by Axel Madsen
She was up early the next morning, however. Her first meeting was with Arthur Lyons, a talent agent Frank had lined up before they left New York. Lyons proved to be a resourceful agent. Before he took her to the United Artists lot, he told her he would demand a radio clause for her. That way, he explained, if she was ever suspended she could pick up pocket money working on “Silver Theatre” or “Lux Radio Theatre.”
UA was located at the former Pickford-Fairbanks Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, and Lyons was smartly whisked through the main entrance on Formosa Avenue. No one at UA had a radio clause, but Schenck agreed to Lyons’s demand.
“Someone will take you over to meet George,” Schenck told Barbara, dismissing her and her agent. Lyons wished her good luck and climbed into his automobile. Five minutes later Barbara met her director, who immediately plunged into a lengthy discourse on the enormous difficulties of filmmaking with microphones.
The forty-four-year-old George Fitzmaurice and his camera operator, Ouida Bergère, were a husband-and-wife team, French immigrants who always worked together. Fitzmaurice was convinced audiences demanded more than action, that filmmakers had to know psychology. “To incorporate human nature into a picture you must understand the science of mental phenomena, for it is this science that is the guiding hand of realistic action,” he said in 1916. He had directed two films in Islington, London, in 1922, and his attention to character analysis enormously impressed his young assistant, Alfred Hitchcock.
Fitzmaurice had misgivings about sound. He was no more eager to “go sound” and risk his reputation than D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim, Allan Dwan, Henry King, William Wellman, and King Vidor. Chaplin positively hated sound, and Dwan wanted to believe talkies were just a fad. Directors sensed that sound created a new dynamic on the screen, and many of them issued brave statements that soon proved either wrongheaded or downright silly. Like the stars and writers, directors had to prove their talents all over again.
To Barbara, Fitzmaurice was the director of Pola Negri in The Cheat and Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik, the man who had worked with all the beauties of the silents—Norma Talmadge, Vilma Banky, Billie Dove. How would he make her beautiful? “He kept arranging all kinds of drapery and tapestries behind me, and finally he shook his head and screamed, ‘Dammit, I can’t make you beautiful no matter what I do. I put tapestries and draperies behind you and nothing helps. So I said, ‘They sent for me. I didn’t send for them.’”
The Locked Door was no low-budget programmer. Rod La Rocque, a Latin lover type from Quebec who was taller than Rudolph Valentino, had top billing as Frank. La Rocque had attracted notice in DeMille’s 1923 spectacular, The Ten Commandments, as Gloria Swan-son’s costar and lover the following year, and as Joan Crawford’s husband in Our Modern Maidens. He had made his talkie debut opposite Norma Shearer and Marie Dressier in Let Us Be Gay and was happily married to Samuel Goldwyn’s star Vilma Banky. William “Stage” Boyd—so named so as not to be confused with the William Boyd who became Hopalong Cassidy—was cast as Stanwyck’s husband, and Betty Bronson, who had played the title role in Peter Pan in 1924, as her stepdaughter. Mack Swain and Zasu Pitts, who dated from the birth of the movies, rounded out the cast.
Fitzmaurice’s reputation rested on his knack for unearthing promising scripts and for his way with actors, but on The Locked Door he had little time for his leading lady. “I staggered through it,” Barbara would recall. “It was all one big mystery to me.” The free-flowing action and continuity that had become second nature to Fitz-maurice during fifty-nine movies was abruptly replaced by a static, stagelike technique because the cameras had to be immured in soundproof booths and the microphone—”King Mike” and “Terrible Mike” to chafing studio crews—was at first immovable and all action had to be geared to its location. Fitzmaurice tore his hair in frenzy when his dramatic efforts were vetoed by the sound engineer, a new despot trained by the telephone companies. The sound engineer’s only concern was that all conversations be conducted at one voice level.
The Hungarian accent of Vilma Banky made her an early casualty of the microphone; Milton Sills the first suicide. The list of stars playing the waiting game included Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, and Norma Talmadge. To take the plunge, Gloria Swanson signed Laura Hope Crews, a former Broadway actress, to a $l,000-a-week contract to teach her diction. The opportunities represented by Hollywood stars with uncultured and untrained vocal cords resulted in a second Gold Rush as Crews’s Broadway colleagues hurried west as coaches.
The Locked Door sound engineer concealed microphones in flowerpots, dictated where actors could stand to record, and yelled “Cut!” if any actor so much as turned his head away from the mike. Since sound film ran at twenty-four frames per second instead of sixteen, twice as much light was needed to expose the same strip of celluloid. Already nervous actors were soaked to the skin under the heat of the added kilowatts.
The picture was awful. Barbara “projected” too much, and Fitzmaurice was too new to talkies to tone down her stage delivery. When The Locked Door was released in January 1930, the film was seen for what it was, an early “all-talker,” that is, a statically filmed play about a husband and wife trying to save each other by assuming guilt for a murder. The reviews were generally devastating, and Barbara quipped, “They never should’ve unlocked that damned thing!”
But The Locked Door made one thing clear—Stanwyck’s throaty voice and her alluring, all-business delivery were made for the talkies.
WARNER BROTHERS SIGNED FRANK FAY. ANN HARDING, WHO HAD been Rex Cherryman’s costar in The Trial of Mary Dugan, was signed by Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), and a postcard from Mae Clarke announced her signing with Warner Brothers. Hollywood would pay anything to borrow Broadway’s zip and smarts because showy talkies were what moviegoers wanted. MGM had set the pace in February by releasing The Broadway Melody, its first talkie, to rave reviews and standing-room-only performances. Warner Brothers came out with a two-color Technicolor The Gold Diggers of Broadway, Paramount had a plotless extravaganza simply called Paramount on Parade, and Fox had Fox Movietone Follies. Warners lured Texas Guinan from her supper club, added her to the roster, and planned to release several musicals under the title The Show of Shows. Fay was to play the master of ceremonies presenting Warners’ artists.
Frank loved being the on-screen emcee, introducing the cast of seventy-seven stars and musical numbers that in one segment included two hundred dancers. John Barrymore delivered the Duke of Gloucester’s soliloquy from Henry VI, the first time his “voice has come from the shadow.” Fay cued in Ted Lewis and his band. He introduced veterans H. B. Warner, Monte Blue, Lupino Lane, and Ben Turpin, stage players Chester Morris and Beatrice Lillie, and, among the new faces, Irene Bordoni, Myrna Loy, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Betty Comp-ton. The director was John G. Adolfi, a veteran of thirty-five silents, who had to struggle not only with sound technicians but with Technicolor engineers. Part of The Show of Shows was filmed in the garish new color process.
Frank and Barbara rang in the New Year of 1930 at the Mayfair party at the Biltmore Hotel. Six footmen in white jackets and red satin knee britches greeted the three hundred and fifty guests, who all seemed to arrive at the same time. The evening was the film colony’s copycat affair emulating Southern California’s blueblood society events, and everybody was there, the stars—Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Dolores Del Rio, Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, Constance Bennett, Ann Harding, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Loretta Young, and the studio bosses—Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, B. P. Schulberg, the diminutive Carl Laemmle, and William LeBaron. The Mayfair benefited the Motion Picture Relief Fund, and it had its own built-in snob appeal. To be invited signaled to a newcomer that he or she had “arrived.”
As Warners’ new contractée, Fay and wife were assigned to the WB table, a few tables from the William Randolph Hearst-Marion Davies party, which included the Hearst papers’ formidable gossip columnist
Louella Parsons. As soon as they and everybody else had found their seats, the men crowded into one end of the ballroom and the women came together in the other end, all to gossip without the restraints of mixed company. After sitting alone for a while, Barbara joined the women and, as a newcomer, waited for someone to initiate a conversation. There was a clock on the mantel. Out of curiosity, she timed her loneliness. It was exactly forty minutes before anyone spoke to her.
IF FRANK COULD USE HIS STAGE-HONED EMCEE TALENT TO MAKE IT in the movies, why couldn’t she? Her wish to sacrifice everything on the altar of marriage was fading. She regretted her decision not to try for the screen version of Burlesque along with Hal Skelly and Oscar Levant, especially after she learned she was director John Cromwell’s choice.
Cromwell was another relocated Broadway whiz, an actor turned stage director with only one film under his belt. Their mutual friend was Helen Flint, who after playing the society lady in The Noose had been Cromwell’s leading lady in Gentlemen of the Press. Cromwell liked Barbara’s earthiness and told her to campaign hard for the role with the Paramount front office. Too late. Studio chief Jesse Lasky now wanted Nancy Carroll, who had just scored in the film Abie’s Irish Rose, to star.
The studio retitled the film version of Barbara’s stage success. Because of its association with bawdy songs, striptease, suggestive dancing, and scantily clad females, the title Burlesque was ruled inadmissible by Hollywood’s censorship czar Will Hays. Paramount owned The Dance of Life, Havelock Ellis’s shocking—and then unfilmable—study of sexuality and simply slapped that title on the movie version of the long-running Arthur Hopkins-George Manker Waiters show.
Columbia Pictures’ feared and fearsome Harry Cohn offered Barbara a one-picture deal to play a bordertown temptress in Mexicali Rose. To make up for missing out on Dance of Life, she let Arthur Lyons convince her to say yes to the low-budget Β picture. The agent insisted that for a new actress any footage was good.
COHN REPRESENTED SHIRT-SLEEVED “GOWER GULCH” B-PICTURE filmmaking. Located on Gower Street, Columbia was small, cheap, and dingy, and its boss took pleasure in being mean, rude, and, when he could get away with it, a cheat. A few blocks east on Sunset Boulevard was Warner Brothers, a film factory that had started out as modestly as Columbia. A family business run by Harry and Albert in New York and Jack in Los Angeles, the brothers Warner tried to hire only a few important stars. With the Vitaphone “talking pictures,” they vaulted themselves into the major league.
A short, broad man with sharp-cut features and intense blue eyes, Cohn resisted the bigger studios’ impulse to move to more spacious quarters. Until his death in 1958, Columbia stayed on Gower Street, swallowing adjacent lots until it occupied the long block between Sunset Boulevard and Fountain Avenue. Cohn, his older brother, Jack, and their friend Joe Brandt were the founding fathers, but by 1929 Harry had wrested control of Columbia from his partners. Except for program westerns, Columbia movies were, as a matter of economics, filmed on interior sets. They were also usually contemporary because Harry felt insecure when he ventured into historical periods. He couldn’t afford the list of stars that Paramount and MGM had under contract, but he knew top people could be lured by good scripts. His improvised style and chutzpah were the opposite of the obsessive second-guessing of Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder with a weak heart who was Mayer’s number-two man and the Hollywood producer incarnate. There were no producers at Columbia. And Mayer had to answer to Nicholas Schenck in New York. Cohn answered to no one.
Frank Capra was one director who preferred to work on Gower Street because Cohn was desperate enough to tolerate a young director’s bustling ambitions. Harry let his staff make their pictures with much of the freedom the pioneers had enjoyed.
Capra had stumbled into the movies and worked himself up through apprenticeship as a gag writer for Mack Sennett to become Harry Langdon’s collaborator. In 1926, he made a promising feature debut as a director with The Strong Man, Langdon’s second feature. Cohn hired Capra to direct action-adventure quickies for a flat $1,000 a picture. No fewer than seven Capra films were released in 1928. Cohn’s attitude toward less ambitious directors ranged from indifferent to brutal. Oddly, his opinion of writers was charitable. The reason, some said, was Dorothy Howell, who had been with him since the beginning when she and a telephone operator were Columbia Pictures’ only two employees. From selecting rented costumes for actresses, Dorothy had progressed to cutting and editing celluloid. By 1925, she was the writer of fifteen of the seventeen stories Cohn produced that year. Sound had made her head scenarist and a sane influence on the fresh, young writers—mostly apprentice playwrights—Harry imported from New York on very short-term contracts.
Jo Swerling was one of Cohn’s imports, a squat, heavyset, Russian-born reporter and magazine writer who chain-smoked White Owl cigars. His output matched Capra’s. During his first eleven months at Columbia, Swerling wrote thirteen produced scripts. Robert Riskin was another. At seventeen, this native New Yorker had sold original screen stories to Paramount. As Capra’s chief collaborator, Riskin introduced the director to urban cynicism and helped tighten the narrative of Capra movies. Riskin wrote his screenplays in longhand, usually sitting on the porch of the Writers Building. If a director was less than happy with a scene, Swerling would return an hour later with four different variations. Riskin never reread or rewrote himself. Among them, Howell, Swerling, and Riskin would write eight movies starring Stanwyck.
Barbara didn’t get to work for Capra on Mexicali Rose. Her director was Erle C. Kenton, another Sennett crossover who was to reach a measure of fame as the director of Frankenstein and Dracula movies. The story was credited to Gladys Lehman—one of Howell’s noms de plume.
Barbara continued to find acting in pictures disconcerting.
On the newly padded stage that became sweltering in the afternoon, Kenton started by shooting the ending, then jumped around in the script, filming scenes in no particular order. Barbara found it hard to snap into the right mood. She decided the only way to survive in the movies was to learn the entire screenplay. As a nine-year-old, she had watched all of Millie’s shows from the wings and learned all her sister’s routines. “You memorize the script, the whole thing, so you can think of any place in it, then work backward or forward from there—like a sailor boxing the compass,” she would remember. Kenton filmed her bare-legged to the crotch as the perfidious Sam Hardy slips a necklace around her left ankle. She wasn’t equipped to play a vengeful border-town belle, and her director offered little help. The critics mocked her flat, nasal Brooklyn accent, and in her own mind, Mexicali Rose was worse than The Locked Door: “I made a frightful thing for Columbia called Mexicali Rose/’ she told the New York Times a year later.
She was certain the movies were a big mistake.
HER HUSBAND WANTED HER TO DROP ACTING. SHE WANTED TO GO back to the stage. Ten months into the marriage their rivalry was still below the surface. She was torn between standing on her own two feet as she had done since she was fourteen and relying on her husband. Frank was persuasive. He was under a two-year contract to Warners, and, he told her, he was enough of a success for both of them. Having her at home suited him fine. Saying yes to screen tests when Art Lyons convinced a studio to ask her became a neat way of not making up her mind.
A test she did at Warners was particularly mortifying. She arrived at the appointed hour at the assigned soundstage only to find it deserted. A monocled cameraman with a heavy Hungarian accent eventually appeared and introduced himself as Alexander Korda. The future movie tycoon was also a newcomer to Hollywood and he, too, hated the place. He had directed films in Berlin and had just finished The Squall with Alice Joyce and Myrna Loy. He made it perfectly clear he considered this screen test assignment the ultimate indignity.
After setting up a couple of lights, Korda put her in front of tapestries and screens. She tensed up, remembering Fitzmaurice doing the same thing and telling her he couldn’t make her beautiful no ma
tter what. Sure enough, nothing worked for Korda either. He dropped his head in despair and told her, “I have tried everything, but look at the way you look. It’s hopeless.” She exploded in anger. She wasn’t here begging for a chance, the goddamn studio had sent for her. Korda had no material, no script she could read from. She decided to do a three-minute scene from The Noose, reading both her own lines and those of Rex Cherryman.
FRANK FAY MAY HAVE BEEN THE PERFECT BRIGHT-EYED EMCEE IN Show of Shows—with billing second to John Barrymore—but the picture was a flop. Stiffly directed by John Adolfi from what appeared to be fifth-row-center, the elaborate musical was a mixture of songs, production numbers, and comedy sketches that included a skit on the French Revolution and the guillotine and a succession of real-life sister acts with songs for each pair.
If low-budget Warners excelled in anything, it was in making movies that looked at life from an underdog’s point of view. Headlines about gangsters, unemployment, corruption, and juvenile delinquency were fodder for the studio’s hard-hitting dramas. Following the takeover of First National, Warners owned nearly a quarter of North America’s movie screens. The driving force behind the studio was former gag writer Darryl Zanuck.
As second in command to Jack Warner, the twenty-eight-year-old Zanuck was a fantastic worker, staying at the studio every night and in general making sure directors, writers, and actors all contributed to the violence, tension, big-city cynicism, and knockout action audiences loved. Little Caesar; filmed under the First National banner, was the first and most famous of WB’s gangster flicks. It was directed by Mervyn LeRoy, the slight and dapper cousin of Paramount’s studio boss, Jesse Lasky, and starred Edward G. Robinson in a daring caricature of Al Capone. With his squat build, frog mouth, and heckling voice, Robinson was the kind of actor no studio would have put in a starring role in a silent. Warners’ “working-girl” programmers—and the actresses Warner and Zanuck put under contract—were fast, hip, contemporary, and urban expressions of self-affirmation. Showgirls were on the lam, spouting wiseass slang, in WB’s shopgirl-princess vehicles. Robinson, James Cagney, Adolphe Menjou, George Brent, and George Arliss fought and loved Ruth Chatterton, Ruby Keeler, Kay Francis, and, soon to outshine them all, Bette Davis. “Women love bums” was the way Zanuck put it.