Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Brecht’s German-English mumblings completely bewildered the committee, and he was quickly dismissed. The remaining Hollywood Ten all refused to discuss membership of any sort, whether in the Communist Party or the Screen Writers Guild, and cited the constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. Some of what they had to say never got a hearing, but Trumbo managed to yell into network microphones that this was the beginning of concentration camps in America.

  Wyler told the congressmen that by their action they were poisoning the well to the point where he “wouldn’t be allowed to make The Best Years of Our Lives today.” Publisher Bennett Cerf testified that “if Hollywood can be bullied into producing only the kind of stories that fall in with this Committee’s opinion and prejudice, it seems obvious to me that the publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers will most certainly be next on the agenda.”

  Da Silva, “named” by Bob, was out of work within days. Dmytryk, who had just directed Crossfire, about anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army, was dismissed by RKO. So was the movie’s producer-writer Adrian Scott, the husband of Stanwyck’s costar in So Big and Stella Dallas, Anne Shirley. MGM fired Cole and Trumbo, and Fox announced it would dispense with the services of Lardner. In November, the studio heads—Mayer, Goldwyn, Warner, Cohn, Schary, and Spyros Skouras and a slew of company lawyers—met at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to settle on the industry’s collective response. Goldwyn and Schary tried to resist calls for wholesale firings of suspected subversives. In an air of panic, they were overruled and a blacklist was established that eventually grew to about two hundred and fifty names.

  On the basis of the testimony of the fourteen “friendly” witnesses, Thomas announced the committee’s conclusion. The Roosevelt White

  House had pressured the studios to produce “flagrant communist propaganda,” and communist writers were subtly writing Moscow’s party line into scripts.

  The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals cheered on the HUAC hearings and kept hunting leftists of every stripe. After working himself into a rage at the news that a liberal screenwriter was suing the Alliance for slander, Wood suffered a massive heart attack. On his deathbed he made a will saying his daughter was to receive most of his estate providing she didn’t prove to be a communist.

  The Alliance members chose John Wayne as their new president and IATSE chief Roy Brewer as principal enforcer and keeper of its growing Hollywood blacklist. The studio bosses maintained there was no such thing as a blacklist and counted on the talent guilds, the unions of directors, actors, writers, stagehands, and studio painters to somehow purge their own membership ranks. Under Reagan’s leadership, the Screen Actors Guild drafted a loyalty oath and, in 1951, openly supported blacklisting. At the Directors Guild, Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Capra were the prime movers of loyalty oaths. Capra had first heard of the Alliance in 1946 when, during the casting of If s a Wonderful Life, he was told to clear Anne Revere with Wayne. Together with Reagan and Disney, Capra now became an informer for the FBI.

  Da Silva, who had appeared in the original Golden Boy Broadway cast and since 1939 had been in twenty-two movies, changed talent agencies four times. Again and again, his agents reported back what film executives said: “We can’t hire him, he’s too hot.” A backlash among actors began to hurt Gary Cooper and Bob Taylor. By cooperating too eagerly with the inquisitors, the two stars had betrayed the entire industry.

  The charge, and the rancor Bob felt, made him paranoid. He became so afraid of being tricked into signing anything political that when fans pressed autograph books at him he looked for carbons under the proffered page before scrawling his signature.

  Beyond the posing and posturing for “radical” causes that are acceptable as long as they are also chic, most actors crave acceptance. They want to be liked and often follow rather than lead. Decades later, when the House Un-American Activities Committee came to be seen as an hysterical aberration, Stanwyck would claim her husband had been betrayed by the studio. Yet Bob was the only star seen and heard on ten thousand screens in newsreels naming names.

  Beneath Barbara’s stance lurked profound hypocrisy. Not only had she worked with many of the Hollywood Ten, she continued to put her career ahead of beliefs. The hypocrisy was not that she had worked with Milestone and Pichel and had starred in pictures written by Odets, Trumbo, Epstein, and Rossen, but that she continued to do so, as did the industry. Her next picture was directed by Anatole Litvak, who chose to hide his leftist sympathies, and the one after that by blacklisted Michael Gordon. When MGM offered her East Side, West Side, she had no objections to acting in a screenplay by freshly blacklisted Isobel Lennart. Nor did she refuse to star in Clash by Night, an adaptation of an Odets play three years later. She was, of course, not alone. Jack Benny sailed through the witch hunt without one on-air barb or comment. Preston Sturges thought the HUAC hearings were a wonderful comedy.

  As a whole, the Hollywood establishment managed to wink at the outcasts and to use their talents at bargain prices. The writers were hardest hit. Trumbo and the others struggled to make a living, writing under fictitious names at a fraction of what they had previously earned. Pichel and Milestone, on the other hand, barely skipped a beat as directors. A few months after the HUAC hearings, Pichel was at United Artists directing Without Honor and Milestone was back at Fox doing Halls of Montezuma.

  If political conformity was vital to national security, sexual correctness was deemed no less essential. Homosexuals were a choice target of the witch hunt. Protestations of sexual conformity were insufficient since deviants, like communists, were known to lie about everything. To be accused was to be guilty. The popular press presented homosexuality as a chief cause of American ills.

  “You can hardly separate homosexuals from subversives,” Senator Kenneth Wherry told the New York Post. “Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say, every subversive is a homosexual, but [people] of low morality are a menace to the government.” Alfred Kinsey was reviled because his statistics showed 37 percent of American men and 13 percent of American women had had homoerotic experiences at some point in their lives. The Senate decided homosexuals must be fired from government jobs because they lacked “emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts.” Professional women had the most to fear when the FBI infiltrated the Daughters of Bilitis, a private organization of middle-class lesbians dedicated to improving the image of same-sex love. Most lesbians felt compelled to deny their sexual preferences, to live covertly, to marry gay men and make sure everybody addressed them as “Mrs.” Many acceded to families’ pleas to submit to psychoanalysis, which promised to cure lesbianism on the couch.

  WHILE THE DRAMA UNFOLDED IN WASHINGTON, BARBARA STARTED FILMING B. F.’S DAUGHTER AT MGM.

  J. P. Marquand wrote about New England bluebloods, at once satirizing and indulging, but never offending, Boston Brahmins struggling to maintain aristocratic standards. His Late George Apley was a Proustian memoir of the flourishing of George and of his wife’s fierce work on a committee to save Boston. Β. F.’s Daughter was both a story of generational prejudices and attitudes and a canny character study of a wealthy industrialist’s beautiful daughter. The story was in some ways Barbara’s own. Polly Fulton is a doer married to a thinker whom she tries to mold in her own likeness. Van Heflin was cast as her poor but brainy husband, and, as in The Lady Eve, Charles Coburn was again her father. Robert Z. Leonard, who had scored with The Great Ziegfeld, was the director.

  Barbara might have disdained Christian Dior in Paris, but the studio insisted on the Dior “New Look” for B. F.’s Daughter The film was the first and only picture in which she was dressed by MGM’s executive designer, Irene (née Irene Lenz-Gibbons), who, with her staff, never came onto the set without wearing immaculate white gloves and suitable hats. The wardrobe they created for Stanwyck spelled taste, position, and means and was memorable enough to earn Irene an Academy nomination.

  Barbara cut
her shoulder-length hair to play Polly Fulton. The haircut somehow underscored her gray streaks, which ran in her family—her brother’s hair had turned white at twenty-six. MGM’s ace cine-matographer Joseph Ruttenberg, who had forty films behind him, wasn’t alarmed—in black-and-white gray streaks appeared as blond highlights—but the publicity department routinely retouched outgoing photos. The front office ordered Leonard to tell Stanwyck to dye the gray out.

  “Everybody said, Oh, my God, no actress can have white hair,” she would remember. “No one wants to make love to a gray-haired lady. Everybody said, ‘To be over forty isn’t possible.’” Saying she had no intention of hiding the fact that she was forty-one, she refused to dye her hair. Publicity kept retouching the stills.

  B. F.’s Daughter had lots of pithy dialogue. Heflin had figured he could use his stage tricks. For hours he practiced rolling a silver dollar from one finger to another as a piece of business. When Barbara asked him during rehearsal if he was going to roll his coin during their long, intricate scene together, he said no.

  Leonard shouted “Action!” Barbara began her speech. Van played with his silver dollar. Halfway through the scene the camera focused on him. Delivering his lines, he heard the crew laughing.

  Losing his concentration, he wheeled around and saw Barbara slowly lifting her dress.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Showing them a trick a helluva lot more interesting than yours.”

  She pulled another trick in a scene in which Heflin carries her, as his mink-coated bride, over the threshold. During the rehearsals he swept her off her feet and over the doorstep with such impudence she decided to teach him a lesson. When Leonard shouted “Action!” for the first take, Heflin pranced over, put his arms around her, and … nearly collapsed. With the help of the propman, Barbara was draped with eighty pounds of ship’s chains wrapped in muslin under her mink.

  Louis B. wanted safe entertainment, and the beginning of the Hollywood witch hunt didn’t favor criticism of economic, political and social values. Luther Davis’s screenplay, the Hollywood Reporter noted when the film was released in February 1948, “never seems to get the social significance to jell and lapses comfortably into that old photoplay standard—the story of a poor but brilliant man who marries an heiress and is saved from the horrors of a life of luxury only through the understanding generated by a great love.”

  Despite its lack of action, B. F.’s Daughter was among MGM’s best efforts in 1947.

  Mayer shipped Bob to England in 1948 to play a communist traitor. When Hedda Hopper first heard about the casting, she called Barbara to say she thought it was a disgrace. The unconvincing plot of Conspirator had Bob as a British officer whose young wife discovers not only that he is a communist spy but that he is under orders to shoot her. In her first adult role, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor was Bob’s wife.

  MGM publicists concentrated on Bob giving Elizabeth her first adult screen kiss and enthusiastically reported how she closed her eyes and imagined herself in the arms of her twenty-three-year-old fiancé, army lieutenant Glenn Davis, stationed in Korea. They quoted Bob as saying all he had to teach her was to powder down her lips so her enthusiastic kissing wouldn’t smear his makeup.

  Conspirator ran into a diplomatic flap over its heavy-handed depiction of Russians. British censors threatened to ban the film, and after Guy Burgess and Donald MacDonald fled to the Soviet Union, the similarity to actual British traitors was too close for comfort. MGM feared libel suits from powerful British families. The release of the film billed as “Elizabeth Taylor’s First Adult Love Story” was held up over a year.

  THE MARRIAGE OF THE TAYLORS’ FRIENDS RON AND JANE REAGAN was falling apart. Like Bob, Ron was stuck in neutral while Jane Wyman’s career echoed Barbara’s in a big way with Johnny Belinda. The Reagans separated in December 1947, after eight years of marriage—a month after he was elected to a full term as president of SAG. In her divorce suit, Jane said her husband’s work with the guild had led to the breakup of their marriage.

  Stanwyck spent the first three months of 1948 filming Sorry, Wrong Number, the first of her commitments to producer Hal Wallis. Both were happy to be out of the political limelight, and so was their Russian-born director Anatole Litvak.

  After making movies in the nascent Soviet Union, France, England, and Germany, “Tola” Litvak had received the red-carpet treatment when he came to Hollywood in 1936 and somehow survived his background. A friend of Wyler’s and Huston’s, Tola and his wife, Sophie, had neglected to sign the Committee for the First Amendment manifesto. He now plunged happily into “all-American” themes, crime {Sorry, Wrong Number) and madness (The Snake Pit).

  Sorry, Wrong Number was Lucille Fletcher’s own adaptation of her twenty-two-minute radio play about a bedridden neurotic who happens to get crossed wires when she calls her husband at the office, hears a couple of men arranging a murder, and comes to realize she is to be the victim. Performed by Agnes Moorehead as a virtual monologue, the radio program was rebroadcast seven times between 1943 and 1948 and translated into fifteen languages.

  Barbara demanded a copy of the script ten days before shooting and consulted physicians about manic-depressive behavior. She was told her new director was something of a martinet. After she met Litvak she decided a European who knew what he wanted wasn’t automatically a Prussian. “When Litvak met me the first time, he was perfect. He asked me what I wanted. Wrong Number had several very difficult technical problems to solve, problems for everybody.”

  Litvak wanted to describe the self-imposed confinement of Leona Stevenson with a circling camera that moves from an array of useless medicines at her night table to the neurotic invalid herself. “Leona is in bed, with just the phone, for almost half the picture,” Barbara would say. The production schedule or “board” allocated twelve working days for the bed scenes. “The first thing Litvak asked me—asked me—was: how did I want to do it? Break it up, a couple of days and then something else, or half a day for twenty-four days. Very considerate. No matter if it screwed up the board. I realized that Leona, after a very short time, starts to get worried, and then terrified, and finally disintegrates. Almost from the word go, she is way up there emotionally, and stays there day after day—twelve days. I decided I’d prefer to jump in, bam, go, stay there, up, try to sustain it all the way and shoot the works.”

  It all worked until Friday. “Five days I was handling it, starting the next day’s work where I’d picked up, sustaining it all, and then I had two whole days to relax and not to worry about the character, and I tell you it was strange. It was really hard to pump myself up on Monday morning to try to feel that desperate tension.”

  Litvak poured on pyrotechnics. Sorry, Wrong Number had flashbacks within flashbacks, surrealistic and expressionistic devices to illuminate the murderer’s shadow creeping up the stairs. Stanwyck scored with her bravura performance as the terrified and finally raving hysterical wife of Burt Lancaster. The film was not a success, however. The plot relied on too many obliging phone company snafus, and the virtuoso storytelling was ultimately too bewildering. Lancaster was miscast as the dull-witted, ineffectual husband, and, to stretch Fletcher’s radio play to eighty-nine minutes, Litvak added too many subplots.

  Both Barbara and Jane Wyman were nominated for Best Actress—Stanwyck for Sorry, Wrong Number; Jane for her deaf-mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda. Barbara didn’t think her performance as a terrified and, finally, whimpering woman—or, for that matter, Olivia De Havilland’s mentally deranged person in The Snake Pit—stood a chance against her friend Jane, Irene Dunne as the serenely beautiful mother image in I Remember Mama, or Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc herself. She was right. Wyman won the Academy Award and ran to the stage in a long-sleeved classic gown to make the shortest acceptance speech on record: “I accept this very gratefully for keeping my mouth shut. I think I will do it again.”

  At the Warners’ celebration party (besides Wyman, Walter and Joh
n Huston, Jerry Wald and Claire Trevor won for Warners), four-time loser Stanwyck said, “If I get nominated next year, they’ll have to give me the door prize, won’t they? At least the bride should throw me the bouquet.”

  Radio was at its prime, and in late November Barbara came to the rescue of Jack Benny when Mary suddenly was unable to perform. The proximity of Christmas inspired the comedian to ask, “Do you believe in Santa, Barbara,” a joke that California listeners might appreciate but mostly had Benny in stitches. Over the next years, Stanwyck filled in on several occasions. When “The Jack Benny Program” switched to television in 1950, she made her TV debut on his show.

  The film industry was skidding. MGM managed to improve its profits a bit, but Universal and Disney went into the red for the second year in a row. A new crisis hit the industry in early 1948. The federal government’s decade-old antitrust effort to break up the majors’ control of both production and exhibition, a practice dating back to the nickelodeon days, finally wound its way through the courts. “Block booking,” the practice that meant if a theater owner wanted the winners, he had to take Β pictures, also-rans, and occasional turkeys, was the core of the fight. As early as 1933, the Department of Justice had looked into these monopolistic trade practices. Industry lawyers had obtained postponements and extensions through the 1930s and the war years, but the Truman administration reopened the entire case in 1948, winning a series of so-called consent decrees, which, in effect, forced the studios to sell their chains of cinemas.

  The government’s action was perfectly sound, but the Justice Department’s victory over “wicked” Hollywood was disastrous for the industry. Fearing they could no longer unload four hundred movies a year on theaters they no longer controlled, the studios lost confidence in themselves. The immediate result was a slashing of scheduled productions and the cancellation of hundreds of long-term contracts with actors, directors, writers, and technicians.