Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Barbara fled to California and slipped happily into Shopworn’s waitress-turned-star role. Playing someone else gave her identity and made her forget Frank’s whining, boozing, and jealousy. Shopworn was a cry picture bringing little credit to those involved in it, but Barbara didn’t care. She is a hard-luck waitress who becomes an actress and marries man-about-town Regis Toomey only to be railroaded on a morals charge by her wealthy mother-in-law (Clara Blandick). Fresh from eight years with MGM, director Nick Grinde tried his best to make the story believable, that is, to make the waitress-turned-star’s setbacks engrossing without telegraphing her faithful love of Toomey that, halfway through, the audience guesses anyway. The Hollywood Herald called Shopworn “tawdry and cheap.”

  WARNERS PROVIDED A DESPERATELY NEEDED BOOST.

  After first borrowing Stanwyck for Jewel Robbery, Darryl Zanuck decided to cast her instead opposite George Brent and Bette Davis in the film version of Edna Ferber’s 1925 Pulitzer Prize winner and bestseller So Big. Twenty-four-year-old Davis was furious when her own studio made her play second banana to loanout Stanwyck’s starring role.

  So Big was Stanwyck’s first A movie and her second picture with Bill Wellman. For star, director, and even Warner Brothers, doing Ferber’s big, sprawling novel as an eighty-minute movie was a big leap. Barbara’s role demanded that she age from a young girl to a woman in her mid-fifties. Wellman saw to it that she matured believably, and Warners had its celebrated new dress designer, Orry-Kelly, do her wardrobe. John Orry Kelly had come from Australia via theatrical design in New York and quickly established himself as WB’s versatile, if temperamental, costume designer.

  Bette Davis was intensely jealous of Barbara. The two had few scenes together, but Bette’s tense mannerisms and constant wiggling struck Barbara as affected and designed to steal scenes. “She had the kind of creative ruthlessness that made her success inevitable,” Barbara would remember. Over the years Stanwyck and Davis would compete for many roles, but, as Bette said, there was “nevah” a fight between them.

  So BIG ESTABLISHED STANWYCK AS AN ACTRESS WITH A BRILLIANT emotional range. Critics deplored cramming the events of the heroine’s lifetime into eighty minutes, but applauded Barbara’s performance. In New York, Frank talked the owner of the Strand Theatre, which was playing God’s Gift to Women, into letting him appear in person before each screening. Despite the presence of the gorgeous Louise Brooks, the seasoned La Plante, and WB house diva Blondell, the picture was “exclusively Fay’s show,” said Variety, adding, “When a two-reeler plot is stretched to feature length, it is no gift to audiences.”

  God’s Gift to Women was yanked after three days.

  9

  WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

  FRANK FAY RETURNED TO LOS ANGELES, WHERE ALL EYES WERE ON HIS WIFE. HIS DOWNWARD SLIDE AND HER STEADY RISE INCREASED HIS jealousy, suspicion, and resentment. No amount of reasoning on her part could dislodge his belief that she, Zanuck, Cohn, Capra, and Hollywood had robbed him of his talent, that her fame was filched and misbegotten. To calm him down, she told interviewers she was either about to retire or, if the movies didn’t want her, she’d be going back to the stage. To herself, she denied anything was wrong and met hints by acquaintances that Frank might have a drinking problem with a blank look on her face.

  To stay out of Frank’s hair, she agreed to do a third picture with Bill Wellman. The Purchase Price, a standard action picture, started filming during the winter of 1931-32. Between setups she confided the details of her marital troubles to her director. Because he understood “fellers” better than “gals,” as he said, Wellman was better at explaining Frank to her than anyone. We do not know whether Wild Bill could explain delusion, tenaciously held, irrational beliefs or whether she heeded his grousing, plainspoken advice. We do know that when he turned in the first draft of A Star Is Born three years later, David O. Selznick pronounced it too close to the Fays’ real-life drama.

  The thirty-year-old Selznick was the youngest studio chief, head of the newly merged RKO and Pathé pictures. Selznick believed Hollywood was a refuge for life’s misfits. He was intrigued by the way movie fame can shunt a husband or a wife, however happily married, into obscurity, how one partner’s identity can be destroyed by the other’s radiance. With Constance Bennett playing a waitress and Lowell Sherman a brilliant but alcoholic director, Selznick made What Price Hollywood? one of RKO’s big 1932 releases. The original story was by someone who knew the Fays all too well, Adela Rogers St. Johns. George Cukor directed the star-crossed romance between the young ingenue and the talented but self-destructive filmmaker who, to avoid becoming a hindrance to her rise, ends up committing suicide. Sherman used his brother-in-law John Barrymore as a role model, and the result was a realistic and not unsympathetic screen drunkard. However, neither director nor producer nor producer’s wife was happy with What Price Hollywood? Cukor called it “a mixed bag”; Selznick said that it went off in too many directions. Irene Selznick thought it was phony. As Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, she knew something about growing up in real Hollywood. Her husband promised he’d make a true inside Hollywood movie.

  When Selznick set up his own production company, he decided to redo the story of a seesaw Hollywood marriage and to get it right. To help Wellman write a script, he hired an untried youngster, Robert Carson. Within two weeks Wellman and Carson submitted a detailed story line that Selznick found so close to the Fay-Stanwyck marriage that he asked attorneys specializing in invasion-of-privacy litigation to go over it. The lawyers came back with a twenty-page brief, listing similarities in incidents and situations between the script and Frank and Barbara Fay. Wellman and Carson decided one way to distance their plot line from the Fays was to make the husband a dejected and humorless person. Selznick, who was never content with letting writers develop a script on their own, ordered another rewrite. In the new version the husband was more comic in tone, that is, more like Fay. Selznick still wasn’t happy with the script. He signed What Price Hollywood? writer-director Rowland Brown to work on the continuity and dialogue, fired Brown a week later, and replaced him with Dorothy Parker and her gay husband, Alan Campbell. Budd Schulberg and Ring Lard-ner, Jr., whom Selznick had hired as “junior writers,” also had some influence on the finished script. Rewrites continued through 1934 and 1935, even after Wellman started the Technicolor film with Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. “It was a story based on things that happened,” Wellman would say defensively of A Star Is Born, which earned him his only Oscar and became a film classic.

  THE MAY 1932 ISSUE OF PHOTOPLAY CALLED STANWYCK “THE most promising young star in pictures” and Fay a has-been with an attitude. Frank refused to accept the industry’s thumbs-down verdict of his talent or Photoplay’s unctuous hope that Frank would “find a niche in pictures.” He had never endeared himself to the Hollywood press, and columnists and reporters blamed him for Barbara’s reluctance to play the movie star.

  Photoplay’s top columnist Cal York said: Stanwyck would sacrifice her career for her husband. The columnist, who knew Fay from Broadway, intimated that if Warner Brothers had given Frank a second chance it was his wife’s doing:

  Suddenly Broadway’s favorite son was no longer the big shot in the family. Did this make any difference to Stanwyck? None—except that she seemed more devoted to her red-haired spouse than ever.

  No Frankie, no fame—she announced it proudly while Hollywood wondered and sighed. Suddenly Fay was really through on the Warner pasture. Barbara announced her independence from Hollywood and all its weird works and ways. Due to start work on a picture at Columbia, she simply failed to show up at camera-time.

  Some people in the know may say it’s money trouble. But the knowing ones will tell you, in all honesty, that the heart is talking and not the checkbook. Barbara Stanwyck will have no part of a world where Frank Fay isn’t chairman of the board of directors.

  For the love of her husband, York predicted, she would give it all up so that someday people would recogni
ze her in a theater lobby or a restaurant and someone would exclaim, “Look! There’s Barbara Stanwyck!” To which another would reply, “Gosh—how beautiful. Do you remember?”

  It was the age of the press columns and fan magazines. The Fays were not the only ones to try to hide the turmoil of their relationship while pretending to “confide” in columnists they invited to their home. Stars and executives cringed before the peephole columnists while wooing them with corruptive flattery and self-destructive cooperation. The ears of Hedda Hopper, her sister columnist Louella Parsons, Cal York, and a host of lesser gossips were always perked, and to be sure they were always au courant, they employed networks of informants while affecting a stewardship of public morality. Nothing was more provocative than the misdemeanors of the privileged. To see them spanked in print was both edifying and entertaining.

  The Purchase Price was shot during Frank’s worst behavior. Barbara laughed off persistent newspaper hints at a breakup. She invited

  Los Angeles Times columnist Harrison Carroll to interview her at home. In the movies, she said, an actress only had a few good years. She intended to make the most of hers. “Either that or I’ll quit pictures.”

  The columnist described how Frank sat in on the interview, “the man of this house, and no mistaking,” saying he and his wife were homebodies. “We don’t have all those fireside pictures taken; we don’t believe in it,” said Frank. “But we like each other’s company. Don’t party much.”

  Frank added that he had never wanted his wife to be in the movies. “On our way out here, we each said, ‘Well, I wonder how long we’ll stick together in Hollywood.’ Here we are.” In his syndicated column, Carroll described how Barbara smiled and nodded, lit a cigarette, and took it over to her husband in a “domestic scene that was very convincing.”

  The Fays could project homely bliss for a visiting columnist, but there were ugly fights in nightclubs that beat reporters picked up from waiters and parking attendants. After accusing Barbara of drinking too much, Frank knocked her down and got into a fistfight with intervening bystanders. One of their evenings out hit the police blotter when Frank was arrested for drunk driving, injuring a woman visiting from San Francisco, and leaving the scene of an accident. Barbara posted bail. Charles Cradick got the municipal court to postpone Fay’s court appearance for the hit-and-run accident until the woman, who didn’t want to return to Los Angeles to testify, dropped charges.

  At home, their fights grew increasingly ugly. Neighbors complained to police of screamed obscenities and door slamming at all hours. Even if no gory headlines reached the newspapers, friends and acquaintances knew what was going on. Nina Foch, who costarred with Stanwyck in Executive Suite twenty-two years later, was to speculate that Barbara’s lifelong back problems were caused by Fay’s beatings, not the result of her fall from a horse during the Forbidden shoot. “She did one odd thing during Executive Suite” Foch would recall of the 1953 filming. “She had a very emotional scene in which she had to walk up to a desk. She kept hitting the desk, bruising herself. She showed off the bruises. It was as if she was proud of the pain.”

  Actors often like to measure a performance’s veracity according to the emotional strain and physical damage it inflicts, but the bruised thigh, hit again and again at the same spot during successive takes, offers a clue to a latent streak of masochism in Barbara. Better to be used than to feel a pit of emptiness. As much as she shrewdly presented herself at work as the pro always in control of herself, she stepped into the loyal wife character at home. Becoming famous not only meant living in a glass house, it required a level of conformity. To keep the marriage respectable, she took her husband’s abuse, sometimes rearing up and fighting back, but always letting him win in the end. She wasn’t sure she could change things, but was certain she could overcome both his sway and her own acquiescence. However, his domination was, in Oscar Levant’s phrase, “suffocating and total.” Still, she preferred pain to neglect, misery to indifference.

  TO ESCAPE THE CROWDS THEY HAD ONCE SOUGHT IN MALIBU, Frank and Barbara bought a three-acre property in the fashionable new Brentwood area of West Los Angeles. The walled, block-long estate was at 441 North Bristol Avenue between San Vicente and Sunset boulevards. Willard Mack lived at 12805 Sunset Boulevard with his new wife, Beatrice Banyard. Cole and Linda Porter owned a beautiful house one street over, and comedy producer Hal Roach was a few houses down. Joan Crawford, newly divorced from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., lived in a ten-room Georgian-style manor across the street. Frank and Lucille Capra moved to Brentwood a few years later.

  Over the next two years, the Fays struggled to keep the facade of their marriage, lavishing attention on the house, pouring money and devotion into it, enlarging, changing, and rebuilding for months at a time. James E. Dolena, the architect who created some of the most elegant neoclassical houses in Southern California, built a gymnasium, and added a swimming pool and bath-bungalow. He insisted on the finest craftsmanship and angrily rejected work that didn’t meet his standards. Barbara paid for the remodeling—and for Frank’s Catholic charities. Barbara’s new Rolls-Royce became the grand prize at Frank’s parish church bazaar.

  The cost of the mansion was fuel for the smoldering rumors that Barbara was fighting with Warner Brothers because of the studio’s treatment of her husband and the recurring speculation about divorce. Frank and Barbara played it cute by making fun of their own nouveau riche status. Now that they had finished the house in Spanish style, they would not be surprised if they rebuilt it in English Tudor, they told Photoplay’s Ruth Biery. If any bright morning, Frank would wake up and say, “What I really wanted was an English house,” Barbara was sure there would be seventy-five workmen on the premises by noon.

  “Sure,” said Frank, “that will give us something to do.”

  “See?”

  Biery described Barbara’s laugh floating over “the Spanish balcony to the Spanish swimming pool, bungalow dressing room and gymnasium” and quoted their banter verbatim:

  BARBARA: I just know it was coming. Then I might want Italian.

  FRANK: Then, we’d do it again, darling.

  BARBARA: We’ll probably end by starving.

  FRANK: But we’ll starve in a nice house, honey.

  More seriously, Barbara told the fan magazine there wasn’t a picture over which she didn’t fight with Zanuck. Recently, Zanuck had showed her a note from an important theater owner criticizing Warners for making an inferior picture like The Purchase Price. “I chose that picture,” she said. “I just knew it would make a good picture. There is no one to blame but me.” Frank called the film business a crap game: “You may take a trip to Palm Springs. The butler will ask for your name at your own door when you return. Whenever you leave Hollywood you are forgotten.”

  They were rarely invited anywhere. Perhaps they knew they were out of their depth among the film colony’s slightly less nouveau new rich. The wives of studio executives were as alien to Barbara as the Manhattan rakes Oscar Levant had wanted her to meet. Barbara and Frank tried to break the ice by inviting fifty people to a big party. Two hundred and seventy-five showed up. Frank ridiculed the Charlie Chaplin fetes, the Douglas Fairbanks-Mary Pickford soirees that were de rigueur for anyone bidden to Pickfair or to the Santa Monica Art Deco home of MGM art director Cedric Gibbons and his beautiful wife, Dolores Del Rio. Frank might be a gambler, but there were no invitations from Joe and Norma Schenck to the Sunday crap games or the rival card games Irving Thalberg played at his and Norma Shearer’s Santa Monica beach house. On Sundays, Frank liked to lend their home to his church, much to the annoyance of Crawford and Tone next door, who objected to the people and the traffic.

  Nevertheless, Barbara and Joan became fast friends. They talked about happy coincidences, people they both knew. Willard Mack was the screenwriter of Joan’s first all-talkie, Ontamed. They had both had Marie Prévost as a fellow actress in the pictures that launched them in films. Less happily, they both had men who weren’t cu
tting it. Joan’s new love interest was Franchot Tone. Newly arrived from New York’s eminent Group Theatre, Tone came from an elegant family and, until he met Crawford, was not interested in movie fame. After she fell in love with him and got MGM to renegotiate his contract, the studio gave him several opportunities. However, he was quickly typecast as the stuffed-shirt second fiddle who usually lost Crawford to Gable. Like Fay, he disdained Hollywood society, hit the bottle, and, after he married Joan, his wife. Like Frank and Barbara, Joan and Franchot were childless. Joan told friends she had seven miscarriages while married to Tone.

  Joan and Barbara had a lot more in common than jealous, alcoholic husbands. Both were products of tawdry childhoods. They shared chorus girl beginnings and showbiz names picked by others. Both were more ambitious than their men. Crawford, of course, was already a glamour queen. The saying around her studio, MGM, was that Norma Shearer got the productions, Garbo supplied the art, and Crawford made the money to pay for both.

  Joan used tantrums, tears, and intimidation to advance her career. Barbara’s toughness was less mannered, less posed, but both were totally self-invented, always trying harder. Joan used sex to land plum roles and preferred treatment; Barbara was less crude. She had a way of manipulating the weaknesses of the opposite sex, of appealing to men’s chivalry. Three years older than Barbara, Joan had a knack for dramatizing herself, for communicating with her fans and, in blue language, for speaking the truth. She had long since forgotten her saxophone player and cast off her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. With Clark Gable, she was MGM’s favorite proletarian. Their rough manner together—in such contrast to the Broadway and British actors imported for talkies—fit perfectly the mood of the Depression. Louis B. Mayer recognized the Crawford-Gable potency. If Gable was a mobster and Crawford an impoverished heiress in Dance, Fools, Dance, he was a Salvation Army captain, she the owner of a clip joint in Laughing Sinners. Theater owners clamored for more Gable-Crawford fare, and MGM rushed the pair into two more pictures. Since MGM had given Joan a screen test in 1924, she had been in thirty-four movies. Studio designer Gilbert Adrian was fast making padded shoulders, ruffles, and wide collars her glamour trademark. Joan believed in physical fitness. Besides going to dance classes, taking swimming lessons and exercising, she had her body rubbed with ice cubes every day.