by Axel Madsen
RKO WAS STILL COUNTING THE MONEY FROM THE INFORMER, when Jack Ford said he wanted to do The Plough and the Stars. Because of the play’s ambivalence about the Irish cause, it had been greeted with such anger when it opened in Dublin in 1926 that Sean O’Casey moved to London. O’Casey’s barroom drama of the Irish character had language that was as fierce and inflexible as his social conscience. What was different—subversive to Dublin theatergoers a decade earlier—was Nora Clitheroe, who wants her man for herself, alive, and not out on the barricades fighting the Brits. In fact, O’Casey was not interested in glorifying the 1916 Easter uprising; he thought it tragic, foolhardy, and pitiful. Samuel J. Briskin, RKO’s new production chief, wasn’t sure a screen adaptation was what moviegoers wanted, but gave a reluctant go-ahead provided Ford agreed to star Barbara Stanwyck as Nora. Briskin, who had trained under Harry Cohn, believed in A pictures and strong box-office names. He signed Ann Sothern to a seven-year contract, Stanwyck to a two-picture deal, and added Barbara’s Woman in Red costar Gene Raymond and her Message to Garcia vis-à-vis, John Boles, as “outstanding names for the studio roster.”
The one-eyed Ford was Hollywood’s “professional” Irishman, a director of a vast and diverse body of work that went back to the silent era. In The Informer; Liam O’Flaherty’s tale of a loser who, for steamship passage to America, betrays a comrade to the British, he had successfully mined the 1916 “troubles.” To keep The Informer within its $340,000 budget, Ford had filmed it like a Β picture. The inspired casting of Victor McLaglen as the “gutter Judas” helped vault the picture onto every critic’s list of Best Pictures of 1935. At Oscar time, it won four awards: Best Director, Writer (Dudley Nichols), Actor (McLaglen), and Musical Score (composer Max Steiner).
Ford wanted an all-Irish cast for The Plough and the Stars. Briskin insisted on Stanwyck, then mellowed enough to let Ford import the Abbey Theatre’s Barry Fitzgerald. Box-office exigencies demanded an American as Stanwyck’s mate, and Preston Foster, with whom Stanwyck had already done Ladies They Talk About and Annie Oakley, was cast as her husband. Walter Plunkett, Katharine Hepburn’s favorite designer, soon to be famous for his Gone With the Wind costumes, created a passably drab Dublin slum wardrobe for the film. Barbara’s brogue was not unpleasant, but in Plunkett’s 1916 dresses and head scarves she was, as one critic put it, “a grande dame in an Irish bog.”
Ford imported half the Abbey Theatre’s stock company to fill out the cast and took out his anger at having to submit to box-office requirements by misusing Barbara. She was too much a modern woman to submit to Irish machismo and squirmed at lines that had her plead with her man not to engage in the violence the audience expected.
Barbara sat with Briskin at the screening of the rough cut. “Halfway through, he said, ‘Nobody’s gonna understand those accents!’” she would remember. “So they called Preston and me back and we shot scene after scene of ‘translations’: ‘Listen, Nora, you hear what they’re sayin’? You know what it means. It means … ‘ Mr. Ford very wisely was unavailable on his yacht.”
Indeed, Ford and his wife, Mary, sailed to Honolulu. While he was away, Briskin resigned and his second in command, Pandro S. Berman, took over as studio chief. In the time-honored tradition of Hollywood moguls denigrating their predecessors’ work and canceling their deals, Berman took one look at the “translated” Plough and decided the film would be sexier if Stanwyck and Foster were lovers instead of married folk. Because Stanwyck and Preston Foster were already on other pictures, an assistant shot their scenes on Sundays. The new footage lacked consistency and sheen and jarred with Ford’s footage.
When Ford returned, he pretended to be furious. “I’ve always felt that John should not have left the sinking ship,” Barbara would recall. “God knows I had no power at that time, nor did Preston. Only John could have saved it and he should have.” Instead of fighting for his cut, Ford moved to Fox to direct Wee Willie Winkie, the most expensive Shirley Temple vehicle to date.
STANWYCK WENT TO WORK FOR THE STUDIO THAT MIGHT NOT match MGM in glamour, but was peerless in imagination and energy.
Paramount Pictures was the least regimented film factory, the one studio where directors, not supervisors or producers, shaped the films. Paramount favored chance over strategy and planning, and was reckless in the way it handled talent, but its output bore the stamp of cunning sensuality. It was there that Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, and such lesser luminaries as Allan Dwan, Harry D’Arrast, and Mitchell Leisen held forth.
Barbara had eagerly sought the attention of Paramount’s successive moguls, and getting the Paramount treatment was a pleasure even if Internes Can’t Take Money was a programmer based on a Max Brand “Dr. Kildare” hospital novel. Max Brand was one of the many pseudonyms of Frederick Faust, an author of over a hundred fast-paced crime, spy, and western novels. Internes Can’t Take Money was the first Kildare film, made a year before MGM took over the character for Lew Ayres. Paramount had bought the book at Joel McCrea’s urging. Joel couldn’t wait to play the young doctor who, under primitive conditions, operates on a gangster and helps a woman just released from prison find her missing daughter.
Before Internes Can’t Take Money started, Barbara was told to make an appointment with John Engstead, the studio portrait photographer. His work appeared on the cover of every woman’s magazine, and his subjects were the Paramount Who’s Who, from Marlene Dietrich to Loretta Young, Cary Grant to Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert to Mae West.
Barbara’s showing up on time was Engstead’s first surprise. He was used to Young’s demands for retouching photographs, Nancy Carroll’s bitchiness, and Colbert’s tardiness. But there was Stanwyck walking into his gallery on the dot of two.
“My assistant Gene and I weren’t ready, but there she was,” he would recall. “She doesn’t have the inspiration that Clara Bow had, or Lombard. But she was a good subject, and she was on time.”
The Internes screen credits read costumes by Travis Banton, Paramount’s alcoholic head designer catapulted to fame with the black feathers, veils, and chiffon ensembles he created for Marlene Dietrich. As a star with a one-picture deal, Stanwyck didn’t rate the Banton treatment, however, and her white satin dress was designed by Ban-ton’s assistant, Edith Head. Both Banton and Head had been with Paramount since the mid-1920s, he coming from haute couture, she from teaching art in Los Angeles high schools.
“Barbara had been a little insulted that Travis didn’t want to dress her,” Head would remember, “but she and I hit it off immediately and it was the beginning of a long and important friendship.” There were parallels to their lives. The designer was at the end of a marriage to an alcoholic. Friends couldn’t understand why she stuck it out with Charles Head, a sales executive who in the face of his wife’s success retreated to booze. Her Catholic upbringing kept her married, but the other man in her life, Barbara learned, was Wiard Boppo Ihnen, a set designer at Fox.
BARBARA THOUGHT SHE AND BOB SHOULD DO ANOTHER PICTURE TOGETHER.
So did Darryl Zanuck. Fan magazines reported gushingly on the Stanwyck-Taylor romance, and the Twentieth Century-Fox chief was sure moviegoers were eager to see the two of them together on the screen. Was Louis B. Mayer mellowing? MGM quickly agreed to loan Bob to Fox. Zanuck signed Barbara to a one-film deal, dusted off a G-man in costume setting script called Private Enemy, retitled it This Is My Affair, and got it into production.
The director was William A. Seiter, a former Keystone Kop who had directed Laurel and Hardy, Shirley Temple, and Fred Astaire. Victor McLaglen and Brian Donlevy played the villains. Frank Conroy incarnated President McKinley, and Sidney Blackmer with a false set of teeth was President Theodore Roosevelt. Bob was Lieutenant Richard L. Perry, one of the victors of the 1889 Manila Bay encounter with the Spanish fleet, who is secretly deputized by President McKinley to break up a band of bank robbers whose astonishing knowledge of passkeys, vault combinations, and alarm systems has weakened public trust in the
banking system. Barbara is a dance-hall belle in the confidence of the gang’s leader. Taylor infiltrates the bank robbers, Stanwyck tests her love for him, but then, of course, McKinley is assassinated.
The filming was a charm. Royer (Lewis Royer Hastings) created an elegant period wardrobe for Stanwyck. To play on the two stars’ offscreen relationship, Harry Brand’s press releases trumpeted how intense their love scenes were, how each remained on the set during the other’s solo work, and how flustered Barbara was when Bob sat in on the recording of her one song in the film, “I Hum a Waltz.”
IF THERE WAS ONE PART SHE LUSTED AFTER—AND PUSHED ZEPPO to get for her—it was the title role in Stella Dallas. Samuel Goldwyn was preparing the picture with his usual panache, trade-paper leaks, and planted announcements. William Wyler, his premier in-house director and master of the high-gloss filmmaking that Goldwyn unashamedly called “the Goldwyn touch,” was set to direct. “I would give up everything I own to make Stella Dallas/’ Barbara told Joel McCrea, Goldwyn’s fair-haired boy. Olive Higgins Prouty’s bestselling novel about a woman who marries an unhappy but socially superior man and, when he drifts away, brings up their daughter alone, demanded an actress capable of playing on multiple registers. There might have been faint parallels between Barbara’s life and Stella’s had Rex Cherryman lived because, like Ruby Stevens, the awkward young Stella has the wits to impress the refined Stephen Dallas, an executive in the factory where she works. Mother love was not the adult Barbara Stanwyck’s strong suit, whereas Stella’s story is all about maternal sacrifice and a mother trying to remake herself to please her child. Playing Stella would be all performance, the most demanding Barbara had ever tried. She would have to be convincing both as a down-to-earth young woman alienating her upper-class husband and as a socially inept middle-aged mother who is a disgrace to their daughter. She would have to be brassy and touching, unselfish and embarrassing.
“Everybody was testing for it,” Barbara would remember of Stella Dallas. “It was almost comparable to the search for a Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, which was going on at the same time.”
Stella Dallas had been Goldwyn’s biggest success in 1925. The themes of upward mobility and of children ashamed of their elders echoed deep within the forty-two-year-old Polish-Jewish rags-to-riches mogul. Stella is an embarrassment to Laurel, the daughter she brings up alone. When Laurel’s father marries a rich childhood acquaintance, she becomes immersed in their socialite world. She doesn’t invite her mother to her high-society wedding, and Stella stands in the rain, behind an iron gate watching her daughter marry the attractive Richard Grosvenor.
In his own life, Goldwyn felt so humiliated by his mother that he never brought Hannah Gelbfisz to America. When he went to Europe in 1925, he made her journey from Warsaw to Berlin to see him. She had her suite next to his at the Adlon Hotel, but for the better part of a week she never left her room. Sam took all his dinners in his mother’s suite. As for the daughter he had with long-since divorced Blanche Lasky, the relationship was little more than awkward vacations and letters demanded of Ruth by her father. He found her distant and resentful. When she was twelve and declined a trip with him to Europe, he threw her out of the Astor Hotel and resolved never to see or speak to her again.
When Prouty’s novel was dramatized in 1924, Mrs. Leslie Carter, a legend past her prime, played Stella and a very young Edward G.
Robinson was Grosvenor. Stella Dallas had been less than sensational on Broadway, but Goldwyn bought the rights both to the novel and to the stage version and hired Frances Marion to write the scenario. Marion was the writer of many of Mary Pickford’s movies and a woman with a talent for picking people. She told Goldwyn he should cast Belle Bennett as Stella and matinee idol Ronald Colman as Stephen Dallas, the man she cannot live up to. To play the daughter, Sam himself discovered the fifteen-year-old Lois Moran. Henry King directed Bennett as a genteel, aloof figure of pity. Warmth and compassion pervaded every scene, and the picture became Goldwyn’s biggest silent moneymaker.
In 1937, however, the idea of redoing the old workhorse made Goldwyn’s rivals hoot that Sam was losing his touch. The fact that every actress wanted to play Stella made him believe he’d have the last laugh.
GOLDWYN ORDERED UP A NEW SCREENPLAY AND ASSIGNED THE filming to William Wyler, his top director. When the writing duo of Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason delivered their Stella Dallas, however, Wyler was on loanout to Warners directing Bette Davis in Jezebel.
Goldwyn hired King Vidor.
After The Texas Rangers, Vidor’s second historical epic for Paramount, the studio had offered him Sam Houston. Vidor might be a Texan by birth, but, as he wrote production chief William LeBaron, “I’ve such a belly-full of Texas after the Rangers that I find myself not caring whether Sam Houston takes Texas from the Mexicans or lets them keep it.” More to the point, Vidor was the president of the new Screen Directors Guild, and during the first critical year of the new union’s life he had no intention of doing a location picture. Since Stella Dallas would shoot at the United Artists lot on Santa Monica Boulevard, he accepted Goldwyn’s offer.
“See silent picture,” Vidor noted to himself when he and Goldwyn came to terms on the remake.
There was little give-and-take with Goldwyn, a fact that made even reasonable arguments difficult. Goldwyn and Vidor immediately clashed on the title role. The producer wanted Ruth Chatterton or Gladys George and tested several actresses with less drawing power. Stanwyck was Vidor’s first choice. Zeppo Marx was a poker partner of Goldwyn’s, but thought it smarter to have Joel McCrea join Vidor in pulling for Barbara.
“She’s just got no sex appeal,” Goldwyn objected when McCrea made his pitch for his Gambling Lady, Banjo on My Knee, and Internes Can’t Take Money costar.
John Boles was cast as Stephen Dallas, Stella Martin’s ticket out of a drab, rigid home. Nineteen-year-old Anne Shirley got the part of their daughter, Laurel, whose birth widens the gap in class and manners between Stella and Stephen. Tim Holt, Marjorie Main, Alan Hale, Barbara O’Neil, Edward Norris, and Lillian Yarbo rounded out the cast.
When Zeppo took Barbara to see Goldwyn, the producer flatteringly objected that she was too young. It hurt when he said she had too little experience with children. When Goldwyn asked her if she had ever suffered over a child, she heard herself say, “But I can imagine how it would be.”
Goldwyn agreed to let her test for Stella.
However much Barbara detested screen tests, she knuckled under. Stella was someone she had played before, the mockingly self-aware, self-sacrificing lower-class woman. With Anne Shirley, she rehearsed and played the script’s birthday scene. Goldwyn said the part was hers.
STANWYCK FOUND VIDOR TO BE A DIRECTOR CONVINCED OF HIS own genius. Another John Ford, but without Ford’s sometimes endearing crustiness, Vidor believed in motion. His camera setups were complicated—rapidly rising or dropping crane shots, often to pick out her character or to punctuate scenes that seemed to have their own climax. There was little creative rapport between Vidor and Stanwyck. Director and star did their jobs.
“I was spurred by memory of the magnificent performance of the late Belle Bennett in the first movie version,” Barbara told the Saturday Evening Post. “Also, there was unusual stimulation in the dual nature of the part; it was like playing two different women simultaneously. Always Stella has to be shown both in her surface commonness and in her basic fineness.” We see her wear outdated clothes and enjoying herself too noisily and, in the working-class and immigrant tradition, skimping and sacrificing to give a child upward mobility. As Stella peels potatoes, Laura prattles on about her father’s new woman (“Well, she reminds me of a flower that grows in Maine, all pale and delicate, but strong too”). After overhearing she is the laughingstock of her daughter’s new tennis-and-tea friends, Stella offers Laura to her husband’s intended new wife (“Everybody would naturally think she was your little girl”).
Boles played her husband wi
th repressed gentility. Stephen Dallas’s millions were made by his father, who committed suicide, the woman he was in love with married another, and he has found anonymity in middle management at a Massachusetts mill. Stella wins his heart by polishing a glass in his office before a dissolve takes them to the movies, and as they leave the theater Stella wonders whether it is appropriate to take his arm. She says she envies the people they have just seen on the screen. Her ambition chills him. He says, “It isn’t really well-bred to act the way you are.” When they kiss, we know that it is a ploy for her, a polite condescension for him. Another dissolve, and they are married. She sees the birth of their daughter matter-of-factly; to him it is the miracle of life.
Stanwyck gave Stella’s grating and seedy callousness the same intensity as the character’s compassionate side, the clash of upward mobility. When Stephen unexpectedly calls on Stella, she quickly wipes off her lipstick and snips frills from her dress, trying once more to remake herself into the classy woman her former husband must want.
Anne Shirley remembered a scene in which Stella takes herself and her daughter to a fancy resort where Laurel meets eligible, collegiate Tim Holt. “Barbara Stanwyck was unforgettable,” Shirley would say. “She stalks across the resort patio dressed outlandishly in a loud print dress, excessive, cheap jewelry and makeup.” Rudolph Maté’s moody camerawork underscored Stanwyck’s acting, in which tragedy and comedy balance perfectly.
Vidor copied Henry King’s silent finale. Alone and forgotten, Stella elbows her way through black umbrellas outside the town house where Laurel’s marriage is being celebrated. She stands at the rail fence and watches through the three-panel windows, biting on a handkerchief until a street cop breaks up the crowd. However, where the silent movie cut between the society wedding inside and Stella watching outside in the rain, Vidor stayed on Stella. Before the fade-out the camera tracks backward in front of Stanwyck as she walks away.