by Axel Madsen
MacMurray was a disappointment to Sturges, who had imagined a livelier, more assertive D.A. “Preston was around a lot,” Barbara would recall. “One day he said to me, ‘Someday I’m going to write a real screwball comedy for you.’ Remember the Night was a delightful light comedy, swell for me and Fred MacMurray, but hardly a screwball, and I replied that nobody would ever think of writing anything like that for me—a murderess, sure. But he said, ‘You just wait.’”
An eye infection hospitalized Barbara in August 1940. Dr. Leo Bigelman performed an operation for what was attributed to makeup poisoning. The infection made her miss a scheduled picture opposite Joel McCrea, William Wellman’s Reaching for the Sun. But Preston Sturges came to see her at the hospital. As soon as she was through recuperation, he would have the promised comedy ready.
19
THE LADY EVE
SIX PEOPLE ARE LEANING OVER THE RAILING OF THE S.S. SOUTHERN
Queen. The luxury liner is at anchor off a tropical island waiting for a motor launch to bring out a very important person. Colonel “Handsome Harry” Harrington and his daughter Jean, both in radiant tropical white, are there with somebody named GERALD. A woman in the group understands the VIP is the Pike. When somebody confirms the rumor, she tells her daughter to go put on her peek-a-boo. THE CAMERA MOVES ON TO JEAN, whose real name is Eugenia. She is a smart-looking girl engaged at the moment in nibbling an apple. She looks down speculatively at the approaching motor launch.
JEAN, COL. H. (TOGETHER)
Is he rich?
GERALD
He’d almost have to be to stop a boat. He’s been up a river somewhere.
JEAN
Haven’t we all.
GERALD
As the steward so picturesquely put it: he’s dripping with dough.
JEAN
What does he own, Pike’s Peak?
GERALD
No, no. Pike’s Pale—the Ale that won for Yale. JEAN holds the apple out over the side of the ship and squints down as if aiming.
JEAN (fervently)
I hope he’s rich. I hope he thinks he’s a wizard at cards …
COL H.
From your mouth to the ear of the Almighty. JEAN
… and I hope he’s got a big fat wife so I don’t have to dance in the moonlight with him. I don’t know why it is but a sucker always steps on your feet.
COL H.
(looking over rail)
And is a mug at everything.
JEAN
I don’t see why I have to do all the dirty work… . There must be plenty of rich old dames just waiting for you to push them around.
COL H.
You find them and I’ll push them.
JEAN (grinning)
Boy, would I like to see you giving some old harpy the three-in-one.
COL H.
Don’t be vulgar, Jean. Let us be crooked but not common.
The first two pages of Preston Sturges’s script set the tone of his story about the elegant swindler and cardsharp, her partner-in-crime father, and, coming toward them in the motor launch, Charles “Hopsie” Pike, their millionaire prey, and his manservant-watchdog, Mugsy.
“He kept his word—and how,” Barbara would remember of Sturges. “By that time I wasn’t under contract to Paramount and he’d have to borrow me. Which would kill it, I figured. He also wanted to borrow Hank Fonda from Fox—another piece of intriguing casting. Hank had been Zanuck’s Abraham Lincoln in so many things, whether his name was Tom Joad or Jesse James; how did Sturges know he was a sensational light comedian? Somehow The Lady Eve all came together.”
THE CURLY-HAIRED CHICAGOAN HAD SPENT MOST OF HIS CHILD-hood in Paris, where his mother was the founder of various perfume and cosmetics ventures. In The Lady Eve, Barbara plays a woman much like Sturges’s mother, who changed her name six times by marriage and, with her precocious son, managed to catch a husband whenever they needed one. Mary Dempsey styled herself Mary d’Este. Her first salon in Paris was named after Leonardo da Vinci’s model, Beatrice d’Este, a name Preston’s mother arrived at through genealogical research. The Renaissance d’Este family, she declared, had spawned Irish offspring, and Dempsey was merely a corruption of d’Este. When the Italian family complained, she compromised by styling herself Mary Desti. Sturges was the inventor of a kissproof lipstick and of movable restaurant-booth tables, and his Players restaurant on Sunset Boulevard was hugely popular. He had started writing in 1927 after his first wife left him and he suffered a ruptured appendix. Immobilized for several weeks in a hospital bed, he wrote Strictly Dishonorable, a comedy hit that ran on Broadway for nearly two years and brought him $300,000 in royalties. Marrying eighteen-year-old Eleanor Hutton, the stepcousin of Barbara Hutton and equally rich, he came to Hollywood to look for a job. The Huttons regarded him as a dreamer, a dabbler, and a fortune hunter. Divorced after a few years, he was currently the lover of the wife of an older stockbroker. With a $350,000 budget and a three-week shooting schedule, he made his debut as a director with the uneven political satire The Great McGinty and followed up with the slapstick romance Christmas in July.
The Lady Eve started shooting during the last week of October 1940, two months after Sturges finished Christmas in July with Dick Powell and Ellen Drew. Sturges chose a gleaming white ocean liner—and art director Hans Dreier’s sleek shipboard dining room and staterooms—to show how impersonators can mock and fleece the rich. To play Jean Harrington’s father, he picked Charles Coburn and introduced them at the cruise ship railing. A moment after the colonel utters the line, “Let us be crooked but not common,” Jean drops her apple. It lands on the head of the embarking chump and makes him look up.
As promised by the title, the picture is a whimsical retelling of how Eve offered Adam the fruit of knowledge. Jean wastes little time finding out that the new shipboard mate is Charles “Hopsie” Pike of the brewing fortune. To complete the Old Testament metaphor, Sturges made Hopsie an amateur ophiologist, a student of snakes.
In the stateroom that evening, Jean has Hopsie under observation in her compact mirror. When he gets up and crosses toward the door, she sticks out a shapely leg that lands him on the floor.
Tripping Hopsie, however, breaks the heel of Jean’s right shoe. She takes Hopsie down to her cabin to help her find a new pair of shoes. She sits, crosses her legs, and lets him kneel to try a pair on her feet.
Sturges’s dialogue is sharp and suggestive. When Jean and Charles return to the salon, her father says: “It certainly took you a long time to come back in the same outfit.” Replies Jean: “I’m lucky to have this on. Mr. Pike has been up the Amazon for a year!”
With that the Harringtons propose a card game. We know Charles is going to be fleeced when, joining the game, he shows the colonel how to palm a card.
Hopsie is the traditional befuddled rich-man foil, but Sturges’s Jean Harrington has left behind the smart aleck, forgiving heroines that Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Jean Arthur played with their eyes closed. More than one biographer would wonder whether much of this was not out of Sturges’s youth. How many times did Mary Desti and Preston cheat in card games as a mother-and-son team on their numerous transatlantic crossings in pursuit of the good life?
Before the Southern Queen leaves the tropical waters, Charles has proposed marriage, and Jean accepted. Things go wrong, of course. A news photo exposes the Harringtons père et fille as con artists.
“Are you an adventuress?” Hopsie asks bitterly coming up behind Jean.
“Of course I am. All women are.”
Hopsie pretends he was aware of the father-daughter scheme all along. But she continues. “We have to be. If we waited around for men to propose to us, we’d die of old-maidenhood. That’s why I let you try on my slippers, and put my cheek against yours, and made you put your arm around me … But then I fell in love with you. And that wasn’t in the cards.”
When they dock in New York everything is off. Hurt and humiliated, Jean vows revenge.
At a reception a few months later, Jean connives to snag her man by being accepted by his family as a member of the English nobility. Her lame excuse when Hopsie instantly recognizes her is that it was really her discredited sister he met aboard the Southern Queen. Love finally leads to marriage. Sturges condenses the nuptials into a silent montage, intercut with shots of a spiraling wedding cake, and concentrates instead on the wedding night. As a train carries the newlyweds on their honeymoon through tunnels and torrential rains, Jean concocts so many tales of love affairs that the disillusioned Hopsie jumps off. Jean opposes her father’s pitch to try for a big-money settlement. When she discovers Hopsie and his ever faithful Muggsy leaving for South America aboard the Southern Queen, she gets passage on the ship. Her cabin is on a lower, cheaper deck than Hopsie’s, but they meet, stumble into Jean’s cabin, kiss, and explain their misunderstandings:
JEAN
Oh, you still don’t understand.
CHARLIE
I don’t want to understand. I don’t want to know, whatever it is keep it to yourself. All I know is that I adore you, that I’ll never leave you again, we’ll work it out somehow … and that I have no right to be in your cabin.
JEAN
Why?
CHARLIE Because I’m married.
JEAN (softly)
But so am I, darling, so am I.
She pushes the door closed. After a few seconds it opens stealthily and Muggsy flattens out through it. He closes the door very softly. He looks straight INTO THE CAMERA.
MUGGSY
Positively, the same dame.
FADE-OUT
THE END
Sturges cast William Demarest as Muggsy, the ever suspicious valet whose curse it is always to be right but never to be taken seriously by his boss. Raspy-voiced Eugene Pallette plays Charles Pike’s father, Eric Blore a phony earl engaged by Jean Harrington to pose as her uncle, and Vic Potel the purser who shows Charles photos incriminating the Harringtons. Jean was modeled on Sturges’s mother Mary Desti, and several plot points came from the director’s own life. The Hutton family’s lawyers had been convinced that Sturges had married Eleanor Hutton only for her money, and when she wanted out of the marriage, he told the attorneys all he wanted was for her to ask him. In The Lady Eve, Jean telephones Charles’s father to say she wants no alimony, just that Charles come and ask her for a divorce.
BARBARA HAD A GREAT TIME FILMING THE LADY EVE. WHEREAS A Capra set was a “cathedral,” she said, Preston’s shoot was a “carnival.” In Fonda, she met her match. He, too, always knew his lines and was affectionately called “One-Take Fonda.” After The Lady Eve, he called Barbara his favorite leading lady. On her fourth birthday Jane Fonda—”Lady Jane” to everybody—came on the set to be feted by daddy and to be bounced on Barbara’s knees. The set was so ebullient that instead of going to their trailers between setups, the players relaxed in canvas chairs with their sparkling director, listening to his fascinating stories or going over their lines with him. To get into the mood for Barbara’s bedroom scene, Sturges wore a bathrobe.
The Lady Eve was one long series of pratfalls for Fonda. “I happen to love pratfalls, but as almost everything I like, other people dislike, and vice versa. My dearest friends and severest critics constantly urged me to cut the pratfalls down from five to three,” Sturges would write. “But it was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of nonacceptance, that paid off so handsomely. There are certain things that will convulse the audience, when it has been softened up by what has occurred previously, that seem very unfunny in cold print. Directing and acting have a lot to do with it, too. I had my fingers crossed when Henry Fonda went over the sofa. I held my left ear when he tore down the curtains, and I held everything when the roast beef hit him.”
As for his leading lady, Sturges said, “Barbara Stanwyck had an instinct so sure that she needed almost no direction; she is a devastating Lady Eve.” Barbara said she’d never had more fun. “He’d ask us how we liked the lines,” she told a New York Times reporter. “If we didn’t, we’d say so, and he’d say the scriptwriter was fifty kinds of an imbecile—and change them. But, you see, he wrote the thing himself.”
“Eve was lucky for me another way,” said Barbara. “My character is a very glamorous lady and for the first time, I got a really sensational wardrobe, designed by Edith Head.”
The clothes were so gorgeous that Paramount gave her gowns the full publicity treatment. Edith Head, whose forte was expressions of simplicity and elegance, managed to outdo herself on The Lady Eve. Her twenty-five costume changes turned Stanwyck into an instant 1940s symbol and trendsetter. Barbara called Head’s wardrobe the most beautiful she had ever worn and, for the first time, she felt like a clotheshorse.
“Lady Eve changed both our lives, it was Barbara’s first high-fashion picture and her biggest transition in costuming,” the designer would remember in 1979. “Barbara was quite trim and had a better shape than most of the other actresses around. She possessed what some designers considered to be a figure ‘problem’—a long waist and a comparatively low rear end. By widening the waistbands in front of her gowns and narrowing them slightly in the back, I could still put her in straight skirts, something other designers were afraid to do, because they thought she might look too heavy in the seat. I just took advantage of her long waist to create the illusion that her derrière was just as perfectly placed as any other star’s.”
Stanwyck credited Head with changing her image and in gratitude hauled the designer off to her dentist to have her teeth fixed. “Edith always covered her mouth when she laughed and I didn’t know why,” Barbara said. “Finally she showed me her teeth and I understood. They were awful—not diseased, but some were missing and she felt self-conscious. She told me that she had been to dentists and they had said nothing could be done. I informed her that my dentist could fix anything. He had fixed my smile.”
Head’s pacifying manners with temperamental stars and directors and her quiet authority turned Barbara into an offscreen Edith Head fan. Since the early 1930s, stars had paid wardrobe departments to make their street clothes, and Edith designed a floor-length black dinner suit with a leaf motif on the back, shoulder, and front and a white crepe suit with flamboyant black mink tails for the personal Stanwyck wardrobe. Barbara’s new fashion conscience reached the gossip columns when Hedda Hopper told of Dion secretly offering the designer $6 to make a nice dress for his mother for Christmas and Barbara adding a few hundred dollars.
The Lady Eve shoot wrapped in forty-one days, just two days behind schedule. To celebrate, Sturges closed his Sunset Boulevard restaurant to the public and invited cast, crew, and spouses for a party. The film was cut and scored with the routine speed of the golden-era assembly line. It opened Ash Wednesday, February 26, 1941, just over three and a half months after it started filming, and grossed $115,700 during its first three weeks.
IN THE LARGER OVERVIEW OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA, THE LADY Eve is considered a screen classic. It represents the dizzy high point in Sturges’s short career—he would die in 1959—as Hollywood’s premier satirist of the American myths of success. The Jean Harrington role was also Stanwyck’s most sparkling comedy acting. Barbara never thought of herself as a comedian. Slapstick yes, but not light comedy. Sturges’s inspired writing and directing brought out talents in her she didn’t know she possessed. “Like Bringing Up Baby,” Pauline Kael would write in 1982, The Lady Eve “is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls. Barbara Stanwyck keeps sticking out a sensational leg, and Henry Fonda keeps tripping over it … neither performer has ever been funnier. “*
20
THE SWEATER GIRL
BARBARA WENT STRAIGHT FROM THE LADY EVE TO PLAYING Capra’s favorite character—a reporter who gets the hero into trouble and ends up saving him. They had both come a long way since The Bitter Tea of General Yen. After Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra’s options were unlimited. Before
he even had a script, Gary Cooper, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, James Gleason, Spring Byington, and Barbara all accepted roles in his next picture.
After twelve years with Harry Cohn, Capra was leaving Columbia. Selznick wanted him, and there were offers from Samuel Goldwyn and Howard Hughes. The idea of total freedom and independence was so attractive, however, that he formed Frank Capra Productions, set up shop on Selznick International’s Culver City lot, and made tentative plans to release his pictures through United Artists. Robert Riskin became a minority stockholder in FCP. In July 1940, five months before principal photography began, Capra and Riskin moved to Warner Brothers after Jack Warner agreed to advance $500,000 if the picture became a WB release.
Meet John Doe was supposed to be a statement on American fascism. Beyond the morality tales of ordinary folk standing up to the greed and corruption of the rich that Capra had perfected in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the new picture was to be a comedy with a sting. Director and writer got excited about a story by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell in an old issue of Century magazine. They immediately decided they wanted Stanwyck as
Ann Mitchell, a newspaperwoman who, after losing her job in a takeover of her paper, writes a fictitious letter about a man who claims he is so troubled by people’s inhumanity that he will commit suicide on Christmas Eve.
The cooked-up story becomes a page-one favorite. Ann gets her job back, but the new owner’s henchman (Gleason) is furious when he finds out there is no John Doe. Big boss D. B. Norton (Arnold) likes her idea of fabricating a John Doe, of bringing in some homeless nobody and using him to build circulation. In Long John Willoughby (Cooper), Ann finds a drifter and untalented minor-league baseball player lacking ideals who, despite warnings from his buddy the Colonel (Brennan), agrees to become Doe.