Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  The stage success brought a lawsuit by Frank’s second wife, Gladys Lee Buchanan, alleging he was $56,500 behind in alimony payments. He had promised to pay her $75 a week when they divorced in 1925 (and Frank was then making $17,500 a week for his twice-a-day Palace show). Payments had been made “sporadically” for a few years, then stopped, she charged. Frank countered that he had paid until 1936, when he became too poor. They settled out of court.

  WILDER WANTED STANWYCK TO PLAY RAY MILLAND’S GIRLFRIEND in The Lost Weekend, but Jane Wyman got the part. For Barbara, the last year of the war passed quickly as she made sure she was working all the time. By the late spring of 1945, she had four movies ready for release. “I don’t like it, to take things this fast, but it couldn’t be helped this year,” she told a Los Angeles Times reporter. When asked if she wasn’t exhausted, she laughed it off. “I guess I’m just stagestruck.”

  She was in Hollywood Canteen, Warners’ all-star service musical, written and directed by Delmer Daves. Joan Leslie, Robert Hutton, Dana Clark, and Janis Paige were the stars and besides Stanwyck, the Andrew Sisters, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Eddie Cantor, Bette Davis, John Garfield, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Ida Lupino, Dennis Morgan, Roy Rogers, Alexis Smith, and Jane Wyman saluted the many people in showbiz entertaining servicemen. Joan Crawford agreed to appear in the picture after she was told that Davis and Stanwyck were in it.

  As Hitler staged a last-gasp but stunning counteroffensive in eastern Belgium and Allied troops fought to beat it back in the murderous Battle of the Bulge, the Defense Department sent Bob to New York on a war-bond drive and to promote the navy documentary The Fighting Lady, directed by William Wyler. Barbara joined him and made sure they were seen together in nightclubs. Less happily, the Taylors displayed—and quickly tried to cover—a fault line in their marriage. The witness was the Daily News columnist Earl Wilson.

  Movie stars in uniform usually had no qualms about sitting still for celebrity interviews. Bob, however, found it unmanly to be interviewed by a gossip columnist as a member of the armed forces. To save the day for Wilson, Barbara agreed to see the columnist and to speak for both of them. But when Wilson arrived at the Taylors’ hotel suite, he was met by Bob. Barbara would be joining them shortly, he explained. Barbara showed up late and after saying hello rushed to the bathroom muttering that she needed a shower.

  The two men chatted awkwardly while they eyed the bathroom door. Bob banged on it a couple of times.

  Wilson finally left. His column the following day was devoted to Lieutenant Taylor. When Barbara ran into Wilson in a nightclub several days later, she apologized. Her explanation for holing up in the bathroom was that she should never have agreed to the interview. Why? Because Bob was on official Defense Department business. As a loyal citizen, it was her duty not to overshadow her husband.

  Wilson didn’t believe a word of it.

  BARBARA WAS NOMINATED FOR BEST ACTRESS FOR DOUBLE Indemnity. So was Bette Davis, for the seventh time, for Mr. Skeffington, Greer Garson, for the fourth year in a row, for Mrs. Parkington, Ingrid Bergman for Gaslight, and Claudette Colbert for Since You Went Away. Oscar night, March 15, 1945, came in the middle of a strike by set designers, illustrators, and decorators. Bergman won for Gaslight. On the way out, good sport Barbara told the press she was a fan of Ingrid’s.

  In Christmas in Connecticut, magazine columnist Stanwyck writes about a Connecticut farm she doesn’t own, a husband she doesn’t have, and recipes she never cooks. The predictable but brisk comedy was fun to make. Reginald Gardiner is the fiancé with the thin mustache who does have a farm, Sydney Greenstreet the publisher who invites himself for Christmas and mustn’t find out. Dennis Morgan is the young sailor Barbara is forced to entertain, and S. Z. Sakall the schmaltzy Hungarian who saves the day. The director was Peter Godfrey. After making a start in acting and directing in London, Godfrey had come to Hollywood in 1939. With fellow Englishman Greenstreet, Peter had cast and crew in stitches with impromptu spoofs.

  Warner Brothers offered Stanwyck Mildred Pierce. Barbara was eager to play another James M. Cain character. Cain was a lot more squalid than Olive Higgins Prouty—the attention on money and its effect was virulent and unrelenting—but it was another Stella Dallas tale of a sacrificing mother. Hard work allows the heroine of the title to climb from waitress to restaurant owner, but she has a despicable daughter who takes everything her mother can provide, including her second husband, himself a manipulative hanger-on.

  The producer was Jerry Wald, a former writer with the irritating habit of announcing projects before the stars he wanted said yes. His infectious enthusiasm made him steal lines from Oscar Levant and smuggle plot points from books into the films he produced. A fast-talking manipulator of the press and all the channels of ballyhoo, Wald was the weasely original for Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? The screen adaptation of Mildred Pierce was not by Wald, however, but by Catherine Turney. A year older than Stanwyck, Turney was Warners’ top melodramatist. She would write three films starring Stanwyck.

  Wald wanted to bury the taboo subject of daughter seducing her stepfather in a murder mystery. When Turney couldn’t deliver a scene of police grilling Mildred, the producer turned to Albert Maitz, a specialist in action movies who had scripted This Gun for Hire and Destination Tokyo.

  Barbara didn’t like the Turney-Maltz script. Billy Wilder had spoiled her for Cain adaptations. The Mildred Pierce screenplay had nothing of the corrosive brilliance of Double Indemnity. The final script was little more than the story of a dowdy housewife who suffers the nasty, semi-incestuous goings-on of her cad of a husband and ungrateful daughter. Bette Davis, who had first refusal on all Class A scripts at Warners, didn’t want to play the mother of a sixteen-year-old. Ann Sheridan, who was offered one of the early scripts, thought Mildred was too tough and the daughter an absolute horror. Rosalind Russell also passed on it. Because Michael Curtiz was the director, Stanwyck said yes.

  But Wald kept tinkering with the script—and casting possibilities. In yet another rewrite, Louise Randall Pierson added a feminist polish to the script while William Faulkner gave it a Southern male perspective, including a scene in which a black maid holds the forlorn Mildred in her arms and sings the spiritual “Sing Away.” Wald thought Crawford would be great in the title role. With Jack Warner’s approval, he sent her a script with a note telling her the final draft would be written by Ranald MacDougall, noted for transferring the Hemingway mystique to the screen. Joan called the producer the same night beaming with enthusiasm.

  After learning that Curtiz was hostile to her, Crawford humbled herself. She might have been in fifty-nine films, she told Wald, but she didn’t mind testing for him. In October 1944, she auditioned for Curtiz, who swore at her in his inimitable Hungarian English. “After the test,” Joan claimed, “he forgot all about Stanwyck.”

  Barbara was angry. “I desperately wanted the part. I went after it. I knew what a role for a woman it was, and I knew I could handle every facet of Mildred. I laid my cards on the table with Jerry Wald. After all, I’d done a dozen pictures at Warner’s, including So Big and Meet John Doe. I’d paid my dues. I felt Mildred was me.”

  Within a week of filming, Curtiz wanted Crawford fired and Stanwyck reinstated. For her screen test, Joan had forsaken her star gloss for bare simplicity. For the film itself, she had no intention of appearing drab and dowdy. Joan, in turn, asked Wald to fire the director. Producer, director, and star settled into an uneasy truce after Jack Warner threatened to close down production. By the time the film was finished, everybody knew Warners had a winner.

  Mildred Pierce brought Crawford an Oscar.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER MILDRED PlERCE SLIPPED FROM HER GRASP, Stanwyck accepted another Catherine Turney adaptation, consoling herself that My Reputation was much more important. It spoke to a predicament many of the war’s home-front women were confronting.

  Two women had written the pseudonymous novel about a young widow who, in al
l innocence, dates an army officer and in so doing almost loses the love of her teenage son. The story dealt with the war’s dislocation of home-front certitudes and of a woman freeing herself from children, a sick husband, and a domineering mother. Barbara thought it had some of the power of Mrs. Miniver. Greer Garson had not wanted to play Mrs. Miniver because, at thirty-two, she was asked to portray a woman old enough to have a twenty-year-old son. Barbara had no such qualms.

  My Reputation would remain one of Barbara’s favorite films, perhaps more for its bold intentions than the final product. The picture was a screen adaptation of “Clare Jaynes”’s 1942 novel Instruct My Sorrows, the story of Jessica Drummond’s first year of widowhood. After her husband dies, Jessica is left with plenty of money, two young sons, and fear of loneliness. Considering the Production Code strictures, Turney’s screenplay was adult both in treatment and concept.

  Director Curtis Bernhardt, however, was no William Wyler.

  Where Wyler gave emotional intensity to Mrs. Miniver’s personal drama and knew how to suggest the larger canvas, the emigré Bernhardt had little sense of the tensions, anxieties, and expectations of men and women trying to cope with the conflict of wartime morality. As Kurt Bernhardt, he had embarked upon a promising career in his native Germany, directing Marlene Dietrich. As a refugee in France, he had made movies with Jean Gabin and Jules Berry. Since reaching Los Angeles in 1940, he had made six pictures, including the brilliant police thriller Conflict with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet.

  My Reputation was quickly shot on familiar sets. Barbara is a widow in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, tattled about for dispensing too soon with her weeds. George Brent is a deskbound major who, during the nervous months after Pearl Harbor, courts her. She keeps saying no when she means yes until his intentions become honorable.

  Bernhardt rubbed Americans the wrong way during the waning days of the war. As the German refugee painstakingly explained to Barbara, Brent, and Eve Arden, Americans were hopelessly, indeed laughably, naive.

  Both Turney and Stanwyck found him hard to work with. James Wong Howe was the film’s true asset. The cameraman, who shot his first movie at Paramount in 1923 and was still photographing Barbra Streisand in Funny Lady in 1974, gave My Reputation its mood. He used extreme high-angle shots of Barbara to emphasize her feeling of emotional loneliness, making her appear small and powerless. Turney and Stanwyck never quite connected. The writer found Barbara cold and felt she couldn’t get close to her.

  Warners released My Reputation for viewing by servicemen overseas before bringing it out Stateside. Barbara cringed at reviews that called it a sob story. She never gave up on My Reputation and years later would say it tried to come to grips with the quandary of the comparatively young widow “who does start to go out with eligible men, and then the gossip starts.”

  23

  RAND AND WARNER

  DURING THE FILMING OF M Y REPUTATION, STANWYCK DISCOVERED a new book that set her imagination soaring. She read hundreds of novels a year, but she had never come across a character she felt she had to flesh out on the screen. Racing through The Fountain-head in one night and one morning at the studio, Barbara saw herself not only in Dominique, the rich and beautiful woman torn between two men, but in the book’s hero. She didn’t have Howard Roark’s enormous ego, but she, too, had made herself. Didn’t her success justify her faith in herself? Wasn’t she her own best creation?

  The 754-page novel was by her fellow member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, Ayn Rand. If an author stood for muscular capitalism and disdain for the common herd, it was this Russian-born philosopher-novelist. Her hero was an architect of unbounded ego who over two decades fights a society mired in tradition and mediocrity. A theme of antiauthoritarianism that appealed to Barbara ran through the pages. Here was the answer to the mushy left, the bleeding hearts, whiny social reformers, union bosses, and people in general who couldn’t pull up their own socks. Rand said everybody should want to fulfill himself or herself, that to believe in yourself was paramount. The independent mind, she said, “is the fountainhead of all human progress.” Barbara saw herself as Dominique, a woman of such private values that she is offended if others love the same books or music as she. “It’s the things we admire and want that bring us into submission,” says Dominique Francon, who marries the book’s villain and loves the hero.

  Barbara called Jack Warner’s secretary and said she had to see the boss. On the appointed hour she rushed into his office, threw The Fountainhead on his desk, and told him to buy the screen rights.

  Next, she talked to the author.

  Rand, née Alice Rosenbaum, lived on Marlene Dietrich’s old ranch in Chatsworth, near the former Marwyck spread. Her strong Russian accent jarred with her streamlined, American prose. She had lived in the United States over twenty years and in the mid-1930s had been a reader at Paramount. Her husband, Frank O’Connor, was a former DeMille actor who managed the thirteen-acre ranch. Their friends included the lavender couple Janet Gaynor and MGM designer Adrian, whose theatrical clothes Ayn wore on dressy occasions. Rand was two years older than Stanwyck. Waving her long cigarette holder as she talked, she told Barbara she had written the Fountainhead heroine for Garbo.

  “But Miss Garbo is not available,” Barbara retorted. “I would just love to do it, because I understand this woman.”

  Jack Warner bought The Fountainhead and gave in to the headstrong author’s demand that she adapt her book. Mervyn LeRoy agreed to direct with Humphrey Bogart as Roark, Stanwyck as Dominique.

  Rand had done some screenwriting for Jerry Wald, but reducing her long novel to a 110-minute screen story was not easy. Nor was the character of Dominique, who leaves Roark because she can’t bear seeing him destroyed and marries a newspaper tycoon in a deliberate act of self-destruction, only to join a triumphant Roark. Rand herself admitted Dominique was, if taken literally, “quite stupid” and suggested readers should see her “more as the projection of a certain attitude, taken to an extreme—an idealist paralyzed by disgust.” She called Dominique “myself on a bad day.”

  WHILE STANWYCK WAITED FOR THE WAR TO END, BOB DUTIFULLY telephoned every Sunday night. He was transferred to a naval base in Illinois, where, pending his discharge, he was still a flying instructor. One young student of his was twenty-year-old Roy Scherer Fitzgerald, who had been assigned to the Aviation Repair and Overhaul Unit and a tour of duty in the Philippines. When they met the next time, Roy was Rock Hudson.

  More bored with her own boredom than anything else, Barbara fleshed out the last months of the European conflict filming The Two Mrs. Carrolls with Humphrey Bogart. Both were miscast in the adaptation of Martin Vale’s play that had been a Broadway triumph for Victor Jory and Elisabeth Bergner.

  Bogart is Geoff Carroll, an American in England with a small daughter (Ann Carter). He is a painter slowly going mad. He falls in love with Englishwoman Sally Morton (Stanwyck) and marries her. The couple settle in an English village, where Sally hears rumors that Geoff killed his first wife shortly after painting her in a portrait called Angel of Death. Sally discovers her husband has a similar portrait of her stashed away in the attic. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Thomas Job eliminated the first Mrs Carroll and with her the play’s big shocker—a scene in which the first Mrs. Carroll calls to warn Sally that Geoff is poisoning her nightly glass of milk. A very young and aggressive Alexis Smith plays a neighbor and would-be third Mrs. Carroll. The ending packs a wallop. Sally comes to realize what is going on when she invades her husband’s locked studio and sees the distorted Angel of Death Dorian Gray-type portrait he has painted of her. Geoff crashes into her locked bedroom through a window, to be met by her brandishing a revolver. He subdues her and nearly strangles her with a curtain cord before her old beau (Pat O’Moore) and police burst in.

  Offscreen, Bogart was plotting to divorce one wife so he could marry another. Mayo Methot was the actress who had set him on fire in 1930 and
had become his third wife. Mayo’s looks and figure had collapsed in alcoholism and in hideous scenes in which he goaded her until she started hurling bottles at him or, on one occasion, went after him with a carving knife. Now he wanted out so he could marry his nineteen-year-old leading lady in To Have and Have Not—Lauren Bacall.

  Stanwyck and Bogart shared the same business manager, Morgan Maree. Bogart was the son of a painter. His mother was the fashionable New York portraitist and magazine illustrator Maud Humphrey, his father the noted physician Belmont De Forest Bogart. Between takes, Bogie told Barbara his mother had painted his portrait when he was one year old. Behind the tough, hardened persona that Bogie perfected even offscreen, behind the sallow complexion and mocking smile, Barbara discovered a caustic, urbane, sophisticated man. There were emotional disturbances in the family, he told her. He had brought his mother to Los Angeles and was paying for her and his elder sister’s institutionalized care. He was forty-six and in a ceremony squeezed in during The Two Mrs. Carrolls he married Lauren Bacall. Both bride and groom wept copiously during the ceremony.

  The press was all over the newlyweds. Bogart was always good for a few punchy quotes, and Charlie Einfeld, Warners’ publicity chief, took care of the Humphrey Bogart image. Barbara profited from the short hiatus Warners granted the Bogarts to visit Bob in Chicago. On her return she told reporters asking her if she had any plans, “How can anybody have plans until the war is over?” Bogie joked about Barbara being married to pretty Bob. “I’m not good looking,” he admitted. “I used to be. Not like Robert Taylor. What I have is I’ve got character on my face. It takes an awful lot of late night drinking to put it there.”