by Axel Madsen
With Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, and Robert Montgomery, Barbara Stanwyck was among the veterans still working, while Vivien Leigh, Merle Oberon, and Irene Dunne made no pictures in 1949. For Barbara, work was more important than billing and the perks that so often became ego traps.
She signed on with Universal for The Lady Gambles. The picture was a step down from Sorry, Wrong Number; but it meant a salary, and, if excuses were needed, a chance to work with old friends. Robert Preston played her patient husband, and Orry-Kelly did the wardrobe. For the first time she was in the hands of a director younger than she, the thirty-nine-year-old Michael Gordon.
Gordon was blacklisted, having been a member of the Group Theatre before the war and part of the stage production of Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. But Universal International was an agent’s studio run by Jules Stein, and being an associate of producer Michel Kraike allowed Gordon to work despite the blacklist. Barbara closed her mind to politics for the duration of the shoot. She admitted she knew nothing about gambling to Gordon, who wanted to match Billy Wilder’s startling exploration of alcoholic compulsion, The Lost Weekend. He made Barbara read Sigmund Freud on compulsive behavior. She got to like Gordon for the energy with which he worked to make The Lady Gambles an above-average psychological soap opera, although it did nothing for her career.
SHE HAD PLAYED THEM ALL, TOUGH DAMES WHO WRECKED HOMES, women sacrificing everything for no-good men, women neglecting their husbands, and rotten-to-the-heart wives. In 1948, she became the cheated-on wife in real life and, on celluloid, the deceived woman opposite Bob’s lover.
Their marriage might be little more than a front, but Barbara had no intention of letting Bob out of her life. Keeping the career in forward was everything Barbara cared about. She insisted that Helen Ferguson get fresh news and magazine space to once more tout the marriage as close to ideal. Helen dutifully lined up interviews and planted stories that called the Taylors Hollywood’s dream couple. Whether Bob was impotent with Barbara or impotence itself was a pretext, he no longer made any effort to have sex with her. When he wasn’t with his male friends at the airport or on hunting trips, he was at the studio. He wanted to play tough guys, but knew his screen persona was against him. He wanted movies that showed him roaming the wilderness, flying airplanes, taming horses. He got to play opposite the premiere sex goddess of the day, Ava Gardner.
At twenty, the North Carolina hillbilly whose rich and provocative beauty was almost overwhelming had been transformed into an MGM startlet and had married Mickey Rooney. That was only the beginning. With her gritty earthiness, sloe-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, chin and lush body, she had been promoted in Howard Strickling’s press releases as “Hollywood’s glamour girl of 1948.” She was recently divorced from her latest husband, bandleader Artie Shaw, and at twenty-seven, was flitting from one liaison to another. Howard Duff forsook Yvonne De Carlo for her, and when her mercurial nature wore him down, he was followed by the bandleader at Ciro’s on Sunset Strip, the impeccable Peter Lawford, and Howard Hughes, who was entranced with Gardner for the second time. Frank Sinatra was in hot pursuit of her. Merely to look at her, critic Kathleen Murphy would write, “suffices to make swine of men and advance the story.”
The Bribe was Metro’s bid to clone Warners’ To Have and Have Not. But The Bribe had none of the sardonic patter or self-mockery that delighted audiences in Hawks’s Bogart-Lauren Bacall starrer. Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, The Bribe was a pretentious, high-gloss melodrama that excused Gardner from her trademark slinky black dress and put her into Mexican huaraches and fetching native blouses. Taylor played a U.S. agent tracking down a gang smuggling surplus aircraft engines to South America and Charles Laughton a weakly aggressive, broken-down Graham Greeneish sot. The film was shot during August and September 1948 on MGM’s all-purpose Mexican back lot. Despite a rousing chase sequence through a fiesta in the midst of exploding fireworks, both Bob and Ava thought it was the worst movie they had ever been in.
Gardner was a randy tease to her leading men, and for the duration of the shoot, she had her fun with Bob. “I was available,” she would write in her memoirs. “And Bob Taylor surely fit the bill for me, and I did the same for Bob.”
Their trysts were carried out, of all places, under his mother’s roof. Ruth at first confronted her son. She relented after he asked if she would prefer him to go to a motel where he might be recognized. Ava would remember the liaison as a “magical little interlude [that] hurt no one because nobody knew.” In her two-page description of the liaison in her 1990 autobiography, she found Bob to be warm, generous, and intelligent, forever typecast in parts that “demeaned his manhood” and in a marriage that had been on the rocks for a long time. She remembered him smoking fifty to seventy cigarettes a day before the cocktail hour and carrying around a big thermos bottle of black coffee, even keeping it in his car. Cigarettes and black coffee kept him going all day long.
“I have never forgotten those few hidden months. I made two more films with Bob, Ride Vaquero! and Knights of the Round Table, where he played Sir Lancelot (of course!), but we never renewed our romance. And Bob, despite all his efforts, couldn’t break the mold of the beautiful lover. The film world remembers him that way, and I have to say that I do, too,” she wrote.
Stanwyck never indicated she knew of the affair. But the moment The Bribe was in the can, she insisted her husband come with her to New York in a demonstration of togetherness. She hated her own shrill stance, her need to be in control, to humble her husband. She longed for Bob to put demands on her, to insist on something, anything. As always when she put her foot down, he did as he was told.
Helen arranged for the New York Daily News’ s Earl Wilson to lunch with Barbara. On cue, no doubt, the columnist brought up the rumors that the Taylor marriage was terminal. Barbara snappily answered if she ever sued for alienation of affection, the defendant would be Bob’s airplane.
“Taylor lives in the airplane—lives in it,” she said. “Oh, there are times when I go up with him with a tight grip and a tight lip to keep the family together. It’s his life and none of my business and I wouldn’t try to interfere.”
“Ha, who am I kidding? If I did try to interfere, it wouldn’t do any good. He had planes before he knew me.”
She explained that on the half-dozen occasions when Bob managed to persuade her to take to the air with him, he never tried to let her fly the plane “because he knows I can barely operate a car.”
“So I just stay home and worry about him while he’s flying. I don’t say anything because I’m modern and I know the airplane is here to stay—darn it! “
Wilson’s September 26, 1948, column was illustrated with a photo of Taylor and Stanwyck kissing.
Six MONTHS LATER, BARBARA PLAYED THE CUCKOLDED WIFE TO Ava Gardner’s homewrecker in a humorless, slightly awed look at Manhattan’s gossip-column set. MGM’s first choice for East Side, West Side was its own Greer Garson, but Mervyn LeRoy insisted on Stanwyck opposite James Mason as the deceitful husband.* Louis B. and Dore Schary invited Barbara to the gigantic studio luncheon that, in April 1949, marked MGM’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In the afternoon fifty-eight of the eighty players in Metro’s contract roster posed for the famous photo—Bob in the last row.
Stanwyck and Gardner had no scenes together, and managed to avoid each other throughout the eight-week shoot. The rest of the cast included Van Heflin as an ex-cop turned author whose sleuthing even-
tually clears Mason of murder, Cyd Charisse as a breathless young model, Gale Sondergaard, William Conrad, Raymond Greenleaf, and a newcomer named Nancy Davis.
Schary thought the aseptic Davis had a bright look. Besides, she was sponsored by Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, who had both met and dated her in New York.
In her memoirs, My Turn, the future first lady would remember being nervous about working with Stanwyck: “She was known as a real pro who always knew her lines—and who expected yo
u to know yours. We had a long scene together, in which I had all the lines, and got my part right on the first take, the crew broke into applause and Barbara congratulated me. That was probably my greatest moment in pictures—I felt I had really passed the test.”
During the filming, Davis discovered her name was on the blacklist. She went to LeRoy and told the director she had been mistaken for another Nancy Davis in New York. LeRoy called Strickling. The publicity chief arranged for an item to appear in Louella Parsons’s syndicated column pointing out that the Nancy Davis on the list of Communist sympathizers was not the Nancy Davis under contract to Metro.
When she was still unhappy, LeRoy suggested the Screen Actors Guild look into her case. SAG president Reagan reported back to LeRoy that there were at least three other Nancy Davises in Hollywood. Next, Reagan called Nancy herself and invited her for dinner.
LeRoy had a gift for tearjerkers, and East Side, West Side offered him exemplary opportunities for moving his characters through a complicated plot that turns from a love triangle to an explosive whodunit when Gardner’s femme fatale is found murdered. He cuts from sympathetic to hostile situations and punctures contrived situations with dramatic interludes that help overcome the stock characters of suffering wife, straying husband, and sultry siren. Barbara was never comfortable with Gardner in the cast and overacted so terribly as the wife who stops pretending her husband still loves her that critics made a note of it.
Clark Gable came on the set one day to ask Barbara if she would like to play a smart-ass newspaperwoman. To Please a Lady was the story of a professional race-car driver who is the menace of the Indianapolis 500 and a columnist and radio commentator who doesn’t exactly fall for his style and says so. The dialogue was flip and fast. After playing East Side, West Side’s long-suffering wife, doing an energetic journalist in control of her emotions sounded so good she immediately said yes. Howard Strickling’s news release quoted her as saying “Gable has the right to chose his leading lady. And I’m it.”
27
PRIMAL WOMEN
STANWYCK’S ICY ALBINO SPIDER IN DOUBLE INDEMNITY SHOWED what a sensational dramatic actress she had learned to be. The rotten-to-the-heart femme fatale had not killed her career as she had feared when Billy Wilder offered her the part. Since Double Indemnity, she had starred in twelve movies. Audiences had come to admire her for the way she played self-assured women who, although ready to use feminine wiles, were smart and tough enough to survive without duplicity. Whatever the riches her screen characters were offered or inherited, whatever comforts and serenity they won or filched, none of them forgot the hard times. With an inflection of her voice or a glance, she knew how to impart an edge, a dignity, and an awareness of women’s primal struggle, even when none was written into the part. She gave up analyzing every script offered her. What made her say yes or no to a role was whether it worked for her. “I couldn’t take a part and tear it to pieces, analyzing it,” she said when she was eighty. “See, I’d rather make a mistake than lose the vitality.” She never hovered over her writers with suggestions. “I could never answer a question about a character until I was playing her so I was no help to writers.”
Stanwyck knew she was no great beauty, but with grit, aches, and sex appeal she made versatility pay. “First I look for a good story. By that I mean one that says something. Does the public want to see and hear the story? Will the leading characters interest them? Then I read the character and ask myself, ‘Can I do this part?’ Do I know enough about this type of person?’” Douglas Sirk, who directed her in two 1950s films, said she was more expressive than any actress he had worked with. “She has depth as a person. There is this amazing stillness about her, and there is nothing the least bit phony.”
She didn’t think of herself as a comedienne, though she played comedy with great success. Comedy was in the writing, she said—Claude Binyon and Dalton Trumbo on You Belong to Me, Preston Sturges on The Lady Eve. “Both of those films I did with Henry Fonda, who is a wonderful comedian. If it’s a situation comedy I’m all right, but just for me to be funny—I’m not a funny person.”
Four Stanwyck pictures were in the can, in postproduction, or in release in the fall of 1949, and the romantic drama with Clark Gable was set to go. Offscreen Barbara’s face adorned the pages of Life, Time, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post in Chesterfield cigarette advertising (“To my friends and fans I recommend Chesterfields. It’s my cigarette”). She turned down a half-dozen films, but also talked herself into lending her name to movies that she should have been smart enough to reject. She justified her acceptance of less-than-promising scripts by saying an actress worth her salt could play any part.
The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was at the height of its power. It had offices at 159 South Beverly Drive, two blocks from the Helen Ferguson Agency, where it compiled names of suspected communists for HUAC, issued press releases, and circulated anticommunist brochures. Alliance President John Wayne demanded “a delousing” of Hollywood and urged “all organizations within the film industry and all civic organizations in the community to press for a resolution to require registration of all communists.”
Barbara applauded the Justice Department’s prosecution of Charles Chaplin. The FBI had files on Chaplin stretching back to 1922, and J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men were interviewing Hedda Hopper to bolster their never-proven allegation that the comedian had been a communist. Chaplin’s gravest affront, in Barbara’s eyes, was that he had never become a citizen. His second offense was mocking America’s moral pomposity. She didn’t speak out too loudly in public, however, perhaps because the writer of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Robert Rossen, was now on the blacklist, and Lewis Milestone was part of the counteroffensive. After taking the Fifth Amendment, the ailing J. Edward Bromberg, Barbara’s fellow actor from Lady of Burlesque, died of a heart attack, prompting Clifford Odets to say that at a time when citizens were “hounded out of home, honor, livelihood and painfully accredited career by the tricks and twists of shameless shabby politicians banded together into yapping packs,” Bromberg’s demise amounted to “death by political misadventure.”
The Red hunt did nothing to improve the quality of American films. Finding it hard to adjust to new popular moods and aspirations, the industry dished out safe, light entertainment. The number of movies dealing with social and psychological affairs declined while production of intentionally anticommunist pictures rose. The sexual politics that pressured women to give up their jobs to returning servicemen influenced Capra’s first postwar movie. Unlike the Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur single-career women of his earlier films, It’s a Wonderful Life’s Donna Reed is a housewife and a mother.
Television was proving a threat even though it remained an unmentionable in corporate Hollywood. While trade papers reported on the drop in movie attendance and the corresponding increase in TV viewing, television was a no-no subject among gainfully employed studio people. Episodic series were proliferating on the tiny black-and-white tube, almost all “kinescoped” in New York, although a pair of Helen Ferguson clients, Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnez, were thinking of making a TV comedy series at the RKO studio on Gower Street. Barbara free-lanced for most of her career, but scores of her friends were set adrift without studio contracts. Many went to New York, assuming the capital of radio would also be the nerve center of TV production.
Bob felt he had gone beyond his patriotic duty playing a Commie in Conspirator: Echoing Ronald Reagan’s crack that the parts Jack Warner gave him were so bad he could “telephone his lines in and it wouldn’t make any difference,” Bob said he wouldn’t have to get out of bed to phone in his lines. Below his posturing lurked a new fear. He was afraid of the studio’s fresh crop of leading men.
Rather than face his wife over the dinner table, Bob went on hunting trips with his friends. When his navy buddy Tom Purvis came out from Chicago for a visit, he stayed at a hotel Bob paid for. “Barbara didn
’t like me, so I didn’t like Barbara,” Purvis would recall. “Understand we didn’t know each other except for one or two brief encounters, but I was Bob’s navy buddy and she was jealous. I felt kind of sorry for him because he put me up in a suite in the best hotel to make up for the lack of hospitality on Barbara’s part—though he never put it to me that way. He knew that I knew.” There was nothing to talk about even when Bob did bring a few friends home. In the company of
Purvis, Bob called himself Dilly; Tom’s nickname was Curly. Dilly and Curly talked hunting and fishing, and their conversation always excluded Barbara.
When Bob and Purvis flew off on their camping trips, Helen stayed with Barbara. Without neglecting Helen Ferguson Agency, she was adding movie-career counseling to her business and becoming a panelist on the television show “RSVP.”
BEFORE METRO COULD SCHEDULE THE GABLE DRAMA TO PLEASE A Lady, Hal Wallis again went after Stanwyck. The producer asked Marty Holland, the author of Fallen Angel and its director, Otto Preminger, to come up with a thriller intriguing enough to lure Stanwyck. What Wallis wanted was a story that explored the neurotic fringes of passion and destructive triangles—a woman between two men as in Preminger’s Laura and Daisy Kenyon or a man between two women as in Fallen Angel.
Holland delivered. She wrote a short story about a woman with a past who, to safeguard a criminal plan benefiting herself and another man, ensnares a district attorney only to fall in love with him. The Viennese Preminger with his trademark shaven head and Prussian manners was the hot film noir director. Preminger had Ketti Frings rewrite Holland’s script. Working with Otto was supposed to be a form of shock treatment, but Barbara was ready to try. She quickly said yes to Thelma Jordan.