by Axel Madsen
Zanuck was furious. He had promised his people to restore their salaries on the date designated by the Academy and Price Waterhouse and in a violent confrontation with Harry Warner refused to renege. It was a rude awakening. Zanuck had come to believe he was the crown prince. Now Harry told him he was just another studio employee.
Zanuck’s fight with the brothers Warner over restoring studio salaries came to a head during the filming of Baby Face. Stanwyck was teamed again with George Brent and directed by Alfred E. Green. Lily Powers is an ambitious working woman who uses her wiles to climb the corporate ladder in a New York bank. Brent is the bank president, Donald Cook the nice young man she tosses aside, and Robert Barrat plays her father, the owner of a shady speakeasy. A big, shy newcomer from Winterset, Iowa, whose name had only recently been changed from Marion Morrison to John Wayne, played the assistant bank manager.
Lily uses the young cashier engaged to marry the first vice president’s daughter to attract the attention of the vice president and, later, the president himself. After she threatens to sell her story to the tabloids, she is shipped to Paris to work at the bank’s branch office. When President Brent comes to Paris, he becomes sufficiently smitten to marry her. Back in New York, he embezzles funds to keep her in cash, jewelry, and furs. Although she knows she must hand back the $500,000 in cash if her husband is to avoid being discovered and convicted, she decided to leave for Paris again. In postproduction, Baby Face ran into demands for stricter censorship rules.
Zanuck was working on the picture when he tore up his contract in his dispute with Harry Warner. Afraid of taking sides, gossip columnists suggested the Warner-Zanuck row was over Baby Face. Cuts and a rewritten ending allowed Baby Face to slip under the wire before a revised Production Code went into effect.
Zanuck walked out cold on his $5,000-a-week WB job. Everybody wanted him. Louis B. Mayer invited him to join MGM, Harry Cohn cornered him at a preview, but it was the canny Joe Schenck who came up with the offer Zanuck couldn’t refuse. “You and I will start a producing company,” said Schenck, who was also becoming restless as United Artists president. They’d call their new company Twentieth Century. To sign the deal, Schenck handed Zanuck a check for $100,000. Barbara would have loved to follow, but she couldn’t walk out of her Warners contract—if nothing else her fights with Cohn had taught her that lesson. She had fought with Zanuck over Illicit, So Big, The Purchase Price, and Ladies They Talk About, but with him gone she lost her best front-office support.
STANWYCK CHANGED AGENTS DURING THE SUMMER OF 1933. After four years with Arthur Lyons, she opted for Zeppo Marx, who after serving as his brothers’ butt decided being a talent agent was more fun.
Adolph (Harpo), Leonard (Chico), Julius (Groucho), Milton (Gummo), and young Herbert (Zeppo) had honed their madcap humor in vaudeville and in 1929 switched to movies and made five moderately popular Paramount comedies, including Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and the now classic Duck Soup. Chico specialized in Italian dialect routines, Harpo performed in pantomime and played the harp, and Groucho was the leering, bushy-browed, fast-quipping, wisecracking leader, leaving little for Gummo and Zeppo to do. Taking pity on Gummo, the brothers had made him their business manager.
In 1928, Zeppo married Marion Benda, née Bimberg. He was getting less money than any of the brothers, and yet Marion and he lived better than any of them. Zep had none of Groucho’s needs for racing to New York for intellectual stimulus. He had none of Chico’s womanizing habits, but all of his gambling addiction. Zep’s aggressive card sense made him a terror of the studio bosses; in one all-night poker game he won $22,000 from Paramount’s studio chief, B. P. Schulberg. Claiming he was “sick and tired of being the stooge,” the youngest son of Minnie and Simon “Frenchy” Marx’s sons left the team after Duck Soup.
Zep got the idea of becoming a talent agent by watching Myron Selznick wheel and deal for the Marx Brothers. Selznick handled writers, directors, stars—even Paramount’s costume designer Travis Ban-ton—and exploited any advantage to negotiate lucrative deals that made his client and him rich and the studios less so.
Myron and his younger brother, David, were sons of a Russian Jewish emigrant who made a shaky fortune in the chaotic early years of the picture business. When Lewis J. Selznick lost it all, his boys vowed vengeance on the studio heads who had contributed to their father’s downfall. Revenge and proving everybody wrong were what motivated much of Myron’s meteoric career as a superagent and David’s as a movie tycoon. Zep could think of no greater thrill than to become an agent of Myron Selznick’s class. In 1933, Zep bought a partnership in the Bren-Orsatti Agency. There was no Bren, only the Orsatti brothers, Victor and Frank. Victor was on the phone all day doing the contracts his feisty brother initiated over cobb salads at studio commissaries and the Brown Derby. Their father, Morris Orsatti, was serving a twenty-year sentence for attempting bribery of a federal agent, and Frank was a former bootlegger and real-estate agent rumored to have connections with the Mafia. Budd Schulberg called Frank Orsatti the characteristic “agent pimp with a touch of Little Caesar. “
Georges Kaufman and Moss Hart gave Zep permission to use their names as clients so that other writers would consider signing up with him. Two years later, Gummo became his kid brother’s East Coast representative when Bren-Orsatti opened a New York office and made plans to represent stage talents. Learning a few tricks from Myron
Selznick, Zeppo threatened MGM’s Irving Thalberg with joining Chico, Harpo, and Groucho in the upcoming A Night at the Opera unless the studio chief hired one of his clients. It is not known whether the prospect of Zep as a straight man so ruined Thalberg’s hopes for the new Marx Brothers films that he gave in, but the threat improved Zep’s aura as a talent agent.
Compared to his brothers, Zep was good-looking. Barbara would remember him as a bodybuilding enthusiast showing off his bulging, rippling muscles and his wife as a vivacious brunette of exquisite taste. Both were fierce tennis players and robust social drinkers who indulged themselves by buying a yacht and, under Marion’s supervision, redecorating their ranch on the far side of the San Fernando Valley. “It was the prettiest house I’ve ever seen,” Chico’s daughter Maxine recalled. “Marion designed it from a movie she saw. It wasn’t ostentatious, but the house was totally charming.”
Stanwyck was a coup for Marx and the Orsatti brothers. Frank Orsatti convinced Barbara she needed a permanent stand-in and insisted the studios use a young actress named Jean Chatburn as Stanwyck’s double and that she be part of each contract. Next, he married Chat-burn. Shortly after Barbara signed up, a saxophone player who didn’t think he could act also became a client. In less than six years, Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray would be the highest-paid Hollywood stars.
Without Zanuck in her corner and without any input from Frank, Barbara made five movies for Warners over the next year and a half. In Ever in My Heart, she played a patriot who marries a German spy. The story was by Beulah Marie Dix, a historian and screenwriter who with William DeMille, Cecil B’s brother, had founded the Famous Players-Lasky scenario department in 1916. Directed by Archie Mayo, this heavy romantic drama had Otto Kruger as a German-born college professor deported during World War I. Barbara is his American wife who discovers he is a spy, kills him, and, to prevent secrets from reaching the enemy, commits suicide.
Eight years later when versatility was paying off and Edith Head created twenty-five gowns for her for The Lady Eve, Barbara would have little use for Ever in My Heart and other “women programmers” of the deep Depression years. “Only once did I seem to be setting into a groove and that was in the days when I was under regular contract at Warners,” she would say in 1944 when she was the highest-paid woman in the United States. “I played a series of parts that were much alike—women who were suffering and poor, and living amid sloppy surroundings.”
She lost a pair of plum parts in film versions of top Broadway plays. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart had satirized Hollywood in their 19
30 smash hit, Once in a Lifetime, and when Universal Pictures bought the screen rights, Stanwyck tried for the movie version. Aline MacMahon, the actress Warners considered among the ten smartest, in a class with Katharine Hepburn and Helen Hayes, got the part in the razor-sharp, mad comedy about the havoc the coming of sound wreaked on Hollywood. Next, Cohn announced Stanwyck would be loaned to Paramount to star in the screen adaptation of the S. N. Behrman play Brief Moment. The leading lady’s role as a nightclub singer was right up Barbara’s alley. But Carole Lombard, who was hitting her stride as the stylish, wisecracking heroine of screwball comedies, got the part.
FRANK CONJURED UP A SCHEME TO REBOUND ON BROADWAY, CONvinced that what his wife and the movie people didn’t understand was his need for a live audience. His comedy routines fed on audience reactions, his phrasing, looks, and timing on laughter and applause. Humor was delicate. A titter in the tenth row could string out a line, belly laughs in the balcony sent him off in new ad-libbing. Jokes wilted on a soundstage, where a director commanded dead silence by yelling “Action!” or asked for a tenth take of the quip. To help save his and her own sanity, Barbara sank her first important money into Tattle Tales, a musical revue Fay could star in.
The timing was wrong. Audiences with money to spend deserted vaudeville for the all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing movies. But Frank was sure that, like Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker, he could still pull them in.
Tattle Tales went on its pre-Broadway tour in April 1933. Fay and Nick Copeland wrote twenty-nine scenes, Copeland performing in some of them. The show featured eighteen performers and, in a spoof on Hollywood, a song called “I’ll take an Option on You.” The road reviews were not unacceptable, and Tattle Tales was scheduled for a June 11 New York opening at the Broadhurst Theater on Street. To give the opening a lift, and despite the earlier criticism for capitalizing on her film success, Barbara joined the Tattle Tales cast with a scene from The Miracle Woman. The premiere audience and critics suggested a summer-long run was in store for Tattle Tales. Two weeks later, Baby Face opened at New York’s Strand Theatre to sensational reviews. “Any hotter than this for public showing would call for an asbestos audience blanket,” winked Variety.
The month of July turned out to be the hottest on record in New York, and Tattle Tales wilted as the heat drove audiences from the non-air-conditioned Broadhust. The Frank Fay show closed after twenty-eight days. As if it wasn’t humiliating enough for Frank to see Tattle Tales fold, his wife’s other Warner Brothers quickie, Ever in My Heart, opened three weeks later. “Barbara Stanwyck demonstrated that she is one of the first—the very first—actresses among the more exalted leading ladies in Hollywood,” wrote the New York World-Telegram.
In Barbara’s mind, the point of adopting little Dion had been to save the marriage. The point of Tattle Tales had been to save Frank’s career and her marriage. Since it did neither, she decided that from now on she would stay in California.
Stanwyck was also hitting her stride as an independent businesswoman. Disciplined and hardworking, she was the exception to the star system. No actress free-lanced as she did during the golden era. In the seven years since United Artists had brought her to Hollywood for The Locked Door; she had made seven films for Columbia, seven for Warners, and was soon to sign one-and two-picture deals with MGM, RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Paramount. She counted on Zep Marx for contractual fine points, Helen Ferguson for public relations, but she was her own judge on what to accept. Her assertiveness and business acumen would grow throughout her life, and in 1933 she found a revealing way of making a mark of her own. Nobody would have been astonished if she devoted her spare energies to the adoption of orphans or other studio-approved worthy causes. Bess Lasky, her former Malibu neighbor, worked to maintain a home where the many eager young women lured west by shady talent schools could escape the casting couches her husband and other producers so diligently set up in their offices. What interested Barbara, however, was not safeguarding the virtue of would-be actresses, but the advancement of young women in business. If businessmen had their Rotary Clubs, why couldn’t professional women have their support groups? Women in the professions shouldn’t hang back like privileged wives of successful businessmen, but try to extend their influence by seizing opportunities. Stanwyck became the founder of the Athena National Sorority, an organization for young businesswomen named after the Greek goddess of war, handicraft, and practical reason. Seven years later, the Athena Sorority boasted more than four hundred members.
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STANWYCK MADE FOUR WARNER BROTHERS PROGRAMMERS BACK-TO-back to pay for Tattle Tales. She was a fashion model in love with an older man in A Lost Lady and, like Crawford, got to change clothes every few minutes. The Baby Face writers, Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola, were responsible for the empty-headed adaptation of Willa Cather’s 1923 novel, Alfred E. Green for the direction. The film so outraged Cather that she wrote a clause into her will in 1943 forbidding any future dramatization of her novels.
Gambling Lady was Stanwyck’s first film with Joel McCrea. McCrea was twenty-nine, a tall, golden, athletic hunk with boyish charm and a winning personality. Born on Hollywood Boulevard, the “All-American Boy,” as William Hearst labeled him, was married to Frances Dee. Barbara and Joel liked each other and thought the chemistry between them was one of bread and butter rather than champagne and caviar. In Gambling Lady, directed by fanny-pinching Archie Mayo, she played the daughter of a professional cardsharp. The cinematographer was George Barnes, Joan Blondell’s husband and future cameraman of a pair of Alfred Hitchcock’s classics, Rebecca and Spellbound. The fast-paced Gambling Lady was smart entertainment for 1934.
The Secret Bride was spun from the same cloth as Forbidden and told the story of a district attorney secretly married to the daughter of a politician he is trying to impeach. Warren William played the D.A., Barbara the title role. There are three murders before she proves her father’s innocence. The director was William Dieterle, a refugee from Nazi Germany, former jeune premier and disciple of Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. Reduced to making schlock for Warners, Dieterle was the busiest director on the lot, turning out an astonishing fifteen films in four years. Whether he was shooting interiors or location work, he wore white gloves and never made a move unless his wife approved it astrologically.
The Woman in Red, a triumph of mise-en-scène over plot, completed her contract with Warner Brothers. Fresh from I Am a Thief, a Mary Astor-Ricardo Cortez programmer about murder on the Orient Express, Robert Florey, who was something of a specialist in chillers (.Murders in the Rue Morgue), directed the trite tale of love overcoming caste and scandal with bracing excitement. Members of the horsy set of Long Island and California raise plucked eyebrows when Stanwyck manages to marry Gene Raymond of a poor but polo-playing family. Things turn tricky when the new bride will either have to remain quiet and see a friend convicted of murder or, by admitting she was, however innocently, the woman in red who was on his yacht on the fatal night, clear him but risk wrecking her marriage. Despite Florey’s enthusiasm, Barbara’s heart was not in it. The shooting coincided with her worst fights with Frank.
Humiliated by his own stumbling, Frank lashed out. In November 1934, the press reported Frank’s altercation with MGM’s general studio manager Eddie Mannix over a table at the Brown Derby. Barbara was mortified.
Barbara might tell Frank she couldn’t imagine life without him, but his drinking and rages were sapping her strength. Making work her escape led to new brawls. Frank upbraided her for leaving at dawn, returning after dinner, and learning scripts until all hours of the night. He swore he would put an end to it and started calling Jack Warner to complain about the hours his wife was forced to put in. Whether Frank’s ultimate revenge was to see her fired or the studio had enough of his interfering, she was let go. “Frank Fay was causing so much trouble that the studio dropped me,” she would say forty-five years later. “There was a period when nothing came my way.�
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Depriving her of work, of what made her feel alive, broke the camel’s back. Laid-off Barbara, Frank, little Dion, and the nanny were at the pool when Frank became enraged because Barbara admitted she had gone to Minsky’s burlesque show with Zeppo and Marion Marx. Dion’s cries drove Frank wild, and he struck Barbara. She hit the ground.
That night she told him she wanted a divorce.
~ ~ ~
IN AUGUST 1935, BARBARA LEFT FRANK. TAKING DION AND HIS nanny with her, she found refuge near Zeppo and Marion Marx. She moved into a ranch in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley, thirty miles from Hollywood. The house was small, built in rough gray stone. The porch, with its rust-red flagstone floor, was as long as the house. The Marxes were a reassuring presence next door.
Barbara had never lived in the country, and there were days when the 160 acres of brush and rustling eucalyptus and nights of cicadas seemed to provide too much serenity. But it was what she needed. To columnists who asked why she was holed up in Northridge, she said, “Right now I don’t want people staring at me.”
The Marxes had horses. She could imagine her own stables, paddocks, and barns and Dion, going on four, learning to ride on his own little pony.
Zep and Marion were the kind of friends any woman divorcing after seven years would wish for. They were considerate without being overwhelming, solicitous without being intrusive, and by interesting her in the business of horse breeding took her mind off herself. They made her take up riding in a serious fashion. When, after an arduous weekend of training, Zep gave her a ring with a horseshoe of diamonds, she was so touched she wore it to work until directors asked her to take it off.
To have something to do while she sorted out her life, Barbara accepted when independent producer Edward Small offered her a part in a picture called Red Salute. Small worked with Joseph Schenck and had a hot little gangster flick called Let ‘Em Have It in release. He sent Barbara the script. Red Salute, she realized, was another facsimile of Capra’s It Happened One Night.