who had been approached as an investor.
Ultimately, Fay preferred to let the show fold rather than give up any of his share of it. It had closed with Fay owing the cast $4,000.
Fay refused to perform in Tattle Tales on New Year’s Eve. Felix Young ordered Fay out of the theater. Young put Richie Craig Jr. and Benny Rubin on in Fay’s place for the next week, until Craig was replaced by Jans and Whalen. B
y the end of the first week the show had broken even, bringing in $8,000.
“A good revue is just what the public needs now,” said Young. Almost a third of the country’s workforce—twelve million people—were out of work.
ELEVEN
Bold and Bad
As Steel Goes . . .
Fay was fired from Tattle Tales, and Barbara went to work on Baby Face in early January 1933. A week into production, The Bitter Tea of General Yen opened in Los Angeles at the RKO Hillstreet with a newsreel and a Charlie Chaplin comedy, The Cure.
In New York, the debut of The Bitter Tea of General Yen inaugurated a big change for the newly opened $8 million Radio City Music Hall, which went from being the world’s largest two-a-day theater (seating 6,250) to a motion picture house with a newly installed screen, seventy by forty feet.
The music hall had taken two years of intensive labor to build and filled the entire block between New York’s Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets, extending halfway from Sixth to Fifth Avenue.
Soon after the theater opened, it was decided that the stage of the music hall, though designed by Peter Clark under the genius of the showman Roxy himself, was too cavernous for variety performers. The stage for the music hall was the largest ever built for indoor entertainment, 144 feet wide and 80 feet deep.
“I believe in creative dreams,” said Samuel Lionel “Roxy” Rothafel, who dreamed his theaters. “The picture of the Radio City theatres was complete and practically perfect in my mind before artists and architects put pen on drawing paper.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 39