Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Wood was the fire in the belly of the Alliance. A former assistant to Cecil B. DeMille, he was good with actors and astute in picking his assignments. As a free-lance director, his credits were a string of successes, from Reagan’s only hit, Kings Row, to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Hemingway’s tale of an American (Gary Cooper) joining the partisans fighting Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascist army was too leftist for Wood. In various rewrites and during filming in southern Arizona For Whom the Bell Tolls became a Cooper-Ingrid Bergman love story set in an undefined political struggle. Behind the director’s crusading single-mindedness was also his anger at losing the Best Director Oscar for Goodbye Mr. Chips to Victor Fleming for Gone with the Wind. Wood invited anti-Communist crusaders to speak at the American Legion hall on Highland Avenue. He carried a little black notebook in which he jotted down the names of liberal “subversives,” beginning with his own For Whom the Bell Tolls screenwriter Dudley Nichols.

  The Alliance had the steadfast support of press magnate William Randolph Hearst and counted in its ranks a number of antilabor zealots. One was Walt Disney, who in 1941 had squashed a strike by cartoonists, saying he would “close down the studio and sell toys” rather than meet the cartoonists’ union demands. Disney brought to the Alliance writers Kevin McGuiness, Rupert Hughes, and Howard Emmett Rogers, a trio who, with Disney, had tried to thwart the creation of the Screen Writers Guild.

  Bob was a staunch Republican who loved to discuss politics. Barbara shared the Alliance members’ fears of subversion. From FDR’s New Deal to Broadway, Hollywood and brother-can-you-spare-a-dime populism, leftist sentiments had been the cutting edge in the arts. Whether it was Odets flaying the corrupting nature of free enterprise in Golden Boy or the Song of Russia quintet praising the Soviet Union, Barbara and her husband were easily convinced that writers, with their facility for manipulating ideas, had become too powerful.

  Barbara’s up-by-the-bootstraps gumption was making her the highest-paid woman in the land. Like so many self-made people of humble beginnings, she didn’t believe she owed society anything in return. It was all her doing, not the consequence of a climate favorable to rapid social climbing. On studio sets she went out of her way to be chummy with electricians, camera assistants, and makeup and wardrobe personnel. But she abhorred their sons and daughters going to college to learn to question the social order as much as she hated the opportunities screenwriters gave themselves to write New Deal or far-left ideas of a reordered social order into scripts in which she was asked to star. The Alliance stood for the kind of robust self-reliance that had always been hers, and she quickly opened her purse and her door to her fellow members. She hosted its meetings in her living room after Bob flew off to basic training and a commission as lieutenant junior grade (the customary rank conferred on men over thirty with a civilian pilot’s license).

  To create a stir that would reverberate beyond the reporting of the Hollywood trade press, the Alliance members decided to go over the heads of the industry and alert sympathetic politicians in Washington. On March 7, 1944, they sent a letter to archconservative North Carolina Democrat Robert R. Reynolds inviting a congressional investigation of communism in Hollywood. Reynolds read the letter into the Congressional Record. Wood followed up with letters to the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC owed its existence to Samuel Dickstein, a Jewish representative from Manhattan’s East Side who, in 1938, had wanted a congressional investigation of “native fascists.” Dickstein had been maneuvered out of power by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas. Under Dies, the committee had dropped the original purpose of exposing American Nazis. After Pearl Harbor, the Dies Committee concentrated on Communists, aliens, and Jehovah’s Witnesses (who refused to salute the flag and whose church was considered a hotbed for conscientious objectors).

  The move by the Alliance against its own industry—by its nature perhaps the most collaborative enterprise in the country—was to have incalculable consequences. The future would punish Odets, three of the Song of Russia authors, a half-dozen other writers and directors who worked on movies starring Barbara Stanwyck or Robert Taylor, and scores of others.

  In helping to organize the Alliance, Barbara and Bob were ratcheting up their basic conservatism, which was largely in keeping with the general mood of the country at the time. Hindsight has accustomed us to seeing Hollywood’s right-wingers as an excitable, often vicious, and ultimately discredited crowd and the witch hunt they instigated as a national embarrassment. But to judge the 1940s and ‘50s through end-of-the-century eyes is somewhat facile. All too soon, a majority of citizens in America—and in the Soviet Union—would believe a nuclear World War III was inevitable. By 1952, even the liberal voice of Adlai Stevenson would warn that the country’s enemies “planned total conquest of the human mind.”

  22

  DOUBLE INDEMNITY

  TAYLOR WAS NERVOUS THE FIRST TIME WE WENT UP TOGETHER,” Lieutenant Tom Purvis would remember. “He was concerned that I was thinking to myself, These handsome Hollywood stars don’t take anything seriously except their box-office ratings.’ We got up to five thousand feet in an open plane and I said, ‘Get ready for a right slow roll. It was perfect, but when we came out of it Taylor looked like he was going to throw up. I asked him what was wrong.

  ‘”Hell, I just lost my cigarette lighter,’ he cried. ‘It’s down there in the Mississippi River!’”

  Purvis laughed and said, “So what?”

  ‘”So what!’ Bob came back. ‘”That was a solid gold Zippo with a raised gold replica of the naval station emblem. Barbara gave it to me. She’ll flip her lid! What the hell do I tell her? A $300 lighter is at the bottom of the Mississippi?’”

  Purvis thought Bob should just tell his wife. “If you ask me, it’s almost funny.”

  ‘”You don’t know Barbara.’”

  After the first adjustments, Bob liked going from celebrity to dog-tag serial number. On his completion of basic training at the naval air station in Dallas, the navy assigned him to its Aviation Volunteer Transport Division. He quickly became all navy, caring little about what was going on at home. He was dashing in uniform and on one of his furloughs posed with Barbara for news cameras on their front step.

  He looked awfully young in his crew cut next to Barbara in a dressing gown with her hair in a bun.

  Bob requested active duty overseas. He was turned down on the grounds that at thirty-one he was too old for combat. When he made a second request, he was told he was needed as an instructor. He was never satisfied with that line of reasoning and suspected he was being denied overseas assignments because of his movie stardom. Barbara came to New Orleans once while he was stationed there. Fearing her wifely concerns might hurt his warrior image, he vetoed any publicity in connection with her visit.

  WILLIAM WELLMAN WAS THE DIRECTOR OF LADY OF BURLESQUE, which had Barbara as a nightclub dancer solving a string of backstage murders. When Gypsy Rose Lee decided she was too old to be taking her clothes off in front of strangers, the famous stripper tried writing. To everyone’s surprise, The G-String Murders was a bestseller. James Gunn’s screenplay was less than lively, but as Dixie Daisy, Barbara sang the Sammy Cahn-Harry Akst “Take It off the Ε-String, Play It on the G-String” and did comedy skits with Michael O’Shea. Barbara tried to get Hermes Pan to work with her, but Lady of Burlesque was a United Artists production and Pan was at Fox doing My Gal Sal. Even without the choreographer, however, Wellman and Barbara managed to stand a cliché on its head by staging a striptease in which she never takes off a thing.

  Iris Adrian was a hoofer who joined the cast and became a friend of Stanwyck’s. Six years younger than Barbara, Iris was a spunky, laugh-a-minute dancer who had sixteen pictures to her credit. A recent arrival from Broadway, she had worked with Frank Fay on the stage and knew Bette Keane, a woman whose two-movie career came to a halt after Frank made her pregnant. Except for an occasional nightclub or variety-show appearance, Fay was virtually retired, bu
t still plotting his return to Broadway. Barbara wasn’t interested in knowing what Frank was doing, but Iris told her anyway. “Frank quit drinking when I worked with him in 1939,” Iris remembered. She was irreverent enough to speculate about the fidelity of absent husbands, Lieutenant Taylor included.

  “I used to kid around with Barbara,” she would recall. “She was always busy, so busy she’d never have time to cheat on Bob. Ha! Frank used to tell me Bob and Barbara were living in sin since the Fay-Stan-wyck marriage had been performed by a Catholic priest. He never said anything about his own two previous marriages.”

  Iris could see how Stanwyck and Wild Bill Wellman were great friends, how the director thought Barbara was a wonderful actress. He had just finished The Ox-Bow Incident, a lynch law parable that was to loom large in the postwar ideological struggle, and had a hard time concentrating on directing the bump-and-grind numbers of Lady of Burlesque. People were embarrassed for Barbara, wondering what she was trying to prove doing cartwheels, splits, and high-heel dancing in scanty clothes. Perhaps Lady of Burlesque was revenge for the screen version of Burlesque Frank had prevented her from doing when she was twenty-one.

  If former chorus girl Ruby Stevens needed confirmation that she had made it, the Treasury Department listed Barbara Stanwyck as the woman who earned the most in 1944—over $400,000, or $3.5 million in 1994 money. Bette Davis was second.

  Hollywood was on a roll. MGM hit its highest net income since 1937 and the industry’s record gross to date—$166 million in period dollars. Profits continued to increase, and even RKO was making money after seven years of short-earned dividends, with hits that ranged from Disney’s Bambi to Howard Hughes’s celebrated and much-censored Jane Russell western, The Outlaw.

  Barbara became a pen pal to twelve assorted servicemen, two of whom requested a giant poster of her in her scanty Ball of Fire costume for their mess hall. Their letters all started out with “Dear Babs,” or “Barb,” or “Hiya Stanny.”

  During the winter of 1943-44, Barbara made her most famous picture.

  BEFORE BILLY WILDER EVEN STARTED THINKING ABOUT ADAPTING Double Indemnity, Paramount submitted James M. Cain’s novel to the Production Code office. Joseph Breen wrote back on March 13, 1943, telling Paramount not even to consider a movie about a pair of adulterers who kill the woman’s husband to collect on his insurance. The story was a blueprint for murder.

  Front-office deference was due Paramount’s hottest writer-director. Wilder and his writing partner, Charles Brackett, didn’t suffer fools lightly, whether Luigi Luraschi, the studio’s legal department head who dealt with the Production Code office, or Breen himself. While other writers on the payroll acted like serfs, Wilder and Brackett were as uncompromising as their brilliant track record. Since Ball of Fire, Wilder had become a director because, he said, he was tired of seeing others ruin his scripts. His first two pictures were The Major and the

  Minor; a frothy wartime comedy starring Ginger Rogers, and the espionage thriller Five Graves to Cairo, with Erich von Stroheim as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Luraschi told Wilder to go ahead with a first-draft screenplay.

  Wilder’s writing partner on Double Indemnity was not Brackett but Raymond Chandler. During the summer of 1943, they turned Cain’s novelette into a vastly revised screenplay that was carnal and criminal well beyond 1940s screen conventions. With Mildred Fierce, Double Indemnity was the best of the James Cain adaptations. The former reporter and screenwriter knew how to make violence vivid on the page. The Postman Always Rings Twice (categorically rejected by the Breen Office) and Double Indemnity both told stories of women plotting with their lovers to murder their husbands. In a clever concession to Breen, they told the story in flashback. Article 1 of the Production Code’s “Particular Applications” read that “crime shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire for imitation.” The first person seen on the screen is the wounded insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) confessing the sordid story of murder into a Dictaphone. His accomplice, now dead, is Phyllis Diet-richson (Stanwyck), their victim her Los Angeles oilman husband (Tom Powers).

  Wilder and Chandler told the rest straightforwardly, how Neff falls for Phyllis and sells her husband an accidental life insurance policy, how they kill him and place the body on a railway track so they can claim the double indemnity clause for accidental death (such as a fall from a moving train). Taking the crime to its lurid and logical resolution, the script had the deadly lovers shoot each other in a final embrace.

  Phyllis was utterly without redeeming qualities. Wilder knew that two things mattered: how he told the story and getting Stanwyck.

  Chandler hated the seven weeks he spent writing with Wilder.

  “Working with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life, but I learned from it about as much about screenwriting as I am capable of learning, which is not very much,” Chandler would write to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton. “Like every writer, or almost every writer who goes to Hollywood, I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures, which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me, I discovered that this was a dream.” The collaboration also left Wilder baffled. As a nondrinker, he had a hard time understanding how an intelligent man like Chandler could let alcohol ruin his talent.

  By December, the Breen Office was down to nit-picking. “As we advised you before,” the Production Office wrote, “this whole sequence in the death chamber seems very questionable in its present form. Specifically, the details of the execution seem unduly gruesome.”

  If Wilder and Chandler needed a boost, they got it from Cain. The original author loved what they had done to his novel. “It’s the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of,” Cain said. “Wilder’s ending was much better than my ending, and his device for letting the guy tell the story by taking out the office dictating machine—I would have done it if I had thought of it. There are situations in the movie that can make your hands get wet, you get so nervous—like the place where Eddie Robinson comes in to talk to Fred MacMurray. Robinson is working close to what the murder explanation is—connecting MacMurray and Stanwyck. And she comes and is about to rap on MacMurray’s door when she hears something and pulls back; the door opens and Eddie Robinson comes out with MacMurray, and she’s hiding behind the door. I tell you, there for a minute, it is just beautiful. I wish I had thought of something like that.”

  THE DOUBLE INDEMNITY SCRIPT LEFT BARBARA DEEPLY TROUBLED. She had never been asked to play an out-and-out killer. “I thought, ‘This role is gonna finish me,’” she would remember forty years later. But it was also the best script she had ever been offered. “It’s brilliant, of course, but what’s amazing is that not one word was changed while we were shooting. Billy had it all there, and I mean all—everything you see on the screen was in the script. The moves, the business, the atmosphere, all written.

  “When I mention ‘atmosphere’ in Double Indemnity—that gloomy, horrible house the Dietrichsons lived in, the slit of sunlight slicing through those heavy drapes—you could smell that death was in the air, you understood why she wanted to get out of there, away, no matter how. And for an actress, let me tell you the way those sets were lit, the house, Walter’s apartment, those dark shadows, those slices of harsh light at strange angles—all that helped my performance. The way Billy staged it and John Seitz lit it, it was all one sensational mood.”

  The picture was filmed at Paramount during the winter of 1943-44. Wilder rehearsed a lot before rolling the camera and told his two stars to underplay the violence. He wanted Phyllis Dietrichson to look cheap and insisted on outfitting her with a blond wig. Watching the first dailies of her prompted Paramount chief Buddy De Silva to grin, “We hire Barbara Stanwyck and her
e we get George Washington.”

  Wilder was happy with Barbara’s lurid blonde engineering her husband’s murder. MacMurray played the insurance salesman with just the right touch of flabby dishonesty. Fred went to the rushes and reported back to Barbara that what he saw of her on the screen was not someone acting but someone enjoying herself. “I remember saying, ‘Fred, really, how was it?’ And very candidly he looked at me and said, Ί don’t know about you, but I was wonderful!’ And that’s such a true remark. Actors only look at themselves.” After she saw herself at the press preview, she had a nice quote for reporters: “I’m afraid to go home with her. She’s such a bitch.”

  Audiences were riveted—and servicemen went wild—when Stanwyck appeared in the blond wig, form-fitting white sweater, and ankle bracelet. Males in the Los Angeles preview theater in Westwood whistled for five minutes, drowning out the dialogue. “There goes my picture,” thought Wilder. “The season’s nattiest, nastiest, most satisfying melodrama,” said Time when the film was released September 16, 1944.

  THE YEAR ALSO MARKED THE RETURN OF FRANK FAY. BROADWAY friends who spoke of him in the past tense were stunned to see him burst from oblivion to national sensation in Harvey. His uncanny timing, soft voice, and faraway looks as the balmy tippler Elwood P. Dowd turned Mary Coyle Chase’s play into the wackiest Broadway hit of 1944. The droll tale of Dowd and his outsized imaginary rabbit was made for Fay. “Elwood, who on stage could easily become incredible or dismaying, is played to perfection,” Time cooed. Fay’s “manner is almost prim, his delivery slow, his material largely pointless. For one drawled gag like ‘Had a date with a newspaperwoman the other night—yes, she keeps a stand,’ there are a dozen droll nothings that are triumphs of timing, and intonation.”

  Ironically, Chase had written the play for Tallulah Bankhead and a four-foot canary named Daisy. Bankhead, who met the playwright after she saw Harvey, called Fay’s performance one of the greatest she had ever seen. Actress Maggie Root, whose art director husband, John, designed the Harvey set, said of Fay, “Nobody could touch him, not even Jimmy Stewart.” In period dollars, Harvey grossed 12 million in five years, earning Frank almost $538,000 in two years on Broadway and two thousand road performances. Again, screen stardom eluded Frank. When Harvey was filmed in 1949, James Stewart played the whimsical Elwood.