Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  The cinematographer was the Citizen Kane cameraman Gregg Toland. The master of ravishing studio camerawork photographed Stanwyck beautifully, experimenting with depth of focus that gave her face contour and relief. Hawks got Barbara to be sexy in the unlikeliest surroundings and made her stand on a stack of books to kiss Cooper. In a steal from The Lady Eve, Professor Potts gets to hold Sugarpuss O’Shea’s bare foot. Cooper played Potts with a slightly bent neck throughout, as befitting a scholar who always has his nose in books. The previews were so promising that Goldwyn managed to book Ball of Fire into Radio City Music Hall for the first week of December 1941.

  Like millions of Americans, Barbara and Bob stayed by the radio on Sunday afternoon, December 7. After the hourly headline news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, local bulletins demanded that all police and firemen report to duty and asked the public to use their telephones in emergencies only and stay off the streets. In Hawaii, bombing raids continued into the night; in L.A. a blackout was in force. All night the air sirens wailed. Southern California expected an invasion. A Japanese attack was believed to be imminent, and crude bomb shelters were thrown up at the studios. Monday morning Bob and Barbara heard President Roosevelt ask Congress for a Declaration of War.

  Unlike the mood change that greeted Golden Boy in September 1939, the romantic collision of Sugarpuss O’Shea and Professor Potts lifted the spirits of a nation going to war. Ball of Fire was a hit. Daily Variety speculated that Barbara Stanwyck might win the 1941 Best Actress Oscar for The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, or Ball of Fire. The competition was Crawford as an ugly crook who reforms after a facelift in A Woman’s Face, Bette Davis’s bravura performance in The Little Foxes, Olivia de Havilland in Hold Back the Dawn, and her twenty-four-year-old kid sister, Joan Fontaine, in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Suspicion. When the nominations were announced, Stanwyck in Ball of Fire came up against Davis, the sisters de Havilland and Fontaine, and Greer Garson in Blossoms in the Dust. The nightly blackouts of Los Angeles killed the idea of a traditional glitter and pomp Oscar event, and on December 17 the Academy board announced there would be no banquet but that the awards would be given in a yet to be determined format.

  Shortly after New Year’s 1942, the Academy reinstated the February 26 Oscar event, calling it a dinner instead of a banquet and promising music but no dancing. “To boost civil morale,” formal dress would be eschewed and women were to donate the money they would spend on orchids to the Red Cross.

  On Oscar night, Barbara and Bob arrived late at the Biltmore Hotel ballroom, which was bedecked with American flags and the flags of the Allies. Ginger Rogers presented the Best Actress award. The winner, she announced, was Joan Fontaine.

  21

  PATRIOT GAMES

  TWO YEARS OF WATCHING EVENTS IN EUROPE HAD PREPARED Americans psychologically for war, but the country was desperately unprepared industrially. The prerequisite of planning a war was to finance it, and the sale of U.S. bonds became an immediate priority. The movie stars’ value to the war effort was in making propaganda films, entertaining the troops, and selling war bonds. The Defense Department was keenly aware of Hollywood’s promotional value.

  World War II was fought with movies—obsessively. On the home fronts of both sides, audiences flocked to the only existing distraction. Movies were shown not only in cinemas, but in factories, schools, and union halls. Millions of men in uniform saw movies endlessly, aboard ships, in barracks and mess halls. In American boomtowns, movie houses remained open around the clock to accommodate swing and graveyard shifts. Attendance reached 80 million a week.

  What were Americans fighting for? President Roosevelt and his chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, decided that the large armies—around 8 million men—the country was raising had to be told why and that movies were the best way. Because he was between assignments, Frank Capra was the first to fly to Washington. Quickly inducted and given the rank of major, Capra began organizing the Army Pictorial Service, which would soon make thousands of training films on every conceivable subject from venereal disease to spotting enemy aircraft and assembling M-l rifles. Within months, freshly commissioned Colonels Darryl Zanuck, William Wyler, Anatole Litvak, and John Huston were in Washington working on a seven-hour “must see” Why We Fight series.

  The why was to cast a long shadow. Buried deep in the question was the difficulty of what kind of a world an Allied victory would deliver. The Soviet Union was an ally, and large numbers of British and French soldiers were determined they and their comrades were not dying for the purpose of restoring the 1939 society of privilege and social strictures. A little over a year into the American participation in the war, Bob and Barbara were swept up in the left-right breach that was to fling them, and the country into the postwar anti-Communist witch hunt.

  THE TAYLORS RANG IN 1942 AT THE BENNYS’ ON ROXBURY DRIVE. For Frederick De Cordova, the future producer-director who had just been hired as a dialogue director by Warners, the Bennys’ New Year’s Eve party was his first in Hollywood: “I was thrilled at the beauty of the home, the decorations, seeing all the big stars I had been reading about all my life. There was Clark Gable, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Stanwyck and Taylor and on and on. I thought it was the greatest night of my life, dancing with some of the girls who had been just a picture on a screen to me. I was standing at a bar in the garden having a drink when the lights went out at midnight, and I could see the shadows of all the famous couples kissing the New Year in.”

  The headlines remained ominous. During January and February, the military situation grew worse as the Japanese swarmed over the Philippines and captured Singapore and Burma. London was under the heaviest part of the German blitz. Californians were convinced the Japanese would launch a sneak attack on the Pacific Coast. The army rounded up Americans of Japanese descent and sent them to internment camps. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to Washington to discuss joint military action.

  The stars enlisted. Jimmy Stewart joined the air force as a private, eventually to become a bomber pilot and a colonel. Robert Montgomery enlisted in the navy; Tyrone Power abandoned both wife and male lover to join the marines; and Henry Fonda, who was thirty-seven and the father of two, volunteered as a sailor, only to be ordered back to Hollywood because Twentieth Century-Fox wanted him in a war movie. Clark Gable hesitated. MGM didn’t approve of the idea of “The King” being drafted, and Louis B. was sure he could use his influence in Washington to have Gable go into the military as a commis-sioned officer. Carole Lombard was against “one of those phony commissions” for her husband.

  Each celebrity’s call to colors was an event in Howard Strickling’s publicity department. He turned the first meeting of Gable’s Victory Committee into a media event. Lombard came in a dark fur coat and black silk dress and told everyone she was disguised as a blackout. She beamed with pride when Clark addressed the assembled actors and urged everyone to volunteer. A subcommittee headed by Gable and including Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, and nine others was chosen to coordinate talent for war-bond rallies, camp shows, and hospital tours. As the wife of the chairman, Carole was the first to stand up and pledge her cooperation. Marlene Dietrich and Merle Oberon seconded. Barbara signed up for railway tours to help sell war bonds. The trains rolled into cities where defense plants were located, usually to be greeted by cheering Rosie the Riveters.

  Bob couldn’t wait to get into uniform, but Barbara discouraged his martial yearnings. She had had enough of his hunting trips, not to mention his new passion for flying. Wasn’t all that dangerous enough? He should be thankful he didn’t have to go, she told him. Behind her back, he volunteered for active duty. At thirty-one, he was overage, although the top brass hadn’t considered the forty-four-year-old Capra too old to make him a major.

  HOLLYWOOD WAS BECOMING AN ASSEMBLY LINE. A TOTAL OF 488 features were made in 1942—a number never to be surpassed—and somebody had to star in all those movies. At Warners, Ronald Reaga
n and Erroll Flynn were playing RAF pilots shot down behind German lines in Desperate Journey when Reagan received his induction notice. Jack Warner personally wrote the army asking for, and, on January 1, 1942, receiving, a deferment.

  Mayer was in no hurry to see the MGM stable drained of male stars either. Bob went with Barbara to the Reagans’ send-off party when, in late April, Ron was told to report to Fort Mason in San Francisco. Despite the birth of their daughter Maureen, gossip columnists speculated that the Reagan marriage was in trouble. In fact, the war brought them closer together. Bob was green with envy. Why couldn’t Barbara and he be like “Dutch” and Jane Wyman, the tailor-made Hollywood “Mr. and Mrs. America Fighting the War”—wife as successful actress, actor-husband in the service?

  Bob was further disconcerted when his wife got to do war duty.

  Actresses were turning out to be especially good at selling war bonds. Hedy Lamarr offered to kiss any man who bought $25,000 worth of bonds. Dorothy Lamour sold $30 million worth in four days. As the most famous native of Indiana, Lombard volunteered to “do” the Hoosier state. Barbara had no links to Canada, but she was “drafted” to do a Canadian railway tour.

  LOMBARD’S DEATH IN A PLANE CRASH ON THE LAST LEG OF HER Indiana tour rocked Hollywood. Her devastated widower, Clark Gable, joined the Army Air Corps at forty-one—as a private—adding to Bob’s discomfort. He was temporarily relieved when MGM cast him in a pair of war movies with all-male casts—Stand by for Action and Bataan.

  WHILE SHE COMMUTED BETWEEN COLUMBIA, RKO, PARAMOUNT, and Warners, Barbara Stanwyck movies came out at three-month intervals—You Belong to Me and Ball of Fire before The Great Man’s Lady. On days off she helped at the Beverly Hills Hotel USO canteen or appeared on radio broadcasts for servicemen. In collusion with Jack Warner, casting director (and soon-to-be Executive Assistant in Charge of Production) Steve Trilling forced Stanwyck, Davis, and Crawford to fight for the best roles. The Little Foxes was turning Bette into the screen’s favorite man-eater, while Joan was in such a freefall that she was desperate about her career. To keep the stars on their toes, Trilling also developed a roster of new actresses, including Lauren Bacall, Joan Leslie, Susan Hayward, Ann Blyth, Brenda Marshall, Ann Sheridan, and Alexis Smith.

  Davis didn’t want to do The Gay Sisters. She found the story dull—three sisters become heiresses in 1915 when their father perishes aboard the sinking Lusitania. “I would be so grateful,” she wrote Hal Wallis, “if you would give The Gay Sisters to someone else.” Barbara had known Wallis since his publicist days. There was never a dull moment—or a free one—around Hal, and trading roles was his forte. Barbara wasted no time telling him she would love to do The Gay Sisters.

  Reunited with George Brent in the intricate courtroom drama about inheritances, absent husbands, and unexplained children, Barbara played the bad apple in a respectable family. Adapted from a Chekovian novel by the recently returned Paris expatriate Stephen Longstreet, the story had Barbara marry engineer Brent to make herself eligible for a legacy. Vixenish Geraldine Fitzgerald and timid Nancy Coleman were her younger siblings.

  Filmed in the spring of 1942, The Gay Sisters was Irving Rapper’s third movie. The former London theater director decided newcomer Gig Young was the next Cary Grant and cast him in the picture as a dashing young artist the sisters fight over.

  Gig Young was, like Bob, a graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse, and The Gay Sisters was his first chance. He was soon the object of Barbara’s setside teaching. They had few scenes together, but she was there with advice. She gave him pointers on how to give his character a roguish charm that immediately came across on the screen. In Gig Young, Jack Warner thought the studio had another Errol Flynn—or at least a Ronald Reagan. The Gay Sisters was a typical wartime production. A week after wrapping the shoot, Rapper started Now, Voyager with Bette Davis.

  BARBARA JOINED EDWARD G. ROBINSON, CHARLES BOYER, BETTY Field, Robert Cummings, Robert Benchley, and Thomas Mitchell in a stylish episode film at Warner Brothers. The Fall of France in June 1940 had brought a quartet of Parisian filmmakers to Hollywood—René Clair, Julien Duvivier, Max Ophuls, and Jean Renoir. Marlene Dietrich adopted them and a few actor stragglers who followed. During the First World War, the teenaged Marlene had handed flowers through barbed wire to French POWs; now she was closer to Hollywood’s French émigrés than to the German and German-Jewish expatriate colony.

  Marlene took in the uprooted Frenchmen—except for Renoir’s companion there were no women among them—and enjoyed mothering these refugees from her triumphant fatherland. She was cook, counselor, and interpreter to them, and, when Jean Gabin arrived, his mistress. Gabin might be the star of Renoir’s La grande illusion, Carné’s Quai des brumes, and Fépé le Moko, Duvivier’s answer to Scarface, but he was lost in Hollywood and clung to Dietrich and the little French colony.

  With the help of Preston Sturges, Clair got his American career off on the right foot, directing Marlene in The Flame of New Orleans and Veronica Lake in the triumphant comedy fantasy I Married a Witch. Renoir found work directing This Land Is Mine with Charles Laughton as a French schoolteacher who finally revolts against the Gestapo occupier. Duvivier was hired by Universal.

  Flesh and Fantasy was filmed during the late summer and fall of 1942. Robert Benchley, the humorist who wasn’t above supplementing his writing income with acting stints and once ran an ad in Variety describing his specialty as “society drunks,” plays a club bore who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but tells macabre stories by Ellis St. Joseph, Oscar Wilde, and Laslo Vadnay. Stanwyck and Charles Boyer were in the Vadnay story, the weakest of the half-hour vignettes, she as a refugee with unusual diamond earrings, he a trapeze performer who foresees his own death.

  ALTHOUGH THE DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WAR WERE STILL TO come, 1943 was a turning point. Out of reach of German or Japanese bombers, the “arsenal of democracy” was in full swing in the United States, and tanks, planes, and ships were coming off the assembly lines in ever-increasing numbers. Bob was sure the war would be over before he’d get into a uniform when he got word that because of his flying experience the navy wanted him.

  Not so fast, said Louis B. Song of Russia must come first.

  MGM’s Mrs. Miniver had done more than a hundred speeches to help President Roosevelt overcome American isolationism and align the country with Britain. Directed by William Wyler and starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, Mrs. Miniver was the most popular film of 1942. A war film without battle scenes, it had happily grossed $6 million for MGM and was now being showered with Academy Awards.

  Mayer envisioned an encore. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was not Mayer’s Russia—Louis B. didn’t like to be reminded that he was born in Minsk, that his parents only emigrated to Canada when he was a youngster, but the land of his birth was an ally. Roosevelt and Churchill were set to meet Stalin at Teheran.

  Song of Russia was Metro’s contribution to the cause.

  Bob threw a tantrum in Louis B.’s office. But Mayer put a call through to the Pentagon office of Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The secretary called back and said that of course the navy was happy to agree to give Robert Taylor time to make the film.

  Whipped together in no time, Song of Russia was, like Mrs. Miniver; a war movie of the home front. Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins were responsible for the original story, and Leo Mittler, Victor Trivas, and Guy Endore wrote the screenplay. For authenticity, Russian-born Gregory Ratoff directed the big-budget story of an American symphony conductor on a Russian concert tour when Hitler’s armies attack in June 1941. Bob was the conductor who, to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky and Herbert Stothart’s arrangements of other Russian composers, falls in love with the country, its people, and comely newcomer Susan Peters. Other members of the cast included John Hodiak and Robert Benchley. Wearing a sort of Russian garb out to lunch, Benchley explained his costume and appearance in Song of Russia by saying, “I’m a shill for Shostakovich.”

  “Grish
a” Ratoff was a hammy actor with early experience in the Moscow Art Theatre, and he was a friend of Darryl Zanuck’s. He had played the producer in What Price Hollywood? and directed Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo. In Song of Russia, he tried to keep the inflections quasi-Russian. His cast, however, spoke in accents that derived from no known language. The New York Times hailed Song of Russia as “very close to being the best film on Russia yet made in the popular Hollywood idiom,” but Newsweek called it MGM’s “neatest trick … leaning over backward in Russia’s favor without once swaying from right to left.”

  Bob hated Song of Russia.

  A WEEK BEFORE SPANGLER ARLINGTON BRUGH WAS SWORN INTO the United States Navy, Barbara and Bob became founding members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. The Alliance was both a backlash against the guilds that in the last ten years had unionized the industry and a reaction against the robust leftism of intellectuals and artists of the New Deal. The Alliance members included people Barbara and Bob had worked with—directors Sam Wood, Clarence Brown, and King Vidor, fellow actors Gable, Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, and Charles Coburn. Also signing up were Russian-born author Ayn Rand, columnist Hedda Hopper, and a pair of labor leaders—Roy Brewer and Hollywood Teamster boss Joe Tuohy. Stanwyck, Hopper, and Rand were the only women originally, although Irene Dunne and Ginger Rogers joined later. Wardell (Ward) Bond, a barrel-chested football player turned actor, would bring his friend John Wayne to meetings. According to the organization’s Statement of Principles, the Alliance was created because “in our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated, by communists, radicals and crackpots.”