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

by Victoria Wilson

  Durning had taught his assistant well; he’d given Bill the confidence of “a pit bull-dog.” A month into Wellman’s picture, he got word while shooting a scene that Durning was dead. “The King of Terrors had reached out and grabbed him,” said Wellman. “Bernie wasn’t ready for that.” He was thirty years old; Wellman was twenty-seven. It was 1923.

  John Barrymore’s drunkenness and outrageous behavior were, along with Frank Fay’s, the model for the doomed matinee idol Norman Maine. Barrymore and Fay, each in his own way, had been celebrated as the most innovative, electrifying, and nuanced performers of their generation.

  Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur called Barrymore “the Monster”; he was celebrated as a theatrical genius who’d created the first postwar modern Hamlet. Greta Garbo, after working with Barrymore in Grand Hotel, called him “a perfect artist. He had that driven madness without which a great artist cannot work or live.”

  Barrymore and Frank Fay had each fallen ill from alcoholism; each had been in and out of sanitariums in an effort to dry out from booze. The scene of Norman Maine in the “rest home” was inspired by George Cukor’s visit to see Barrymore at Kelley’s Rest Home, where he was struggling, once again, to get out from under the Barrymore curse.

  “Lollipop Hollywood bastards” was the way Barrymore described the film world. A “goddamned sink hole of culture. The good die young because they see it’s no use living if you have to be good.”

  To David Selznick, Barrymore was Norman Maine, and he was determined to use the fallen theatrical idol in the role. “If we use him,” Wellman warned, “we’ll have to blackboard him.” Selznick wanted to chance it, but he didn’t want to be the one to tell Barrymore about the blackboard.

  America’s greatest Shakespearean actor, whose Hamlet the English critic James Agate had called “nearer to Shakespeare’s whole creation than any other I have seen,” had for the past few years become unhinged by lapses of memory. After years of too much alcohol, Barrymore at fifty-four was having trouble remembering his lines.

  Three years earlier Barrymore had delivered one of the most startling screen performances in Elmer Rice’s Counsellor at Law. In it Barrymore had spoken his lines at rapid fire with speeches that went on for pages, and he’d finished the picture without a problem. Weeks later, after completing Long Lost Father for RKO, Barrymore was recalled by William Wyler to reshoot a sequence for Counsellor at Law.

  It was a simple scene between Barrymore and the actor John Qualen. Barrymore finished his longish speech; Qualen said his lines. Barrymore started to give what was a few short lines and stumbled over the words. He made a silly face, people laughed, and they started the scene from the beginning. Again Barrymore missed the line. He looked at the script. They started again. The words still escaped him. Barrymore was somewhat tired but not drunk. After several more tries, he was angry and upset, and then Qualen blew his lines. Barrymore persisted. Hour after hour, take after take, Barrymore blew his lines at the same place. Fifty-six takes later he asked for the scene to be shot the following day.

  That night Barrymore was called on to help his neighbor John Gilbert, who was threatening suicide; Gilbert’s fourth wife, Virginia Bruce, had announced she was taking their three-month-old baby daughter and leaving him. Barrymore stayed with Gilbert until seven the following morning and, without any sleep, went before the cameras and shot the Counsellor at Law scene perfectly.

  Two months later Barrymore began tests for a Technicolor screen version of Hamlet. The picture was to be directed by his friend Robert Edmond Jones and financed by Jock Whitney. For the test, Barrymore was to perform the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy. He began the speech from act 1, scene 5, a speech he’d made onstage hundreds of times. He came to the line “Yea, from the table of my memory,” and he couldn’t find the lines that began, “I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.” Barrymore tried to do the scene again but was still unable to remember the lines. He was neither drunk nor ill.

  The Hamlet production was canceled.

  Two months later Barrymore created the inspired performance of the demented manic Oscar Jaffe, adapted for the actor by Hecht and MacArthur from their play Twentieth Century. Barrymore was brilliant and had no problems with his memory.

  During the next couple of years, as Barrymore attempted to work in other pictures and contracts were canceled, he was diagnosed with Korsakoff syndrome, toxemia affecting the brain brought on by excessive alcohol. Barrymore could at times be vital and alert; at other times he was listless and unable to sustain attention. The lapses of memory had panicked the actor, and he’d progressed to a point where in order to work, he required a blackboard with the scene’s lines out of camera range. The Selznick office called Barrymore and asked him to come in regarding the role of Norman Maine. Selznick’s business manager told the actor they wanted him for the part of the fading movie idol.

  Barrymore listened as he was told that the part of the doomed actor was his but that he would have to use a blackboard. He said nothing and left the office.

  • • •

  The model for the Vicki Lester–Norman Maine marriage was Barbara’s marriage to Fay, which by this point had become Hollywood lore. Fay had come to Hollywood a huge Broadway star; Barbara’s big Broadway success in Burlesque had carried no weight in Hollywood. She was an unknown girl married to one of the biggest draws in vaudeville and on Broadway. For the first few years in Hollywood, after Fay changed his mind and allowed Barbara to work, he’d guided and supported her career; it was Fay who had Harry Cohn hire his wife for Mexicali Rose and arrange to pay her salary. Fay brought Capra a copy of Barbara’s test scene from The Noose, shot by Alexander Korda, when Barbara, after making eleven unsuccessful tests, refused to make another for Capra’s new picture, Ladies of Leisure, and it was Fay who insisted that Capra watch the test. Capra, watching it, had fallen in love with Barbara and starred her in four of his pictures, launching her career. Wellman and Carson used this in the picture when Norman Maine insists that the producer, Oliver Niles, watch Esther Blodgett’s screen test.

  It was part of Hollywood lore that as Barbara’s star began to rise in picture after picture, Fay’s godlike stature as Broadway’s Favorite Son began to collapse. Warner Bros. had put Fay in one improbable movie role after another in an attempt to make the red-haired, brilliant monologuist into the screen’s most irresistible Latin lover.

  Bill Wellman had watched much of this unfold. He adored Stanwyck and she him. They’d made three pictures together—Night Nurse, So Big, The Purchase Price—during the years—1931–1932—when Barbara’s marriage was starting to come apart. In many ways Bill felt that Barbara was a female version of himself: the leanness, the energy, the passion, the toughness, the fierce loyalty.

  Hollywood had watched appalled and sniggering as Barbara stood steadfast by Fay’s side (“I’m Mrs. Frank Fay,” she’d insisted to reporters at the height of her stardom and the low point of his): through his publicized brawls, his string of failed pictures, and his disastrous return to Broadway’s Palace, where once he’d played the longest engagement in the theater’s history.

  Wellman knew about Barbara’s troubled marriage. He’d watched, though she hadn’t spoken about it, as Barbara supported Fay, fighting his decline every step of the way, signing studio contract after contract with the stipulation that Fay be part of the deal and be given money to make his pictures. She’d appeared with Fay in his act—as his straight man and performing her old cartwheeling dance numbers—much to the horror of the press, who accused them both of denigrating her image as a serious actress. Barbara had invested in Fay’s extravagant revue that crisscrossed the country, even appearing with him in it when he was often too drunk to go onstage. The press wrote about the marriage, about how it wouldn’t last, how it shouldn’t last, which made Barbara fight harder to keep it alive, until Fay’s illness—his alcoholism and violent rages—forced her to flee it for good.

  John McCormick, head of production, First
National, and his wife, Colleen Moore, circa 1923. Her mother cut off her long curls, shaped her bangs to look “like a Japanese girl’s haircut,” she said, and the vision of flaming youth took hold. “We were coming out of the Victorian era and in my pictures, I danced the Charleston, I smoked in public and I drank cocktails. Nice girls didn’t do that before.” (MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)

  Interwoven in the portrait of the Maine-Lester marriage was that of John McCormick and Colleen Moore, a producer-star team that fused into being one artist. McCormick, the former publicity chief of First National, became production head when First National went from a distribution company to a producing studio, and he set out to make his wife into America’s No. 1 box-office draw. Moore, neither beautiful nor glamorous, had starred in a string of treacly pictures. Through McCormick’s persistence and Moore’s pragmatism, she cut off her hair and went from being a modestly successful sweet young thing to America’s Jazz Age flapper with Dutch bob and boyish figure. Colleen Moore’s straight hair took the place of Mary Pickford’s curls. With The Perfect Flapper and We Moderns, the convent-educated Colleen Moore became bigger than Pickford, Swanson, Chaplin, and Tom Mix.

  Throughout the 1920s, John McCormick was making $100,000 a year.

  William Wellman (in black sweater to the right of the camera), Janet Gaynor, Adolphe Menjou (seated), Fredric March, and W. Howard Greene, the cameraman (seated, with hat), on the set of A Star Is Born, winter 1936.

  McCormick and Moore made twenty pictures together; their collaboration seemed to be at its height. Moore’s pictures were bringing in millions. As she became the idol of the nation, McCormick’s alcoholic binges grew more frequent and destructive. America’s wide-eyed flapper stood by her husband through his hospitalizations and covered for him at the studio until she realized he was set on his own destruction and Moore filed for divorce to save her life. The girl with the Dutch bob and the short shorts, who became on-screen the symbol of the Roaring Twenties, made the transition to sound pictures and flourished, making several successful movies, among them The Power and the Glory by Preston Sturges and The Scarlet Letter. Americans, though, still yearned for their perfect flapper, and in 1934 Colleen Moore left pictures altogether.

  In A Star Is Born, love was the heroine; drink was the destroyer.

  Wellman was so drawn to the lore of those whose careers were done in by drink and by the coming of sound that he cast several actors undone by both in small parts in the picture: Owen Moore, Mary Pickford’s first husband, was cast as a director. Marshall Neilan, a former silent director, was given a small part as someone who bumps into Norman Maine at the Santa Anita racetrack. Bob Perry, who had appeared in three of Wellman’s pictures, beginning with the 1928 Beggars of Life, as well as Night Nurse and The Purchase Price, was given a role as a boxing referee. Even Wellman’s first wife, the silent star Helene Chadwick, appeared in the picture. Chadwick first met Wellman at a dinner party in New York when he’d returned from the Lafayette Flying Corps before the United States entered the Great War. Throughout the 1920s, Chadwick had made more than seventy pictures, including The Cup of Fury, Dangerous Curve Ahead, and Brothers Under the Skin; Wellman, as a twenty-four-year-old studio messenger, had delivered Chadwick’s fan mail.

  In its own way, A Star Is Born was a love letter to Hollywood. Scenes were shot at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Trocadero, the Hollywood Legion Stadium, the swimming pool of the Ambassador Hotel, the Santa Anita racetrack, and the Hollywood Bowl.

  • • •

  The picture’s first sneak preview was in Pomona, where there were technical difficulties. Next it was shown in Huntington Park.

  “The audience,” Wellman said, “did everything but dance in the street—they laughed, cried and shook the ceiling with applause.”

  Selznick had told Wellman he was a lousy writer; Wellman expected an apology. Instead, Selznick jumped up and down “as awkward looking as a kangaroo leaping around with his front paws against his chest” and grabbed Wellman in a bear hug and repeated hysterically, “What did I tell you, what did I tell you.” Selznick wrote a memo saying that A Star Is Born was much more his story than either Wellman’s or Carson’s. Selznick went on to say, “The actual original idea, the story line and the vast majority of the story ideas of the scenes themselves are my own. If, however, I am wrong in my recollection of our contract, and it states that Wellman is entitled to a bonus on Star Is Born, as it is his story, I would not for a moment quibble on whose story it is, and we should by all means pay him.”

  A coast-to-coast hookup nationally broadcast for the first time the world preview of the all-color production of A Star Is Born at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Grandstands lined both sides of Wilshire Boulevard. A twenty-piece orchestra played as hundreds of stars, directors, studio executives, civic leaders, and Los Angeles society arrived. The event was broadcast over the radio.

  George Fisher, of Hollywood Whispers, introduced the stars as they arrived: Fredric March, who earlier in the evening had had his footprints taken in cement at the forecourt of Grauman’s; Janet Gaynor in white summer ermine; Adolphe Menjou, Andy Devine, Lionel Stander, Bill Wellman, Robert Carson, Selznick, and Jock Whitney were there, as was almost everyone else in Hollywood from Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Cecil B. DeMille to Jean Harlow and William Powell, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Myrna Loy, Cary Grant, Charles Chaplin, and Marlene Dietrich. Also there were P. G. Wodehouse, at work at Metro, who had allowed Selznick to appropriate the title of A Star Is Born from one of his short stories; Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; and Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone. Noticeably absent from the evening were John Barrymore, Frank Fay, and Barbara Stanwyck.

  Barbara was just starting production on Stella Dallas.

  THREE

  Stella Dallas

  Stella is real.

  —Barbara Stanwyck

  You may say that Stella is crude and noisy and vulgar,” said Barbara. “She is. But when you get through with the play you also must say, ‘That was a woman.’ And it means something to play a real person. I’ve had so many of the other kind to do; pretty women who didn’t matter. Stella is real.”

  Being beautiful and romantic in the theater was all very well, but Barbara understood that sooner or later an actress had to see that it was the “unladylike role” that would give her an opportunity to achieve greatness. “Helen Hayes scored her greatest screen triumph in The Sin of Madelon Claudet,” said Barbara. “Ruth Chatterton created the greatest of all her characterizations in Madame X. Her work in Dodsworth proved that a portrayal may be repellent yet so finely turned that it is beautiful to watch. Miss Chatterton is versed in the ways of acting for it has been the unattractive roles that have meant her greatest successes.”

  Barbara admired character actors; they were constantly working. She saw how character actresses playing type roles were being rewarded with substantial recognition. Gale Sondergaard as the female heavy in Anthony Adverse had won the Academy Award and was the outstanding character in the picture; Beulah Bondi’s homely Rachel Jackson in The Gorgeous Hussy had been acclaimed, while the performances of two newcomers to the screen, Estelle Winwood and Fay Bainter, in the just-released Quality Street were notable successes.

  “Give me a good supporting role,” said Beulah Bondi, “that’s all I ask.”

  Barbara saw the deep dramatic possibilities inherent in those roles, which to her “did not preclude unrestrained acting.” An ordinary leading role, “even though good,” she said, didn’t offer the chance to “slough off the restraints of glamour.” To Barbara, the average leading lady had been “built up” and was forced to act in type, “to hew the line laid down for her,” and was unable to “realize the full potentialities of her acting ability.” Barbara believed that character roles allowed an actress to “sink her teeth into the part and extract the last bit of flavor. Forgotten twists in characterization come to the fore.” Barbara had been looking for a part “of that
kind for some time” before she won the role of Stella Dallas.

  Stella, ambitious, illiterate, with her misguided social ambitions, wearing frightful clothes and too much makeup, is undone by her generous but preposterous manners, her flamboyant, vulgar self. Her beloved daughter takes after her father, with his refined taste, bearing, and curiosity, as Stella learns of the enormity of the handicap she is to the one person she loves.

  Goldwyn’s Stella Dallas, the 1925 silent and the 1937 remake, were about mother love, about marriage and divorce between two people of different social backgrounds: he, rich and educated; she, poor and striving.

  Stella Dallas is a punitive movie in which the woman is tortured with class, propriety, and the split between husband and child. Stella Martin, the ambitious seventeen-year-old daughter of a mill hand, aching to get out from the squalor of her upbringing, finds escape through impulsive love and marriage. Stella Dallas, in both play and movies, flaunts an exaggerated notion of a woman. She is a spectacle and is oblivious of its effect. The production code did not allow sexuality in a family picture, and the women in Stella Dallas aren’t sexual, including the slinky good debutante widow.

  Olive Higgins Prouty, author of the novel Stella Dallas, was pleased that Barbara avoided “any attempt at sex appeal in Stella,” she said. “This innocence was one of Stella’s outstanding characteristics.”

  • • •

  Olive Higgins had shocked her family when she announced she was going to Smith. “College was apt to make a girl opinionated, undomestic, unmanageable and also unmarriageable in the opinion of many a young man who didn’t want a ‘blue stocking’ for a wife.”