by Axel Madsen
A mixture of screwball farce and radical politics, this early road movie was Stanwyck’s first screen comedy. The director was Sidney Lanfield, a former jazz musician and gag writer whose claim to fame would be the Basil Rathbone version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. In Red Salute, Barbara is the leftist daughter of an arch-conservative general. To bring her to her senses and cool her passion for a college pacifist, the general (Purnell Pratt) arranges to have her kidnapped and dropped off in Mexico. There, she meets Robert Young, an American soldier on leave. The two of them get passably drunk. By the time the soldier has come to his sober senses, he has unwittingly deserted, smashed a government car, run the border back into the United States, and finds himself driving toward California with a girl whose politics he can’t stand, who loathes the sight of a uniform, and can’t wait to get back to her campus agitator boyfriend. Hardie Albright, who in The Purchase Price had filled the role of Barbara’s son, was her boyfriend.
The “Red” in the title intimidated some distributors, and when the film was released in October 1935 it was banned in several cities for the way it made fun of politics. United Artists changed the title and rereleased it as Runaway Daughter; The picture found one enthusiastic reviewer in Britain. Graham Greene was The Spectator’s new film critic. Red Salute, or Arms and the Girl as it was titled in England, was “one of the best comedies of the screen since It Happened One Night,” the novelist wrote. “Miss Stanwyck as the malicious-tongued aristocratic Red and Mr. Robert Young as the reckless irritated private soldier give admirable performances.”
ON NOVEMBER 9, 1935, BARBARA FILED FOR DIVORCE. STILL PROtective of Frank’s fragile ego, she charged him with harassing her about “trivial matters.” She asked for custody of Dion and in her complaint said a property settlement had been reached.
The Fays signed a predivorce settlement December 31. The New Year’s Eve agreement gave Barbara full custody of Dion and Frank twice-a-week visiting rights. Frank relinquished all claims to the house in Brentwood. The divorce was granted six weeks later.
Six months later the Internal Revenue Service garnisheed her wages for nonpayment of her and Frank’s joint taxes. They had been a married couple, filing joint returns when Frank had neglected to pay the taxes she had set aside and told him to pay on her considerable earnings. Since he was unemployed in 1936, the government attached her earnings.
Comedians had their fun with the divorce.
Ed Wynn said, “The second nicest thing Frank Fay ever did was to marry Barbara Stanwyck. The nicest thing he ever did was to divorce Barbara Stanwyck.” At the 1936 Friars Club roundtable, Jackie Gleason roasted Humphrey Bogart for his performance of the vicious, inhuman Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest by saying, “Bogart played a real creep, he must have studied Frank Fay for weeks.” When Bogart, Milton Berle, and Frank discussed a new play and Fay knocked every performance, Bogey turned to him and said, “Frank, the way you find fault, you’d think there was a reward for it.”
In a postmortem to the divorce, the Hollywood Citizen reported that Frank had ordered his attorney, Hy Schwartz, to hire three private detectives to tail his wife. Frank’s jealousy didn’t end with the divorce. He began using his visitation rights to Dion to call at odd hours. When he was drunk in New York, he would call and plead with Barbara to forgive him. Harry Golden, the cigar-chomping wit and ghostwriter for politicians, would recall agreeing to let Fay dial Stanwyck in Los Angeles and pay for the call later. “He would go on binges, work himself into a crying jag, and then beg to use the phone to see if she would take him back.” After a while Barbara refused to so much as speak to her former husband. “She loathed him,” Oscar Levant would remember, adding that he always felt guilty about having been the catalyst to the Fay-Stanwyck romance.
Barbara felt empty, second-rate. Divorce was so common. She had allowed Frank to dictate her behavior and feelings, allowed herself to be bullied and misused. She was too angry, too proud, and too rich to ask for child support. Fay only called when he was drunk. Barbara refused to let him see Dion. When Frank was out of town and called to talk to Dion, she handed the phone to the boy. Fay complained to Schwartz: “All I get for a hundred bucks a call is ‘Hello, Dad’ and dead air!” His lawyer contacted Barbara’s attorney, who retorted that Frank was always inebriated when he called and therefore a threat to the child’s welfare. She sold the Brentwood house for $80,000 and moved permanently to Northridge. She barred Frank from the ranch and was eventually hauled to court to show cause why her former husband should not see their son.
HER EARLY LIFE HAD BEEN STRUGGLES AND SUSPENDED HOPES. SHE had trained herself to look for the positive side. Now, at twenty-eight, she was alone but able to be herself for the first time, in charge of her life and her career. She was not overanxious about her adopted son and easily convinced herself that what the boy needed most was stability. She was more than happy to leave him in the care of his nannies. Uncle Buck McCarthy came with her to the ranch, and for a while Byron came to stay. Her brother had grown into a quiet, handsome man, whose hair turned snow-white when he was twenty-six. Something of a daydreamer, he had little of his sister’s ambition and eventually found a career as a film extra. When attending social functions was mandatory, she went with Byron—a mystery man in her life to columnists until their sibling relationship was explained.
The abutting Marx and Stanwyck ranches totaled 140 acres of dry California grasslands, and Barbara and Zeppo went into business together to breed thoroughbreds. Their corporate name was Marwyck.
Knowing that Uncle Buck would look after her interests, Barbara made him the boss of the ranch hands and stable boys.
Zeppo was doing well as a talent agent. William Wilkinson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, took sixteen-year-old Julia Turner to Marx, who, after changing her first name to Lana, got her a walk-on in Mervyn LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget, the film that turned her into “The Sweater Girl.” Zep and Marion took it upon themselves to arrange dates for Barbara. She told them she wasn’t interested. They kept trying, setting up dates with Moss Hart, newly arrived in Hollywood, and others.
RKO, THE “BIGGEST LITTLE MAJOR OF THEM ALL,” OFFERED Stanwyck movies that promised to be of a higher caliber than the Warner Brothers quickies. Under the flaring lightning bolts and flaming radio beacons of the RKO logo, the Gower Street studio announced a procession of “big pictures,” guaranteed to “electrify the industry,” including Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat and Barbara Stanwyck in Annie Oakley. The publicity release didn’t mention that Stanwyck got the part in the sunny costume picture because Jean Arthur had turned it down. Barbara didn’t care.
Constance Bennett was RKO’s brightest star, and its stable of contractées included Ann Harding, who seven years ago had shared the stage with Rex Cherryman in The Trial of Mary Dugan. Barbara knew Hermes Pan, the choreographer of the studio’s song-and-dance shows, from her chorus-girl days. Pan never worked out routines on paper, just remembered everything in his head and told directors what angles to shoot from. Barbara sneaked in on the double soundstages where he was rehearsing Top Hat. The sight took her breath away. In the huge white Art Moderne recreation of Venice with canals and danceable bridges, Astaire, Pan, and Rogers went through “The Piccolino” number. Pan rehearsed with a huge mirror instead of a camera. Hermes, who danced as well as Astaire, shaped the ensemble numbers while Astaire worked out his dances with Rogers. Then with a playback of Irving Berlin’s tunes, the two men refined the numbers together. With Fred, Pan was Ginger; with Ginger he was Fred.
Barbara’s feet were tingling. At the commissary, she and the choreographer agreed they would try to work together if either of them had a chance to recommend the other.
Annie Oakley was the saga of Phoebe Anne Oakley Mozee, who learned to shoot with a muzzle-loader in the Ohio backwoods in the 1860s and whose story was set to music by Irving Berlin and immortalized in Annie Get Your Gun. Annie was still in her teens when she beat Frank Butler, the celebrated marks
man, in an all-comers challenge match in Cincinnati. Frank and Phoebe married and toured with Buffalo Bill’s Original Wild West Show. Annie Oakley’s director was George Stevens, RKO’s fair-haired boy who had honed his talents on shoestring productions and was enjoying his first hit—Alice Adams with Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray.
Stanwyck’s Annie is no gawky, pigtailed yahoo, but an intelligent farm girl competing in a male world. The screenplay by Joel Sayre and John Twist had her win Buffalo Bill’s sharpshooting “Male Against Female Titanic Battle” contest without losing her man. Says Melvyn Douglas sweetly: “I don’t care anymore who wins. I know you can beat me, and I’m proud of you.” The script was only partly finished when Stevens started shooting. The director improvised as he went along—and drove Barbara crazy with his slow, thoughtful work method and his long silences before he answered a question. If the final film paid too much attention to Annie’s romantic problems, Chief Sitting Bull, played with comic virility by a superbly surly Indian billed as Chief Thunderbird, stole the picture and had 1935 audiences screaming with laughter.
NONE OF STANWYCK’S 1936 FILMS WERE AS GOOD AS ANNIE OAKley, but they kept her working at Century-Fox, RKO, and MGM. A Message to Garcia was one of Darryl Zanuck’s sillier endeavors after he merged Twentieth Century with Fox Film. The capital foundation of the merger gave Zanuck financial clout—and a salary of $260,000 a year. Instead of making himself production chief as he had been at Warners, he made himself a full-sized mogul, and the films he produced or wrote under one or another of his pseudonyms made money. To feed its National Theaters and Fox West Coast chains with thirty-five movies a year, the new company hired stars left and right to supplement its few in-house contractées, Alice Faye, Henry Fonda, John Boles, and Shirlëy Temple. Stanwyck was quickly signed, along with Loretta Young and newcomer Tyrone Power.
Zanuck’s fondness for directors who were “absolute bastards” made him keep a pair of Fox’s no-nonsense craftsmen, the boozing John Ford and the cheerful George Marshall. Both knew how to knock out three or four films a year. Marshall was assigned to A Message to Garcia.
Barbara read Retired Lieutenant Andrew S. Rowan’s bestselling memoirs of his adventures as presidential emissary and spy in Cuba in 1898. John Boles was cast as Rowan, Barbara as a Cuban nobleman’s daughter who falls in love with Rowan, Wallace Beery as the soldier of fortune, and Enrique Acosta as General Garcia. Harry Brand, the studio’s publicity chief, waxed effusively about Stanwyck’s beautiful spy. Known as the “herald of hyperbole” for his enthusiastic news releases, Brand invited the Hollywood press corps to the set to see Barbara crawl through the backlot jungle. Soldier of fortune Beery, however, ran away with the picture.
Barbara was back at RKO to star with Gene Raymond and Robert Young in an affable marital comedy that promised more than it delivered. Leigh Jason, who directed several agreeable but negligible comedies, was in charge of The Bride Walks Out. Boy (Raymond) and girl (Stanwyck) are married and trying to live on his $35-a-week salary. Girl likes pretty clothes and buys them, so first thing you know they’re in trouble and headed for divorce. Rich man (Young) is ready to lead our young lady into the lap of luxury when husband starts off on a dangerous mission to South Africa. Wife sees the light. Reunion. Fade-out. Variety said Stanwyck was a little hard to believe, but called The Bride Walks Out “a homey picture in which nothing happens but there’s a lot of pleasant chatter about it all.”
Barbara signed a one-picture deal with MGM to star in His Brother’s Wife with Robert Taylor. Taylor was Metro’s new matinee idol, and Zep and Marion took it upon themselves to have Barbara meet her new costar in a more congenial atmosphere than a studio office. They invited Barbara to a dinner dance at the Café Trocadero, the new Sunset Strip supper club. They had someone they wanted her to meet. Who?
R.T., they said.
The gorgeous young actor with the coal-black hair, blue eyes, and double eyelashes was seated at their reserved table when the Marxes and Barbara got there. Zeppo and Marion soon made themselves scarce so the two stars could chat. When Taylor stood up to invite her to dance, she realized how short he was. She declined, saying she was waiting for a Mr. Artique. He sat down again, puzzled. She said perhaps she wasn’t pronouncing the name right.
“Artique … Artique,” he repeated. His face lit up. “That’s me,” he laughed. “R.T. Get it?”
The next morning, she received a box of long-stemmed roses with a card from Taylor thanking her for “a thoroughly delightful evening.”
12
ARLY
STARDOM HAD COME TO ROBERT TAYLOR IN MAGNIFICENT OBSESsion, his ninth movie, in which he played the doctor he had once wanted to be. Directed by the urbane John Stahl and costarring Irene Dunne, the movie version of Lloyd Douglas’s international bestseller had Taylor as a physician questioning his own values after accidentally blinding the story’s heroine. “We have abandoned the dangerous sheik and the man who socks women and the sophisticated lover,” wrote Adela Rogers St. Johns in the first magazine assessment of the twenty-four-year-old prince charming. “Our girls and women have declared for Robert Taylor, and that is as important an indication of our return to old-fashioned femininity as was the return of the trailing skirt, the soft girls, and the picture hat.” What charmed St. Johns when she met him in person was the fact that his terrific success hadn’t spoiled him. “You wish instantly that he was your younger brother or your son or your sweetheart or something. Dick Barthelmess had that same tug at your heartstrings. No one has had it since, until young Taylor came along.”
Summing up, she said Taylor was someone for young women to hang their dreams upon: “He is the young man they hope to meet some day, and marry and set up housekeeping for and with. I think they must be rather nice clean fine dreams somehow, or Robert Taylor wouldn’t fit into them. For he belongs to romance, not to the day of sex drama and melodrama.” Overseas, he was becoming so big so fast that the London Observer declared, “1936 will go down as the year of
Edward VIII, the Spanish war and Robert Taylor.”
If anyone typified the Hollywood golden age it was this matinee idol whose name had been changed from Spangler Brugh the moment he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February 1934 and who remained under contract to MGM longer than anyone else. Except for loanouts, Robert Taylor never worked for another studio until 1960. The so-called standard seven-year studio contract was the norm and only Charles Boyer, Cary Grant, and a few others insisted on signing for just one picture at a time. The contract, with options, gave the studio all the advantages. It allowed the studio both to terminate the relationship every six months and, if the newcomer was promising, to lock him or her in for seven years. The studio usually renewed its option twice a year, usually with an increase in salary. “Talent”—actors, directors, and any other people considered valuable enough to be under contract—benefited from the security of continual employment. The advantage for the studios was that the system allowed management to favor those who behaved. Free-lancing was not without its downside for an actor. No one studio, for example, had a vested, long-term interest in building up hopscotching Stanwyck.
Barbara may have been troubled in her relationships with others, uncomfortable with intimacy, but she was never assailed by profound, existential self-doubt, never questioned her ability to survive. Bob Taylor was different. As much as she liked being in charge of her own momentum, Bob’s temperament was suited to the strictures of the studio system. He was a mama’s boy who was comfortable with being told what to do. Still, if there was one thing he admired in Stanwyck, it was her free-lancing. He was not alone. Joan Crawford, under contract to MGM since 1925, admired Barbara’s independence. Conveniently forgetting she was getting $100,000 per picture, Joan complained to Barbara, “It’s like a one-sided marriage. What the hell do I get out of it?”
A few actresses were leading the rebellion against what all contractées hated most—the self-perpetuating nature of the studio contracts.
Following a few poor decisions by several stars, the studio chiefs had become frightened and proclaimed that no artist, no matter how big, had the right to decide what films he or she wanted to work in. The penalty for disobedience was, as always, suspension, which meant the particular artist was declared persona non grata on his or her home lot and forbidden employment elsewhere. The suspended person’s salary was stopped and the number of weeks or months of suspension tagged to the end of the running contract. At Warner Brothers, “doing solitary” meant suspension plus roles in “triple Β pictures.”
Shooting The Secret Bride two stages away from the Bette Davis-Humphrey Bogart starrer Marked Woman in 1935, Stanwyck had been eyewitness and cheerleader to Davis’s mutiny. After being denied better scripts and cast as a lady lumberjack, Bette Davis had revolted.
Despite dire warnings from fellow contractées, agents, and lawyers, Bette had fled to Vancouver with her husband, Harmon Nelson, Jr., crossed Canada to Montreal, and sailed for England, all to avoid being served injunctions by Warners’ lawyers. In London, she signed with Anglo-Italian producer Ludovico Toeplitz, who caved in when pressure built from Hollywood and reneged on his contract with her. Warners served her with an injunction forbidding her from rendering her services anywhere and prepared for a court battle.
Jack Warner came to London with William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers treated Davis as a wayward schoolgirl in need of a spanking. Warner had Alexander Korda testify on his behalf, and the court turned down Davis’s argument that the self-perpetuating nature of industry contracts made them into “life sentences.” Warners won a three-year injunction which, if the studio chose to pick up all the options, put Bette into golden bondage until 1942. The injunction was valid in Britain only, but Bette knew when she was defeated.