by Axel Madsen
I can write it, however. You are always right about everything so you must be right about what you want to do. Please, Frank, love me—whatever you do. And wherever you go, take me. For there I shall be content.
Pain rather than indifference.
10
DEPRESSION BLUES
A FEW YEARS AGO THEY TALKED ABOUT HER AS ‘FRANK FAY’S POOR talented little wife who couldn’t seem to get a start in pictures,’” wrote columnist Thomas Reddy. “Today they talk about her as a picture star in her own right who goes on to the stage to act as ‘stooge’ for the wisecracks of her comedian husband. Barbara didn’t worry about the sympathy that was wasted on her three or four years ago, but she objects rather strenuously to the ‘talk’ occasioned by her devotion to the career of Frank Fay.” She insisted they were going to be happy despite the gossip.
Living with Frank was a roller-coaster ride of good times and pain, fun and disillusions, and desperate attempts at making up. The relationship chewed them up. There were moments when she found it hard to believe it was she talking. She wanted the two of them to make it and made herself believe it was her duty to get Frank to stop drinking because she was married to him and marriage was supposed to anchor their existence and last forever. She was angry with herself because he didn’t succeed in making his career rebound. Was a child the solution?
Not that she was expecting. During her teenage years and early twenties, she had avoided stag parties but shimmied in speakeasies, danced in chorus lines on Broadway and on the road, cadged meals at LaHiff’s, impressed Willard Mack and Arthur Hopkins, and fallen in love with Rex Cherryman, all without getting pregnant. Or had she? Contraception was crude in the 1920s. Barbara would never admit to an abortion, nor would she ever bear a child. An unwanted pregnancy was the chorus girl’s curse—her friend Crawford admitted to four abortions—and for Barbara and Rex enjoying their first flush of success, a pregnancy would have been devastating. There can be no doubt that she would have done whatever it took not to let the brass ring slip from her grasp, including a back-alley abortion.
Frank didn’t want to adopt a child—to him fatherhood had to be biological. But Barbara insisted. Two weeks before Christmas 1932, they adopted a ten-month-old boy from the Children’s Home Society. Court papers showed John Charles Greene to be the son of Vivian Greene, whose written consent was obtained for the file. No father was mentioned.
Once home on Bristol Avenue, Barbara and Frank named their son Anthony Dion and happily played house. For a brief time they bent over the crib in awe and self-congratulation, but within weeks, the infant was left in the care of a succession of nurses and nannies. Stanwyck talked of baby Dion as a fulfillment and reminded reporters that she had been an orphan herself. She would like to adopt a slew of orphans and surround them with love, she told Photoplay. When the press asked to take pictures of Dion in her arms, she refused. “Too much attention will make him unhappy, too,” she said. “We want him to have a normal, happy childhood. We all just want to be left alone, please.”
It was all a facade. Barbara put in long days, six days a week at the studio, and her husband’s brooding and drinking didn’t stop. Frank whined that he was sacrificing his career for hers. She couldn’t stand to seeing Frank unhappy and, against her better judgment, all too often gave in to him. After he threw Dion into the swimming pool in a drunken rage, the nanny locked herself and the toddler into the nursery when he was home. Frank’s father was so ill at ease he talked of moving out.
IN HIS RAGES AND SELF-PITY FRANK CONVENIENTLY FORGOT WHO earned the money that paid for the mansion and the staff and kept him in booze. Frank had voted for Herbert Hoover, but Franklin D. Roosevelt won on the promise of intervening directly to redress the economic situation. Hollywood was among the last businesses to feel the Depression. Cinema admissions were pushing a hundred million a week in 1930, and going to the movies remained the cheapest and, for many, the only entertainment. All-night movie houses at ten cents a seat were crowded with homeless snorers. Many people couldn’t afford even dimes for entertainment or comfort, however, and attendance began to slip. By 1932, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warners, Fox, and RKO were losing money. The need to turn out sparkling entertainment—and to complete the costly switch to sound—kept even a pacesetter like MGM (and cost-conscious outfits like Warners and Universal) dependent on a few sources of big money. It was, of course, the moviemen’s experience that bankers first made suggestions, later imposed restrictions, and finally gave orders.
Sure enough. A month after Roosevelt had won the election, creditors forced Loews Inc. and its subsidiary MGM to temporarily cut the salaries of everybody earning more than $1,500 a week. Paramount, Fox, and RKO were on the brink of receivership. The industry imposed a 50 percent across-the-board salary cut for all personnel in a scramble to contain costs. To make everybody swallow, the studios agreed that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Price Waterhouse accounting firm—not the studios themselves—would decide when a company must end its cuts.
Since Ladies of Leisure Stanwyck had made four pictures for Columbia, four for Warners, and in the process turned herself into a recession-proof asset. As a girl with a past, dance-hall hostess, tent-show evangelist, unwed mother, night nurse, waitress on the make, Edna Ferber heroine, and torch singer turned mail-order bride she had become the throaty-voiced stand-up dame that Depression audiences loved. In The Bitter Tea of General Yen, she got to play a brash and virginal missionary tempted by unseemly desire for a man of another race. Capra got to veil her in the most erotic camerawork of his career.
THE ORIGINAL NOVEL WAS BY GRACE ZARING STONE, AN AUTHOR of spare prose and cosmopolitan views. The Bitter Tea of General Yen had been published to glowing reviews in 1930—a year before Pearl S. Buck’s Good Earth. “A remarkable picture of white people in China, and wherever Miss Stone deals with them she is extraordinarily effective,” wrote The Nation. The book told the story of a young American woman who comes to Shanghai to marry a medical missionary and finds herself, through stress of civil war and circumstance, an uninvited guest in the spy-infested residence of General Yen, a Kuomintang leader fighting the Communists. For three days Megan Davis is in intimate contact with the cultured, brilliant, cynical general. She tries to save his concubine from the inevitable penalty for treason and to save Yen from the encircling Communists. An American named Jones counterbalances Megan as a Machiavellian figure whose chosen vocation is to bankroll the civil war and advise General Yen.
When a railway car stashed with money to pay his mercenary army is waylaid by Yen’s enemies, the general finds himself powerless. Aware that Megan has fallen in love with him, he nevertheless commits suicide by poisoning his own tea. Megan and Jones escape to Shanghai by boat, she much less sure of herself and of Christian ethics as a cure-all for the world. As Jones tells her, “Yen was a great guy. He said we never really die, only change. Maybe he’s the wind that’s pushing the sail now and playing around your hair.”
Capra not only fell in love with Stone’s story of people from alien cultures coming together, clashing, and falling in love, but saw its screen version as a chance finally to earn a Best Director Academy Award. Constance Bennett, who had starred in Capra’s latest film, American Madness, was set to play Megan, when he cast Stanwyck. “The missionary was a well-bred, straightlaced New England young lady, externally frigid but internally burning with her ‘call,’” he would write in his autobiography. “Casting this part was easy—Barbara Stanwyck.” So was the role of Jones. In a New York play, Capra had seen Walter Connolly and immediately decided he should play the fat, wheezy cynic who sells his deadly talents to the highest bidder.
General Yen was another matter.
The realism of sound aroused fierce demands for stricter censorship. The transplanted playwrights, short-story writers, and novelists writing talkies were accustomed to the freedom of the stage and of publishing and tended to write screenplays with much of the same freedom. But
sound gave ammunition to procensorship pressure groups. What had been a pantomime of hints, winks, and allusions in silent movies was shockingly amplified when words matched the action.
The detailed listing of “don’ts” and “be carefuls” of the revised 1930 Production Code included miscegenation. If the studios pledged that their movies would never show “any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette, any inference of sex perversion, white slavery, sex hygiene and venereal diseases, and children’s organs,” they also agreed not to show love relationships between people of different races. While the code was more often honored in the breach than in the observance, this was one taboo that nobody dared infringe. Miscegenation statues forbidding and declaring invalid marriages between persons of different color were on the books in thirty states, including California.
In 1916, DeMille had starred Fannie Ward and Sessue Hayakawa in The Cheat, the story of a society woman who gambles away Red Cross funds entrusted to her, borrows $10,000 from a wealthy
Japanese, and is forced by the exigencies of the plot to behave for most of the film like a vamp. But that was before Mary Pickford’s Nevada “quickie” divorce from Owen Moore and her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks without waiting the full year required by California law shocked the country. It was before Charlie Chaplin was caught with underage girls, before the California State Board of Pharmacy revelation that over five hundred film personalities were on its rolls as drug addicts, and before the 1924 sex-orgy-with-murder-trial of Fatty Arbuckle that gave churchmen, clubwomen, schoolteachers, and editorial writers the chance to inveigh against the new Sodom on the Pacific.
In self-defense, the studio chiefs had hired Will Hays, the Presbyterian elder and Indiana politician, and created the Association of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America—better known as the Hays Office. Howard Hawks was forced to cast Myrna Loy as a Chinese woman in A Girl in Every Port so Victor McLaglan could kiss her. As Capra tried to decide how to shape The Bitter Tea of General Yen, the newly organized Catholic Legion of Decency pushed for a tougher code.
As Barbara knew from her tough-dames flicks, the trick for producers and directors was to walk right up to the don’t line while suggesting in their advertising that they were crossing it. Capra protested that what he didn’t want was a well-known star made up as an Asian while knowing a Caucasian in makeup was the only solution. After seeing several actors, he chose Nils Asther, a tall, blue-eyed Swedish homosexual whose impassive good looks usually had him cast as exotic, often royal, romantic figures.
Almost deported six months earlier for working on a tourist visa, Asther conveniently married Vivian Duncan of the Duncan Sisters, divorcing her several months later. He was a portrait painter on his days off, and had been Greta Garbo’s leading man in The Single Standard. To the delight of the film crew, Garbo told him during a kissing scene, “Don’t kiss me so hard! I’m not one of your sailors!” Asther spoke a slightly pedantic English that as much as his imperturbable face pleased Capra.
Blue eyes photographed steel-gray in black-and-white. Working with the studio makeup artist, Capra and Joe Walker covered Asther’s upper eyelids with smooth, round, false “skin” and clipped his eyelashes to one-third their natural length. The stiff upper eyelids kept his eyes in a permanent, half-closed position. On the screen, he looked strange and decisively not Caucasian. Wearing a uniform or a Mandarin wardrobe and adapting a long, slow walk with arms moving back and forth parallel with each stride, the handsome Swede was metamorphosed into a stunningly cultured, mysterious, and ruthless General Yen.
Exposing his denuded eyes to the glare of studio lights, however, nearly blinded him. Studio doctors ordered him locked up in a dark dressing room between shots and insisted that he wear dark glasses during rehearsals. Despite the precautions, he suffered acute pain throughout the filming. Doctors administered compresses, eyedrops, and painkillers after each exposure of Asther’s nearly eyelashless eyes to the sun arcs. Capra and Cohn congratulated themselves on their own cleverness. Who could object when what anyone would see on the screen was Barbara Stanwyck kissing a white man in makeup?
The Megan Stanwyck and Capra created on the screen hovers disturbingly between missionary rectitude and unseemly yearnings. Megan is both repelled and attracted to Yen, and, in Capra’s changed ending, the general commits suicide rather than live with the humiliation of sexual rejection. “Any revulsion would be within herself,” said Barbara of Megan. “At least that is how I felt—how could I be attracted. How could I?”
It was only a year earlier that Capra had taken off for Europe after Barbara had refused to divorce and marry him, and, on the rebound, had married Lucille. To show her attraction to the general, Capra invented a disturbing sexual dream sequence that didn’t exist in the novel. Caught in Joe Walker’s most sensuous camera movements, Megan dreams that a handsome, masked stranger comes to her bed. For a quick cut Yen turns into a westernized lover. A second later, her erotic dream turns into nightmare as she realizes the clawed and diabolic stranger is General Yen. Was Capra exorcising his own passions for Barbara? The dream-hallucination scene would remain a unique attempt at illustrating unconscious desire in his career.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen was the only Capra film until Lost Horizon in 1937 not set in America. The film inaugurated New York’s Radio City Music Hall as a movie theater on January 11, 1933. Over 10 million Americans were out of work—there would be 14.5 million unemployed by midsummer—and in its review of the picture the New York Times noted how the Music Hall management was agreeably surprised at the throngs for the initial performance: “Most of the lower-priced seats were filled before 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and later there were lines in the grand foyer and along the 50th Street side of the house awaiting admission. Even the loge chairs were well patronized.” Critics praised Capra for the sensuous atmospherics, Stanwyck for her portrayal of the prim Miss Megan, and Asther for his exotic Yen, but called the story of forbidden love and suicide as implausible as it was entertaining. Variety warned that “seeing a Chinaman attempting to romance with a pretty and supposedly decent young American white woman is bound to evoke adverse reaction.”
The film was not a success, and Capra would have to wait until It Happened One Night before he won his first Oscar. Scheduled for at least a two-week run, Bitter Tea was pulled from Radio City after one week.
“The story was far ahead of its time in that the missionary comes to respect the ‘heathen’ attitudes of the Oriental,” Barbara would say forty years later. “Before the General drinks his poisoned tea, she touches him in farewell—and worse—actually kisses his hand. His hand! Women’s groups all over the country protested, wrote letters to exhibitors, saying we were condoning miscegenation.” Barbara was under the impression that Bitter Tea was banned in Britain and the Commonwealth, when it fact it was passed by the British Board of Censors after a few cuts were made and also approved by the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board. Barbara no doubt got the impression of racial censorship after Columbia passed along an Australian scandal sheet’s attack on the film. Calling it a “detestable” story of “a loathsome Chinese bandit pawing and mauling a white woman,” Truth deplored the fact that it had been passed “by the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board without the slightest misgiving, apparently.”
ZANUCK ASSIGNED STANWYCK TO STAR IN A WOMEN’S PRISON YARN that stands the woman-redeeming-the-man conventions on its head. In her tough, no-nonsense style, Barbara plays a gorgeous bank robber and Preston Foster a reformer-evangelist she gets even with. After she accuses him of frustrating a jailbreak in which two of her friends are killed, she loses her temper, pulls a gun from her handbag, and shoots him. Ladies They Talk About had two directors—Howard Bretherton and William Keighley. Bretherton made over a hundred Β movies between 1926 and 1952 and reached a measure of fame as William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd’s favorite director. Keighley was a painstaking company craftsman who spent his twenty-year career at Warners. Togeth
er or separately, they surrounded Stanwyck with a motley crew of sashaying, conceited, jealous fellow prisoners and added domestic touches to life in the “Big House.” The convicts’ frank man-hunger got the Ladies They Talk About into trouble with the Hays Office.
Feminist film historians would come to see Barbara Stanwyck as a victim of the Depression screen smut and cite Baby Face, a nervy Zanuck programmer, as the most exploitative of the string of early 1930s Stanwyck movies. But Barbara was an inventive partner in the sleaze.
Notes kept by writer Howard Smith of a November 1932 story conference show how he, Zanuck, and Stanwyck decided to start the movie with a zinger: Baby Face’s father should force her to have sex with different men.
Smith wrote to Zanuck:
Following the conference with contract star Barbara Stanwyck, I am sending you this note to remind you of the things she suggested, and which you suggested during this conference, for amplification and improvement of the story.
The idea of [sic] Baby Face’s father beats her and forces her into a room where he knows a guy is waiting to spend the night with her—forces her into the room and turns the key in the lock after her. This is planted to definitely establish dialogue at the scene where the young banker asks Barbara Stanwyck to let him have the money he had given her in order to save him from prison.
Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler became reich chancellor of Germany. The next day, the new president informed the nation he was calling for a special session of Congress and that the next four days were to be holidays for all banks and financial institutions. By June FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act was helping Hollywood by sanctioning certain monopoly practices. Darryl Zanuck was sure Warners had weathered the Depression. When the Academy and Price Waterhouse told the company to restore salaries, however, Harry Warner refused.