Barbara was getting ready for The Mad Miss Manton. Leigh Jason was directing the picture.
Barbara watched as the careers of those actors and actresses denounced in the Theatre association’s ad suffered the effects of being called “box-office deterrents.” Pan Berman had allowed Katharine Hepburn to leave RKO for Columbia since her ranking at the box office had fallen to 189. Joan Crawford saw herself go from “being Queen one year to being washed up the next,” while Louis B. Mayer assured her that the public loved her and would always love her and that he would take care of his “little Joan” as if she were his daughter (“His hand always touched my right tit,” said Joan, “whenever he said the word ‘daughter’ ”).
When Crawford’s contract was up, Mayer offered her a one-year renewal at $300,000 for two pictures. Marlene Dietrich left America—Cohn canceled the George Sand picture after the exhibitors’ ad ran—and the thirty-seven-year-old German actress returned to Europe. Mae West had just returned from a triumphant ten-week nationwide personal appearance tour—doing six shows a day—to drum up business for her picture Every Day’s a Holiday. The picture had not done well at the box office. West said, “The only picture to make money recently was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and that would have made twice as much if they had let me play Snow White.” West’s career was considered finished, but she was determined to make a picture as Catherine the Great.
• • •
Breakfast for Two opened to positive reviews.
Bob went to New York for a few days, and Barbara and Cesar Romero, her co-star in Always Goodbye, went to the Trocadero and were given dancing lessons in the shag by a group of college kids.
Always Goodbye was rushed into theaters as a summer picture. Unlike the 1934 original, Gallant Lady, reviewers called the remake “sentimentally sticky and maladroit” and “careless as to details, logic and reason” but wrote about Barbara’s and Marshall’s “fine performances in the face of the material they have to work with.” Louella Parsons, always a champion of Barbara’s, wrote about how Stanwyck, “one of our most attractive stars, plays with emotional understanding and feeling in the role.”
In the picture Barbara was loving and patient as the mother fighting to win a place in the life of her little boy, played by five-year-old Johnnie Russell. Barbara was not as patient with her own son, Dion, only a year older than Russell. In Always Goodbye, the turning point in the picture comes when Stanwyck’s character is told by her son’s soon-to-be stepmother that the boy will be sent off to military school. Stanwyck’s character, alarmed by this, asks, “Isn’t six years old too young to send the boy to military school?”
Dion Fay had witnessed his father’s frightening rages and drinking, but Barbara’s expectations of her son were high. She wanted perfection. Dion was a freckle-faced six-year-old boy with glasses who was starting to get plump, which annoyed Barbara, who had little patience for people who were fat. Dion was not the perfect movie son of Always Goodbye, Ever in My Heart, or So Big. When Barbara and Dion were living in the city proper, he went to kindergarten at CalCurtis on Beverly Boulevard. When mother and son moved to Northridge, Dion was sent away to school, partially to protect him from Fay’s winning the appeal that would uphold his visitation rights and also because Barbara thought it would be good for the six-year-old boy.
It was a damp, overcast day when Uncle Buck and Dion headed over the Santa Monica Mountains and Sepulveda Boulevard to Raenford Military Academy in Encino, five miles from Marwyck. Buck and Dion didn’t talk much. The drizzle turned to a slight rain. Once at Encino, the car turned onto Louise Avenue. Dion recognized it; Gable and Lombard lived there.
As the car passed the Gable-Lombard ranch, he remembered the great times he’d had with their horses and dogs. Carole had always picked him up and kissed him on his cheek. It was the first time he’d thought about love.
He thought of where he was being driven and became frightened. He was being taken to an unknown place and was terrified he would never see home again. He’d been warned by Barbara about the school’s disciplinary ways and that he’d better be good.
Dion, age six, in cadet uniform, 1938. Raenford Military Academy, on Hayvenhurst Avenue, was originally the Encino Country Club, built in the 1920s and bankrupt a decade later. Dion, who learned the close-order drill and the manual of arms for rifle and saber, often watched Darryl Zanuck and others playing polo on his Hayvenhurst Avenue field. Note the inscription: “To Nany. With all my love. Dion.”(COURTESY TONY FAY)
The sky opened up to a downpour. Raenford Academy, with its ivy-covered buildings, loomed in the distance.
Once at the school, Dion was given an olive-green wool uniform with a sand-brown belt to wear around his waist and over the shoulder. Each boy was issued a wooden rifle to be carried during morning formations and parades.
Dion’s fear gave way to excitement about his new school.
He was given a small spare room to share with another boy, who was much more knowing of the world than Dion and who soon showed him how to smoke. Often the two boys wandered up in the shrub-covered hills behind the barracks to explore. Dion would take a certain kind of weed, hollow at the center, and light it up, pretending to smoke.
On weekends some of the boys went home. Dion wasn’t among them. Uncle Buck came to visit on Sundays once every other month and on holidays drove him back to the ranch. The boy counted the days until Thanksgiving, when he would go home for a week. On Saturdays, those who remained at the school were taken to the movies at the La Reina Theatre in Sherman Oaks on Ventura Boulevard.
Dion graduated from first grade, which Barbara celebrated with a party at Marwyck. The party was postponed for a week as punishment for Dion’s bad behavior. Barbara wanted no publicity about the party and swore each of the mothers to secrecy so there would be no cameramen and the children would be free to play.
From The Mad Miss Manton, 1938. Right to left: Frances Mercer as Helen Frayne, Barbara as Melsa Manton, Linda Perry as Myra Frost, Henry Fonda as Peter Ames, and Sam Levene as Lieutenant Mike Brent.
Dion hated school; he was lonely and wanted to be home, though he wasn’t happy there—he saw little of Barbara—but it was better than being sent away. At home Dion had his own room with a workbench where he could make models. He swam in the pool with its clear view of the valley and spent time at the stables. He rode his horse, Beauty, and helped Uncle Buck paint the fences. Uncle Buck and Nanny took care of him, and he learned from his beloved nurse how important it was to be a good person.
• • •
RKO borrowed Henry Fonda from Walter Wanger at Fox for the role opposite Barbara in The Mad Miss Manton. Shooting began on the picture following the July 4 weekend. In addition to The Mad Miss Manton, RKO had four pictures in production: Room Service, Gunga Din, The Castles, and Love Affair; eleven more were due to start within the next two months.
The Mad Miss Manton fulfilled Barbara’s nonexclusive contract with RKO. The picture was a whodunit comedy adventure with Stanwyck as a spoiled debutante who discovers a double murder and, to spite the police who dismiss her story of finding a dead body as another in a long line of charity high jinks (the corpse has vanished by the time the police get there), sets out with her Park Avenue sidekicks to prove they’re not liars and parasites to the community and solve the murder on their own.
With Leigh Jason, director of The Mad Miss Manton. (PHOTOFEST)
Fonda is the serious newspaper editor who, in an irate editorial on unemployment and the budget, denounces “the mad Miss Manton and her ilk” for their ermine-lined escapades wasting police time and money. He soon finds that he’s landed the newspaper in a million-dollar libel suit (“Did you print that?” Melsa Manton says to him after slapping his face. And he hers. “I’ll make you eat every word of it,” she promises). He ends up chasing after Melsa and her dizzy deb detectives in what turns into (for him) risky business and (for editor and heiress) battling romance.
Anne Shirley was to be feature
d with Barbara in the picture but was instead put into Condemned Women, starring Sally Eilers and Louis Hayward. Frances Mercer, Vicki Lester, Eleanor Hansen, and Penny Singleton were among the flock of Melsa Manton’s seven society friends.
Leigh Jason, known for his fast-paced, whimsical pictures, was to direct. Jason was married to Ruth Harriet Louise, a rabbi’s daughter from New York, who, at twenty-two years old, was hired in 1925 by Howard Strickling to be Metro’s official portrait photographer, the only woman employed as a photographer by a major Hollywood studio. Lillian Gish thought Louise’s photographs “magnificent. I took orders from her as I would have from D. W. Griffith.” Louise left Metro in 1930 to marry Leigh Jason.
From The Mad Miss Manton with Henry Fonda. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Henry Fonda didn’t like the script of The Mad Miss Manton or the picture’s director. After Fonda’s roles in Jezebel, You Only Live Once, and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, even the screwball farce The Moon’s Our Home, Peter Ames was a one-note—but so was the part of Melsa Manton. Fonda is one-upped by the undone Miss Manton, who bounds and gags him and leaves him flummoxed. Fonda—a true deadpan comedian—resented having to make the picture. He was known to work hours, days, on a gag, and when he’d spring it at the right moment, he didn’t laugh.
On the set, Fonda was aloof and barely talked to anyone, including Barbara. When he asked Frances Mercer, one of the society sleuths, to have lunch one day, Barbara was not happy.
The script was written by twenty-nine-year-old Philip Epstein. His twin brother, Julius, had been in Hollywood for a few years, writing for Warner Bros. In New York, the brothers Epstein had worked as press agents for Fatty Arbuckle and written a play, And Stars Remain, produced in 1936 by the Theatre Guild and starring Helen Gahagan, called by Heywood Broun “ten of the twelve most beautiful women in America.” Philip, at his brother’s prompting, had come out to Hollywood to write. The Epstein brothers—practical jokers and wits—did everything together; they thought of themselves as one person.
Philip was newly arrived at RKO. His script for The Mad Miss Manton was smart, worldly writing, with its allusions to “communism” and “come the revolution.” At the heart of the picture was the issue of class: the rich versus the rest of the world (one character to the police detective played by Sam Levene: “I’m class-conscious, see! I don’t like society dames.” Ames to Melsa: “You’re just a decorative, useless member of a rapidly vanishing class”).
Fonda, at thirty-three and more than six feet, was boyishly handsome, fresh, clean looking, with an honest face, a midwestern drawl, and a slow grin. His innocence played well against Barbara’s sexuality, her seeming glamour and worldliness.
Barbara was making $60,000 for the picture; Fonda, $25,000. Sam Levene, as the harassed police lieutenant driven to distraction by too much Melsa Manton and in need of a “bicarb” as antidote, $1,500 per week; Hattie McDaniel as Hilda, the clever, wisecracking maid, $500 a week.
The New York City scenes for The Mad Miss Manton were shot at the Warner Bros. Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, where the sun was brilliant, hot. More than $50,000 worth of furs were worn in 120-degree heat. The society sleuths, including Barbara, were swathed in fur for the winter scenes and were miserable. Electric fans put behind blocks of ice failed to provide relief.
Production was stopped for a week when Barbara caught a severe cold that almost resulted in pneumonia. When she returned to work, she was given the use of Ginger Rogers’s new dressing room (Rogers had sent a telegram from Mexico offering it) while shooting the picture, and she spent most of the time there between scenes.
The first day into production Barbara and Bob attended the long-awaited premiere of Marie Antoinette at the Carthay Circle in Hollywood. The premiere was planned as the most spectacular in motion picture history.
Norma Shearer, the star of the picture and the first lady of film, arrived with Louis B. Mayer and Helen Hayes, the first lady of the theater, and her husband, Charles MacArthur. As Bob and Barbara and the others entered the theater, the crowd of more than twenty-five thousand in the specially erected grandstands gave them an ovation.
Mayer had put Bob forward for the part in Marie Antoinette of Count Axel de Fersen, but Shearer insisted on Tyrone Power, who was stunned when he learned that he was being loaned out by Fox to MGM to make the picture. Ty Power, from two generations of Shakespearean actors, his great-grandfather, the first Tyrone Power, an acclaimed Irish comedian, with his liquid brown eyes and dark, handsome face, had been prevented by Fox from appearing in pictures at competing studios. Fox, in exchange for the loan-out to MGM, got Spencer Tracy for its production of Stanley and Livingstone.
Marie Antoinette had cost the studio almost $2.5 million, more than any previous Metro picture except The Good Earth.
After the screening of Marie Antoinette, Mayer gave a party at the Trocadero for six hundred guests. Shearer arrived in a brocade coat over a low-cut white gown and went to the powder room, where her maid was waiting. The picture’s star emerged in a handmade black-sequined sheath “so tight,” wrote Hedda Hopper, “she had to watch not only her step but her breathing.”
Marie Antoinette, according to Thalberg’s plan for his wife, was to have been Norma’s final picture. “Too many stars stay on camera too long,” Thalberg had said. He wanted Norma to leave “at her highest point.” Instead, it became his ultimate picture in a brilliant career.
Marie Antoinette was a triumph for Shearer, and rather than it marking the finale of a long ambitious run, her success in the picture prompted David Selznick to woo her for the most coveted part in Hollywood history.
Word got out that Shearer was being seriously considered for the part of Scarlett O’Hara. A group of stenographers working in the Fisher Building in Detroit wrote in to protest the choice. They wanted, they said, to see Miss Scarlett played by Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, or Barbara Stanwyck.
THIRTEEN
Pomp and Glory
1938–1939
Barbara was still suffering from a recurrence of the back injury she’d sustained in Laguna Beach when she was thrown from a horse while shooting Forbidden. She’d ridden in The Woman in Red, Annie Oakley, and A Message to Garcia but didn’t want to ride in front of the cameras again and had a clause added to her RKO contract that protected her from having to do so.
She was worried about Marion Marx, who’d taken a bad fall from a horse she intended to buy for Marwyck and was flat on her back in a cast with a broken shoulder.
Marion and Barbara were both out of riding commission for the two-day horse event they helped to organize. The San Fernando Valley Fiesta Horse Show, “The Horse Show of the Stars,” was held across the road from Marwyck on Northridge Estates in a specially constructed arena at Devonshire and Reseda Boulevards. Carole Lombard, Bing Crosby, Noah Beery Jr., and Harry Hart, Marwyck’s manager, were co-organizers. Barbara and Marion, along with Bob, Don Ameche, Andy Devine, Clark Gable, and Carole Lombard, were to be trophy presenters.
Lombard and Gable had bought the Raoul Walsh estate nearby and transformed the twenty-one acres from a rich man’s retreat into a working farm with orchard, dairy, hennery, and vineyard, staffed by secretary, butler, cook, two maids, caretaker, groom, and handyman. Lombard, manic practical joker and hostess, late of the Mayfair Balls, who had collected $50,000 worth of star sapphires and then sold the collection when she grew tired of them, became architect, agriculturalist, and economist of the Gable-Lombard venture. She tended their cows, chickens, ducks, pair of mules, goat, rabbits, and horses, including Gable’s two racehorses. Lombard oversaw the growing and selling of the farm’s garden vegetables, its hay, alfalfa, peaches, oranges, lemons, walnuts, apricots, grapes, and turkeys, which MGM bought for its commissary. Raoul Walsh had previously rented the property to the studios at $500 for location work, but that stopped with Gable and Lombard.
Carole Lombard, circa 1938. (PHOTOFEST)
Barbara and Marion entered
six horses from Marwyck in the Northridge show. Their horse Heromane took second place among the Thoroughbred stallions; Little Shower, third. Gable’s horse Nugget’s King won first place in the stock class with the trophy presented by Lombard. Bob’s copper-colored stallion, Rokhalad, won first prize in the Arabian class; his black gelding, Midnight, took third place in the silver mounted class. Watching from the boxes were Mrs. Liz Whitney, Louella Parsons, Jack Warner, Bruce Cabot, and Harry Strickling.
Bob’s latest picture, The Crowd Roars, opened on his twenty-seventh birthday; Barbara celebrated by giving him an elaborate horse trailer. Reviews for The Crowd Roars were positive for him, less so for the picture. “Let it be noted at once,” wrote Howard Barnes in The New York Herald Tribune, “that Mr. Taylor plays a tough guy with considerable persuasion. If you are keenly interested in just how virile he can be, you will find the show intriguing. If you are looking for a genuinely entertaining prizefight picture you are likely to be disappointed.”
• • •
On “Reno,” Marwyck, circa 1938.
Life for Barbara with Bob and the Zeppo Marxes was social. Joan Crawford, Tone, the Marxes, the Ray Millands, the Fred MacMurrays, and Barbara and Bob were a regular set.
Barbara came to love Bob. He did the things she wanted to do. If she wanted to go to the racetrack, Bob went to the track. If she wanted to go to the newsreel theater, they went to the newsreels. On the rare occasions when she wanted to join friends for a night out at one of the nightclubs, he was willing to go. Barbara enjoyed being on Bob’s arm at Hollywood functions. She took pleasure when Bob got a role and asked her opinion about it and wanted to be coached by her.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 82