Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Zanuck was the only mogul who wasn’t Jewish. A Midwesterner who had started as a writer, he possessed a busy mind bubbling with story ideas cribbed from tabloid front pages and cocktail-party chatter. He had dashed off scripts under a number of pen names, but when he became production chief he hired others to flesh out his ideas. Although his opinion usually prevailed, he was a great listener with an open mind. He watched every wardrobe test of every star and could remember that he didn’t like a spotted tie on a man in test number three or he didn’t like the cut of a skirt on Barbara in test number four.

  Frank Fay’s talent was too peculiar to hold the production chief’s attention. But since Frank was under contract, Zanuck decided he should play foreigners. The studio barber changed Frank’s tousled red hair to sleek, oily black so he could play a Frenchman in The Matrimonial Bed and a Mexican in Under a Texas Moon. Adopted from a farce that ran in London under the title What’s His Name, the complicated Matrimonial Bed had Fay as a boulevardier who, because of a train crash, is amnesiac. After five years he doesn’t recognize his wife, who, anyhow, has since married someone else. Fay hadn’t been on a horse in twenty years, but they hoisted him up on one and put him through Under a Texas Moon. The picture had him as a redoubtable Don Juan who, at the sight of a pair of pretty eyes and ruby lips, forgets an apparently dangerous mission. Myrna Loy played one of the distracting damsels.

  Both Β pictures were directed by Mihaly Kertész, who, since coming to Hollywood from his native Budapest, had changed his name to Michael Curtiz. This tall, flamboyant Hungarian, who married Zanuck’s favorite screenwriter, Bess Meredyth, was famous for his command of lighting, mood, and action and for his vigorous mangling of the English language (Bette Davis, he said, “is a flea in the ointment and a no good sexless sonofabitch”). As a director, he was ruthless. No matter what, he’d finish on time and within budget.

  Frank didn’t want to play a Mexican or a Frenchman. He wanted to play himself, Broadway’s Favorite Son. But he was the star of Under a Texas Moon, heading a cast of twenty that besides Myrna Loy, Raquel Torres, and Mona Maris included Noah Berry, George Cooper, Fred Kohler, and Tully Marshal. And movie stars were America’s aristocracy. What they wore, on and off the screen, set fashions. Their lifestyles and opinions—invented or merely improvised by studio publicists—were chronicled in every tabloid and a score of fan magazines. As Warners’ director of publicity, Hal Wallis saw to it that the Fays—Frank more than Barbara—got their share of attention. Wallis had been the publicist on The Jazz Singer and was currently concentrating on the studio’s expensive musicals. “This was before the days of the gossip column when stories were simple, bland, and devoid of scandal,” the future producer would remember. “The public worshiped the stars, loving them as though they were personal friends. They wanted to hear about their lavish homes, luxurious gardens, parties, automobiles, and clothes.” The Fays had no lavish home to show off, but they looked good in bathing suits, and Wallis sent a studio photographer to Malibu to shoot them clowning on the sand.

  Frank and Barbara liked the informality of Malibu so much they rented a beach house.

  In contrast to the Santa Monica beach homes that Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Joe Schenck, and William Randolph Hearst built twenty miles to the south, the Malibu colony was a collection of bungalows owned or rented by lesser picture people.

  Adeline Schulberg, the wife of Paramount studio boss B. P. Schul-berg, built the first Cape Cod on a ninety-foot oceanfront lot and filled it with Early American furniture. Warner Baxter, John Gilbert and his new wife, Ina Claire, Clara Bow and her boyfriend, Rex Bell, the ageless Gloria Swanson and her French marquis husband, Henri de la Falaise, followed, owning or renting cottages for the summer. George Cukor, the recently transplanted Broadway director, shared a rented beach house with Alex Tiers, an independently rich young man making a halfhearted stab at acting. Cukor was discreetly homosexual and threw memorable parties. The Fays’ immediate neighbor was Joseph Santley; Barbara’s first friend was Adela Rogers St. Johns. Like Barbara, Santley was a former Broadway dancer induced to come west to be in talkies. With Robert Florey, he had been hired to direct the Marx Brothers in The Coconuts. Adela was the Hearst chain’s most famous newspaperwoman, the star reporter of the Lindbergh kidnapping trial.

  The daughter of Earl Rogers, California’s celebrated trial lawyer, she shared her beach house with an Italian heavyweight champion.

  Going out in Los Angeles meant different places on different nights. The place to be Sunday nights was the Cotton Club in Culver City, where the Fays saw the ravishing Jean Harlow with Howard Hughes, the orphaned Texas millionaire who was vaulting into national prominence as the producer-director of Hell’s Angels. One Tuesday night, Barbara and Frank ran into Oscar Levant at the Club Montmartre, where songwriters gathered. Oscar was in Hollywood to play his original part in The Dance of Life. He was thinking of staying on to write songs for Radio Pictures, RCA’s newly formed production subsidiary. For Barbara, the success of The Dance of Life hurt. The “all-talking, all-dancing, all-star production of stagedom’s hit of hits” could have been hers. If only she had traveled to California with Hal back in August 1928 when Paramount invited Hal Skelly, Oscar Levant, and her to come out and test for the Burlesque screen version. The Skelly-Nancy Carroll musical with Levant at the piano even featured a musical number filmed in two-color Technicolor.

  Fay went to church Sunday mornings, but insisted on having open house in the afternoon. Anybody and everybody dropped in, the women in fluttering beach pajamas, the men in white duck trousers and striped shirts. Frank drank too much.

  7

  CAPRA

  THE DIRECTOR WHO, WITH KLNG VLDOR, PERSONIFIED AMERICAN optimism, the virtues of common people, and sophisticated comedy was a man who proved you could be creative and successful in Hollywood without going crazy. At thirty-three, Frank Capra was a recently divorced charmer who was converting from Catholicism to Christian Science to please his fiancée, Lucille Warner Reyburn.

  Born in the hills above Palermo, Francesco Capra had arrived in America at the age of six, and, in Los Angeles, spent a traditional Sicilian immigrant childhood and youth, hawking newspapers while attending the new Manual Arts High School on Vermont Avenue and becoming a door-to-door-salesman to help his family and send himself through college. In 1923, he had married the sharp-witted actress Helen Howell (no relation to Cohn’s formidable senior writer Dorothy Howell) because she could help him get into the movies. Emotional and stubborn streaks in his character made him an ideal director.

  His success as a gagman and director for Harry Langdon allowed him to buy a home in the Hollywood Hills and with Helen start a family. When Helen suffered a miscarriage, she went to pieces and Capra became distant and hostile toward her. Helen began to drink, and by 1927 the marriage was over. By the first year of the Depression, Capra was a conspicuous success story, an ambitious thirty-three-year-old, both attracted to and deeply suspicious of money—and women. His obsession with corruption and loss of innocence that would make him a household word for urban romances, comedies, and social commentaries was all in the future.

  Ladies of Leisure would be his fifth talker and his first “woman’s picture.” The source material was Milton Herbert Gropper’s play Ladies of the Evening. The story was derivative of George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 Pygmalion—itself an update of Ovid’s rewrite of the Greek legend of the sculptor king of Cyprus who, although he hated women, fell in love with his own statue of Aphrodite. The heroine of Gropper’s play, produced on Broadway by David Belasco in 1924, was Kay Arnold, a prostitute who longs to be loved, but is too proud to believe it can happen. Capra was less than happy with the play. After sending a first-draft screenplay to Dorothy Howell, Jo Swerling, Robert Riskin, and ten other creative people on the lot, Capra got everybody together in Cohn’s office for a brainstorming session.

  “Capra doesn’t want to hear what you like about the script,” Cohn told the new people. “H
e’s looking for knocks. Understand?”

  Puffing on his White Owl, Swerling jumped up: “You want knocks, Mr. Cohn. That’s my cue. I don’t like Hollywood, I don’t like you, and I certainly don’t like this putrid piece of Gorgonzola somebody gave me to read.” He called the script inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, and incredibly dull. Capra challenged the cigar-chomping critic to come up with a rewrite that was less inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, and dull.

  Three days later, Swerling delivered forty pages.

  To give Jerry Strange, the story’s wealthy hero, something to do, Swerling turned him into a society painter and updated Kay Arnold to a professional escort, a “party girl.” For a “meeting-cute” opening, he had both escape from wild parties. Jerry abandons his snooty fiancé and a party in his Park Avenue penthouse and drives out into the country only to blow a tire on a shoreline road. A white-gowned Kay jumps from the clutches of a guy aboard a yacht and rows herself to shore. Hair disheveled and mascara smudged, Kay scrambles up a hill and comes upon Jerry changing his tire. Before prompting him to offer her a ride back to town, she asks, “Hey, don’t you tote a flask—you know, first aid to the nearly injured?”*

  Jerry loads her into his automobile and wraps her in his topcoat. As Kay draws it over her shoulders, she registers the fatness of the wallet in the pocket. She doesn’t swipe it though. She returns it with the borrowed coat when she shows up for her first sitting as his model.

  Capra called the forty pages “magnificent, human, witty, poignant” and sent the writer back to the typewriter with the admonition not to forget the theme. “It’s all in two words, ‘Look up!’ That’s what the boy must say to this tart—’Look up at the stars.’”

  Swerling complied.

  “Look up!” says Jerry to the Eliza Doolittle he is sketching for a canvas he wants to call Hope. Swerling’s script had her snap back that he should entitle his painting The Lost Zeppelin.

  Capra cast his former boss at Mack Sennett’s as the moneyed artist Jerry Strange. Ralph Graves was an aloof and amiable actor who in the Keystone Kop two-reelers Capra wrote for Sennett had played college men or clumsy go-getters. Graves had become a director for Cohn in 1927, and it was Graves who had brought his former gag writer to Cohn’s attention. Since then, Graves had starred in two of Capra’s sound pictures. While looking for the actress to play Kay Arnold, Capra filled out the rest of the cast by signing the frizzy-haired Marie Prévost as Kay’s roommate and stage actress Nance O’Neil to play Kay’s mother. Lowell Sherman was given the role of Jerry’s best friend.

  FRANK FAY AND HARRY COHN WOULD BOTH CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY for introducing Stanwyck to Frank Capra. Everyone agrees, however, that Barbara was a terrible snob who refused to meet Capra, let alone read for the part in his new picture.

  One version has Frank, forever the emcee, hosting a benefit sponsored by the Los Angeles Examiner, the powerful Hearst paper no one said no to. Onstage, Barbara joined her husband in a sketch that prompted one man in the audience to seek her out afterward.

  “Capra is going to do Ladies of Leisure,” Cohn told her. “Why don’t you test for it?”

  “No thanks,” she answered. “I’ve had my experience with tests. I made one at Warner Brothers. If you want to see me on film, send for it.”

  In another account the various rejections had sent Barbara into such a funk that Fay sought out Cohn and offered to pay back whatever salary Columbia agreed to pay his wife for starring in Ladies of Leisure. Both Fay and Cohn were notorious tightwads, and we can only guess who was more discomfited—Frank in bribing the studio boss or Harry in refusing an under-the-table payback. In the end, it seemed, Cohn insisted Capra see the new actress. Under duress, Capra did.

  To please her husband, Barbara agreed to the meeting. She walked into the director’s office with defeat written all over her face, and a bored Capra kept the interview to a polite minimum. Signaling the end of the meeting, he said that in any case she would have to do a test.

  She got up and crossed to the door. “Oh hell, you don’t want any part of me!” she yelled in tears and left.

  Capra picked up the phone and dialed Cohn. “Harry, forget Stanwyck. She’s not an actress. She’s a porcupine.”

  Seeing Barbara arrive home in tears, Fay called Columbia, got Capra on the phone, and asked what the hell the director had done to his wife.

  “Do to her? I couldn’t even talk to her.”

  Fay got huffy, but Capra cut him off. “I don’t want any part of your wife or of you. She came in here with a chip on her shoulder and went out with an ax on it.”

  Fay mellowed. Since they got to California, his wife had been kicked around. Maybe Capra should just look at Barbara’s big third-act screen test from The Noose.

  Capra said okay. Fay tore off in a taxi with the can of The Noose test under his arm. It was 9:00 P.M. before a screening room was available. Cohn and Capra slumped down in executive recliners, and Fay nodded to the projectionist to roll the three-minute test. Capra was certain that nothing in the world was going to make him like the test, but he recalled, “after only thirty seconds I got a lump in my throat as big as an egg.”

  Writing his autobiography forty years later, Capra got the Noose relationship wrong, but his own reaction to the Stanwyck screen test right. “She was pleading with the governor to pardon her convicted husband [sic],” he would remember. “Never had I seen or heard such emotional sincerity. When it was over I had tears in my eyes. I was stunned.”

  Cohn huffed that Capra was “crazy” when the director begged to be allowed to cast the bristling twenty-three-year-old he had dismissed hours earlier. Cohn let himself be persuaded—after all, Stanwyck was already under contract and not exactly the most expensive choice Capra could come up with.

  Shooting began January 14, 1930, ten days after Swerling finished the rewrite. For director and star the shoot was a mutual discovery. Capra got to play his own Henry Higgins, molding near-virgin clay. Barbara brought to the part her Brooklyn directness, her intuition and honesty, that both coarsened and softened the heroine. Her severe beauty and wounded pride muted the character’s impertinence and made Swerling’s wisecracking party girl both earthy and contemporary.

  “Naive, unsophisticated, caring nothing about makeup, clothes or hairdos, this chorus girl could grab your heart and tear it to pieces,” Capra would write. “She knew nothing about camera tricks, how to ‘cheat’ her looks so her face could be seen, how to restrict her body movements in close shots. She just turned it on—and everything else on the stage stopped.”

  Stanwyck was at her best the first time they filmed a scene. Capra noted that in her multiple-take scenes, she got worse and worse while her opposite actor often got better and better. To avoid tensions, the director rehearsed the cast without Barbara and filmed her closeups with several cameras so she would only have to do the scene once.

  The cameraman on Ladies of Leisure was Joseph Walker, a heavy-set miner’s son from Denver who designed and ground his own custom lenses for each female star he worked with and held twelve patents for motion picture devices. Capra would do twenty movies with Walker, Barbara six. Walker’s camera caught her hard little chin, full cheeks, gum-chewing, fast-talking funny face. But multiple-camera setups were time-consuming—and demanding of Walker. Graves and the others grumbled that it was not fair to them. Capra was adamant. Stanwyck was to stay in her dressing room until every camera angle was in place and rehearsed. When he brought her out, he told his leading lady, “No matter what the other actors do, whether they stop or blow their lines, you continue your scene right to the end.”

  Capra told his crew they were working for the actors and not the other way around. “It put a helluva burden on everybody,” said Edward Bernds, who started with Capra as a sound mixer on Ladies of Leisure and worked on nearly all his other Columbia pictures. “My God, we were all on our toes to get it the first time. That first take with Stanwyck was sacred.”

  Did Svengali fall in love
with his Trilby? Capra was aware that Fay’s drinking and jealousy were getting on Barbara’s nerves and claimed he would marry her if she divorced Fay. “I fell in love with Stanwyck, and had I not been more in love with Lucille Reyburn I would have asked Barbara to marry me after she called it quits with Frank Fay,” Capra would write in 1971, when he and Lucille were about to celebrate their fortieth anniversary.

  When Barbara, Lucille, and the two Franks were all dead, biographer Joseph McBride would claim Capra and Stanwyck were lovers for nearly two years, that it was Barbara who in the end rejected the director. Without saying outright he was Barbara’s lover, Capra would admit he was very close to her, that their relationship was both impor-tant and rewarding: “I wish I could tell you more about it, but I can’t, I shouldn’t, and I won’t, but she was delightful.”

  Barbara never admitted to any affair. Sentiments aside, a liaison stretching into the fall of 1931 seems unlikely. If anything, Barbara was trying to save her marriage. Frank Fay had walked out on wives twice before and probably would have done so again if his interest in Barbara had dwindled. However morbid his resentment of her success would eventually become, his intense jealousy demonstrated his wish to keep her. As it was, it was Barbara who would compromise her movie career to help Frank recapture his Broadway celebrity.

  But that was a year away when Capra rented a beach house in the Malibu Colony across from Clara Bow’s house. Frank Capra and Lucille were a sane presence, symbols of moderation and rationality for whom all-night drinking and gambling were unthinkable. Fay, Capra, Barbara, and Lu saw a good deal of each other and of Jack Gilbert. Ina Claire had left Gilbert, and the actor was leasing a beach house again and living alone with his Scotch terrier. His latest picture, The Phantom of Paris, was a success, and seemed to end the curse of his voice registering too high.