Killer Tomatoes

by Ray Hagen

  “She and Skelly were a great team,” wrote Hopkins in his autobiography, To a Lonely Boy, “and they made the play a great success. I had great plans for her, but the Hollywood offers kept coming. There was no competing with them.” In an interview shortly before his death, he described Stanwyck as “the greatest natural actress of our time.”

  Also in the cast of Burlesque was Oscar Levant. During the run he introduced Barbara to his friend Frank Fay, then riding high as “Broadway’s Favorite Son,” as he was billed. Fay, a show biz veteran since childhood and now at the peak of his fame, had recently completed a record 12-week run at the Palace. On August 26, 1928, they were married. Their marriage, Fay’s third, would, in time, become the stuff of Hollywood legend.

  The movies had just learned to talk and Hollywood was raiding Broadway for actors who could walk and talk at the same time. The Fays were both offered film work and they moved to California. As Arthur Hopkins later complained, “One of the theater’s great potential actresses was embalmed in celluloid.”

  Barbara’s talkie debut, The Locked Door (1929), a creaky old melodrama even then, co-starred Barbara with silent veterans Rod La Rocque and Betty Bronson, both of whose performances could most charitably be called dreadful. It sank like a stone, and Barbara told the Los Angeles Times in 1958, “They never should have unlocked the damned thing.”

  Although she had no experience in film acting, her own performance was remarkably simple and honest, given the chaotic surroundings. But her next opus, Mexicali Rose (1929), starred Barbara as the title vixen, and she was utterly at sea. Another dud, it was the first “bad girl” role she ever played and all she knew to do was sashay about with her hands superglued to her hips, her rotating elbows endangering everything not nailed down within a three-foot radius. Her Brooklyn accent didn’t help. It was a disaster all around, and what turned out to be the only really bad performance of her entire career. She later said that Mexicali Rose “reached what I shall always believe was an all-time low.”

  Fay, meanwhile, brimmed with confidence as he began what he was certain would be a standout film career. Barbara was becoming more and more depressed as one screen test after another yielded no results.

  By the time she was interviewed by a young director named Frank Capra for his next movie at the minor-league Columbia studio she was ready to pack it up and go back to New York. Truculent throughout the interview, she finally said, “Oh, hell, you don’t want any part of me,” and stomped out. But when Frank Fay showed Capra a color test she’d made under Alexander Korda’s direction, her big speech from The Noose, he knew she was exactly what he wanted for the role of Kay Arnold, the street-smart yet vulnerable “party girl,” in Ladies of Leisure. “Underneath her sullen shyness,” Capra later wrote, “smoldered the emotional fires of a young Duse, or a Bernhardt. Naïve, unsophisticated, caring nothing about make-up, clothes or hairdos, this chorus girl could grab your heart and tear it to pieces … She just turned it on—and everything else on the stage stopped.”

  Ladies of Leisure was a great hit, a major step up for Columbia, and it made an instant star of Barbara Stanwyck. Critics raved about this lovely young actress, effusively praising the naturalness and honesty of her acting, her unique voice and her strong presence. Photoplay rhapsodized about “the astonishing performance of a little tap-dancing beauty who has in her the spirit of a great artist … Go and be amazed by this Barbara girl.” “Is this just a flash in the pan,” asked another fan magazine, “or the beginning of a major career?”

  With Ralph Graves in Ladies of Leisure (Columbia, 1930).

  She signed non-exclusive contracts with both Columbia and Warners and was immediately put to work in one starring vehicle after another, a pace that wouldn’t slow down for the next quarter century.

  Meanwhile, Frank Fay’s career turned to ashes as his movies flopped and his performances bombed. Barbara’s sudden ascension to stardom and his profound public fall from grace were much noted, Fay becoming unemployable and hitting the bottle as Barbara became the star (and breadwinner) of the family. It was the Fay-Stanwyck marriage that inspired the soon-to-be Hollywood classic A Star Is Born. The writers had to step very carefully to avoid being sued and many alterations were made but, at its basic core, A Star Is Born is very much the story of Frank Fay and Barbara Stanwyck.

  Throughout the 1930s she worked like a mule, grinding out over 30 movies at all the major studios. A few were worthy of her, most were run-of-the-mill programmers and too many were out-and-out stinkers, but they had one thing in common: All were “Barbara Stanwyck movies.” Along with Crawford, Hepburn, Davis, Dietrich and Garbo, it was her name that sold them and her fans that supported them. But she differed from all those ladies in some key respects. She lacked their exaggerated facial features and vocal mannerisms (mimics and drag queens never did camped-up Stanwyck impressions), cared not a whit about elaborate lighting, hairdos or wardrobe and never considered herself glamourous or even beautiful. She simply loved acting, took her profession seriously and wanted to work. All stardom meant to Barbara was that it allowed her to continue doing so.

  Critics repeatedly called Stanwyck’s performances “natural,” “honest,” “sincere.” These adjectives showed up in countless reviews, and while they were meant as high praise they bespoke a drabness that came to characterize both Barbara and her vehicles, fairly or not. But a few films from this decade stood out.

  She’d become Capra’s favorite actress and he directed her in three more Columbia dramas. The Miracle Woman (1931) was an initially daring but failed attempt at telling the story of a fraudulent preacher, based on the notorious Aimee Semple McPherson. Barbara delivered a strong performance but the cop-out script sank it. Forbidden (’32) was nothing more than mawkish soap opera worthy of neither of them. The Bitter Tea of General Yen (’32) was a truly strange tale with Barbara as the captive and lover of a Chinese warlord, but casting Swedish Nils Asther as General Yen was pure racial cowardice. None approached Ladies of Leisure in quality or box office success.

  At Warners, a studio more in synch with her slangy energy, she did a trio of films with William “Wild Bill” Wellman, who saw Barbara’s strengths in a less romantic light than did Capra. After directing her as a gritty, two-fisted Night Nurse (1931), he cast her as the heroine of Edna Ferber’s So Big (’32), a farm saga in which she ages 20 years with grace, skill and a minimum of old-age makeup. Her performance was widely admired but the film’s scant 80-minute running time severely undercut its potential. They then collaborated on The Purchase Price (’32), an absurd tale that took her from hardened nightclub chanteuse (singing on-screen for the first time) to plucky, loyal, weather-worn farm wife. Early in that script she delivered a short speech that must have had an eerie resonance for her: “I’ve been up and down Broadway since I was 15 years old. I’m fed up with hoofing in shows. I’m sick of nightclubs, hustlers, bootleggers, chiselers and smart guys. I’ve heard all the questions and know all the answers. And I’ve kept myself fairly respectable through it all. The whole atmosphere of this street gives me a high-powered headache.”

  She always considered Wellman, Capra and Billy Wilder her favorite directors.

  Also at Warners, she did three zippy pre–Code programmers that solidified her image as a sexually liberated, been-through-the-mill tough dame, equally handy with a withering wisecrack, a solid right hook or, if needed, a pistol. In Illicit (1931) she defiantly preferred “living in sin” to the joys of wedded bliss. Ladies They Talk About (’33) had her slugging fellow high-heeled inmates in a prison replete with beauticians and designer uniforms. Baby Face (’33) became notorious for its depiction of a totally amoral slut who escaped the coal town where her father doubled as her pimp, moving to the big city where, the ads bragged, “she climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.” This one, along with the advent of Mae West, was the last straw for bluenoses, and henceforth the stringent Production Code saw to it that all traces of honest sexuality would be absent fro
m films until the 1960s. Baby Face and Ladies They Talk About, while hardly masterpieces of cinema art, are still great fun to watch and she never dogs it for a second.

  In 1932 she was seen for the only time on film with Frank Fay in an all-star short spoof, The Stolen Jools. That year she and Fay adopted a boy, Dion (later called Tony), in the hope of strengthening their marriage.

  The following year she returned to Broadway with Fay in Tattle Tales, financing it with her movie earnings in a doomed attempt to bolster his sagging career and ego. It opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on June 1, 1933, and limped on for 28 performances. Fay appeared in witless comedy sketches and Barbara did scenes from Ladies of Leisure and The Miracle Woman. It was her final stage appearance.

  She returned to Hollywood and continued grinding out programmers, now mostly substandard sob-fests. A welcome respite was Annie Oakley (1935), her first Western. Her feisty energy and humor made for a welcome relief after so many weepies, and it was a much-needed hit.

  In late 1935 she divorced Frank Fay, by now alcoholic and physically abusive. After winning a long and bitter custody battle, Barbara sent their son off to a series of boarding and military schools, eventually cutting herself off from seeing or even discussing him for the rest of their lives. Not her proudest achievement.

  The following year was quite notable for her. She signed with Darryl Zanuck to do two Fox films with varying results. A Message to Garcia had her ludicrously miscast as a Brooklyn-accented Cuban senorita, but Banjo on My Knee was a popular riverboat comedy-drama with music that had Barbara singing with Tony Martin and hoofing with Buddy Ebsen. Martin praised Barbara in his 1976 joint autobiography (with wife Cyd Charisse), The Two of Us. It was his first dramatic role and he hadn’t a clue how to get through a particularly difficult scene with her. As he wrote: “‘It’s a tough scene,’ Barbara said. ‘I’ll tell you what let’s do. I’ll meet you here at eight o’clock in the morning and I’ll help you.’ So that’s what we did. We met at eight, before anybody else was there, and she showed me how to do the scene. I’ll never forget her kindness to me. Everybody liked her. She had the vocabulary of a Marine sergeant and I guess that’s what made the crew putty in her hands. She catered to them. And, in return, they couldn’t do enough for her.” Ebsen later happily recalled that “She gave me my first screen kiss. When she finished I couldn’t remember my next line.”

  The Bride Walks Out (1936) was her first all-out comedy, albeit a weak one, but His Brother’s Wife (’36) had a major effect on her life. It was her first film at MGM and she was co-starred with America’s new pretty-boy sensation, Robert Taylor. The picture was ridiculous but the stars had fallen in love, becoming one of the film world’s glamour couples. She was four years older, not a great beauty, was from a tough, hardscrabble New York background and had been a highly regarded star actress for six years. He grew up in Nebraska, was new to big-city life in Hollywood and his beauty was such that he could have his pick of anyone he wanted. Why, everyone wondered, choose Barbara Stanwyck? His oft-quoted, classic reply: “Barbara is not the sort of woman I’d have met in Nebraska.”

  They again co-starred in This Is My Affair (1937), a period piece, by which time their romance was widely known. The ads, not to mention the title itself, didn’t fail to capitalize on their relationship. They made a dazzling couple and audiences thronged to see the real-life lovers. Barbara, as a café singer, positively glowed, singing five numbers amid the melodramatic goings-on.

  That same year she worked with the Abbey Players in a badly botched version of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars under John Ford’s direction, but it was her next film that gave Barbara’s career its biggest boost to date.

  When Samuel Goldwyn decided to film Olive Higgins Prouty’s Stella Dallas, it was already a dated, shameless tear-jerker of self-sacrificing mother love, but Barbara wanted the role and fought for it. Goldwyn considered her too young and inexperienced with children, but she won him over by swallowing her pride and making a test. He caved. Her portrayal of the loud and vulgar Stella who nonetheless would (and did) make any sacrifice for her beloved daughter was a personal triumph. The film worked despite its outrageous bathos because Goldwyn, Stanwyck and director King Vidor so believed in and committed themselves to the story that critics and audiences were bulldozed into acceptance. Molly Haskell, in her 1973 overview of women in film From Reverence to Rape, called Barbara’s portrait of Stella “at once the most excruciating and exhilarating performance on film.”

  She copped the first of her four Oscar nominations and was profoundly disappointed at losing (to Luise Rainer in The Good Earth). As she later said, “I poured my blood into that one.”

  Her 1938 vehicles were fairly minor, though one—The Mad Miss Manton, a so-so screwball comedy—teamed her for the first time with Henry Fonda.

  She was one of the many actresses briefly considered for Gone with the Wind—hard to imagine Scarlett O’Hara with a Brooklyn accent—but she wasn’t a serious contender. Instead, 1939 found her in Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific, a rambunctious railroad saga co-starring Joel McCrea and Robert Preston. The focus was on the men and the trains, but Barbara was a lively and playful Irish lass who held her own through all the battles.

  DeMille found her a dream to work with and, although Union Pacific was their only film together, he used her often on his Lux Radio Theatre, by far radio’s most popular and prestigious dramatic series. Barbara recreated many of her film roles, eventually appearing in 17 shows between 1936 and 1954. She also starred in roles made famous by other actresses, including Wuthering Heights, Morning Glory, Smilin’ Through, Penny Serenade, These Three and Dark Victory. The latter was aired in 1938 before the film was made and Barbara wanted it to be a test run for a movie version. Losing the part to Bette Davis was a crushing disappointment.

  Her final 1939 film was Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy. It had been a high-profile hit on Broadway and the movie version was severely marred by a sappy happy ending that was widely criticized, but Barbara was well received for her unflinching portrait of a hard-edged “dame from Newark” who falls for the young hero. The boy, an extremely demanding role, was played by a very nervous newcomer, William Holden. It didn’t start out too well. When she got word that he was going to be fired, she threatened to walk off the picture if they did any such thing, and spent every available moment coaching and working with him so he could deliver the performance she knew he was capable of. With her help, Golden Boy made William Holden a star, and every year for the rest of his life he sent her flowers on the anniversary of the film’s starting date.

  (Many years later, when Holden and Stanwyck were introduced together as presenters at the 1978 Academy Awards, he unexpectedly ditched their prepared script, saying instead: “Before Barbara and I present this next award, I’d like to say something. Thirty-nine years ago this month we were working in a film together called Golden Boy, and it wasn’t going well because I was going to be replaced. But due to this lovely human being and her interest and understanding and her professional integrity and her encouragement and, above all, her generosity, I’m here tonight.” Surprised and overcome, her eyes filled with tears as she embraced him.)

  In the midst of shooting Golden Boy, on May 14, 1939, she and Robert Taylor were quietly married. They became Hollywood’s brightest star couple for the next dozen years.

  The ’40s brought a new Stanwyck to the public with her first 1940 release, Remember the Night (an utterly meaningless title). The short, flattened, marcelled hairdos of the ’30s, never very flattering to Barbara, gave way to more softly waved, longer styles and gave her a far more attractive appearance. Remember the Night, beautifully written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, presented a softer, lovelier Barbara than moviegoers were used to seeing. She was a shoplifter who was reformed by assistant D.A. Fred MacMurray and the mix of toughness, tenderness and gentle comedy made for a delightful movie. MacMurray and Stanwyck were a dynamic team, and Leisen cal
led Barbara “a woman of unlimited ability and, with Carole Lombard, the easiest woman I ever worked with.”

  Radio had become one of Barbara’s favorite performing venues and remained so until its demise in the mid–’50s. She did all the movie adaptation series (Lux, Screen Director’s Playhouse, Screen Guild Theatre) as well as a wide variety of dramatic and comedy shows. In 1940 she made the first of a half-dozen guest appearances on The Jack Benny Program. The Bennys and the Taylors were close friends and Barbara delighted in sending up her own movie star image on the Benny shows, frequently lampooning her own movies.

  In 1941 she was co-starred with Gary Cooper for the first time and was happily reunited with Frank Capra in his overwrought and overweight Meet John Doe, a condescending tribute to “the common man” by filmmakers who were now out-of-touch millionaires. It was a big hit nonetheless, but it was her other major ’41 release, The Lady Eve, that shot Barbara into a new realm of stardom. A brilliant and now-classic comedy, it was a joyous reunion with Preston Sturges and a fortuitous re-teaming with Henry Fonda. Critics went into astonished tailspins praising the textbook comic performances of Stanwyck and Fonda.

  One other reason for Barbara’s huge success in The Lady Eve was Edith Head’s trend-setting and figure-flattering wardrobe, the most glamorous she’d ever had. Previously, Barbara’s indifference to clothes had been legendary, allowing costumers to outfit her however they wanted, feeling that was their department, standing for fittings patiently but passively with her back to the mirror. But now, after a dozen years in movies, Stanwyck suddenly became one of the sexiest babes and savviest clotheshorses in the business. She and Edith Head became friends for life and Barbara took her along on almost every movie she subsequently made.