Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  The Two Mrs. Carrolls was Stanwyck’s second film with Godfrey. The English director, who gave himself a small part as a racetrack tout in the film, introduced Barbara to his wife Renee, a former Miss American Venus who had met Godfrey when she came west from a modeling career in New York. Barbara found Peter and Renée appealing. Going to dinner with them Friday nights soon became a routine.

  As a director, Godfrey indulged his male lead, letting Bogart mug outrageously. But by constantly hinting at Geoff Carroll’s insanity, Godfrey undercut the suspense. Warners held up the thriller’s release for two years, and when it did come out it was laughed off the screen.*

  Barbara worked nonstop while waiting for Bob’s demobilization and in The Bride Wore Boots made a tolerably light comedy with Robert Cummings, Diana Lynn, and Robert Benchley. Cummings played Stanwyck’s husband in this battle of the sexes that ends with hubby riding an old nag to victory, thereby winning back his wife. The director was Irving Pichel, an escapee from Republic’s low-budget pictures who had just scored with Tomorrow Is Forever, a conjugal drama starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, George Brent, and eight-year-old Natasha Gurdin. Pichel changed Gurdin’s name to Natalie Wood, after his director friend Sam Wood, and put her in The Bride Wore Boots. Barbara found Benchley the most entertaining member of the cast. He told her everybody becomes the type of person he or she hates most.

  AYN RAND FINISHED HER UNCOMPROMISING FOUNTAINHEAD script in six months. As sales of her book reached 400,000 in hard-

  back, Jack Warner decided the film should be a major production. However, the story line requirement that Howard Roark blow up a housing development based on a castrated version of his architectural designs caused the War Production Board to cancel The Fountainhead on the ground that demolishing scarce housing stock amounted to despoiling strategic materials. Instead of fighting Washington, Warner decided to wait until wartime restrictions could be lifted. Director availability and the “major” picture status would bring King Vidor and Gary Cooper to the project in 1947. There was talk of a younger actress. Vidor didn’t think Stanwyck was sexy enough to play Dominique. Ida Lupino, who often got the parts Bette Davis dismissed, was mentioned. In the end newcomer Patricia Neal was cast.

  Barbara was furious. On June 21, 1948, she sent a telegram to Jack Warner:

  DEAR JACK:

  A COUPLE OF YEARS HAVE GONE BY SINCE I MADE A FILM FOR YOU AND SINCE THEN I AM SURE YOU WILL AGREE THAT THE SCRIPTS SUBMITTED TO ME HAVE NOT COMPARED WITH “THE FOUNTAIN-HEAD.” I READ IN THE MORNING PAPERS TODAY YOUR OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT THAT MRS. PATRICIA NEAL IS GOING TO PLAY THE ROLE OF “DOMINIQUE” IN “THE FOUNTAINHEAD.” AFTER ALL, JACK, IT SEEMS ODD AFTER I FOUND THE PROPERTY, BROUGHT IT TO THE ATTENTION OF THE STUDIO, HAD THE STUDIO PURCHASE THE PROPERTY, AND DURING THE PREPARATION OF THE SCREENPLAY EVERYONE ASSUMED THAT I WOULD BE IN THE PICTURE, AND NOW I FIND SOMEONE ELSE IS DEFINITELY PLAYING THE ROLE. NATURALLY, JACK, I AM BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED.

  HOWEVER, I CAN REALISTICALLY SEE YOUR PROBLEMS, AND BASED ON ALL OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES IT WOULD APPEAR TO BE TO OUR MUTUAL ADVANTAGE TO TERMINATE OUR PERSONAL CONTRACTUAL RELATIONSHIP. I WOULD APPRECIATE HEARING FROM YOU.

  KINDEST PERSONAL REGARDS.

  The moviegoers’ romance with Hollywood was cooling. By 1948, studios were negotiating early ends to star contracts, and Warner obligingly thanked Barbara for firing herself. “Naturally your interest in this property is well understood, but our studio does not confine its operations to cases where people bring in books and other stories and we buy them solely on their suggestion,” Warner wrote in his next day’s reply. “Since our actions have offended you and you desire to termínate your contract with us, it may be that, under the circumstances, this would be the best thing to do.”

  The Fountainhead “no-go” would remain a disappointment for Mervyn LeRoy as well. “For weeks we had gradually whittled away at the book’s 754 pages and had forged what I think was an excellent screenplay,” LeRoy would remember. “Nothing came of it. That production would have to be classed as a war casualty.”

  Barbara turned forty-one three weeks after backing out of the Warner Brothers contract. The Fountainhead was her first defeat to a younger actress.

  24

  UNEASY PEACE

  BOB’S DISCHARGE CAME ON NOVEMBER 5, 1945. BARBARA WAS filming The Strange Love of Martha Ivers at Paramount when a telegram announced his homecoming. She rushed to Burbank airport, where her husband told reporters he wasn’t sure how he’d feel about civilian life. “I met some great guys,” he said. “It’s rough splitting up as a group.”

  Bob looked as gorgeous as ever. Once Barbara and he were back behind closed doors, she played her most degrading scene—pleading with a man who didn’t desire her to make love to her. He said he couldn’t, that he had a prostate problem. She told him to see a doctor. Jane Ellen Wayne, Robert Taylor’s biographer, quotes an unnamed psychologist telling Bob he was comparing Barbara to his mother, that no man was aroused by his mother in bed and the only way to restore his libidinous confidence was to have an affair with another woman. Viege Traub, a psychiatrist who treated a number of sexually dysfunctional actors, and knew Taylor and assumed he was gay, would find the two-mothers analogy atypical. A more likely cause would be the returning star’s fear of somehow damaging his own success.

  Behind her husband’s professed prostate difficulty and his armed forces jargon, Barbara detected defiance against the responsibilities and improvisations of civilian life. He had never seen combat, but like so many returning soldiers, he was full of moralistic self-righteousness. Questions were never in doubt in the armed forces, issues were clear-cut and one-sided. In retrospect, life in uniform took on a rosy hue.

  Money hadn’t mattered. The military was a tight-knit fraternity with precise and straightforward rules. “You know exactly who you are and what’s expected of you,” he said. Ronald Reagan was also shocked to come home and see the war effort had not reformed anyone. “I learned that a thousand bucks under the table was the formula for buying a new car,” he would recall. “I learned that the real-estate squeeze was on for the serviceman. I discovered that the rich had got just a little richer and a lot of the poor had done a good job of grabbing a quick buck.”

  Bob resented men who had holed up at the studios (a “heart murmur” had excused Errol Flynn from serving). After a first luncheon at the MGM commissary, he came home saying there were too many new faces. It offended him that the war had made their old friend Zeppo Marx a millionaire. Zep had realized there was more money in the war effort than in actors’ “ten percenting.” After Frank Orsatti died, Zep left the talent agency in the hands of his brother, founded a company making coupling devices, and employed five hundred people. His company concentrated on U.S. Air Force procurement and clinched the contract for the clamping devices that carried the atomic bombs over Japan. He divorced Marion and was living in Palm Springs with a former Las Vegas showgirl twenty years his junior.

  Bob returned to work, unhappy and confused. He hated more than ever the movies Louis B. Mayer had put him in before the war, the romantic parts that had made him a star. To him, the matinee idol roles the studio regarded as money in the bank were insults to his self-respect. He wanted to be a man’s man on the screen, a guy like him, who rode, worked horses, hunted, fished and loved big-sky country. As a welcome home gift, MGM presented him with a $7,500 twin-engine Beechcraft, and assigned his navy buddy Ralph Couser as his copilot. Bob and Ralph flew everywhere in the plane.

  Barbara was jealous of her husband’s all-male circle. When Couser phoned, she angrily yelled, “Hey, Bob, your wife wants to talk to you!”

  Hollywood was turning its attention to peacetime opportunities. With a worldwide weekly audience of 235 million wanting new entertainment, MGM served up profits of $18 million, their highest ever, although gross income was slightly down. Paramount racked up a fantastic $39 million profit; Fox and Warners $22 million each. Many of the best creative minds wanted a new,
freer, more relevant cinema. Returning Majors and Colonels Capra, Wyler, and George Stevens formed Liberty Films and started out on a happy foot with Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!” proclaimed the Adventure posters for Clark Gable’s first postwar movie.

  In response to audiences bored with maturing stars in formula entertainment, MGM was grooming a new crop of performers—Van Johnson, Cornel Wilde, Frank Sinatra, and Peter Lawford. Since 1916, the Exhibitors Herald had charted moviegoer comments across the United States and Canada. By March 1946, theater owners reported audiences spurning Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Without Love and in their next effort, The Sea of Grass.

  Bob was nevertheless happy when the studio assigned him to star with Hepburn in Undercurrent. Louis B. also wanted to test the chemistry of Bob and newcomer Robert Mitchum, whom William Wellman had catapulted to stardom as Lieutenant Walker in The Story of G.I. Joe, one of the most convincing films of the war. Mitchum was cast as Bob’s good-guy brother and Hepburn’s husband in the suspense thriller about a woman menaced by the mystery surrounding her brother-in-law. “I’m sure we’ll get along,” Hepburn told director Vincente Minnelli at the first read-through. Both Minnelli and Taylor thought the remark was as much a threat as an invitation to camaraderie.

  Minnelli and Hepburn were at loggerheads throughout the shoot of what was new territory for both. Minnelli’s specialty was musicals, and his forte was making films look beautiful and move gracefully. He had directed only one straight drama, The Clock, starring his soon-to-be wife, Judy Garland. Undercurrent was Hepburn’s first thriller, and she had a hard time getting “the right horrified reactions.” Compared with the assignments handed to MGM’s other returning GIs, however, Bob still considered himself lucky. He had a strong script, a dazzling partner, and a chance to play a heavy. Gene Kelly was put in a new Ziegfeld Follies movie to dance with Fred Astaire. For Red Skelton, the studio trundled out The Show-Off, a Broadway staple already filmed three times. For Mickey Rooney it was back to playing Andy Hardy.

  STANWYCK CAUGHT THE UPDRAFT OF THE NEW GENRE MOVIEGOERS were beginning to enjoy—the film noir with its predilection for ambiguity, entrapment, sexual obsession, and vortex of crime. The studios liked the new class of action pictures as a replacement for the prewar Β pictures because the films noirs could be shot on existing sets and easily promoted on the basis of sensational or violent story lines. Double Indemnity made Barbara an arresting choice when Hal Wallis and Paramount cast The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, in which the heroine is twice the hard-boiled, lustful Phyllis Dietrichson.

  Like Zanuck before him, Wallis had become too successful for Jack Warner. After more than ten years heading up WB production, Wallis set himself up as an independent producer. Doing The Strange Love of Martha Ivers for him was, in Barbara’s mind, a guarantee of taste and some daring. His choice of material ran toward adaptations of romantic novels and stories that didn’t pigeonhole his productions in routine categories. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was a twisted love triangle, an irresistible star vehicle about a murderous child who becomes a wealthy woman with a spineless husband. The drama begins when a former boyfriend returns to town. To make the movie, Wallis hired the writer and the director of the vivid war film A Walk in the Sun—Robert Rossen and Lewis Milestone.

  Wallis and Milestone borrowed Van Heflin and Roman Bohnen from MGM and, at Lauren Bacall’s recommendation, brought out a promising Broadway actor to make his screen debut—Kirk Douglas. “I knew I was taking a risk pitting a newcomer against that powerhouse, Stanwyck,” Wallis would say of casting Kirk Douglas, “but she was extraordinarily considerate and played unselfishly with him in every scene.”

  Milestone knew how to grab an audience. He concentrated the action in night scenes, contrasting the opulent mansion of the corrupt rich with seedy third-rate motels, bars, blind alleys, and garages. As the wealthy neurotic of the title, Stanwyck gave a bravura performance. Toward the conclusion, she stands at the top of a long curving staircase, her arms slung over Van Heflin, urging him to finish off Kirk Douglas, who has collapsed in a drunken stupor below. Her face freezes into blank disbelief when Heflin fails to kill her husband. At the film’s end, she embraces Douglas and tells him she will again love him. She smiles when he presses a gun into her stomach because she doesn’t believe he has the guts to kill her.

  Within weeks of the October 1945 filming start, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was caught in a vicious labor dispute that set the stage for heightened ideological struggle and turned Stanwyck into a scab. During the war, the American Federation of Labor had pledged there would be no strikes before V-J Day. Japan’s surrender in August brought a rising tide of strikes, shutdowns, and threats of strikes in oil, automobiles, coal, textiles, and many other industries. Enough of sacrifice was the word, time to concentrate on making money.

  The film industry was 90 percent unionized in 1945, and on the surface the feud was an internecine David and Goliath dispute between a coalition of reformers and the sixteen-thousand-member labor umbrella organization, the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE). Before the war, seventy-seven set decorators had formed their own union and in 1943 strengthened their little local by affiliating with the painters’ union. IATSE wanted to represent the painters, but George Brown, the IATSE president, was in jail for racketeering, and the studios signed with the new combined decorators-painters union. Under its chief Herbert Sorrell (“I’m just a dumb painter”), the union was everything IATSE was not—leftist and honest. After winning a vicious fight with Walt Disney over the right to organize cartoonists, it quickly grew into the nine local Conference of Studio Unions.

  Crossing the Conference picket lines was in total accord with Barbara’s political convictions. While she, Douglas, Heflin, Milestone, and crew tried to concentrate on their scripted mayhem, nearly eight hundred members of the Conference marched outside Warner Brothers in Burbank and, to prevent IATSE workers from going to work, overturned three cars. People fought with knives, clubs, battery cables, and chains in the middle of Barham Boulevard while Jack Warner and his executives on a stage roof watched Burbank police and Warner guards beat back the Conference picketers with clubs and spray them with fire hoses. The next day eighty people were injured in a pitched battle. The combined force of police, guards, and IATSE workers beat back the strikers. Roving groups of pickets arrived at Paramount.

  “We continued to shoot, but it meant we were locked in at the studio—if we went out, we couldn’t get back in,” Douglas would remember. “Milestone favored the strikers, and went across the street to Oblath’s restaurant, where a lot of strike supporters discussed it over coffee. For a while, the picture was directed by Byron Haskin. I felt guilty. What was I supposed to do? Stanwyck was working.”

  Milestone, Stanwyck, Douglas, Martha Ivers, and the rest of Hollywood were saved by Washington. At the end of October, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the set decorators were entitled to join the painters. The studios and IATSE gave way. For Sorrell and his allies, however, it was a Pyrrhic victory. The cries of communist infiltration grew louder.

  BOB AND BARBARA FOUND READJUSTING TO EACH OTHER DIFFICULT.

  Whatever efforts to sustain a sexual relationship they had managed before were dropped. She possessed drive, energy, and ambition and was almost entirely self-directed. Bob successively surrendered the direction of his life to his mother, MGM, his wife, and the navy. Double Indemnity made her the quintessential actress of animal ambition—the tough, independent woman. The navy had shaped Bob in ways that made him rebel against his wife.

  Few people were invited to their home, and those who did were appalled at what they saw and heard. It was painful to listen to her yell at Bob and to see him take it. She forbade conversation about guns, fishing rods, and airplanes. John Wayne would remember an evening at the Taylors when, after Barbara retired, the men drank downstairs and told tall yarns about fishing trips on which
bears sniffed their sleeping bags. Suddenly, Barbara appeared in her nightgown on the top of the stairs and ordered Bob to bed. Recalled Wayne, “It was so humiliating for Bob that we all went home. He took it—in front of all those guys, my God.”

  Dion remained on the periphery. When he was twelve at summer camp and got a fishing spear through his leg, he was hospitalized for four or five days. “The doctors phoned my mother,” he would recall. “I waited and waited for her to come, she never so much as called.”

  On the boy’s level, neither Barbara nor Bob ran the household. Uncle Buck did. If anyone showed concern for Dion it was Millie Stevens’s onetime lover. Barbara barely saw or spoke to Dion; nor did she talk about him. If reporters asked, Helen Ferguson came up with excuses, blaming the Taylors’ marriage for Barbara’s lack of interest in Dion. Bob claimed it was not his place to interfere. “Except for his bad grades, he was not a bad kid,” Bob would recall. “It was hard to reach the kid because he saw nothing of his mother and father and had no personal affection, attention or direction.”

  Dion changed his name. After being Dion and Skippy, he was now Tony. His teenage years were difficult. With no love and little supervision from anyone except Uncle Buck, he was in scrapes that bordered on delinquency. In 1947, Barbara sent him half the continent away to the Culver Military Academy in Indiana. The military boarding school had a reputation for turning rebellious youngsters into little stalwarts in uniform and featured such traditions as hazings and older boys tormenting newcomers. The lifelong alienation of mother and son was cemented when she enrolled him in the academy. After a brief summer visit, Dion didn’t see his mother for the next four years, as he never dared to come home without an invitation.