by Axel Madsen
The story spins out of control.
The newspaper hires Doe and interviews him daily on the subject of Love Thy Neighbor. When his sermons touch local and national hearts, Doe makes a nationwide tour and becomes the subject of a Time magazine cover. Publisher Norton sees a chance to realize his political ambitions. He sets up a third political party and plans a rousing convention where Doe will nominate him for president. Doe discerns a would-be dictator in Norton and instead of nominating him at the podium starts denouncing the publisher. Norton manages to cut Doe’s speech off and expose him as a fake.
The convention scene was filmed in Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field. Fifteen hundred extras were paid $5.50 and a box lunch each night for several nights’ work as delegates. The band plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the crowd cheers as John Doe makes his way to the platform. A chaplain asks for a silent moment to pray for “the John Does all over the country, many of whom are hungry and homeless.” Scores of newsboys suddenly break the silence, shouting, “Extra! John Doe is a fake. John Doe movement is a swindle!” State troopers escort Arnold to the stand and hustle the astonished John Doe from the microphone. Norton grabs the mike and denounces Doe.
“It’s a lie,” Doe interrupts.
“It’s not a lie,” shouts the newspaper mogul. “Ask him who wrote his newspaper article. Ask him if he intended to jump off the building. Ask him. It’s all in the paper. Go ahead and read it.”
With this Norton leaves the stand. Doe tries to explain, but the crowd is booing and throwing things (no bottles, please, suggested Capra). Brennan dashes up to protect his old friend, and with the help of “local police” Doe is led out of the angry mob.
Totally disillusioned, Doe decides to do what Ann’s initial letter proclaimed—kill himself at midnight on Christmas Eve. Ann finds him on the roof of a tall building ready to jump. She convinces him to live and fight against the Nortons of the world. Stanwyck would remember a couple of different endings being written and filmed. Capra couldn’t decide which one to use. The happy ending he did choose so distorted the meaning that Connell and Presnell, the original authors, sued.
Warners hyped Meet John Doe by calling the film “controversial” and keeping the screenplay a carefully guarded secret. Only Stanwyck, Cooper, Arnold, and Brennan received actual scripts; the rest of the cast were handed their lines scene by scene.
Barbara was perfect as the tough, wisecracking reporter, but the kudos went to Cooper’s John Doe, whose naiveté and convictions end up melting her opportunism. Time gave Cooper its cover in January 1941, waxing lyrically about Gary and Veronica Coopers’ social life, their tennis, bridge, and backgammon games with friends such as Tyrone Power and Annabella, the Fred MacMurrays, and the Robert Taylors, TWO DOWN AND ONE TO GO the New York Times headlined a story on the busy Barbara Stanwyck. Meet John Doe was released on March 12, 1941, two weeks after The Lady Eve, and, reported the Times, Stanwyck had signed with Paramount to star in Pioneer Woman.
BEHIND THE POLISHED FRONT OF MR. AND MRS. RIGHT, BOB reared up. Barbara loved their busy, regulated lives and, in public, was quick to say their careers were totally separate. Their smooth utterances occasionally got crossed. In a candid moment, Bob said his wife coached him for all his pictures while a Hunt Stromberg publicity profile quoted her as saying, “We have always agreed that our professional careers should be separately maintained at all times.” Bob felt suffocated. Whenever they had time together, which wasn’t too often, they argued, and he usually lost. He was the screen lover a million women swooned over, yet he was married to a cold, controlling woman. Despite Howard Strickling’s denials that the Taylor marriage was in trouble, the relationship was strained. Bob was tired of Barbara’s aloof perfection, her domineering ways, her calling him Junior, her objecting to his lifestyle, to his fondness for hunting and flying, to his wanting to be one of the boys. Shortly before their second anniversary he came home one night and told her he was having an affair with Lana Turner and wanted a divorce.
Lana was his costar in Johnny Eager. She was twenty and divorcing bandleader Artie Shaw after a three-month marriage. In the picture, Bob played a supposedly reformed gangster, Lana a society girl falling in love with him. Their director was Mervyn LeRoy. The love scenes were hot and heavy. Decades later, TV producer Norman Lear would say the sexiest woman he could think of was “Lana Turner, as she was held in the arms of Robert Taylor in the terrace scene in Johnny Eager: “
Lana made a play for Bob. A female fan rushing toward him made him shudder in disgust, but a costar thrusting her thigh between his legs in the middle of a break demanded that he respond in kind.
“Bob had the kind of looks I could fall for, and we were attracted to each other from the beginning,” Turner would write in her autobiography. She felt a pang of fear, however, when he told her how unhappy his marriage was, how all he felt for Barbara was respect. As she would put it, “I would never be responsible for breaking up a marriage, however unhappy it was. I wasn’t in love with Bob, not really. Oh, we’d exchanged kisses, but we’d never been to bed together. Our eyes had, but not our bodies.”
Lana had no intention of becoming a problem in the Taylors’ relationship. “CI care for you,’” she would remember telling him, “’but don’t make me the solution to your marital problems. Don’t tell her.’ But he did.”
The Sweater Girl, provocatively sexy with a small-town winsomeness, had enough problems with men. Howard Hughes was after her, and she went out with Victor Mature and bandleader and legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa. Before marrying Shaw, she had been the girlfriend of Gregson Bautzer, a fashionable attorney taking care of her divorce. On his own—or at Strickling’s urging—Bob joined the Lana Turner fan club, telling one reporter she was perfectly proportioned and not as “busty” as her pinup photos would make you believe. “I have never seen lips like hers and though I was never known to run after blondes, Lana could be the exception.” Bob told friends he’d have to have Lana if only for one night.
Barbara lost her finely honed composure when Bob told her he wanted a divorce. She fled the house and for the next four days holed up in the home of Harriet Corey, her maid. Gossip columnists picked up the scent. Cornered, Barbara said it was not she but her husband who was away. Bob was tired, she explained. Since Waterloo Bridge, he had made five pictures in a row. “He wanted to take some extensive flying lessons and took his instructor to the Odium Ranch in Palm Springs,” she told a news conference.
Perhaps believing pregnancy might account for a moody overreaction or a marital tiff, a reporter asked if she were pregnant. A wistful smile creased her lips. “I’d shout it from the rooftop if I were.” She suggested resentment might be behind the false rumors. “We are by no means separated and there are people, I suppose, who are jealous and would like to see me take a fall. Since my career has been successful lately, they attacked my marriage.” Repeating almost verbatim her chin-up housewife defense she had used when the press questioned the Fay marriage, she said her husband and she were building a house in Beverly Hills. “Does that sound as if we’re getting a divorce?”
Public appearances and busy schedules papered over the incident. What Bob later called his deep respect for Barbara made him rethink a divorce. Helen Ferguson would say he wanted neither to be alone nor to live with his mother. In a display of marital harmony, Stanwyck and Taylor made imprints of their hands in the forecourt of Sidney Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and, with a stick, scrawled a thank-you note in the fresh cement to the celebrated showman. Others had planted their hand and/or footprints in the famous courtyard on Hollywood Boulevard, but Bob and Barbara were the only couple immortalized in fresh cement.
TAYLOR AND TURNER, THEY’RE HOTTER’N T-N-T, screamed the MGM publicity when Johnny Eager was released.
BOB REPORTED TO GEORGE CUKOR FOR HER CARDBOARD LOVER. Norma Shearer was his leading lady in this French boulevard farce that Jeanne Eagels had played on Broadway just after Ruby Stevens was cast in The No
ose. The script was witless, but Bob gave a wonderful performance as a gigolo hired by Shearer to impersonate her lover. Her Cardboard Lover proved to be Shearer’s last film.
The Lady Eve was such a hit that Columbia quickly signed Stanwyck and Fonda to star in an imitation soufflé called You Belong to Me. Capra’s Meet John Doe was also a success. Variety said, “Stanwyck has never had a better role,” but most reviewers echoed the Baltimore Sun’s affection for Cooper, “so right in every respect as this country’s Everyman that it is hard to imagine anyone else in Hollywood filling the bill.” Before You Belong to Me went into production, however, Barbara was doing a woman-as-empire-builder saga.
William Wellman was the director of The Great Man’s Lady, as Paramount renamed Pioneer Woman. An exception to 1940s westerns, the film had Stanwyck as a San Francisco matriarch who, in the early days, roughed it up and as a centenarian now rules as the dowager of Nob Hill society. “It’s a kind of history, San Francisco history, and possibly sacred,” she told reporters. The original story was by a husband-and-wife team who wrote under the wife’s name, Viña Del-mar. Eugene and Viña were the writers of the 1937 crazy divorce classic The Awful Truth. An oddity in golden age Hollywood, the couple worked at home, refused to go near any studio, appear on a set, or meet actors.
Barbara liked to meet her writers. “Whenever people ask me about the movies I’ve done,” she’d say, “I always mention the writer first. I was very lucky, most of the time, in having good scripts. Good writers, directors. To me, the words come first. If it ain’t on paper, it ain’t ever gonna get up there on the screen.”
Writers paid back her compliments, sometimes in spades. Herman Mankiewicz, the prolific screenwriter and script doctor, said of her that she was the nicest woman he had ever met. “I could just dream of being married to her, having a little cottage out in the hills, roses round the door. I’d come home from the office, tired and weary, and I’d spy Barbara there through the door, walking in with an apple pie she’d just cooked herself. And no drawers.”
Joel McCrea, Brian Donlevy, Katharine Stevens, Thurston Hall, and Lloyd Corrigan rounded out the Great Man’s Lady cast. Wellman had Barbara dress in an unflattering raincoat and get drenched by a storm during a cattle drive. For the parlor stuff, Paramount publicity arranged for reporters to witness makeup artist Wally Westmore turn the thirty-four-year-old Stanwyck into a variety of ages. Stanwyck, Westmore, and an assistant director visited the Masonic Old Ladies Home in Santa Monica so Barbara could get a feel for how a centenarian walks and sits.
Wellman shot an exciting battle with Indians and the cavalry fighting in the middle of a shallow river. The complete battle sequence was so thrilling that Paramount sold the footage to Fox, which blew it up to CinemaScope and spliced it into two 1950s westerns, Pony Soldier and Siege at Red Riven
The Great Man’s Lady reinforced Barbara’s iron-willed screen image. The film would remain one of her favorites because it cast a jaundiced eye on pioneer myths. Its deeper theme—the sense of loss that comes with uprooting—cut close to her personally. With Wellman she agreed it was the best picture they had made together.
“It broke my heart,” Barbara said when The Great Man’s Lady was not a success.
Stanwyck and Fonda’s professionalism and Wesley Ruggles’s brisk direction saved You Belong to Me, but the picture failed to repeat The Lady Eve’s success. Ruggles was the veteran of many Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert comedies. Barbara played a doctor, Fonda her playboy husband who becomes jealous of a handsome patient of hers. Late in life she regretted You Belong to Me was her last film with Fonda. “He was delicious to work with,” she would say in 1983. “I was sorry when each of the three pictures we did was over. I wish we had done more movies together. I loved Hank.”
Bob moved from Her Cardboard Lover to Stand by for Action, his first war movie, and Barbara to a romantic comedy when an odd event again thrust their marriage into the gossip columns.
Barbara was rushed to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on October 7, 1941, with severed arteries on her wrist and arm. Attempted suicide? No, Bob told the press, an unfortunate accident. His wife had tried to open a jammed window. Using the heel of her hand, she had broken the glass and cut herself.
Barbara told Helen Ferguson to handle the press. The suicide angle was too tempting. To put a stop to further inquiries, Helen put an Irish proverb in Barbara’s mouth. The press agent quoted Stanwyck as saying there was nothing more to add because “The more you kick something that’s dead, the more it stinks.”
It is hard to imagine Barbara deciding to end her life over a husband she saw as immature and called Junior, but the crumbling of her carefully constructed facade would have devastated her. She never tried to explain the slashed arteries. When asked much later, Bob also avoided a direct response. Clumsily, he said that what had troubled him, and apparently made him decide not to leave her, was realizing how much a divorce would hurt her, how deeply she loved him, implying that she might indeed have taken drastic measures.
Hollywood was full of divorces and recouplings. Behind Barbara’s pride at being seen as one half of an ideal couple was little Ruby needing a home of her own. She had tried so hard to play house with Frank and little Dion. She had given herself a second chance, and it, too, wasn’t working. She had known that from the start. She was thirty-four, running on a treadmill of success. She was a mother more than a wife to a man who had turned thirty in August and who, since their marriage, spent his working hours in celluloid romances with Hedy Lamarr, Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, and saucy little Lana.
She never forgave “the other woman.” More than forty years later, Lana Turner made an effort to see and talk to Barbara, only to be intentionally and decisively snubbed. Helen put the blame for Bob’s defection on Barbara herself. “She meant well telling him what to do and how to do it,” Helen would say. “This was her way of helping. Bob wanted to be the man of the house, and Barbara didn’t know how to accept that, despite the fact that she insisted he was.”
ONCE MORE, BARBARA IMMERSED HERSELF IN AN INVENTED CHOrus girl and was rewarded with a smashing success. Ball of Fire was The Lady Eve with a twist—burlesque dancer collides with fuddy-duddy professor.
Gary Cooper was Samuel Goldwyn’s hot property, used as much for trading purposes as for starring on his home lot. In exchange for the promise of his future service in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Goldwyn got a smash writing team from Paramount.
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were Paramount’s top writing duo. In 1937, Paramount producer Arthur Hornblow had realized that Wilder’s enthusiastic English revealed significant gaps in grammar and syntax and that the Writers Building also harbored Brackett, whose polished, elegant prose had adorned The New Yorker but who—like Wilder—was achieving little at the studio. Hornblow teamed the Viennese Jew and patrician New Yorker to write Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Since that picture, the pair had written Ninotchka, Paramount’s comedy hit starring Garbo, and some of the best escapist entertainment—stories about millionaires, chambermaids, assassins, drunkards, smart-aleck cabdrivers, and nouveaux riches. The genre ceased to amuse with the outbreak of the war, and they charted its disappearance in two scripts for Mitchell Leisen—Arise My Love, set against a collapsing Europe, and Hold Back the Dawn, in which Charles Boyer is discovered trying to get into the United States by marrying an American schoolteacher.
After rejecting the projects Goldwyn had in development for Cooper, Wilder proposed a rewrite of a script he had written in Berlin eight years earlier. A variation on the Pygmalion theme, it was the story of seven professors who have labored nine years on a new encyclopedia. They have finally arrived at the letter ‘s’, and one of them, the fuddy-duddy Bertram Potts, is given the word “slang.” Professor Potts’s academic enquiry leads him to a gangster’s moll. Sugarpuss O’Shea, as Wilder and Brackett named their heroine, is all jive and street talk. She disrupts the scholarly calm of Bertram and
his colleagues and nearly gets him fired from the university. In the fade-out, the professor marries the burlesque queen. Twenty years later, Wilder would admit to the inherent creakiness of the plot, but in October 1941 everybody called the script superb. Goldwyn wanted the brassy Ginger Rogers to play the stripper and, to be on the safe side, sent the screenplay to Jean Arthur and Carole Lombard. As Rogers had just won an Academy Award for her performance in Kitty Foyle, she sent word that henceforth she would only play ladies. Columbia wouldn’t lend Goldwyn Arthur, and Lombard wrote back that she didn’t care for the Sugarpuss O’Shea character. Goldwyn convinced himself that as encyclopedist and showgirl Cooper and Stanwyck could repeat their Meet John Doe money-spinning.
The director was no studio toadie. Howard Hawks alternated between comedy and drama—he had just finished Sergeant York with Cooper. Goldwyn paid him $10,000 a week, which didn’t prevent Hawks from walking off a picture when the ebullient producer got too “creative.” Goldwyn thought Hawks had no character because he bet on horses and was involved in real estate schemes. On a studio set, however, Hawks’s temper kept people on their toes—Barbara said his mind was as sharp as a rattler’s fangs. Hawks was seen at nightclubs with the Taylors, but Barbara would remember their working together as less than cordial.
Goldwyn gave Dana Andrews his first break by letting him play the gangster Sugarpuss is supposed to marry, and in a life-imitates-art reversal, Virginia “Sugar” Hill, the mistress of mobster Bugsy Siegel, was cast as a showgirl.
Hawks’s direction was clean and sharp. He gave boogie-woogie singer-stripper Barbara a zinger of a screen introduction. The first time we see her she slides onto a nightclub stage in a stripper’s costume and, with Lana’s former boyfriend Gene Krupa on the drums leading his orchestra, performs a rowdy rendition of “Drum Boogie.” Her gown scintillates, her midriff is bare, her legs flash, and, after her vocal, Krupa switches from drumsticks to matchsticks that, at the end of his solo, burst into flames.