Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Charles Boyer, said Zanuck.

  Barbara signed on.

  Boyer hated the Kathryn Scola-Edith Skouras script so much that Herbert Marshall was cast instead. Ian Hunter and Cesar Romero played two tiresome “other men” in Margo Weston’s life. The child was a chubby little boy played by Johnnie Russell.

  Variety called Always Goodbye “a fair summer attraction.”

  Stanwyck thought she had Dark Victory in the bag when Variety reported Selznick was selling the rights to the play to Warner Brothers for $27,000. Never mind that Jack Warner bought it for Kay Francis, Barbara was ready. The word got around that Casey Robinson, WB’s top writer, had licked the script.

  “Then it was announced that Bette Davis would be doing it,” Barbara would remember. “Well, I had the right idea, and so did Warners. The picture was nominated for Best Picture, Bette was nominated for Best Actress.”

  BARBARA AND BOB WERE AMONG THE FIRST-NIGHTERS AT THE opening of Earl Carroll’s theater-restaurant on Sunset and Vine. Photographers caught them with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Gable and Lombard were Hollywood’s most brazen twosome. A 1938 poll of 20 million moviegoers declared Gable the “King of Hollywood” (the “Queen” was Myrna Loy).

  DeMille gave Stanwyck a plum of a role in his new epic, Union

  Pacific. The director cast Joel McCrea as a kind of western G-man whose job it is to see that law and order are kept all down the line, Barbara as the engineer’s daughter he marries, Brian Donlevy as the villain who tries to stop the progress of the iron horse, and newcomer Robert Preston as McCrea’s rival for Barbara.

  DeMille’s last black-and-white film had the usual resplendent costumes and settings and feats of daring, climaxing in a spectacular train wreck. The picture was made with the cooperation of Union Pacific’s president William M. Jeffers, who allowed DeMille’s assistants to go through historical records stored in Omaha, Nebraska, where the railway started, loaned the film crews four 1860s locomotives and thirty-seven period cars and spectacular stretches of track. A replica of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was built in Utah, and a thousand Navajos were bused in for the location shooting.

  The director staged a romantic interlude on a handcar hemmed in by grunting bison, a tender farewell in a caboose surrounded by hostile Indians, and a sentimental death beneath the smoking wreckage of a locomotive. There are Indian raids, shooting scrapes, brawls, fistfights, train robberies, fires, and chases.

  The actors did their own stunts, Barbara leaping on and off railroad cars, escaping from a herd of buffalo, and lying flat on her back in a boxcar while sulfur and molasses splashed over her.

  Writing his autobiography twenty years later, DeMille would say he had never worked with an actress “more cooperative, less temperamental, and a better workman—to use my term of highest compliment—than Barbara Stanwyck. I have directed, and enjoyed working with many fine actresses, some of whom are also good workmen, but when I count over those of whom my memories are unmarred by anyway unpleasant recollection of friction on the set or unwillingness to do whatever the role required or squalls of temperament or temper, Barbara’s name is the first that comes to mind, as one on whom a director can always count to do her work with all her heart.”

  DISPATCHES FROM EUROPE WERE OUTNUMBERED BY GONE WITH the Wind bulletins during the summer and fall of 1938. Americans found more relevance in the latest scoop on who was going to play Scarlett O’Hara than in the mission to Munich of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier’s or Adolf Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Benito Mussolini. War raged in China, civil war in Spain, and progressives in Hollywood gave money for the Republican, or Loyalist, forces battling Generalissimo Francisco

  Franco’s rebel armies. Selznick’s search for O’Hara, however, was a new national fantasy. After Samuel Goldwyn signed Stanwyck to star in Golden Boy; his publicity people pushed her for Scarlett. When Selznick did not test Barbara, a Goldwyn publicity release said he took a special note of her acting ability. In all, 1,400 Scarlett candidates were interviewed; ninety were given screen tests.

  Not to be outdone, DeMille and Paramount staged a Union Pacific monster premiere in Omaha. On Easter Sunday 1939, the director, Stanwyck, McCrea, Preston, and a party of one hundred left Los Angeles in a special UP train, to be greeted at the Omaha station by two hundred thousand Nebraskans in period costume. Bands played, and the streets were jammed as the movie stars rode through in carriages, confetti filled the sky, and people hung from every window. The festivities were capped by a dinner for ten thousand.*

  The Depression sharpened Americans’ awareness of the deeper correlation of economic and other forces in society. Themes of the down-and-out flourished in theater and literature. Anxiety was universal on Broadway, but so was the creative ferment. Productions that in 1929-30 had reached nearly 250 were now under one hundred, and five thousand actors were out of work. As New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson would write in hindsight, “Perhaps the depression had a ghastly dramatic undertone; perhaps it sharpened the minds, broadened the range of interests, and excited the notions of theater people. Perhaps it drew them closer. Whatever the reason it was one of Broadway’s most stimulating times.”

  Golden Boy was a Depression play that focused on the tension between social ideals and people’s obsessive desire for celebrity and money. Its author was Clifford Odets, an actor turned playwright identified with the New Deal’s more aggressive social agenda.

  The screen rights to the 1937 Odets play belonged to Rouben Mamoulian, the director of Garbo, Dietrich, Miriam Hopkins, and Irene Dunne. Frank Capra wanted to film the sentimental “we are the little people” morality play about a young Italian-American who wants to make it, abandons his musical talent, and turns to professional boxing. Like Odets, Capra felt the Depression raised questions about the validity of the country’s political and economic system. Deep pessimism runs through Capra’s movies and Odets’s plays. The little guy may win in the end, not so much because evil is overpowered, but

  because the contrivance of the third act demands it. Golden Boy was the eternal American quandary: how to succeed in a society that trusts only one thing—success.

  While Capra filmed You Can’t Take It with You, he kept after Mamoulian. The Armenian-born Mamoulian considered himself a man of the theater. In 1935, he had directed the Alvin Theatre production of what Gershwin himself considered his biggest achievement, Porgy and Bess, and he was revered in Hollywood for his broad stage experience, his technical abilities, and his high-strung independence. When Capra offered to buy the screen rights to Golden Boy, the monocled Mamoulian said no. He wanted to do it himself. Capra upped his price. Mamoulian refused offers that eventually reached a stratospheric $75,000. After much haggling and posturing, Cohn agreed to let Mamoulian do Golden Boy for Columbia. To Cohn’s astonishment, Mamoulian accepted only what he had paid for the play, $1,500.

  Mamoulian insisted Odets adapt his own work. Odets had burst onto Broadway with his effective and bitter Waiting for Lefty in 1935 and was acclaimed as the outstanding proletarian dramatist. Four of his plays had been produced in New York in 1935, propelling him to fame as Eugene O’Neill’s successor—a playwright, as he mockingly said himself, “who receives fantastic offers from Hollywood, invitations to address ladies’ clubs, one hundred and fifty phone calls a day and a lot of solemn consideration from guys who write pieces for the dramatic pages.”

  Odets arrived in Hollywood in December 1938, “hot as a pistol,” as his agent put it, to visit his wife—Luise Rainer. Stanwyck’s nemesis at the Academy Awards eighteen months earlier was terribly unhappy at MGM, and Odets was in no mood to do the Golden Boy screenplay for Cohn and Mamoulian. He was convinced a creative marriage between social drama and commerce was essentially unfeasible and that he would not work in Hollywood “unless I am broke.” Hearing from Phil Berg, his agent, what kinds of money Cohn, Capra, and Mamoulian had tossed at each other over Golden Boy; he was determined to stay
away from screenwriting and to rescue his wife from MGM.

  Mamoulian went to New York to find writers with a feeling for Odets’s Joe “Golden Boy” Bonaparte. Daniel Taradash, a scion of wealth and a graduate of Harvard Law School, and Lewis Meitzer, a wry, unpredictable playwright with one unfortunate play to his credit, were two twenty-five-year-old fringe members of the Group Theatre. For $200 a week, they agreed to come west to script Golden Boy.

  To Mamoulian’s annoyance, Cohn told the two young men to “make it sound like Capra.” Mamoulian spirited Taradash and Meitzer to the Mojave Desert so they could concoct a script far from Cohn’s interference.

  MAMOULIAN, TARADASH, AND MELTZER DELETED A LABOR ORGAnizer and much philosophizing about Joe Bonaparte’s forsaking a future as a sensitive, penniless violinist in favor of becoming a tough, brutalized but well-paid professional fighter. They coarsened Stanwyck’s Lorna Moon character. Lorna is an orphaned “dame from Newark.” She is the mistress of a fight manager who uses her to seduce Joe Bonaparte into real fighting. Instead of a sniveling, slightly tarnished girl, director and writers developed an embittered, wisecracking persona just right for Stanwyck.

  The stage Lorna’s third-act incantation after Napoleon has killed his opponent in a fight read:

  LORNA: Somewhere there must be happy boys and girls who can teach us the way of life. We’ll find a city where poverty’s no shame, where there’s no war in the street, where a man is glad to be himself; to live and make his woman herself.

  Director and writers couldn’t imagine Stanwyck spouting those lines and made the speech read:

  LORNA: Be glad you’re rid of him. You’re free. Now you can go back to yourself, to your music.

  The toughening process was helped by casting Adolphe Menjou as Joe’s manager, Tom Moody, and Joseph Calleia, in a caricature of Bog-art, as a gangster in pinstripe suit who wants to buy a piece of the new boxing hopeful. Menjou brought a touch of elegant despair to his love for Lorna.

  Cohn sent a copy of the first-draft screenplay to the office of the Production Code Administration for preproduction clearance. Chief censor Joseph Breen replied that “the adulterous relationship between Moody, a married man, and your sympathetic female lead, Lorna … and a suggestion of a sexual affair between Lorna and Joe should be changed.” Also, the following Stanwyck lines were unacceptable:

  Page 1-2-25: “What the hell’s so special in bed.”

  Page 1-3-31: “I don’t like this seduction scene.”

  Page 1-3-37: “I’m a tramp from Newark, Tom, I know a dozen ways.”

  Page 2-1-11: “You expect me to sleep with that boy?”

  Page 2-2-16: “He picked me up in Friskin’s Hotel.”

  Page 2-3-29: “Because he’s a queer.”

  Page 2-36: “This isn’t a hotel bedroom.”

  The script went back for rewrites. It was submitted again, the Lorna-Moody relationship still found unacceptable and rewritten one more time.

  HARRY COHN WANTED LUTHER ADLER, WHO HAD BEEN A thrilling Golden Boy (to Frances Farmer’s Lorna Moon) during the long run at the Belasco Theatre. Tyrone Power was the second choice, but Zanuck refused to lend him. “How about going for an unknown, Harry?”producer William Perlberg asked. “We could have a Search for Golden Boy, like Selznick did for Scarlett O’Hara.”

  Columbia publicity launched the campaign, and Alan Ladd was one young unknown who competed for the part with athletes and actors of all descriptions. Mamoulian was not amused. He preferred to watch screen tests to the Golden Boy search charade. Concentrating on finding someone to play Joe Bonaparte’s sister, he saw six Paramount tests, including one of a young actress named Margaret Young. What made Mamoulian lean forward in the screening room, however, was the young Paramount actor reading lines to Young.

  William Holden was sent for.

  “Can you act?” Cohn growled when Mamoulian sent in the twenty-two-year-old newcomer with high praise.

  “I’m not sure,” Holden admitted.

  “Can you box?”

  “No.”

  “Can you play the violin?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the hell are you here?”

  “Because you sent for me.”

  Holden’s forthright answer and Cohn’s sense of a bargain clinched the deal. Splitting Holden’s salary with Paramount came to $25 a week.

  William Franklin Beedle, Jr., was from South Pasadena. His appearance in a friend’s play at Gilmor Brown’s Playbox Theatre showcase in 1936 had led to a $35-a-week, seven-year Paramount contract. The studio had changed his name to Holden (after a Los Angeles Times associate editor) and used him as a member of a road gang in Prison Farm, starring Lloyd Nolan, and as a collegiate in Million Dollar Legs, a Jackie Coogan-Betty Grable musical. Golden Boy was his first loanout.

  Before filming started on April 1, 1939, Holden boxed with an old-time fighter and studied the violin with a concert violinist and his lines with a dialogue coach, but the person who really helped was Stanwyck.

  “Look, Bill, we all had to start in this business sometime,” she told him on the first day of shooting. “You’re going to be terrific, I know you are. Just hold on, and if there’s any way I can help, for God’s sake let me know.”

  The rest of the cast was less than charitable during the first three days. When he didn’t show on the fourth day, but came back two days later complaining of “nerves,” Mamoulian began to regret recommending the young actor. After one week, Cohn wanted to replace Holden.

  Barbara went to Cohn and Perlberg and asked them to give the boy a chance. “My God, he’s only had a week,” she yelled at Cohn. “I don’t know what you want. None of us can walk on water.” Besides, Holden was sensitive and intelligent. He had the physique they wanted, his boxing was passable, and the story didn’t make him a champion.

  Her argument prevailed. She coached Bill and every night read the next day’s lines with him in her dressing room. “I told him much of what Willard Mack had taught me,” she would remember. Holden was still insecure, and the drinking that would eventually ruin his life started right there on the Golden Boy set. After a few nips of alcohol in his dressing room, he felt loosened up enough to face Mamoulian, Stanwyck, and crew.

  17

  MARRIAGE

  THE JANUARY 1939 ISSUE OF PHOTOPLAY; WITH HEDY LAMARR ON the cover, provoked a first-class scandal. The lead article in the influential and popular movie magazine was entitled “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives.” The byline read Kirtley Baskette, but within hours le tout Hollywood knew the writer was Sheilah Graham. Although the points were made entirely through innuendo, “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives” was the most outspoken article about the stars’ private lives ever published. It zeroed in on Gable and Lombard, Taylor and Stanwyck, Constance Bennett and Gilbert Roland, Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, and George Raft and Virginia Pine:

  Barbara Stanwyck is not Mrs. Robert Taylor. But she and Bob have built ranch homes next to each other. Regularly, once a week, they visit Bob’s mother, Mrs. Brugh, for dinner. Regularly, once a week, too, Barbara freezes homemade ice cream for Bob from a recipe his mother gave her.

  Nowhere has domesticity, outside the marital state, reached such a full flower as in Hollywood. Nowhere are there so many famous unmarried husbands and wives … When Bob Taylor docked in New York from England and A Yank at Oxford, he waited around a couple of hours for a load of stuff he had brought over there to clear customs. Most of it was for—not Bob—but Barbara Stanwyck and her little son, Dion.

  They’ve been practically a family since Bob bought his ranch estate in Northridge and built a house there.

  The story described their ranch life, their permanent seats together at the Hollywood Legion Stadium on fight nights, evenings together, how they were always invited together, “just like man and wife,” and how they gave each other gifts—he a tennis court for her, she a two-horse auto trailer just like “old married folks” for him.

 
Louis B. Mayer was furious. Although more worried about Clark Gable’s reputation in the middle of the Gone with the Wind shoot than Robert Taylor’s, he called both male stars on the carpet. As popular as they were, he thundered, moviegoers might not pay to see anyone involved in scandal. Strickling took it from there.

  Photoplay was informed of Louis B.’s wrath. If a retraction was not printed, MGM was not only going to cancel all advertising but choke off the magazine’s access to its stars. Photoplay knuckled under and the following month published a full-page apology to the celebrities mentioned in “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives,” ostensibly because newspaper quotes from the piece had made “these friendships appear in a light far from our original intention.”

  Strickling took care of Gable next. Living apart from his older wife, Rhea, since 1936, Gable permitted the publicity department to tell the press he was going to ask for a divorce. The announcement was one too many insults for Rhea. He was robbing her of the one little triumph that had always been hers. She had understood that when the inevitable happened, she would do the announcing and the divorcing. A message from her lawyers notified Clark she would contest. The Gable divorce, one columnist informed her readers, “hit a snag.”

  Everybody knew Gable and Lombard had been together since 1936 and with her $40,000 had bought a ranch in Encino. At Carole’s suggestion, a new lawyer was brought into Gable versus Gable. Clark could not pay Rhea’s demands of $300,000 ($2.4 million in 1994 money), so Mayer agreed to an advance on Gable’s new contract, which boosted his salary to $7,500 a week. After Rhea’s settlement had been put in an escrow account in January 1939, she announced she was leaving for Las Vegas to seek a Nevada “quickie” divorce.

  The Taylor-Stanwyck scrape was a breeze by comparison. Bob had never been married, and it was exactly three years before that the Stan-wyck-Fay divorce had been granted. Nevertheless, before the February Photoplay retraction appeared, Metro announced the formal engagement of Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck. Louis B.’s ultimatum that Taylor marry Stanwyck had the force of law for Bob, of course. And Barbara was discerning enough to realize that if she wanted to sustain her star stature in the company town it behooved her not to offend MGM’s formidable boss. Three months after their engagement, Strickling masterminded a wedding.