by Axel Madsen
The Taylors were more comfortable with Mary and Jack Benny, Marion and Zeppo Marx, Lillian and Fred MacMurray. They became friends with Annabella and Tyrone Power, who had returned from Europe the day before war broke out. Bob didn’t care much for the movies he made and hadn’t even seen his most famous film until Barbara and he were dinner guests at the Louis B. Mayers one summer evening in 1940. Waterloo Bridge was MGM’s summer hit, and Louis B. was proud of Bob.
“You were great in that one!” Mayer beamed over cocktails.
“Don’t know,” Bob responded. “I never saw it.”
Mayer couldn’t believe it. When the all-too-sincere Bob convinced him it was true, Louis B. phoned the studio and ordered a print to be dispatched to his home. After dinner, Waterloo Bridge was screened in the Mayer living room.
FEAR OF WAR RAN THROUGH THE NATIONAL CONSCIENCE. BY MID-summer the defeat of Great Britain seemed entirely possible, and Americans were debating whether to rush material aid to Britain or stay out of the war. Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt’s appointee as Secretary of War, told the Senate Military Affairs Committee, “We may be next.” Bob and Barbara were isolationists and against a third term for Franklin D. Roosevelt, as were Gable and Lombard, Reagan and Wyman, Mayer and Cohn. Capra spoke admiringly of Benito Mussolini. When William Wyler started Mrs. Miniver and wanted one fanatical Nazi youth in the film, Louis B. reminded him that the United States was not at war with anybody and that MGM had cinemas all over the world, including a couple in Berlin.
Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota flayed Hollywood for trying “to rouse war fever in America and plunge the nation to her destruction.” The Taylors agreed when Charles Lindbergh told a radio audience, “We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of America but because we American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe.” But screaming headlines of Germans smashing through Belgium and down into France made a lot of Americans nervous, and both the people who espoused open aid to the Allies and those who opposed it felt a need to rally around the flag. When Barbara was the guest of honor at the Athena National Sorority convention in Los Angeles she expressed the hope that the association was destined to become “one of America’s foremost patriotic and humanitarian organizations.”
Whether it was war, that traditional spur of population booms, or ticking biological clocks, Hollywood’s birthrate soared in the spring of 1940. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Ray Milland, Anne Shirley, Janet Gaynor, Bill Henry, Geraldine Fitzgerald, John Garfield, Russell Hay-den, Johnny Weissmuller, Madge Evans, Pat Ziegfeld, and several others were expecting “newcomers to their families,” as the June issue of Photoplay put it. The year before Joan Crawford and her fourth husband Phillip Terry had followed Barbara’s example and adopted a baby they named Christina. Babies were a touchy subject. Glamour queens and screen heroes were supposed to lose all box-office appeal if they were known to be mothers or fathers.
Stanwyck and Taylor had no happy event to announce, but Barbara had followed Mary Benny’s pregnancy that, by summer, resulted in a miscarriage. Photoplay asked Barbara to answer the question: Can Hollywood Mothers Be Good Mothers? In a sidebar to the June issue’s cover story on Hollywood couples having babies, Barbara wrote effusively of bringing up Dion. No doubt ghostwritten by Helen Ferguson, the piece told of a day in the life of a movie star mother and her too busy son. She saw Dion for breakfast and had her chauffeur bring him to the studio at six P.M. so he could ride home with her. His bedtime was seven, she explained, seven-thirty when she was working.
“The Hollywood child is a desired child,” she wrote. “Hollywood women want children so much they adopt them if necessary.” Celebrity youngsters were not awed by actors or actresses. “Dion knows simply that Mr. Power and his wife, or Mr. Gable and his wife, are coming to dinner. He knows them as individuals, not as famous names.”
When Bob and Barbara entertained on Saturday nights, Dion was taught to say the guests wore “evening gowns” and “dinner jackets,” never “formal” or “tuxedo.” The guests usually included the Bennys, Annabella and Tyrone Power, George Montgomery and his wife, Dinah Shore, Ray and Mai Milland, the Reagans, the MacMurrays. Divorces and remarriages might vary the pairings, but the dinner parties remained the same. Cocktails were followed by a catered sit-down dinner, which was followed by dancing to the strains of a professional band.
In the Photoplay piece, Barbara only mentioned Bob in connection with too many toys for Dion. She strongly condemned parents who, because of a deprived childhood, overcompensated by giving their youngsters too much. “I had to discipline myself to insure his future happiness. I’m not going to rob him of the excitement and triumph of a right perspective on possessions—and other Hollywood mothers discipline themselves on this matter as I do.” The proof would be in how Hollywood children turned out as adults. Sounding like an echo of Nazi agitprop, she concluded: “In the face of wars and the rumors of general catastrophe, Hollywood women are taking time out to bear strong, beautiful children, or to adopt them. And whether the rearing of these children is good, bad or indifferent, at least they’ll exist and they’ll have healthy bodies, tans, straight teeth, and minds filled with the ideals of American democracy.”
However wholesome her published view of her own motherhood, she was, in reality, appalled that Dion was not the beautiful and resilient child befitting her image, that he was not a clever, good-looking reflection of her. When he was six, she started sending him to a succession of boarding schools.
“She threw me away like so much garbage,” Dion would remember when he was in his fifties. “When I was five or six, I got heavy. I was freckle-faced. I had to wear glasses, and I was awkward. And just by doing the normal things any active kid would do, like not picking up my clothes or playing in the dirt, I began to feel that I caused nothing but trouble for my mother. I can still see my mother standing over me, slim and beautiful but oh so threatening. She would say, ‘What’s the matter with you? Why do you do those horrible things? I’m disgusted with you.’ Once I broke some toys and she screamed at me for what seemed like hours. ‘You stupid child,’ she yelled and began shaking me.” Dion would not remember his mother ever touching him with affection or kissing him.
He called Taylor “Gentleman Bob” and saw him as a nice, ineffectual presence. Barbara never visited Dion at his boarding schools. Their living under one roof was limited to two weeks a year. During summer vacations, she sent him to camp on Catalina island.
BARBARA’S EXISTENCE WAS ENTIRELY DEDICATED TO HER LIFE before the cameras. Weekday mornings, her ritual consisted of drinking four glasses of water, followed by a hot and cold shower, and a copious breakfast. Assistant directors rarely had to call her because she checked her work schedule, drove herself to the studio, and never quibbled over early starting hours. On the set she was a quick study, knew her business, and demanded that her coworkers know theirs. She studied scripts at home, drank twenty cups of coffee, and chain-smoked all day, using a jeweled cigarette case given to her by Joan Crawford. She never allowed men to leap to their feet and light her cigarette or fix her chair. She ran the home on a budget, allocated her personal expenditures with the impassivity of an accountant, and admitted to no expensive tastes. Her favorite dinner was a thick steak and green vegetables.
Beatings by Frank Fay, falls from horses, and other work-related accidents had given her a bad back. To ease spinal pain a doctor once gave her five shots of a substance containing morphine, saying she would be out cold for at least twenty hours. After forty-five minutes she was awake. Bob insisted her case was written up in a medical journal.
Bob discovered a new passion—flying. Flight Command, a routine join-the-armed-forces flag-waver, was made with the cooperation of the naval air command, and for his navy ensign role Bob decided to take flying lessons. He found soaring into the air from Burbank airport liberating and exhilarating and soon began spending every spare moment at ai
rstrips with instructors, flyers, and “hangar jocks,” as general aviation enthusiasts were called. Bob’s Flight Command was a Christmas 1940 release. With its exciting air sequences, the film was as fresh as the front-page news. The New York Post’s review was music to Bob ears: “The story is pretty much what you would expect: flying thrills, tragedy, courage, misunderstanding, and eventually the heroism that proves to everyone that Robert Taylor has what it takes to be Clark Gable, even if he is less rugged.”
Barbara was not only afraid of ocean travel, she was also terrified of “going up” in an airplane. Flight Command marked the end of any pretense of their ten-month marriage. Barbara tried to be patient. As much as she had disciplined Dion, she indulged her husband as if he were a wayward teenager. The pampering drove him further away from her. If he couldn’t be up in the air, he enjoyed going to an airport and watching planes take off. Her response was to mock his enthusiasm. When he boasted about the number of flying hours he was racking up, she snapped, “Now you can do everything the birds can do except sit on a barbed wire fence.”
To BE ONE OF THE BOYS AT THE STUDIO, BOB WENT ON HUNTING trips with Victor Fleming, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy. Fleming, a former race car driver, was the open-air type who dressed for the part, sporting puttees and wielding riding crops. Gable owed much to him, and Bob’s ardent wish was to be his friend. Once in 1943, Barbara went along. Bob was on one Sun Valley hill, Cooper on another, and Ernest Hemingway on a third, with a posse of guides beating the bush to drive the deer toward the hunters. “It wasn’t hunting,” she’d remember. “It was the damndest ambush I’d ever seen.”
Hemingway loathed Bob, loved Barbara. In a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway called Taylor a miniature man who was neither very funny nor very impressive while Barbara struck him as being “very nice with a good tough Mick intelligence.”
Bob wanted to be the man of the house. Barbara insisted he was, but didn’t know how to make it a reality. She felt disappointed and looked for reasons to justify her unhappiness. Claiming she was tired of the long drives from Northridge to the studios, she suggested they move. He resisted her idea. She began looking for a house on the city side of the Santa Monica mountains. When she found a furnished home for lease in Bel Air—the house belonged to Colleen Moore’s mother—she signed a one-year lease. Bob said he didn’t want to live in somebody else’s furniture. She told him she was tired of his hunting rifles, gun racks, and camping trips; he argued he had just installed the kitchen he liked. What would he do without his horses? She said they had so little time together. He said he considered Northridge his first real home.
Barbara got her way. She sold her interest in the thoroughbred stable to her partner Zep, the ranch to Jack Oakie, and found a house she liked at 423 North Faring Road in the Holmby Hills of West Los Angeles. There were four bedrooms, one each for Bob, her, and, downstairs, for Dion and Uncle Buck.
There was less to do for Uncle Buck on Faring Road, no thoroughbreds or stable hands to oversee, but he was someone Barbara couldn’t be without. He had known her since she was twelve and lived with her even when she was married to Frank Fay. Now in his fifties, he was the only stable influence Dion knew.
When asked what he meant to her, she said he was the one person she could always turn to for honest advice. In her world of flattering, self-serving agents and studio cronies, Uncle Buck told her the truth about her career moves and was the only one who could tell her that she was awful in a movie. He made himself indispensable not only as her levelheaded critic but as front man and go-between when she wanted to remain anonymous. Charity was one such area. In a throwback to her hard-luck youth, she was easily moved to help little people struck by misfortunes, but too fearful of becoming a prey of cupidity and scams to let anyone know. If the morning newspapers told of Los Angeles victims of rotten luck, fire, or other calamities, she sent Buck with a cashier’s check and orders not to reveal the donor’s identity. During the depth of the Depression she tried to surround her money orders to a family that had been kind to young Ruby Stevens with the same discretion.
ELIMINATING THEIR LONG STUDIO COMMUTES WAS SUPPOSED TO give Barbara and Bob more time together. On his days off, however, Bob took to the air. She took out her frustration on the furniture and, as she had done in the waning days of the Fay marriage, became a compulsive redecorator. She laughed it off to the gossip columnists. “I have a passion for moving furniture from one place to another. Bob says he’d never sit down in any room in the dark because he’d be sure to land on the floor. I love to change colors in furniture, too. If I could afford it, I’d redecorate my house every month.”
Rumors of a breakup began less than six months after Bob and Barbara were married. They dismissed the rumors as idle talk, saying they were just busy at different places, she going to work at Paramount, he taking flying lessons at Palm Spring’s Odium Ranch on days off. Bob’s bosses nevertheless saw to it that he came under psychiatric care. Freudian analysis was fashionable and MGM wealthy enough to keep Eric Drimmer, a Swedish psychologist briefly married to Eva Gabor, as an in-house shrink. Besides Bob, Dr. Drimmer’s patients included Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney, and Garbo (Judy Garland was seen by Ernest Simmel five days a week). Barbara was not asked to be part of the therapy. She was careful not to come down too negatively on Bob’s romance with flying even though she began to hate airplanes and the jocks Bob met around the general aviation hangars. She held her tongue because she sensed this was one area where he might become sarcastic and call her outdated. She tried golf but found herself uncoordinated on the green and after a few months gave it up. A smart movie offer from Paramount saved her from brooding.
REMEMBER THE NIGHT WAS STANWYCK’S THIRD FILM FOR PARA-mount, her first with Fred MacMurray. With Cary Grant and Ray Mil-land, the former saxophone player belonged to the studio’s new stable of dandies. The unflappable MacMurray was often teamed with “strong” women like Claudette Colbert and Rosalind Russell. He was married to Lillian Lamont, a dancer he had met playing in a band.
Their director was Mitchell Leisen, a gay former costume designer and art director sometimes dismissed as a poor man’s George Cukor. However, every star under contract and the studio’s best screenwriters wanted to work with the elegant Leisen, who fashioned Paramount’s fizziest romances and smartest musicals. Edith Head was now Paramount’s chief designer. Alcoholism had slowly killed Travis Ban-ton’s career, and for the last two years Edith was firmly in control of the wardrobe department. She was happy to work with Barbara. Her life was turning around, she told Barbara. Put off by one too many of her husband’s binges, she had divorced Charles Head in 1938 and finally married her lover, Wiard Boppo Ihnen. The Taylors became frequent guests at parties at their rambling hacienda in Encino.
The clever Remember the Night script was by Preston Sturges.
Barbara saw a lot of the screenwriter. He was hard to miss. At the studio, Sturges held forth at lunch in the commissary, dominating the repartee at the writers’ table. After hours, Sturges was a restaurateur. Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart helped make his Players restaurant-nightclub flourish. Barbara was a regular at the 8225 Sunset Boulevard hangout and was photographed in the Blue Room with Bogart and Welles.
Famed for his string of marriages and eccentric careers, Sturges wanted to direct the scripts he wrote, and Frank Orsatti, of Barbara’s former Bren-Orsatti talent agency, was on the verge of getting him a directing job at Paramount by selling the studio a Sturges script for $1.
All Barbara would remember of her first meeting with the thirty-nine-year-old Sturges was that she never got a word in. “As long as you didn’t open your mouth, but let him do the talking, everything was fine.”
The central conceit of Remember the Night is that love reforms Stanwyck and corrupts Fred MacMurray. The film opens in a New York department store during Christmas rush with a shot of a glittering jewel in a counter case and a hand reaching in to take it. As Lea Leander, Barbara is
from the wrong side of the tracks, but a far cry from Frank Capra’s early recession heroine stumbling onto good fortune. Lea is a shoplifter, quickly picked up with the jewel in her possession. Assistant district attorney MacMurray isn’t going to let her off easy by bringing her before a tolerant, Christmas-besotted jury and instead has Lea’s court appearance postponed until after New Year’s. It is Christmas Eve, however, and he feels pangs of guilt when he realizes she will have to spend the holidays in prison. He arranges with a bondsman to obtain her temporary release. The bond agent mistakes the D.A.’s intentions and delivers Lea to MacMurray’s apartment as he is preparing to leave for Indiana to spend Christmas with his mother (Beulah Bondi) and aunt (Elizabeth Patterson). Assuring Lea he has no ulterior motives, he takes her to dinner. The fun for the audience is to see MacMurray squirm at her total honesty as she tells him how she became a thief; the scene is highlighted when the deeply shocked judge enters the restaurant and sees D.A. and defendant at their table.
The film was Leisen’s thirteenth, and during the shooting he endured jokes about surviving the jinx of thirteen. Since the story propelled Stanwyck and MacMurray from New York through Pennsylvania to Indiana and back again through Canada, and the remaining characters appeared only briefly, the director decided to typecast all other roles.
Leisen never really listened to dialogue during takes. He shot Sturges’s script word for word and had a dialogue assistant who would nod to him before he would yell “Print!” Leisen had a knack for becoming so engrossed in the filming that he would forget to call lunch breaks. The cast presented him with an alarm clock, set to ring at noon.