MacMurray had never thought of being an actor, never intended to be one. He’d planned on being a musician like his father, a concert violinist who had taught MacMurray to play the instrument. MacMurray, like the character in Preston Sturges’s script, was from the Midwest, Kankakee, Illinois. His grandfather had been the leading minister of the town; his grandmother, the head of the local telephone exchange. But one fluke followed another until he found himself being an actor and had to learn to get over his horrible stage fright.
Leisen trusted MacMurray’s work and felt that in the end he could be counted on to come through. If he got bogged down, a line or a movement was changed, and Fred got around it.
Leisen had just directed Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, and John Barrymore in Midnight, a picture he’d wanted Barbara to star in after Carole Lombard had turned it down, having worked with Jimmy Stewart in Made for Each Other and resting while Gable shot Gone With the Wind. Instead of making Midnight, Barbara went to work for DeMille in Union Pacific.
Leisen thought Lombard’s comedic sense superb, as he did Jean Arthur’s and Claudette Colbert’s.
A year before, Leisen had wanted Barbara to star in Swing High, Swing Low, a remake of The Dance of Life, based on her Broadway success Burlesque. When Barbara wasn’t available for it, Leisen tried to get Irene Dunne. Instead, Carole Lombard starred in it.
Leisen had helped launch Carole Lombard’s career when he’d recommended her to Cecil B. DeMille for his production of Dynamite. DeMille rehearsed Lombard for two weeks and then let her go; she was out too late at night and didn’t concentrate on her work.
• • •
Beyond These Tears was from an original screenplay by Preston Sturges written for the Paramount producer Al Lewin, based on a love story from a Scottish poem (“Beyond these tears, sweet bairn/So needful to a better ken/Of light and shade and happiness and pain/We’ll scamper doon a better geen/Your eyes aspark/Your lips like roses in the rain”).
Two years before, the studio, under Lewin’s supervision, hired Rebecca West (born Cicely Fairfield; her adopted name, the designing woman of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, was taken for the stage when West studied acting at the Royal Academy) to write an original outline for a picture, for either Carole Lombard or Claudette Colbert. West met with Adolph Zukor and asked for a two-month extension on the outline’s delivery date; she was at work on a nonfiction book on Yugoslavia. West looked at several of Lombard’s and Colbert’s pictures and in August 1938, six months after her extended due date, turned in an outline of The Amazing Marriage. The studio paid West $5,000 for her outline instead of the $15,000 she would have received had she been given a writing credit, and the rights to the material reverted to Paramount. The Amazing Marriage was the working title of the picture that became Remember the Night.
• • •
Preston Sturges hated deadlines; he put off working for as long as he could and much preferred to play, but he needed money to do so.
Sturges grew up having money one day and being broke the next. Whether his mother was rich or poor, Sturges was always in the flush of the beau monde in the gayest of cities. He took money for granted; it was somehow there for him when he needed it, and he was accustomed to living by the seat of his pants. “Men of intelligence need very little,” Sturges said. “And writers have always worked better hungry.”
Paramount had to prod pages out of Sturges, and he was still at work on the script weeks before the picture was to start shooting.
Sturges had written a number of plays, most of them unsuccessful. His play Strictly Dishonorable, written in six days, a month before the stock market crashed, ran in New York for two years. (Brooks Atkinson called it a well-nigh perfect comedy. “Mr. Sturges has not only an extraordinary gift for character and dialogue but for the flow and astonishment of situation.”) The play made Sturges one of the most acclaimed playwrights of the moment—and $300,000, which he quickly spent. He came to see the theater “as a little old man, the last living member of a once rugged dynasty,” and saw the movies as “a big twilly with high-button shoes,” beckoning him to “come up and see me some time.”
Sturges had grown up in a world of privilege, surrounded by artists, café society, who found large sums of money for their art and millionaire benefactors to provide it. His upbringing, chaotic but enchanted, took place in Europe part of the time; his mother, Mary Dempsey, thought of herself as an Italian princess and used the name Mary d’Este Dempsey. She came to know Isadora Duncan, and they became lifelong intimates until Sturges’s mother, indirectly, became the instrument of Isadora’s death when d’Este’s gift to her beloved friend of a bright red batik silk shawl, which Isadora instantly wrapped around her neck, got caught in the spokes of the wheel of Duncan’s open Amilcar and instantly killed her.
• • •
Sturges finished the script of Beyond These Tears in nine weeks; it was 148 pages long, too long for Paramount’s maximum running time of a hundred minutes. Barbara loved the script.
“There’s only one thing I want,” she said, “a good story. I don’t care about clothes or production values or the rest of those things. If it’s a good yarn, the other things will take care of themselves.”
Though Sturges came from the top and Barbara from the bottom—he from a European bohemian aristocracy and she from a showgirl street life—Barbara felt a great compatibility with Sturges.
She thought him enormously talented and his script one of the best she’d ever read. “What’s on paper is on the screen,” she said. “If it isn’t there, it isn’t on the screen.”
Sturges had worked as a writer at various Hollywood studios, being fired almost as soon as he walked through the door: a month at Metro adapting Michael Arlen’s Green Hat for Thalberg; four days at Columbia on Twentieth Century for Harry Cohn; a quick round for B. P. Schulberg on Thirty-Day Princess; a quicker round on Universal’s Imitation of Life and a turn on Tolstoy’s Resurrection (it became We Live Again) for Goldwyn, who each day asked Rouben Mamoulian, the director, “When can we get rid of this fellow, Sturgeon?” Sturges also wrote a few scenes for The Buccaneer until DeMille saw that his Napoleon was being turned—“Sturgeon”-style—into a comedian.
In between writing (Hotel Haywire; Never Say Die; If I Were King), being hailed as a genius, being fired, and running an engineering company, Sturges opened a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called Snyder’s that served steaks, chops, and liquor and stayed open past ten o’clock. After that he built and opened the Players, also on Sunset.
• • •
Sturges felt that Mitch Leisen didn’t get his humor. When Sturges went to work under contract at Paramount, he was given a Vera Caspary story to adapt called Easy Living, which he hoped to direct himself. Instead, the script was given to Leisen, a man Sturges thought arrogant, without a sense of pacing or a knack for comedy.
Everything Leisen knew about making pictures he’d learned from Cecil B. DeMille, with whom he had worked for twelve years. Leisen started working with DeMille at the age of twenty-one on Male and Female without knowing anything about costume design or set decoration. In the end, he designed the look of seven of DeMille’s most stylized pictures, including The Godless Girl, Dynamite, Madam Satan, The Squaw Man, and The Sign of the Cross.
Leisen set DeMille’s cameras—the lighting, setup, the actors’ movements—for each of the pictures. DeMille wanted to get as much production value as possible out of Leisen’s sets to compensate for his own natural inclination to shoot a master take straight on. When DeMille’s master shot was broken down for close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots, the angle would be reversed, and there would be no set behind the actors, no matter how lavish or big Leisen’s sets. Long after Leisen stopped supervising DeMille’s pictures, he stayed on the set with DeMille to help him stage the action.
When Leisen left to direct his own pictures, DeMille hired ten people to do what Leisen had accomplished himself.
Because of Leisen’s obsessive conce
rn with the look of his pictures and with authenticity and his years as a costume designer, Sturges felt that the director was more interested in the sets than the material. Leisen, with his training as an architect at Washington University, had designed his own house as well as that of the Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Gladys Swarthout, also under contract to Paramount. He designed the Palm Springs Racquet Club. His pictures were considered equally elegant. Their light touch was compared to those of Lubitsch’s; their charm, to Capra’s.
Leisen was able to make the unusual transition from art director/costume designer to director. He’d studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and started directing pictures in 1933 at the age of thirty-five with Cradle Song and Death Takes a Holiday.
Sturges and Leisen were an interesting combination of sensibilities. Sturges believed that Leisen threw away lines he should have held on to and kept lines that should have been tossed.
Sturges wrote comedy with flashes of feeling and warmth; Leisen directed pictures that were warm with bursts of comedy.
• • •
Barbara was five feet three, with broad shoulders and back, a long waist, and flat buttocks that then extended outward. She refused to “glamorize” or care how she looked on-screen. The problem of how she looked in clothes on-screen was the designer’s, not hers. She wanted her mind to be free for her performance. It didn’t matter to her what she wore in a picture. “People don’t remember what you wear,” she said. “And if they do, you’re fading.” Leisen could dress his actors beautifully—both male and female. He designed the costumes on many pictures, among them The Thief of Bagdad, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, and DeMille’s Sign of the Cross. For The Thief of Bagdad, Leisen designed a different costume for each of the picture’s three thousand extras. With Dorothy Vernon, he designed a dress embroidered with real pearls for Mary Pickford that was so heavy he had to carry her onto the set each morning to conserve her strength.
Barbara would rather wear a piece of gunnysack for “wardrobe” and have people remember her for one scene she did. She knew she was supposed to set the standards of glamour higher, not lower, that if she were on the screen, she had to try to be glamorous. “The trick,” she said, “is to stay natural doing it. The only thing that counts in the long run is the ability to be natural and believable and interesting on the screen.”
Naturalness, to Barbara, was “as appealing as glamour,” she said. “Maybe more appealing.” Her clothes had to be simple, unadorned, well made with good fabrics: man-tailored suits of hard fabrics for daytime and work; tweeds for topcoats; draped gowns, dinner gowns in print, hostess gowns, and afternoon dresses in black, designed by Monica, for evening.
If Barbara didn’t wear a dress for a few weeks, she gave it away. She hated hats but bought them, as long as they were “sit-ons,” hats that could be crushed and then worn.
Most designers coped with the problem of Barbara’s long waistedness by creating clothes for her that had a slightly higher waist and a full skirt. Edith Head did this as well but devised another way to cope with the problem. Head designed belts for Barbara that were wider in the back than in the front and gave the appearance of lifting her waist.
“Nobody understands my figure as well as Edith Head,” said Barbara, who called Edith “Jug Head” and thought she was a great designer.
Barbara arrived for a fashion sitting one day in a dress that was three inches off the floor. It was neither a dinner dress nor a street dress. Barbara didn’t know what to make of it, but the tailor had lifted it three inches off the floor, and that was that. She coped with it by sitting down on the davenport and draping the skirt over the seat so no one would know how long it was. “And what difference did it make anyway?” she asked.
Hollywood had a wonderful standard of beauty, and most women paid attention to their looks. Barbara didn’t. “I have the face that sank a thousand ships,” she said. She held on to the theory that what’s on the surface isn’t as important as what comes from within. “And so far I’ve managed to make a living.”
• • •
For a modern-dress picture, actors were to wear their own clothes. Fred MacMurray didn’t have the right clothes for the part of the assistant DA; he owned very few clothes at all. Mitch Leisen, however, was one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood, with perfectly cut suits and specially designed shoes. He and MacMurray were the same size, and Leisen had lent Fred various suits for both Hands Across the Table and Swing High, Swing Low.
Edith Head, Paramount Studio designer, with Claudette Colbert, 1939. For the new season, Head wrote, “I shall use a lot of white for whole costumes and for accents, but am deserting navy and black for shades of green in sage, sap, heather and yellowish greens.”
Leisen asked MacMurray why he didn’t buy more clothes. MacMurray was so sure he wouldn’t last as a movie actor that he’d waited to cash his first few payroll checks. He’d worked at Paramount for a year as a day laborer, helping to construct Stage 5, putting the soundproofing boards in place, painting signs, and doing other odd jobs.
MacMurray was known to be tight with money. Both Barbara and Leisen said that Fred still had the first penny he’d earned. He brought his lunch to the studio: a hard-boiled egg in a brown paper bag. MacMurray was adept at getting by with little money (he’d grown up in near poverty after his parents had separated). In Chicago, studying at the Art Institute at night, MacMurray sold golf clubs during the day and kept his living expenses below minimum. He cooked every meal in his room.
• • •
Beyond These Tears was a comedy romance.
It starts out more as a wisecracking comedy: a callous beautiful jewel thief (Anna-Rose Malone, sometimes known as Lee Leander), on trial for stealing a priceless bracelet, is about to be acquitted by a sentimental jury (it’s the day before Christmas). Her (“windbag”) lawyer’s defense: she’d suffered a temporary loss of will and consciousness known as . . . hypnotism! “Consider the jewel scene between Mephistopheles and Marguerite in Faust,” he tells the jury; she’s overcome by the jewels’ dazzling light and walks out of the store with the bracelet on her wrist not knowing what she’s doing. Of the legal ploy put forward by her lawyer, the Stanwyck character says, “That gag’s so old, it’s got whiskers.” Trying to send the ravishing thief to prison for a good long time is the fast-rising assistant DA (John Sargent) with a big future in politics. He’s known for his smooth courtroom technique with women and an unbroken record for winning convictions. He asks for, and is granted, a continuance until after New Year’s, knowing that he will get his conviction after the sentimentality of the Yuletide season has passed.
Fred MacMurray circa 1939, six foot three and painfully shy, called “Mr. Normal” by his friends. As a boy in Beaver Dam he dreamed of having a wood lathe, a leather-punching outfit, and an Irish setter.
The DA is getting ready to drive home to Wabash, Indiana, for the holidays to the family farm to see his mother and aunt. In the spirit of Christmas, he bails out the girl he’s about to prosecute so she won’t have to spend the holiday behind bars. The bondsman delivers her—with his compliments and a wink—to the DA’s apartment, the last thing he wants or expects (“What are you doing here?” he asks her. “I don’t know,” she says, “but I’ve got a rough idea”). Now he’s stuck with her; she’s been locked out of her hotel; she’s got nowhere to go, and she’s in his custody.
As Lee Leander, shoplifter, with Chester Clute as salesman behind the counter, Remember the Night, 1940. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
He takes her to dinner, and as they dance to “Back Home in Indiana,” he learns they’re both Hoosiers, from towns not fifty miles apart (“When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash/Then I long for my Indiana home”), and offers to drive her to her mother’s for a Christmas visit. She hasn’t seen her mother since she ran away years ago; he offers to drop her off and pick her up on his way back to New York.
In a wistful moment full of yearning, she a
grees to go.
He asks her about her past as a thief, and she assures him she’s not a kleptomaniac; it’s just that her mind works differently. She makes clear the difference between them. “Supposing you were starving to death,” she postulates, “and you didn’t have any food and you didn’t have any money and you didn’t have a place to get any, and there were some loaves of bread out in front of a market—now remember, you’re starving to death—and the man’s back is turned, would you swipe one?”
“Of course I would.”
“That’s because you’re honest,” she says. “You see, I’d have a six-course dinner at the table d’hôte across the street and then say I’d forgotten my purse.”
• • •
What starts out as sophisticated whimsy as the two drive through Pennsylvania and Ohio and experience a series of detours and mishaps, adventures and near escapes, turns darker and darker as they reach her hometown in Indiana. They arrive at her mother’s house late at night; it’s on the other side of the tracks, a bleak, forbidding Gothic bathed in blackness and shadow—and the jewel thief comes face-to-face with the past that has held her in its grip.
Walking up to the house, she’s buoyant, she’s glad to be home, and then she’s scared.
Somehow believing that she will be welcomed home, as John Sargent has assured her she would—as he will be with his mother—they are instead brought into a dark, bleak parlor, lit by the light of an oil lamp (no one had electricity in rural America) carried by her mother, who is somber, stone-faced, rigid (played by Georgia Caine), partly enveloped in a shawl, and the girl’s joyless past washes over her. Her mother—grim, punishing—asks her what she’s come home for, as if the years had meant nothing, as if their argument were still in place.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish, I said the day she left,” the mother tells her daughter. “We weren’t good enough for her here, a hardworking mother with a crook for a daughter. Stealing my mission money that I put by with the sweat of my brow. You didn’t pay me back and you never paid me back.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 90