by Axel Madsen
On Saturday, May 13, 1939, studio publicists whisked Bob and Barbara to San Diego for a wedding before Municipal Judge Phil Smith. To fool the press, their marriage license, taken out three days earlier, was in the names of R. Stevens and Spangler Arlington Brugh. To report back that everything was kosher, Louis B. made Ida Koverman, his secretary who had come up with Bob’s stage name, join the party. Marion Marx was the matron of honor and Uncle Buck the best man. Strickling managed to squeeze an “item” out of the fact that the wedding party had a buffet supper and waited until after midnight so that Stanwyck and Taylor would not be married on the possibly ill-starred thirteenth. After midnight, Barbara, in blue silk dress and a hat borrowed from her hairdresser, pronounced her vows in a clear voice; Bob, in a brown business suit, mumbled his “I do.”
At a press reception at the Beverly Hills Victor Hugo Café, they posed for photographers, arms entwined, smiling at each other. Joel McCrea phoned his congratulations, and a telegram from William Holden signed “The Golden Boy” read: GOSH, WHAT A BLOW! When photographers asked them to kiss, Bob refused, saying. “We’ll just smile and look silly, I guess.” Their raising horses led to a question of children. Again, Bob replied, “Well, we’ll raise horses—definitely.”
After the press reception, Barbara returned to the ranch while Bob went to see his hysterical mother. He gave Ruth a sedative. After a while they talked, but the word “wedding” was never mentioned. He assured her nothing would change. Didn’t she know there were nights when he was too tired to drive out to Northridge? Why, he’d stay with her more often. She said she felt sick and asked him to stay and check her heartbeat every so often. He had learned to do that from his father and had done it many times before. How could he abandon her now? He spent the wedding night with his mother. The next morning, he reported to the set of Lady of the Tropics, filming a wedding scene with Hedy Lamarr.
Barbara went back to the set of Golden Boy and sometime during the next years became William Holden’s lover. His alcoholism destroyed their relationship but not their friendship nor his affection for the woman who had helped him through his first movie. Every April 1, the starting date of Golden Boy; he sent Barbara two dozen roses and a white gardenia.
Frank Fay summed up his reaction to the marriage in one word. “Spite” was the reason Barbara had married again, Frank told actor Jay C. Flippen.
Louis B.’s DIKTAT WAS PROPITIOUS BOTH FOR BARBARA STANWYCK and for Robert Taylor. Fame was what effortlessly enveloped Bob, what Barbara hustled for. If being married was what it took, both were winners. Their celebrity was based on their ability to convincingly play love games with the opposite sex. Consummating the relationship was possibly easier for Barbara, who knew more about men than Bob knew about women. Crawford, who was “Aunt Joan” to Dion, would remember Bob telling her, “All I had to say about it was, Ί do.’ I didn’t know what happened.” When he added that something good did come out of it, and Joan asked if he meant the marriage, he told her how the press had hounded him with the “pretty boy” epithet. “Overnight, I was a he-man but I still break out in sweat if anyone refers to me as pretty boy. MGM did all it could. Something came out of it though.”
Did he mean marrying Barbara?
He hesitated. “Well, yes, but I was actually referring to the tough roles I’m assigned now … boxers, cowboys, gangsters, that kind of thing.”
At the wedding reception, he expressed the hope that marriage would mean the end of ordeal-by-fandom. No matter how much he loathed feminine hands groping him in public places, no matter his sexual preference, his ego demanded that, when challenged, he live up to the image a million women swooned over. Barbara had been married and perhaps thought she could limit any “slip” of Bob’s that, if found out, could be catastrophic. Neither of them found exclusively homosexual circles attractive, although they were friends of Hollywood’s newest lavender couple: Tyrone and Annabella Power. Bob might have been directed by George Cukor, but he was no more a habitué at Cukor’s soirees than Barbara belonged to the so-called sewing circle, Hollywood’s clandestine sisterhood of mostly rich, well-connected, and free lesbians who surrounded Greta Garbo.
Homosexuality was against the law in the 1930s, and it would be decades before anyone wrote that Stanwyck and Taylor were both drawn to same-sex love. In discussing Judy Garland’s affairs with women and how commonplace so-called lavender marriages were in 1940s Hollywood, her biographer, David Shipman, would write that “the Stanwyck-Taylor marriage was obviously a precedent, since both were basically attracted to people of their own sex.” In any event, Barbara and Bob lived their lives outside the gay subcultures. To themselves and each other, their busy lives allowed them, all too conveniently, to gloss over their differences.
For Barbara, marrying Metro’s leading matinee idol meant radiance and gravity. For Bob, wedlock meant social acceptance, moorings, and confidence. Barbara gave little of herself to the marriage. Her seven years with Fay had taught her not to try to do anything for a man that he didn’t want to do himself. For Bob, getting a wife sheltered him from marauding females and put a distance between him and his mother. Not that Ruth would ever stop intruding in her son’s life.
MGM WANTED TO COSTAR THE NEWLYWEDS IN A THIRD MOVIE together, but nothing came of it. At Mayer’s insistence, however, Barbara and Bob sandwiched in a brief honeymoon before their next assignments. The honeymoon took them east to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and the home of Moss Hart. Since the turn of the century, the hills above New Hope on the Delaware River had been a Bohemian retreat, first discovered by American impressionist painters. Buying Bucks County farmhouses was the rage with Broadway types in the 1930s, and the seventy-two-acre Hart estate in Holicong was just across from the fifty-nine-acre farm that Beatrice and George S. Kaufman had bought to put some distance behind them after his tumultuous affair with Mary Astor. Moss and Kitty Hart had added wings and ells to the stone farmhouse, turned a toolshed into a library, built a swimming pool, and imported 3,500 pine trees for more shade, leading the acerbic Alexander Woollcott to comment, “It just goes to show what God could do if he had money.” A 110-acre Pennsylvania Dutch farm in Pipersville belonged to Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell. The newlyweds considered buying an Italianate house with a view of the Delaware River a few miles north of New Hope.
Back in Los Angeles, the Taylors’ engagement calendar quickly filled up. “They made you—made you—go out two or three nights a week,” Barbara would say of MGM. Barbara and Bob were an attractive couple. And marriage was in style. Barbara’s friends, from the Bennys to Crawford and Blondell, were married. Everybody was getting older, the hungry days were passé. The marriage put a still greater distance between Barbara and Dion. To a pair of role players like Barbara and Bob, the boy’s presence no longer fit the play. To Barbara, he was a reminder of her failure with Frank. Joan Benny would come to believe Bob Taylor was the reason Barbara got rid of “Skip.” “The boy was in the way when she married Robert Taylor,” Benny would say, “so she put him in the closet, in a succession of boarding schools.”
Dion was more forgiving. In 1959, he would say that Bob tried for a while to play his father. “At first he tried to teach me baseball and football, discussing the games and complaining when his favorite team lost. But I just didn’t respond. These were things I had no knowledge of and the names and scores he talked about were completely foreign to me. After a while he gave up. I think he had a feeling I was Barbara’s son, not his.”
To the outside world, Barbara and Bob covered their differences with humor and jokes. They were seen to have struck an endearing balance between his quiet strength and her raw sense of humor, his level temper, her chip-on-the-shoulder quicksilver reaction. Their quirks were remarked upon. Where actresses habitually had their wedding rings taped over with flesh-colored adhesive, no-nonsense Barbara removed her wedding band when a role called for it. Bob refused to dance with his wife, insisting he was no good, she too terrific on a dance floor.
In private he reacted to Barbara’s authority as he had always responded to his mother’s—by withdrawing. His wife, he discovered, was a lot like Garbo. Both were headstrong, stuck to their guns, and never gave in.
Few people glimpsed the Taylors’ intimate lives or saw any reason to look askance at their separate bedrooms. Bob was the first to say he fell asleep the minute his head hit the pillow. Barbara made no bones about her chronic insomnia that had her read in bed until all hours.
Were the separate bedrooms a consequence of Bob’s physical inadequacy? A story flying around the Los Angeles-Santa Monica Gun Club had Bob going on a hunting trip with fellow actors Andy Devine and Robert Stack. After much beer and a long haul over back roads, they could no longer refuse nature’s call. As reported by skeet shooter and soon-to-be actor Robert Stack, the pair were irrigating the desert when Devine caught a glimpse of Taylor’s penis. “That doesn’t look like it belongs to the world’s greatest lover,” Devine said. Without missing a beat, Bob said, “I know, but don’t tell my wife. She thinks they’re all the same size.” Bob would grow defensive over the years when it came to male intimacy and would refuse to hear out a fellow actor confiding his own homosexuality. Sal Mineo visited the set of the multinational flop The Glass Sphinx in Rome in 1967, and although
Bob was not his type, he wanted to be seen with him. The twenty-seven-year-old Mineo’s career had started at the top with Rebel without a Cause but had gone nowhere since. When Mineo brought up his own homosexuality over cocktails, Bob said he didn’t want to discuss politics.
AFTER THREE COMRADES—A CAPTIVATING ADAPTATION OF ERICH Maria Remarque’s wasted-youth romance that earned Margaret Sulla-van an Oscar nomination for Best Actress—Bob played a prizefighter in The Crowd Roars, again showing his hairy chest. To build on the tough-guy Taylor image, Louis B. had him brawl with Wallace Beery in the action picture Stand Up and Fight. Myrna Loy, who made Lucky Night with Bob in 1939, thought him “a bit stuffy” and, she claimed, not above trying to play her off Barbara. “For some reason he tried to cook up a little triangle; he wanted her to think I was after him,” Loy would recall. Barbara’s maid talked to Myrna’s maid, who could report back that there was nothing to it.
MGM renewed Bob’s contract for another seven years—but Barbara insisted Morgan Maree become their joint business manager. Bob let MGM rule his life. As for Barbara, the fact that she had thirty-five movies behind her egged her on instead of slowing her down. Helen Ferguson and Mervyn LeRoy saw her battle with frequent back pain and insomnia. She made fun of their concern for her health, saying she was slowing to a gallop.
Work kept the Taylors apart for ten, twelve hours a day.
Barbara was scheduled to star with Fred MacMurray in a warm and witty Paramount picture called Remember the Night. After Lady of the Tropics, Bob went right into Remember with Greer Garson. On the Motion Picture Herald’s annual poll of ten thousand independent theater owners, he ranked number six in screen popularity. Stanwyck didn’t make the 1939 Most Popular list, but she was nevertheless a star of such magnitude that to keep Henry Fonda under contract at Fox, Darryl Zanuck offered to have a part for her written into Fonda’s next film. “Zanuck knew the propinquity of Stanwyck on a film set was a temptation Fonda would find irresistible,” Leonard Mosley would write. Fonda had come to loathe the pictures Zanuck starred him in and turned down the offer.
The week Stanwyck and Holden were sent to New York for the Golden Boy launch war broke out in Europe. Barbara was more engrossed by the fact that Frank Fay was hitting the big time on Broadway again. His costars in Frank Fay’s Vaudeville were ladies from his youth—Elsie Janis and the gay actress-writer-celebrity Eva Le Gallienne.
Barbara talked absentmindedly about the “trouble” in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening. After overrunning Poland, Hitler and Mussolini seemed at a loss what to do next. There was no enthusiasm for the war in France and England, let alone in America, where opinion polls showed a majority against any involvement. French and German soldiers glowered at each other across the Rhine, and the conflict was quickly dubbed “the phony war.” It was a beautiful fall in France. As Clare Boothe Luce reported in Time, September and October had never been lovelier in Paris.
Barbara and Bob were dead set against seeing the United States tricked or stampeded into joining another war to bail out the English and the French. Let the Europeans fight their own wars. Neither of them was a Roosevelt Democrat. Archconservatism had run through her first marriage, and Bob was influenced by his mother’s and Louis B.’s right-wing convictions.
The September 7, 1939, Golden Boy premiere at Radio City Music Hall was a disappointment. Not only did the outbreak of World War II four days earlier date the two-year-old Depression story, but its “Holly woodization,” including a long, brutish slugging match in the ring and a hokey happy ending, irritated critics. Odets’s name was on the marquee, but the playwright stayed away.
FORMAL DINNER PARTIES REMAINED THE SOCIAL DISTRACTION AS Europe slid into the phony war. Barbara and Bob made their appearance when they had to. They were popular, she poised, stunning-looking, and attuned, he cordial, taking life as easily as it took him. If David Niven and Laurence Oliver felt obliged to return to defend England, the rest of the sizable English film colony concentrated on smart soirees and the occasional patriotic charity ball. Ouida and Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman, Clive Brook, Herbert Marshall, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, and MGM’s distinguished C. Aubrey Smith set the tone. Ouida Rathbone was a superb hostess who requested formal attire—gowns for the women and white tie and tails for the men. “We dressed to the teeth for everything,” said Barbara. “Never the same dress twice, a hairdresser would come to the house the day of the party, and for special events a makeup man would come from the studio to do my face.” Barbara’s clothes reflected her lifestyle perfectly. Her extensive wardrobe was smartly tailored. “She had dozens of suits, sports clothes and slacks, all made of men’s material,” Hollywood Citizen-News columnist Sidney Skolsky reported.
Edith Goetz and Irene Selznick were the movie colony’s leading hostesses. No matter how famous, movie stars could be hired and fired. Louis B.’s two daughters were Hollywood princesses. An invitation to the Goetzes in the heart of fashionable Bel Air or the Selznicks’ Beverly Hills aerie implied total acceptance. Barbara and Bob spent Christmas 1939 with the Selznicks.
After Gone with the Wind, David wanted to celebrate, his wife to catch her breath. He pretended annoyance when Gone with the Wind was brought up, but was resentful if it wasn’t. He escorted Barbara to the dinner table and, to everybody’s surprise, recited a hastily scrawled homage to her:
Barbara
A Quick Impression on a Drunken Christmas Night by David O. Selznick
Without guile O Henry style. Evening prayers at home Corned beef at the Court of Rome Minsky learns emotion Devotion
Grant Wood on 48th Street Salome’s Vine Street Beat Guff
Helen Hayes gets tough
Situation found
Talent on a merry-go-round
Rhapsody in Blue
Spangles for Sunbonnet Sue
The Manhattan Nation
Appreciation.
18
HE far passions
The ONLY REAL FIGHTING IN EUROPE IN JANUARY 1940 WAS IN THE far north, where a Russian army tried to batter its way into Finland. Elsewhere the ominous calm of the drôle de guerre continued. The war made an impact on Hollywood’s pocketbook as Germany and the Axis countries barred American films. The lull ended in April, when Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway to win bases for an impending assault on England and, with the northern flank secure, turned his armies against France and the Low Countries.
If Barbara scanned the newspapers every morning, Bob had little interest in world affairs. When filming, he was in bed by nine; she read half the night. Yes, she had her own bedroom, she told Hollywood Citizen-News columnist Sidney Skolsky, specifying that she slept on her right
on the left side of her double bed. When she was working, she averaged three and a half hours sleep.
Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable were similar couples, the wives keeping up with current events, the husbands more interested in hunting trips and football.
Bob and “Dutch” Reagan were the same age. Reagan never tired of telling how, back in 1937, his agent, Bill Meiklejohn, had pitched him to WB’s casting director Max Arnow: “Max, I have another Robert Taylor sitting in my office.” To which Arnow said, “God made only one Robert Taylor” before agreeing to look at the radio announcer from Iowa.
Ron tried to please and at closer inspection was more substantial than the characters Jack Warner had him play. Wyman believed in making her own breaks. She was articulate, cared about people, was loyal to friends, and active in the Screen Actors Guild. Barbara liked the fact that Ron and Jane drove to Warners together and managed to work together in An Angel from Texas, based on George S. Kaufman’s play The Butter and Egg Man.
The Taylors were, of course, rungs above the Reagans and invited to glamour parties given by MGM executives. The stars were supposed to outshine each other, and the studio designers and workrooms busily dressed the screen goddesses for these soirees, where the same glittering people kept seeing the same glittering people. Bob and Barbara were never comfortable at these events—Barbara called them command performances. She liked to know the people she was to meet at the dinner party and disliked going to nightclubs. “I’ll go to Ciro’s or the Tro-cadero with Bob some evening,” she would recall. “I’ll be wearing a lovely gown, and my hair all doozied up. No sooner do I get there when I think, gee, I look awful. I see Claudette and she looks divine, or I see Dietrich looking something out of this world, and I imagine I look like some dowdy little shopgirl.” Socializing at night spots meant being photographed—Jane Wyman with James Stewart, Reagan with Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert, Bob with Jane. These “on the town” impromptu sessions kept newspapers and magazines supplied with photos for weeks, sometimes months.