Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Barbara had danced for Florenz Ziegfeld, but visiting Stage 34 made her wish she was eighteen again and dancing all night. The Great Ziegfeld was fast becoming MGM’s most expensive production since Ben Hur and was planned as a three-hour extravaganza. Three cameramen were filming Dennis Morgan singing Irving Berlin’s “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” on a giant wedding cake topped with a sweep of chorus girls. Even at his most extravagant, Ziegfeld had never matched the opulence Metro lavished on his movie biography. William Powell incarnated the great showman, and the two Mrs. Ziegfelds were played by Myrna Loy, as Billie Burke, and Luise Rainer, as Anna Held. Fanny Brice was herself.

  His Brother’s Wife was not quite Magnificent Obsession, but it, too, had a fateful plot line. Robert Taylor is a medical researcher and Barbara Stanwyck a nightclub hostess. He goes to the tropics to investigate spotted fever. Why she should decide to show her love for him by marrying his brother, played by John Eldredge, is never explained. But in the last reel, she has spotted fever, Taylor gets her, and director W.S. “Woody” Van Dyke had another of his seemingly endless hits.

  Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II liked to shoot fast. This son of an actress had been a lumberjack, gold miner, railroader, and mercenary before finding work as an assistant to D.W. Griffith. “One-take Woody” was responsible for the first talkie Tarzan and the first William Powell-Myrna Loy Thin Man. It was rumored that he got a large extra sum for each day he brought in a picture ahead of schedule, and he was impatient with any assignment that took more than twenty days to shoot. He had not seen the script of His Brother’s Wife until the first day of shooting. When somebody objected that the swamp effects of the back-lot tropics were not geographically correct, he snapped, “Fine, kid, that’s how it is, and this is how it’s going to be.”

  Bob Taylor provided pleasant offscreen interludes. He was such an attentive date that Barbara found herself saying yes to his invitations. Going out with an inexperienced young man carried little risk of evenings ending with clammy invitations to a backseat tumble or messy front-porch good-night kisses that insisted on more. Stanwyck and Taylor were seen at Palomar’s, the huge nightclub on the corner of Vermont and Third streets that was packed every night, where a year earlier Benny Goodman had soared to fame. Barbara danced with Jackie Cooper, Bob with Bette Davis and Martha Raye.

  Barbara enjoyed teaching Bob the showbiz ropes. When his latest picture, Private Number, came out, he was so thrilled at seeing his name above Loretta Young’s that he took Barbara to Hollywood Boulevard to see his name in lights at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre marquee. “The trick,” Barbara told him, “is to keep it there.”

  His meteoric rise at MGM was so overpowering, he told her, it made him as bewildered as if he had failed. “Most of the time you don’t know where you stand,” he said one evening at the Venice amusement park. Mayer and Strickling encouraged and destroyed romances according to what they decided the worldwide box offices of Loews movie houses wanted, and Bob was sure the press-agent fiction had a way of becoming fact. Studio photographers snapped the two of them smoking, talking, even standing in front of Bob’s roadster. Picking up the story, press photographers caught the new twosome dancing to the tunes of the Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller bands at the Palladium, near Sunset and Vine.

  Van Dyke finished His Brother’s Wife in his usual double time. The New York Times’s Frank Nugent called it “a triumph of machine-made art that will succeed no matter how we, in our ivory tower, rail against it for its romantic absurdity.” Nugent called Taylor the “crown prince of charm and heir apparent to Clark Gable” and reported that at the screening he attended the dialogue was almost drowned out by the coos of women in the audience.

  To his mother’s ongoing distress, Bob saw altogether too much of Barbara. He had moved into his own apartment, but was in the habit of looking in on his mother every day. To show him how deeply his relationship with Barbara wounded her, Ruth stopped dyeing her hair. “Arly likes it natural,” Ruth said when people asked why she was suddenly silver-haired.

  BARBARA HAD BEEN AROUND; BOB WAS INEXPERIENCED. HE WAS well educated; she was not. She had been in charge of herself since she was fourteen; he heeded his mother, his teachers, Louis B. Mayer. She hated a lie and never trusted anyone who failed her a first time. He was bad at fibbing, and hated picking up a ringing telephone for fear he wouldn’t be able to say no. If invited by mail, he sent telegrams to beg off, knowing he was too easily persuaded to reconsider if he talked to the would-be host by phone.

  He was tactful where Barbara was brutally frank. He admired the way she never forgot those who had rankled or hurt her. He understood her drive but had little of it himself. He didn’t see the point of quarreling endlessly with studio bosses. Besides being chain smokers and disliking displays of temperament, Barbara and Bob had little in common. They overlapped in their caustic humor, emotional ambivalence, and hatred of crowds. He loved to cook, she was hopeless with pots and pans. He loved hunting, she loathed guns. He liked non-threatening women in soft blouses and flounce skirts; she dressed in tailored suits, sports outfits, and slacks made of men’s fabric. His classic line to reporters eager to know more about the romance was “Miss Stanwyck is not the sort of woman I’d have met in Nebraska.”

  Louis B. put him in The Gorgeous Hussy, the spurious retelling of the mildly scandalous love affair of President Andrew Jackson and Peggy O’Neal, an innkeeper’s daughter who became the president’s confidante. Joan Crawford played O’Neal. Lionel Barrymore was President Jackson, and Taylor joined Melvyn Douglas and James Stewart in the opulent $1.1 million production. Without telling Crawford, Mayer cast Franchot Tone as the hussy’s suitor. Crawford exploded when she realized her husband only had eleven lines.

  Mayer asked her to be patient and supportive of the new boy, James Stewart.

  “What about Robert Taylor,” she snarled. “Do I change his diapers, too?”

  A week into production, Joan realized The Gorgeous Hussy was a mistake for her. To Bob’s dismay, there was more tension on the set than in the movie they were shooting. Joan thought Bob had a complex because he was so damn handsome. “He knew the public didn’t give a damn if he had talent. They came to see his face.”

  Franchot was one hour late one morning, provoking Joan to give him a tongue-lashing that director Clarence Brown and the entire cast and crew applauded. The blowup was the beginning of the end of their marriage.

  Barrymore and Beulah Bondi as his backwoods wife cunningly stole the show, and The Gorgeous Hussy cooled both Crawford’s and Taylor’s fans.

  Bob in knee britches, however, caught the eye of Irving Thalberg.

  THE PRODUCER’S LATEST PRESTIGE FILM WAS THE GOOD EARTH. As with The Bitter Tea of General Yen, it was out of the question to film the Pearl S. Buck saga with Chinese actors playing Chinese. Instead, Paul Muni and the Viennese actress Luise Rainer were made up as Chinese peasants. Louis B. considered The Good Earth dicey—it cost as much as any MGM film since the silent Ben Hur—and Thalberg had to be careful. His other recent big picture, Romeo and Juliet, starring his wife, Norma Shearer, and Leslie Howard, had been a box-office disappointment. With Garbo in the title role, Camille was a low-risk project.

  Members of Thalberg’s staff feared Bob Taylor was too unseasoned to match Garbo. The producer overruled their objections. Garbo’s films demanded screen lovers who were young, clumsy, and irresistible so her disillusioned persona could treat men as love objects and never surrender her authority. In the spring of 1936, Thalberg and his director, George Cukor, decided Bob should play Garbo’s young, inexperienced lover Armand Duval.

  The immortal courtesan with a weakness for pleasure and camellias who drifts through the Parisian demimonde with scant regard for her own delicate health and in the end sacrifices herself for a penniless lover had been played on the stage by Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Clara Kimball Young, Pola Negri, Alia Nazimova, and Norma Talmadge had portrayed Marguerite Gauthier in silent screen versions and Yvon
ne Printemps in a French talkie. Thalberg and Cukor believed Garbo might give the Alexandre Dumas classic vitality if she could make audiences both understand that the story was of a period when a woman’s reputation was everything and forget they were seeing a costume picture.

  Cukor didn’t particularly like Garbo. He found her too dour and lesbian and, in a letter to Hugh Walpole, said her noble suffering depressed him. Cukor’s playwright friend Zoe Akins, the novelist James Hilton, and Metro’s premier screenwriter Frances Marion came up with a script that turned on the delicate distinction between a “good” and a “bad” woman.

  Lionel Barrymore was cast as Monsieur Duval, Armand’s father, who, to save his son from the whore’s clutches, makes Marguerite leave the boy she truly loves and return to her former life of dissipation. Henry Daniell, who had played coolly sadistic men of affluence before, was chosen for the Count de Varville, Marguerite’s former lover who offers to relieve her debts if she will become his mistress again. Rex O’Malley was set to play the gay sidekick, Gaston. Mercedes De Acosta, Garbo’s lover, was in on the production. In the executive screening room, Thalberg ran the dailies for De Acosta and had her read the French original. In a village in Normandy, Mercedes found a farmer’s wife who was a descendant of Marguerite’s sister.

  If Garbo had Mercedes as an off-camera adviser, Robert Taylor had Barbara.

  Although Thalberg and Cukor thought all Bob had to do was to be decorous and pretend undying love for Garbo, Bob had enough sense to realize Armand was his most demanding role. He confided in Barbara when the $1.5 million prestige production started. She told him she had made so many blunders that she was happy to help him not make the same mistakes. When he asked for specifics, she advised him not to approach Garbo between scenes. The suggestion was judicious. To maintain the tension she felt was needed between the doomed lovers, Garbo kept her distance from Taylor. She thought he was well brought up if a bit shy. “He used to have a gramophone with him that he would play because he knew I liked music,” she would recall. “He told me that his best friend during his youth in Nebraska had been a Swede.”

  To be directed by Cukor was evidence of any actor’s importance. Cukor sympathized with Bob’s fear of being seen as “beautiful” Robert Taylor. “In those days you had to be very virile or they thought you were degenerate,” the director would tell Gaven Lambert in 1972. “It can be hell for an actor to be good-looking.” There were scenes in which Marguerite pulls Armand toward her, kisses him all over the face, on the mouth, and pushes him away. It was acting Bob had never tried before. Cukor’s directions were demanding. Everybody put in ten-hour days on the set. Barbara told Bob to be patient with his director’s demands for endless retakes.

  After propositioning a boy in June 1936, MGM star William Haines, his boyfriend, Jimmy Shields, and a group of friends were chased from a beach by an angry mob. The story hit the Los Angeles front pages, and there was speculation that Cukor was one of the men in the group. Whitey Hendry and Howard Strickling worked fast. Within forty-eight hours, the charges were dropped.

  Louis B. BEGAN TO OBJECT TO THE PUBLIC DISPLAY OF THE TAYlor-Stanwyck friendship. He hated having his crown prince of charm linked with a divorcée still in custody battles with her former husband over their adopted son. Helen Ferguson told Barbara to be cautious. It would be foolish to go against Mayer’s wishes. Barbara only had to look at John Gilbert’s ruin to see what happened to a star who defied the authoritarian boss of MGM. Whether ordered by Mayer or merely suggested by Howard Strickling, Taylor appeared at parties alone or with studio-supplied dates. Barbara didn’t mind. She lived by the rules of the company town. Besides, she wasn’t sure what she felt. She was free, successful, and in no hurry for serious involvement. Bob was a distraction. He was “nice,” always understanding, and impressed by her independence. She sensed a fear of rejection and intimacy behind his well-behaved attention and assigned it to his inexperience. He hadn’t had time to live. He had gone from college to stardom in eighteen months, and there were times when the four years between them felt like a generational chasm. So she told him he should enjoy his fame. At Helen’s suggestion, she was seen with other escorts.

  While Bob worked on Camille, Barbara returned to Fox to star with Joel McCrea in Banjo on My Knee, directed by John Cromwell. The film was based on a folk novel by Harry Hamilton and told the story of a newlywed Mississippi couple prevented from consummating their marriage when the groom runs into trouble with the law. The script was by Darryl Zanuck’s favorite screenwriter and Hollywood wit, Nunnally Johnson, with additional screen dialogue by Hollywood’s most famous writer-import, William Faulkner. The author was better at developing atmosphere and plots than writing screen dialogue. One Faulknerian mouthful written for Barbara read like this:

  PEARL: Then he left me before we were even married. He fixed it so that his people could say the things about me they wanted to say. Then he left me, because when I left I wasn’t running from him. I was running after him. If he had loved me he would have known that. If he had loved me he would not have left me. If he had loved me he would have followed me and overtaken me. He could have because no woman ever runs too fast for the man she loves to catch her, but he didn’t. All he was after was to catch the man he thought had offered to give me what he had denied to give me. So that even this man would have to leave me just as he had left me.

  None of Faulkner’s scenes survived in Johnson’s final script.

  Stanwyck was happy to make a picture with John Cromwell. Seven years earlier the director had wanted her to repeat her Burlesque role opposite Hal Skelly in the Dance for Life film version, and since then Cromwell had made more than twenty movies at Paramount and RKO, including Spitfire with Katharine Hepburn, Of Human Bondage, and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

  EVEN IF THE SCREEN CHARACTERS BARBARA FLESHED OUT WERE not intuitively natural for her, she knew how to make them look right. Her strength was cumulative, and compliments came from unsuspecting quarters. Crawford wondered aloud what, in the end, her twelve years with MGM had given her. She should have followed Stanwyck’s example, she told friends. Filming That Certain Woman, Bette Davis told a news conference she was trying to emulate Ruth Chatterton’s “nobility that Barbara Stanwyck seems to be inheriting.” Loretta Young believed that if Barbara was gaining in self-assurance, it was because she molded her private self after the characters she played. “Barbara Stanwyck has always been strong, but she takes this strength from her pictures,” said Young. “She’s drawn on every character; I know her well enough to say that.”

  Cromwell said it best. Presence, he believed, was what made an actor a real star. “Stanwyck had great star presence. Sometimes the word personality is interchangeable with presence although they aren’t the same thing. But the principle applies.”

  Cromwell took his time with his actors. In Banjo on My Knee he got from Stanwyck a full-bodied performance. Walter Brennan’s disarming Old Newt Holley came as close as any 1930s movie portrayal of Old Man River shanty boaters. As Old Newt’s daughter-in-law, Stanwyck projected an earthiness, inner savagery, and loneliness that other directors would one day help lift to unsuspecting heights of intensity.

  BARBARA AND BOB WENT TO THE RACES ON LABOR DAY 1936. IT was a long weekend, and everybody, it seemed, was out of town. With Harpo Marx, the directors Mervyn LeRoy and Sam Wood, and their wives, Irving and Norma Thalberg spent the weekend at the Del Monte Club in Monterey in northern California. Thalberg caught a head cold playing bridge in the sea breeze. The cold turned into pneumonia when he returned to Los Angeles. On September 14, 1936, the thirty-seven-year-old Wunderkind with a weak heart was dead.

  Hollywood shut down for five minutes’ mourning as his funeral began, and MGM suspended operations for the rest of the day. Bob attended the funeral at the Synagogue B’nai B’rith with the Barrymore brothers, the Marxes, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, and MGM’s top stars Spencer Tracy, Ramon Novarro, Garbo, Jeanette MacDonald, Crawford, Constance
Bennett, Myrna Loy. In the face of speculation that Thalberg’s death meant MGM would stop making classy pictures, Mayer immediately asserted his control. The well-organized Thalberg unit was dismantled. A new, confusing beginning was filmed for Camille.

  Bob wanted a brief vacation, and Louis B. authorized a trip to

  Hawaii. Bob went alone, but the Matson Line’s press agent made sure movie fans greeted him at the bottom of the gangplank in Honolulu. Screaming women pulled his hair and for souvenirs tore buttons off his clothes as he set foot in Hawaii. Police were unable to hold back the crowd, and in the melee Bob panicked. The next day, he caught the first boat back to California.

  The January 22, 1937, Los Angeles premiere of Camille turned into a wake for Thalberg, with Garbo, a notorious no-show at celebrity events, attending. Taylor escorted Stanwyck to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Camille brought Garbo’s career to a climax. For the first time, said the critics, she acted, giving a warm yet sardonic portrayal of Dumas’ harlot. Barrymore was dismissed as too American for Monsieur Duval, but Taylor’s romantic profile and his curiously touching portrayal of Armand were judged perfect. Unfortunately, the studio never trusted him with such subtleties again, and, perhaps more unfortunately, he never pressed for them.

  Bob trusted Mayer. Where others told stories of L.B.’s real or feigned tantrums, fainting fits, and other histrionics when faced with demands for more money from his stars, the handsome young provincial had only nice things to say. L.B. was kind, understanding, and protective, even if he was not above resorting to sly fatherly blackmail when Bob asked for a raise. At his agent’s urging, Bob once made a private appointment to see Mayer. Before Bob could ask anything, L.B. launched into a glowing description of how proud he was of his two daughters.