by Axel Madsen
When comes the eaglet’s time to fly
No mother-softness robs him of his sky
If she wanted someone to look after her, she didn’t permit anyone to do so. Nor should Dion. He had to learn to be responsible for himself. He sure couldn’t count on Frank Fay. Besides, to be looked after meant being vulnerable, and, in example and words, she made it clear there was nothing more revolting that being weak. She made blunt demands on the boy and responded to his calls for reassurance with dismissal or pop psychology.
BOB MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT HE HAD SUCCESSFULLY REBELLED against his mother by buying a ranch in Northridge, but he visited or talked to her on the phone every day. Living next to Barbara with no strings attached was comfortable for Bob. She was no clinging vine. She came over for a swim or a barbecue and went home to study her lines. He liked to putter around. She kidded him about the cookbooks and dozens of watches he bought. On the weightier matter of remodeling and furnishing his ranch, it was Barbara who came up with ideas.
The press—and Ruth—deeply embarrassed Bob in February 1937. Newspapers revealed that his paternal grandfather was living on $16-a-month welfare. Reporters had a field day interviewing Ruth. She had told the Nebraska county assistant director that old Jacob A. Brugh’s four children living in Nebraska should take care of him. At a time when laborers earned about $6 a week, the press was happy to point out that MGM was paying old Brugh’s grandson $3,500 a week. Ruth made it worse by telling reporters Arly was too busy, that her son did give the eighty-two-year-old Brugh $20 the previous fall and actually paid several of his bills. Making sure the press couldn’t get to Bob, Strickling professed the studio’s dismay, hinted at a family feud, and said, “The old folks in Nebraska were trying to shove something over on Robert.”
Louis B. Mayer abhorred disrespect of family and threatened to deduct enough money from Bob’s pay to make the Nebraska story go away. An Associated Press story datelined Beatrice, Nebraska, February 24, reported Robert Taylor was taking his grandfather off the dole.
In the middle of the construction and redecorating of Bob’s ranch, Metro sent Bob to England.
Alexander Korda had come a long way since the Stanwyck screen test. The British cinema owed him its renaissance. Yet despite his 1933 hit, The Private Life of Henry VIII, almost no British film other than a quickie could earn back its cost on the home market. The American market was therefore essential, but in spite of British producers’ constant efforts the transatlantic target eluded them. Korda’s remark that when the film business makes money it is in millions, “and so obviously, when we lose, it must be in millions” was typical of the industry’s spendthrift delusions. While Korda cut salaries at his London Film Productions and a receiver was appointed at Twickenham Studios, debt-ridden Gaumont-British stopped making films altogether. To limit layoffs and studio closings, the government tightened its quota system limiting foreign films. MGM was the first American company to set up a British production division. Mayer hired Michael Balcon, with Korda the only real showbiz wizard in London, to head an ambitious program of Anglo-American films, each of which would justify its expense by being treated in the United States as a normal MGM release. Robert Taylor was assigned to star in the first MGM-British movie.
IN THE DAYS BEFORE COAST-TO-COAST AND TRANSATLANTIC AIR travel, it was quite a trip. The fastest travel from Los Angeles to London took at least ten days of continuous travel, via the Santa Fe’s Super Chief to Chicago and the New York Central’s no less famous 20th Century Limited to New York for a morning ocean liner, the Cunard’s Berengaria or the French Line’s swank new Ile de France.
Barbara had no intention of visiting Bob on his faraway location, and Helen Ferguson quoted her as telling Bob the six-month separation would test their feelings for each other. Bob’s arrival in England to star in A Yank at Oxford with Maureen O’Sullivan and Lionel Barrymore caused a mob scene such as London had not seen since Charlie Chaplin’s return to his native city in 1922.
Louis B. came to London with his son-in-law, William Goetz, and Howard Strickling. An elaborate press luncheon at the Savoy was arranged, and Strickling duly impressed on the English press the importance of having Mayer in their midst. Graham Greene was present and noted how Sir Hugh Walpole sat at the high table with O’Sullivan and Taylor. Mayer, Green observed, spoke for forty minutes:
The bright lights of Mr. Mayer’s eloquence soar up: ‘Thank God, I say to you, that it’s the greatest year of net results and that’s because I have men like Eddie Sankatz (can that have been the name?). It sounded like it after the Chablis Supérieur 1929, the Chateau Pontet Canet (Pouillac) 1933, G. H. Mumm Cordon Rouge 1928 and the Gautier Frères Fine Champagne.
One can’t help missing things, and when the mind comes back to the small dapper man under the massed banners, Mr. Mayer is talking about his family and God again … For forty minutes, we have listened to the voice of American capital itself: a touch of religion, a touch of family, the mixture goes down smoothly.
A Yank at Oxford told the story of a brash American college hero coping with English university life and two female students. Back in
Hollywood, seven writers, including Scott Fitzgerald, had toiled on the script—the author of Tender Is the Night to add “collegiate gloss.” Fitzgerald’s participation was not substantial enough to earn him a screen credit, but when the film came out he wrote to his mother-in-law that “the sequence in which Taylor and Maureen O’Sullivan go out in the punt in the morning, while the choirboys are singing in Magdalene Tower, is mine, and one line very typically so—where Taylor says, ‘Don’t rub the sleep out of your eyes. It’s beautiful sleep.’ I thought that line had my trademark on it.”
Fresh from directing a pair of Jean Harlow pictures, Jack Conway was shipped over to lend his brisk style to A Yank at Oxford. Korda loaned Vivien Leigh for the small but showy part of a bookseller’s adulterous young wife who almost gets Taylor kicked out of Oxford. Leigh had her own notions of how an Englishwoman’s character should be portrayed and, as Bob told Barbara on the transatlantic telephone, there was much tension on the set. Bob relayed all the gossip. Maureen and Vivien had gone to convent school together at Roehamp-ton, and both owed their first movie roles to Korda. Vivien was living with Laurence Olivier, discreetly, since she was still married to Leigh Holman, Larry to Jill Osmond. When MGM sent Bob to Stockholm for the Swedish premiere of Camille, Barbara told him to send flowers to Garbo’s mother.
AFTER WORKING ON NONEXCLUSIVE CONTRACTS FOR RKO, MGM, and Fox, Barbara became a client of Morgan Maree, the business manager of Marion Davies, Cary Grant, David Selznick, and Mervyn LeRoy. What she liked about the stately Maree, who sat in a mammoth office in downtown L.A., was that he abhorred journalists and publicity. She also got a new agent.
Whether Barbara felt slighted by Zep’s paying more attention to his brothers than to his other clients—he had just agented a record-breaking $250,000 contract for them for Room Service—or she believed Jules Stein was better for her, she left the Bren-Orsatti agency and signed up with Stein and the Music Corporation of America (MCA), an agency that was beginning to represent general talent in addition to musicians and had just landed Bette Davis as a client.
Unlike Zeppo, but very much like Barbara, the stubby, wispy-voiced Stein was a workaholic. He had put himself through medical school to become an ophthalmologist by playing the violin and saxophone in Chicago and promoting bands. After two years at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, he realized he could make more money booking musicians than as an eye doctor and in 1924 founded the Music Corporation of America. Five years later he had a 10 percent interest in half the major bands in the country. Bootleg whiskey was usually part of the deal for booking bands in the Prohibition 1920s, and Stein never shook his mob connection. When his boyhood chum James Caesar Petrillo became the head of the American Federation of Musicians, the union boss worked out a sweetheart deal that gave Stein a monopoly over big bands that was only discovered in a Justice Department in
vestigation in 1945.
When Stanwyck joined MCA, Stein had just moved his agency to Los Angeles. He was so obsessed with landing Bette Davis as a client that he hired her husband Harmon Nelson’s friend Eddie Linsk (nicknamed “The Killer”) at a high fee just to convince her to sign with him. The feat was accomplished in three weeks. Errol Flynn and John Garfield followed.
WHEN THE QUEEN MARY DOCKED IN NEW YORK IN DECEMBER 1937, Bob’s masculinity became a national joke. Women had mobbed Taylor in London, and Strickling had him greet reporters in his cabin in pajamas with a day-old stubble of beard. The P.R. strategy backfired when a reporter asked Bob if he thought he was pretty.
“I’m a red-blooded American, and I resent people calling me beautiful, and I’ve got hair on my chest,” he snapped.
When he refused to unbutton his pajamas for photographers, the hair on his chest became a running joke. Damon Runyon, the syndicated humorist, found the story irresistible:
As we understand, Mr. Taylor’s resentment of the suggestion that he is beautiful is offered as a sneer. Now this may not be altogether true. Some persons may truly think Mr. Taylor is indeed beautiful. We never have viewed the young man in the flesh, so we are unable to pass an opinion. However, if we were beautiful, we do not believe we would object to folks so stating. Apollo was accounted beautiful, and there was no public record that he put up any squawk when there was public gossip about the matter.
Runyon reported that Ernest Hemingway was also hairless and that as a result of the brouhaha at least six engagements had been broken in suburban Westchester “because young men unwittingly admitted under crafty cross-examination by their beloveds that they lacked mustaches on their bosom.”
But did Bob have hair on his chest? The question dogged him to Los Angeles. “Just what does a fellow have to do to be a regular guy?” he complained to the press. “Of course, I’m glad that I’m a popular actor, but I certainly don’t get a kick out of a lot of girls who ought to know better pawing me and mauling me.”
They still wanted to see his chest.
Instead of unbuttoning his shirt, he got to wear a low-slung bathing suit in Three Comrades that allowed him to show off a hairy chest.
16
SCREWBALLS, MR. C.B., AND GOLDEN BOY
BARBARA DECIDED SHE COULDN’T POSSIBLY DO ANOTHER EMOtional drama immediately after Stella Dallas. Reading the Breakfast for Two script RKO proposed for her and Herbert Marshall, she realized she had very little to do, that the comedy was practically Marshall’s picture. Charles Kaufman was one of the writers of Breakfast for Two, and the comedy had some hilarious scenes as a headstrong Texas heiress turns a Manhattan playboy into a businessman and pursues him until he catches her. Alfred Santell was going to direct, and RKO promised a superb cast.
Stockholders were fighting over control of RKO-Radio, with studio boss Pandro S. Berman trying to get rid of Sam Briskin and three studio unions on strike, when Breakfast for Two went into production. Fred Astaire was filming A Damsel in Distress with Joan Fontaine (billed as RKO-Radio’s “sensational new sweetheart”), John Boles, Jack Oakie, and Ida Lupino were in a little farce called Fight for Your Lady, and Burgess Meredith and Ann Sothern were shooting There Goes the Groom.
Santell did his best to give the “screwball” script spin, and Stanwyck and Marshall did their best in a boxing match in which she knocked him out with weighted gloves. She called Breakfast for Two a vacation, more play than work. She romped through the picture with her slow smile, he on his absent-minded charm. As Stanwyck and Marshall’s maid and butler, Glenda Farrell and Eric Blore stole the show. Blore was a London lawyer-turned-actor who specialized in butlers—
his discourse on crumpets and scones in The Gay Divorcee set a new high for a gentleman’s gentleman hilarity.
In November 1937, RKO released Breakfast for Two on a double bill with Don’t Forget to Remember; an amiable comedy starring Burgess Meredith and Ann Sothern. Berman spent the next two months looking for a story for Stanwyck. She hated his choices, and when one of her horses won at the Santa Anita racetrack, she quipped, “I’m glad someone in the family is working.” She tried for Warner Brothers’ Jezebel, to be directed by William Wyler. But Warners’ own Bette Davis got the part of the impulsive, complex Southern belle who destroys her chances for happiness by perversely flouting convention.
By January 1938, Barbara’s search for a role had become so desperate that columnists got wind of it. The Hollywood Citizen-News reported Stanwyck was being consulted about doing a picture for Paramount, but that neither RKO nor Paramount could come up with the right story. At Berman’s suggestion she considered The Son of Monte Cristo with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., for RKO. The film would be a sequel to the 1934 Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat and Elissa Landi.
Agreeing instead to do a part Katharine Hepburn refused gave Barbara a screwball hit. Hepburn’s career at RKO was a succession of hits and misses. The studio’s Broadway lookout, who had standing orders to “question every playwright and author in an attempt to find Hepburn material,” signaled rehearsals were beginning on Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Stage Door Hepburn wanted it. Her decision meant she refused a Park Avenue screwball comedy in which the heroine inherits a haunted house—The Mad Miss Mantón. Berman granted Hepburn her wish. But she found herself third in the Stage Door billings, behind Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou. Stanwyck inherited The Mad Miss Mantón.
With his lookalike twin brother Julius, Philip G. Epstein was fast becoming the screenwriter of “champagne comedies.” The twins’ fast, risqué, sophisticated dialogue gave them uncommon liberties and, in 1943, an Oscar for Casablanca. The Mad Miss Mantón was a solo job for Philip.
For openers he had dizzy heiress Melsa Mantón out walking her dog at 3:00 A.M. after a costume ball and stumbling on a corpse. She immediately gets a bevy of scatterbrained Junior League girls in their best party dresses to play scavenger hunt at the crime scene, scampering all over to find clues. The corpse disappears before the police arrive, and everybody calls it another Melsa Mantón hoax. The loudest hoax-crier is a newspaper editor. Miss Mantón promptly sues for libel and enlists her bridge club in her detective work, leading to more bodies, absurd situations, and madcap romance.
Henry Fonda was cast as the sarcastic newspaper editor. He was on loan from Fox, hated his role, hated the script’s sneering repartee with his leading lady, and tried his best to ignore everybody. For Leigh Jason, who directed with a light touch, he went through the motions. But he was smitten by Stanwyck. “Everyone who is close to me knows I’ve been in love with Barbara Stanwyck since I met her,” Fonda would say forty years later. “She’s a delicious woman. We’ve never had an affair. She’s never encouraged me, but dammit, my wife will verify it, my daughter and son will confirm it, and now you all can testify to the truth. Stanwyck can act the hell out of any part, and she can turn a chore into a challenge.”
Fonda was a challenge to work with forever-word-perfect Barbara. Hank had total recall, could read two pages of dialogue just once, put the script down, and recite the whole thing without making a single mistake. The summer was hot in Southern California. Wrapped in their furs, Mantón and her debs were filmed at the Warner Brothers ranch in San Fernando Valley in hundred-degree weather. The Production Code objected to a scene that showed an elderly married couple in bed hearing strange noises. RKO printed the film so dark that the audience could not see the couple in bed, only hear their voices. The Mad Miss Mantón lacked the zaniness of standard screwball comedies. Reviewers, however, called Fonda and Stanwyck refreshingly natural.
RKO publicity appreciated the irony of Barbara playing a Park Avenue debutante. Its press releases told of her being born “to the grimmest poverty at 246 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn.”
BARBARA’S SEARCH FOR SOLID ROLES CONTINUED. APPALLED BY the paucity of good parts any studio had to offer, she renewed a campaign for Dark Victory she had begun a year earlier, when she heard David Selznick was adapting the George E
merson Brewer, Jr.-Bertram Block play. The part of a doomed-to-die woman who develops a brain tumor and learns to accept death with the help of a surgeon who is a friend and, finally, her husband was an actress’s plum, and Stanwyck remained keenly interested in the project despite having been rebuffed in her earlier approaches to the always elusive Selznick. Now Selznick had put the picture on the shelf because no writer could lick the play, that is, find the middle ground between treating cancer as nature’s scourge and romanticizing terminal illness. “That wasn’t going to stop this girl,” she would recall. “I’d done several Cecil B. DeMille ‘Lux Radio Theatre’ shows, so I pitched Dark Victory as a ‘Lux’ and I was set to do it on radio. It was a very successful show.”
Her easily recognizable voice made her ideal for radio. With John Boles and Anne Shirley, she repeated Stella Dallas for “Lux Radio Theatre.” DeMille used Barbara more than any other actress on his radio show. Besides Dark Victory and abridged radio adaptations of her movies, she did Main Street, Morning Glory; Only Yesterday, Smilin Through, This Above All, and Wuthering Heights.
While she tried to goose Selznick into getting Dark Victory into development, she listened to Darryl Zanuck pitch Always Goodbye. She would play a woman faced with the choice of securing her little son’s happiness or giving up the man she loved. The movie’s Margot Weston gives up her illegitimate child to a couple and, after becoming a success, marries the now divorced adoptive father so as to become her own child’s stepmother.
Barbara wanted to know who would play the man she marries.