A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

  Barbara was excited about being part of the Lux Radio Theatre program. “No one identified with stage or screen can listen to radio without [wanting] to become a part of it,” she said.

  The Lux Radio Theatre was lavishly produced, with a weekly budget of $20,000. Barbara and the other actors met on an empty stage at the Music Box, sat around a large conference table, and read from the script several times until they had the feel of it. “We spent five hours on it the first night,” Barbara said. “Six hours the next.”

  Before the show was broadcast over the CBS nationwide network, the cast had spent twenty-five hours in actual rehearsal. It was assumed by listening audiences that Mr. DeMille was the show’s producer and director, though DeMille didn’t arrive at the theater until dress rehearsal. It was Frank Woodruff, described as “an actor’s director,” who oversaw the production.

  Main Street had just been released by First National under the title I Married a Doctor, from the Sinclair Lewis novel that had been made into a silent in 1923, based on the 1921 Broadway adaptation.

  With John Ford (left). Joseph H. August (underneath the lens) was the cameraman on both The Plough and the Stars and Mary of Scotland, 1936.

  The Lux Radio Theatre presentation used Lewis’s novel, rather than the silent picture or the Broadway play.

  Radio, to Barbara, “staggers the imagination. Man comes near approaching infinity in service,” she said. “Radio is a hard job but I like it, because it demands more of my talent and ability than any other business, and it is my job to make a perfect delivery. At least that is my sincere ambition.”

  • • •

  When finished with the Lux broadcast, Barbara was back at work on Plough. Bob Taylor called her each morning. Ford stuck his head through the open window of Barbara’s bungalow and said, “Don’t let that Taylor make you late on my set!”

  At the end of the production, Ford gave Barbara an old Gaelic cross. On the back he had inscribed in Gaelic: “To Barbara. God and Mary always be with you. Jack Ford.” Ford told her, “Always wear it inside your clothes.” She did.

  Despite that, Barbara said she wouldn’t work with Ford again. “And he wouldn’t want me, either,” she said. “That’s old fashioned crap, what he does. I don’t want any acts like that. I’ll take some young guy who doesn’t know anything and try and do it.”

  • • •

  Robert Sisk, an associate producer on the picture with Cliff Reid, sent O’Casey a set of stills from the picture (“All in all,” Sisk wrote to O’Casey, “it is certainly the best production the play has ever had and though it has been a costly affair, and though we have certainly taken a risk on the English market, I suspect we will sneak out on it”). He let O’Casey know that he and Ford were trying to secure the rights for Juno and the Paycock.

  Sam Briskin, the picture’s executive producer, wasn’t happy with the finished picture. “Why make a picture where a man and a woman are married?” he asked. “The main thing about pictures is love or sex. Here you’ve got a man and a woman married at the start—who’s interested in that?” Briskin wanted the scenes between Nora and Jack to be reshot with them unmarried.

  Ford refused to reshoot the scenes, as he had five years before on Arrowsmith after arguing with Sam Goldwyn about retakes. Now, on The Plough and the Stars, Ford proceeded to get so drunk that Cliff Reid called on Kate Hepburn for help. Hepburn went to Ford’s house, helped get him into her car, and drove him to her dressing room on the RKO lot, where she plied him with a large whiskey and a heaping dose of castor oil that made him so ill he thought he was going to die. When he finally passed out, Hepburn thought he had died. She somehow got him to the Hollywood Athletic Club, where he often went and where he could recover.

  Ford soon left Los Angeles for the San Pedro harbor and set sail on his 106-foot ketch, the Araner, named for the Aran Islands, and headed west toward the translucent waters of Honolulu.

  “After I had shot it exactly as it was written,” Ford said, “they tried to make a love story of it.”

  In the reshooting of The Plough and the Stars, the uprising is kept in the background. The struggle between the newly married Jack and Nora Clitheroe is brought to the fore—hers to keep him safe, alive, and at home (“A woman’s nature is to love just as it is a man’s nature to fight,” Nora says to Jack, “and neither one can help it more than the other”), his to be a freedom fighter (“Ireland is greater than a mother,” Jack says to her, “Ireland is greater than a wife”).

  Pan Berman had the assistant directors George Nichols and Ed Donahue direct retakes on two weekends when Barbara and Preston were at work during the week on two other pictures: she on Banjo on My Knee at Fox; Foster on Sea Devils for RKO.

  The O’Casey play showed the futility of war and the waste of human life in the fight for freedom; it was also alive with the wit, spirit (O’Casey’s dedication to the play read, “To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave”), and crackle of the characters of the boardinghouse—old Peter, Fluther Good, the handyman, the teasing young Covey, Bessie Burgess, and Mrs. Gogan, constantly at it with one another—and the others, Rosie and the Barman. In the picture, both threads—the love story and the comic chatter of the Dubliners—run parallel with the third, the uprising itself. With the varying notions of director and writer and studio executives, the picture was pulled in too many directions.

  “The final result wasn’t any good,” said Barbara. “John should not have left the sinking ship but stayed behind and fought for us. Only John could have saved it, and he should have.”

  SIXTEEN

  Fresh Passion, Fresh Pain

  Barbara owed 20th Century–Fox two pictures after A Message to Garcia, and the studio coordinated shooting schedules with RKO. Fox planned to use Barbara for eight weeks following The Plough and the Stars, from the end of August through the end of October.

  John Cromwell was directing a romantic character-comedy adventure set on the Mississippi River written and produced by Nunnally Johnson. The story was about a loopy shanty boat colony and the ornery, cheerful patriarch, Newt Holley, determined to “git” himself an heir from the last of his six sons (the other five drowned in the river) to carry on the family name. The son marries a land girl—the daughter of a renegade river man—rather than one of his own kind, and the newlyweds, through mishaps, the law, chases and escapes, arguments and equally matched bullheadedness, can’t seem to get together even for one night.

  The part of the girl, Pearl Elliott was seen as “a Janet Gaynor character,” in fact was to be played by Gaynor, but she was shooting Ladies in Love with Loretta Young, Constance Bennett, and Simone Simon and wasn’t available.

  John Cromwell thought Barbara would be a “natural for the role.” Zanuck dismissed the idea; Barbara had “no sex appeal.” He wanted Sylvia Sidney, Jean Arthur, or Margaret Sullavan. Zanuck’s take on Barbara had more to do with how “he couldn’t catch me,” she said, than it did her allure or her acting ability. “He ran around the desk too slow,” she said.

  Zanuck, like Bill Wellman, was known as a drunk and whore hound. Zanuck interviewed his actresses, tested them, then made his play. Sometimes he opened a desk drawer and took out a genuine gold casting of his genitals and showed how admirably hung he was. If actresses resisted him, he could be vindictive.

  John Cromwell, a former stage actor who’d appeared in the American premiere of Major Barbara as well as an outstanding theatrical director, had appreciated Barbara’s work before they’d both left New York for Hollywood. Cromwell had seen Barbara on Broadway in The Noose and wanted her for a new play he was then directing. Barbara had read a play called Burlesque and chose to go into it instead. When Cromwell co-directed with Eddie Sutherland the picture based on Burlesque—The Dance of Life—Nancy Carroll was in the role Barbara had made her own in its run on Broadway.

  With Joel McCrea (left) and John Cromwell, the director of Banjo on My Knee, 1936. (PHOTOFEST)

  Cromwell believed Barb
ara had “just the right quality” for Zanuck’s picture. The producer held firm against using Barbara until weeks before production was to start and then relented, saying she “would be perfect for the part.”

  Fox paid RKO $45,000 for Barbara’s services.

  Pearl Elliott marries Ernie Holley, a hardheaded, hard-lovin’ shanty boat man, a Mississippi catfish, a “Spencer Tracy type.” Zanuck wrote “Henry Fonda” next to the description of the character. He wanted Fonda or Fred MacMurray or Jim Stewart. Henry Fonda had been under a nonexclusive contract to Fox, appearing in Way Down East and The Farmer Takes a Wife, before Zanuck merged 20th Century with Fox. While not particularly won over by Fonda’s screen presence or the money the actor was asking, Zanuck kept Fonda on.

  Barbara and Joel McCrea had become friends during Gambling Lady, and Fox borrowed the thirty-year-old McCrea from Samuel Goldwyn for $25,000 for six weeks. In exchange, Goldwyn was to get either the three Ritz Brothers or Jack Haley for one picture. McCrea wasn’t fond of Zanuck; he thought the producer “an egotistical little bastard; a gutty little guy and a chaser, but smart.”

  McCrea was natural as an actor, and underplayed as much as he could. Gary Cooper was his idea of a romantic leading guy.

  Together McCrea and Stanwyck had a quality: they looked like pioneer stock; she was full of pluck, ready to pitch in, and game for life; he was tall, athletic, all-American, and homespun with a sincerity and innocence and a readiness to take care of her. McCrea’s sexuality was in his beauty and build, his simplicity, poise, and shyness. He didn’t drink or smoke or gamble. Stanwyck didn’t play for being sexy; it was all around her. She didn’t flaunt it but it was there, underneath everything she did, and she drew on it.

  Walter Brennan was being considered for the part of Newt Holley, head of the clan. Brennan, at forty-two, had appeared in more than a hundred pictures in bit and supporting parts as the stubble-faced codger, the sailor, the sidewinder. He was a young man but played older characters—cranky, ratty, eccentric figures—with a comedic flair that made his work impossible to ignore.

  Brennan was known as one of the most democratic men in Hollywood, without a “fake sense of values,” said one of the sound mixers. His characterizations were picked up from friends he made along the way—street sweepers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, postmen.

  He had started in pictures in 1925 “purely from hunger,” he said, an extra getting paid $7.50 a day. Soon he was making between $25 and $100 a day until he got his big break with Goldwyn in Howard Hawks’s Barbary Coast, working with Joel McCrea. Hawks, who directed Brennan in Come and Get It, thought the actor had “an amazing quality . . . able to play anything and do it right.”

  Fox decided to use Brennan for Newt, and in exchange Goldwyn was to get both the Ritz Brothers and Jack Haley. Brennan had just finished making Goldwyn’s Come and Get It from the Edna Ferber novel, playing the logger Swan Bostrom. Brennan considered the Goldwyn Studio the country club of the motion picture industry and stayed with Goldwyn for ten years. “Sam was class,” said Brennan. “He did nothing cheap.”

  Walter Brennan circa 1935. He left engineering school to work in vaudeville, raise pineapples, speculate in real estate, and work as a stuntman. As Newt Holley, he had to learn to play a one-man band with harmonica, a xylophone of bottles, cow bells, and bass drum, and mastered the contraption without a hitch.

  As Newt, Brennan had to learn to play a one-man-band contraption, a jungle gym of branches tied together that had tethered to it a harmonica and a xylophone of bottles, cowbells, and bass drum. Brennan mastered the musical contraption without a hitch and learned as well to play the piccolo, accordion, and banjo. Brennan was nimble with his fingers and had an uncanny ear; he could imitate car horns, wasps, bees, birds, cows, roosters, dogs, and cats. He made “goofy sounds,” as he called them, “just like a high school kid, simply for the hell of it,” which he learned living on his farm in the San Fernando Valley with his wife, three children, dogs, horses, and cows.

  Brennan decided to play Newt without his false teeth; he’d lost the originals several years before in an accident.

  Katherine DeMille was set to play the boat woman in love with Ernie who determines that no one else should get her man if she can’t have him. Buddy Ebsen, the former Ziegfeld Follies dancer of Broadway Melody of 1936, was Newt’s nephew, Buddy, the shiftless, shambling young man, as vague in intelligence as he is on everything; he sings and dances an odd shuffle. Anthony “Tony” Martin, in his second picture, was a New Orleans crooner down on his luck and unsure of his talent who falls hard for Pearl.

  The Holley clan on board their Mississippi houseboat, Banjo on My Knee.

  The picture was based on a novel of the same name by Harry Hamilton, recently published by Bobbs-Merrill in February 1936. Hamilton had co-written the play—called From Now On—ten years before with Norman Foster. Fox had bought the motion picture rights to the novel for $10,000.

  Stories of the Deep South had taken hold in Hollywood since the publication of Gone with the Wind, which to date had sold 600,000 copies. Studios were making a picture about New Orleans, and Warner was planning a sequel to Anthony Adverse set in the South.

  Zanuck assigned Nunnally Johnson to produce Banjo on My Knee, intended to be a kind of lighthearted, musical Tobacco Road, then running on Broadway in its third year and still shocking audiences with its comic brutality of life lived by the dissolute Lester family. If the Lesters of Georgia’s Tobacco Road are a foul and lazy clan living in filth, Zanuck wanted the Holleys of Banjo on My Knee to be a merry, pride-of-folktale bunch, odd but decent sorts, who are banded together in a Mississippi shanty boat colony, folk who work hard and play harder.

  Nunnally Johnson had worked with Zanuck since 1933, when the producer had left Warner Bros. to form 20th Century Corporation with Joe Schenck and Bill Goetz. Each of Johnson’s pictures captured the complexity of the subject; each was visually powerful and dramatically told; and each earned large amounts of money for Zanuck. Johnson had worked as a reporter in New York City, first on the Tribune, then on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Herald Tribune, and the New York Evening Post. A year after going to Hollywood, he was hired by Zanuck at the newly formed 20th Century Corporation. When 20th Century merged with Fox, Zanuck made Johnson a producer. He took the job because Zanuck asked him to, and, Johnson said, “If he asked me to jump off the bridge I’d have done it.”

  Banjo on My Knee was set in the South above Memphis and in New Orleans. Johnson hired William Faulkner to work on the story. Faulkner was in Hollywood; he’d been back and forth from Oxford, Mississippi, since 1932 to augment his income, after finishing Light in August. Sam Marx at Metro had hired Faulkner to write original stories for $500 a week, more money than the writer had ever seen, “more money than there was in all of Mississippi,” he said. Faulkner had written a script for Metro’s biggest star, Wallace Beery.

  Following Flesh, Faulkner wrote a treatment and screenplay for Howard Hawks from Faulkner’s story “Turnabout,” which became Today We Live and was made with Joan Crawford and Gary Cooper. Faulkner wrote the treatment in five days; Thalberg read it and said to Hawks, “Shoot it as it is. I feel as if I’d make tracks all over it if I touched it.” When Hawks left Metro after a year and a half (he was glad to get out of that “goddam place”) and went to Movietone City for 20th Century–Fox, he took Faulkner to work with Joel Sayre on a script called The Road to Glory.

  Faulkner was at work on a new novel, Absalom, Absalom!, when Nunnally Johnson approached him about Banjo on My Knee. Faulkner needed money and agreed to write a treatment, which he turned in in March 1936; Zanuck thought it full of “great possibilities” and proceeded to lay out his own ideas about the script.

  Faulkner was getting paid $1,000 a week and living at the Beverly Hills Hotel. While at work on Banjo on My Knee, he was lonely and wrote in a letter, “I wish I was at home, still in the kitchen with my family around me and my hand full of Old Maid cards.”

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p; Faulkner’s pages for Banjo were “magnificent,” said Dave Hempstead, Nunnally Johnson’s associate producer. “[He] wrote practically blank verse, sometimes two or three pages long. They were beautiful speeches.” But impossible for an actor to perform. One of Pearl’s speeches, written by Faulkner:

  Then he left me before we were even married. He fixed it so that his people could say the things about me they wanted to say. Then he left me, because when I left I wasn’t running from him. I was running after him. If he had loved me he wouldn’t have known that. If he had loved me he would not have left me. If he had loved me he would have followed me and overtaken me. He could have because no woman ever runs too fast for the man she loves to catch her, but he didn’t.

  Faulkner said of writing scripts, “It ain’t my racket. I can’t see things. I can only hear.”

  The language could be heard on the page, but it wasn’t conversational dialogue.

  The picture’s producer next gave Banjo on My Knee to Francis Faragoh, a scriptwriter whose work ranged from Little Caesar and Frankenstein to Becky Sharp. Faulkner was loaned out by RKO to work on George Stevens’s Gunga Din. Zanuck trusted Faragoh but thought his screenplay for Banjo on My Knee “terrible . . . must have been on strike,” Zanuck wrote. “Audience will laugh at drama.”

  Zanuck believed Banjo on My Knee could “easily be a comedy riot and very romantic,” but Faragoh’s script had turned the book into “an old fashioned rural melodrama like Way Down East . . . the script was terribly censorable—unnecessarily so.” Zanuck doodled in a note to himself, “Censors kill us.”

  Zanuck made it clear to Nunnally Johnson that Pearl was the star of the story and that the underlying theme of Banjo on My Knee had to be the father doing everything he could to get his son and daughter-in-law into bed so he could have a grandchild.