by Axel Madsen
Like Harry Cohn had done after Stanwyck’s insurrection five years earlier, Jack Warner bent over backward to forget and forgive when Bette returned. The publicity of her fight, however, paved the way for other court contests. But it would be 1944 before Olivia de Havilland won, on appeal, a California Superior Court ruling that time lost by a player put on suspension could not be added to a term contract after its expiration date.
ON THEIR SECOND DATE, BOB TOOK BARBARA AND DION TO THE Santa Monica pier. Barbara found Bob to be surprisingly normal, a small-town boy who took life as easily as it took him. Going out with the respectful and courteous Bob, four years younger than she, was such a change from her years with Frank Fay that she enjoyed their dates. She took him to meet Joan, still married to Franchot Tone and still living in regal splendor on Bristol Avenue in Brentwood. The country might be in the depths of the Depression, but Joan forcefully defended her lavish lifestyle. “I believe in the dollar, everything I have, I spend,” she said. The evenings on Bristol Avenue followed the same timetable—cocktails and dinner followed by a movie at Joan’s private screening room, nightcaps and chat around Bob on the piano.
Music was something that was part of him. He had started on the piano when he was twelve, had tried the saxophone, and settled on the cello in school. If anybody besides his parents had molded his life, he told Barbara, it was his music teacher, Hubert Gray, at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska. Taylor came to California to pursue music when Gray transferred to Pomona College in Claremont.
SPANGLER ARLINGTON BRUGH, BORN IN FILLEY, NEBRASKA, August 5, 1911, was the only son of a merchant turned country doctor and a woman with a weak heart. His father, Andrew Spangler Brugh, was a twenty-nine-year-old grain merchant of Pennsylvania Dutch stock who had come west and, in Filley, met eighteen-year-old Ruth Stanhope. The birth of their son almost cost Ruth her life. It revealed the fact that she had an incurable heart ailment. When doctors decided nothing could be done for her, Andrew decided to study medicine himself. At thirty, the grain merchant sold his successful business, moved his family to Kirksville, Missouri, and entered medical school. What takes most people eight years, he did in three. As a physician he specialized in heart diseases.
Arly, as everybody called their son, grew up ruled and cuddled by his debilitated mother. Ruth domineered both her husband and her son. She dressed Arly in velvet and soft white shirts that made classmates ridicule him. She was often too ill to care for her son, and Arly spent many quiet hours sitting in on lectures with his father.
“There are so many great men who are just country doctors, smalltown doctors,” he told Adela Rogers St. Johns. “They have so much understanding, so much strength. They give so much and help so many in trouble. My father was like that. I asked him one time what was the greatest study I could follow. And he just smiled at me and said, ‘Human nature.’”
At twelve, Arly decided he wanted to be a doctor—a surgeon if possible—and to specialize in childhood diseases. A year later, he was smitten by music, but never quite abandoned the idea of going to medical school. When Gray moved to Claremont, Arly persuaded his parents to give him a car so he could attend college there.
“I remember the day the professor told me he was accepting a teaching job at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and my whole world fell apart,” he told Barbara. Arly persuaded his mother to make the three-thousand-mile round-trip journey to the Los Angeles suburb with him and, once she had inspected the Pomona College campus, to allow him to enroll.
It was the first time Arly had been away from home. At eighteen, he was terribly handsome. His dark good looks made his classmates nickname him “The Sheik.” He was homesick, slow to make friends, and didn’t know anyone besides Gray.
The teacher was a stern taskmaster, quick to berate Arly for showing interest in anything but the cello. “He can be a concert performer,” said Gray. “He has tremendous talent. But he must stop monkeying around with this acting business. Dramatics! Such a waste of time.” MGM publicity would wax on the way young Robert Taylor struggled with himself, hard-pressed to decide whether he should make the cello his life or yield to the siren call of acting. His first school play role, in his senior year, was that of the once idealistic hero in R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, a play set in the British trenches of the Great War. Bob would never forget seeing the printed program, which coincidentally combined his mother’s maiden name with his:
Captain Stanhope Spangler Brugh
The Robert Taylor studio bio would tell how studio scout Ben Piazza was in the Pomona College auditorium that night and how a surprised Spangler Brugh was called to the phone the next day and asked to come to Hollywood for a screen test. In reality, it was Arly who pulled all the wires to get an audition. Joel McCrea was the most famous graduate of Pomona’s drama department, and Arly’s teacher wrote a letter of introduction. “I took Arlington out to MGM, where he made a test for a crime short with Virginia Bruce,” McCrea would remember.
Arly spent another year at Pomona. His parents came to California for his graduation in June 1933. Four months later, Dr. Brugh died.
RUTH BURIED HER HUSBAND IN NEBRASKA, MOVED TO Los ANGERS, and set up housekeeping for her son. Arly was twenty-two with a widow’s peak and a face so handsomely regular it looked as if he had undergone plastic surgery. He made a second screen test, this time at the Goldwyn Studios and, while he waited for a casting call, tried to enrich his acting skills at the Pasadena Playhouse, Southern California’s most exciting theater venue.
The Biltmore, El Capitan, Hollywood Playhouse, Mayan, Belasco, and, in season, the Hollywood Bowl were the locales for touring
Broadway productions, the Pasadena Playhouse the home for experimental and avant-garde drama. Besides reviving classics the Playhouse regularly offered new plays by unknown playwrights and conducted an acclaimed acting school. Its founder and director was Gilmor Brown, recently made California state supervisor for the Roosevelt administration’s Federal Theatre Project. The forty-six-year-old Brown was a notorious homosexual who immediately found an opening for Arly in his acting class, and in his experimental Playbox showcase. “Every year Gilmor Brown had a particular favorite, and during the early 1933-34 season Arlington Brugh was the one,” fellow neophyte actor Harry Hay would recall. “We all understood what it meant to be his protegée. A year later it was Tyrone Power.”
The Playhouse was an exciting place—seven hundred actors performed there over the years—but it didn’t pay. Brugh and Hay wanted to be in the movies. Harry, who was a few months younger than Arly and had come to Los Angeles at the age of seven, knew Hollywood was a party town. They got themselves invited to dance parties, costume parties, theme parties, pajama parties, and come-as-your-favorite-character parties. “We had no money, but an elderly gentleman took us to a gay and lesbian party at Mercedes De Acosta’s huge house in Brentwood,” Hay would remember. “She was the lover to the stars, Garbo and Dietrich were among her conquests, and was notorious for wearing pants and slicking back her black hair with brilliantine.” Arthur Treacher, the Englishman who had made his screen debut in a minor role opposite Stanwyck in Gambling Lady and between film jobs was active on the local stage, introduced them to the lively British colony. Arlington could recite Hugh Walpole’s poem “Make Me a Man” (“Blessed be all Sorrows, Torments, Hardships, Endurance that demand Courage … Blessed be these things; for of those things cometh the making of Man”) and blushed when Treacher introduced him to the famous homosexual poet and novelist. Being Gilmor Brown’s fair-haired boy meant rehearsing at the director’s home, where the Playbox Theatre was showcased. The day before rehearsals were to begin, however, Arly was asked to come to Culver City to meet Louis B. Mayer. The MGM boss studied the young man with a talent man’s shrewd eye and ordered a screen test.
Arly’s startling good looks photographed handsomely. In February 1934, Metro signed him to a $35-a-week, seven-year contract. Ida Koverman, Mayer’s secretary and confidante, changed Arly�
�s name—although Arly thought “Robert Taylor” terribly common for someone named Spangler Arlington Brugh. The studio put him in Oliver Tins-dell’s acting school and loaned him out to Fox for a role in Handy Andy, a star vehicle for Will Rogers full of cracker-barrel folk wisdom. When the studio bought the rights to S. J. and Laura Perelman’s Americans-in-Paris play All Good Americans a month later, Bob and fellow-newcomer Betty Furness starred in it in a summer charity production.
Bob was acutely conscious of his looks and couldn’t wait for rugged, brawny parts. The studio supervisors, if not L.B. himself, said, Yes sure, after the next one. Realizing that his well-bred, clean-cut persona made women swoon, they cast him in supporting roles in weepers like There’s Always Tomorrow and Society Doctor and romantic dramas like Times Square Lady, designed as a test for young talent.
Bob might have resented the pretty-boy image, but Howard Strickling, MGM’s formidable publicity chief, capitalized on it, creating celluloid romances with Virginia Bruce, his leading lady in Society Doctor and Times Square Lady, and with Metro’s new Hungarian import, Hedy Lamarr. Pairing new male hopefuls with their leading ladies or starlets was part of the publicity machine. With His Brother’s Wife in production, Strickling jumped at the chance to link Taylor and Stanwyck.
STRICKLING WAS SOMETHING OF A RARITY IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS, a native of Los Angeles. A high school dropout who had worked as a sports reporter, he found his true métier in the new field of movie public relations. His work methods were not dissimilar to those at the other studios. Golden age press agentry of course, was invented not only to blow the horn but to act as a giant veil. “We told stars what they could say, and they did what we said because they knew we knew best,” Strickling would say in a rare candid moment. He rewrote the lives of Metro’s stars in free translation and, as the guardian angel of Metro’s galaxy of stars, made sure each performer’s reputation remained unsullied.
L.B., as Mayer was called, believed the public should never hear of the screen idols’ failings. “Talent is like a precious stone, like a diamond or a ruby,” the boss told Strickling. “You take care of it. You put it in a safe, you clean it, polish it, look after it. Who knows the value of a star?” To which Strickling added that film studios were the only companies where the assets walked out the gate every night. “In other businesses it’s different, like if an editor gets drunk too often you hire another one. Well, if you got John Barrymore in a picture you can’t say throw the bum out. Okay, you’ve got Gable and Taylor and Garbo, but there’s only one of each so you work things out.”
Strickling realized the press could be neutralized by cooperation. With one hundred press agents under his command, he developed the technique of continued coverage from the inception of a script through every phase of production to release. By making himself indispensable to the stars, they came to rely on him and eventually to heed his advice. He also attached spies to willful stars, making his publicist, Betty Asher, the personal press agent to twenty-year-old Judy Garland. Asher became Garland’s lover, encouraged the young star’s drinking, and, unstable herself, eventually committed suicide. “MGM created a certain name, but they didn’t prepare you for life,” Lena Home would recall. I mean, what do you say when Howard Strickling wasn’t around and you had to get an abortion.” Strickling said that by helping Gable or Taylor or Harlow, he became important to them. “And in that way I could get them to do things. My relationship with Clark and Bob Taylor—maybe Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer—was different, because I was closer to them than to some of the others.”
Protecting the celebrities from themselves was no easy job, but Strickling could count on MGM’s own police force headed by Whitey Hendry, a former chief of police of Culver City, who had been lured to the studio for a lot of money. If, during one of his boozy nights out, Spencer Tracy was picked up for wrecking a hotel room in Beverly Hills, Hendry would call the Beverly Hills police chief and Tracy wouldn’t be booked. When a very drunk Gable smashed up his car and himself in Brentwood one night, police on the scene called the West Los Angeles Division, which called downtown.
“The accident scene was roped off,” Strickling would remember. “Gable was hustled away to a private hospital, and the incident never reported on the police blotter—or in the press. For multiple-problem people like Tracy, we devised an even more elaborate technique. We kept an official-looking ambulance on call at the studio. Every bar owner and hotel manager in the area knew what to do if Tracy showed up drunk and began causing a problem. They’d phone me, and I’d phone Whitey, and the ambulance would take off with a couple of our security men dressed as paramedics. They’d go to the scene, strap Tracy to a stretcher, and then rush him away in the ambulance before too many people could recognize Tracy as the troublemaker.”
Strickling’s worry in Robert Taylor’s case was how to contain rumors of homosexuality. Gays lusted as much after Bob as Adela Rogers St. Johns and a million women moviegoers did, and he was not always as careful as Strickling wanted him to be. Bob insisted he was not gay but had a hard time pretending he desired any woman in the flesh. “Taylor was careless because he thought he had the cleanest image of any of Metro’s male stars, onetime Strickling publicist Rick Ingersoll would recall. “Whispers that his intense, dashing virility was a sham never went away.” Each attestation to Taylor’s heterosexuality—usually offered by women—would be matched by an equally convincing denial. Hedda Hopper couldn’t believe Taylor was a homosexual. “We’re always in costume,” said Harry Hay of the industry’s homosexual executives, producers, writers, agents, and actors. “Whether we groom our physiques, go to a party, or look for a job, we turn on attitudes.”
A sexy, heterosexual image was crucial, and Strickling linked Taylor to several actresses, even though none of these relationships ever became a full-fledged romance. Bob was defensive about his personal feelings. Gilmor Brown, Harry Hay, and Forman Brown of the Hollywood Turnabout Theatre knew him as a homosexual. He was a friend of John Gilbert and cruised gay parties with the silent-screen idol. Gilbert was sixteen years older than Bob, but they were both from small western towns (Gilbert was born in Logan, Utah), and both knew the only reason they were in the movies was their looks. Gilbert was drinking himself to death. “I have been on the screen for twenty years and I have managed to squeeze out of it complete unhappiness,” he told Bob. In 1930, he had made $250,000 a picture; now he couldn’t get a job at $25 a week. Bob accompanied Gilbert to a gay party in Hollywood. While Gilbert was dancing, his toupee fell off. Bob gallantly retrieved it from under a dancer’s feet, only to see Gilbert flee the party.
In concert with Mayer, Strickling planted stories about Bob’s growing up in rugged Big Sky country, his affection for firearms and hunting. At the studio commissary, Strickling got Bob seated at the directors’ table, a large table on a screened-in porch off the main dining room. Some thirty people, a handful of directors, Gable, Tracy, plus a coterie of writers and department heads lunched at this ultimate symbol of macho status. No actress ever sat at the table.
At Fox, Harry Brand worked as diligently to coarsen that studio’s too handsome new star Tyrone Power. Two years younger than Bob, the handsome Ty was another repressed homosexual who lived with his mother and was discovered at Gilmor Brown’s workshop. He was fascinated with people as famous as he and enjoyed the excitement and danger of liaisons with gay celebrities. While Fox linked him with Loretta Young, Janet Gaynor, and Sonja Henie, he went to bed with the composer Lorenz Hart, Errol Flynn, and several other stars. When he was on the verge of becoming Fox’s top male star, ahead of Henry Fonda and John Payne, Darryl Zanuck arm-twisted him into marrying Annabella (née Suzanne Charpentier), an athletic older French actress with an eight-year-old daughter.
During the first week of the shooting of His Brother’s Wife, press releases from the Strickling office described how Taylor lunched with Stanwyck every day in her dressing room or his, how he never let her begin a day without a basket of flowers.
L.B., who called Taylor “son,” doubted there was anything in the Taylor-Stanwyck relationship. It was all right if Strickling invented a little setside romance to sell His Brother’s Wife, but it was out of the question for Bob to be serious about a woman who was not only four years older than he but a divorcée with a young son. Besides, women wanted their matinee idol single.
13
PRIVATE LIVES
BARBARA’S EARTHINESS AND UNAFFECTEDNESS WAS AS FETCHING AS her ranch living, where she appeared at the stables in red flannel shirt, corduroy riding britches, and hair tucked under a scarf. Her chin-up, keep-busy style, her wry sense of humor and one-of-the-boys aplomb covered a lot of bitterness. Her gift for turning chores into challenges covered her fear of being had again, of losing control over herself and her carefully reconstructed world and its inhabitants.
She wasn’t sure she understood men. Love was not the vital center of her existence. Work was. His Brother’s Wife was her second picture in 1936—two more would follow before the year was out. She had played a Cuban señorita in A Message to Garcia and was now set to frolic with Bob Taylor, Jean Hersholt, and Joseph Calleia in MGM’s back-lot jungle. Work gave her freedom to live according to her own rules, and divorce allowed her to pick up where she had been at twenty-one. Now, however, she would be in charge of herself, be well beyond the girl she had been in 1928, who, after Rex Cherryman’s death, had been too alone and too willing to believe Frank Fay’s snake oil. She now lived with people of her choosing. She was paid unheard-of sums to get herself to a studio in the morning and, in the company of pros she valued, plunge into make-believe.
His Brother’s Wife was Barbara’s first for MGM. The sprawling film factory in Culver City was hitting its stride and laying down the standards by which Hollywood measured prestige, glamour—and earnings. Metro’s profits in 1935 had been $7.5 million in period dollars, more than the rest of Hollywood’s Big Seven movie companies combined. For 1936, profits surpassed $10 million.