Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  When Preminger ultimately proved unavailable, Barbara agreed to Wallis’s choice of Robert Siodmak. The German-born director had followed the beaten track from Berlin to Paris to Los Angeles. His big break had come in 1944, when he met Joan Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock’s English assistant. To make it on her own, Harrison bought the rights to The Phantom Lady, a mystery story by Cornell Woolrich, who wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. The Phantom Lady proved successful beyond all expectation. It kicked Siodmak’s career into high gear and made him the master of moody, atmospheric thrillers.

  Barbara was conscious of a change in public attitudes. Moviegoers seemed to want less sugarcoating when it came to depicting human nature. King Vidor was shooting The Fountainhead she had wanted so much. In Pinky, Elia Kazan was trying to come to grips with the taboo subject of interracial romance, and in The Asphalt Jungle John Huston was filming a caper from the criminals’ point of view. The File on Thelma Jordan, said Wallis, was about the extremes to which people will go to get money. With her customary speed, Barbara read all of Woolrich’s books, including those written under his pen name William Irish. Woolrich sold I Married a Dead Man to Paramount and a short story that Hitchcock turned into Rear Window.

  The File on Thelma Jordan script spun the chilling logic of Double Indemnity in a new direction. Thelma Jordan tricks the innocent Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) into helping her with a crime that benefits her and another man, only to fall in love with Corey. Siodmak’s thrillers delivered their punchy payoffs through expressionist lighting and offbeat, sometimes loony characters—Franchot Tone in The Phantom Lady; Charles Laughton in The Suspect—and lustful women—Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross. In Thelma Jordan, he gave Barbara the screen’s most erotic cigarette holder. He built action and suspense, but his best shock effects were missing. Paramount kept Thelma Jordan on the shelf for over a year. Before its halfhearted 1950 release, however, Barbara starred in another thriller by Woolrich.

  I Married a Dead Man was the first and last of Woolrich’s major crime novels that Mitchell Leisen, in league with Stanwyck, persuaded Paramount to buy as a Stanwyck vehicle. Bleaker than Woolrich’s Bride Wore Black and Waltz into Darkness, I Married a Dead Man told the story of Helen Georgesson, pregnant and fighting a sadistic lover, injured in a train collision and wrongly identified at the hospital as another pregnant woman found dead in the train wreckage. The joke around Paramount in the early summer of 1949 was that Leisen was spending more time shooting a train wreck than directing Barbara Stanwyck. In an inside-joke homage to Barbara’s publicist friend, Catherine Turney rechristened the heroine of Woolrich’s assumed-identity thriller Helen Ferguson.

  Stanwyck is the haggard, sick, and very pregnant woman who embarks upon a transcontinental railway journey with five dollars to her name. The train is wrecked, and in the middle of the crash scene she goes into labor. The new mother assumes the identity of the dead woman next to her. When she meets the woman’s family and sees its social position and inheritance, she is drawn into blackmail and near-murder.

  As the male lead, John Lund was never better. The son of a Norwegian glassblower, Lund had reached stardom in 1946 opposite Olivia De Havilland in To Each His Own. Jane Cowl played the mother who assumes Helen is her daughter-in-law. Lund played Cowl’s son and brother of the man whose death in the train wreck presumably has left the new mother a widow. Lyle Bettger was Barbara’s blackmailing lover and father of her child and Phyllis Thaxter the woman killed in the accident.

  Two stages over, Wilder was filming Sunset Boulevard, and besides concentrating on her Helen Ferguson role, Barbara had to soothe William Holden’s frail ego and tell him a real actor can make love to an older woman. Montgomery Clift’s agent had persuaded the sensational newcomer that teenage girls would never forgive him if he played a gigolo to Gloria Swanson’s fading movie star. Bill, too, had been assailed by self-doubts once he agreed to play the screenwriter who can’t hack it and lives off the wealthy and slightly dotty relic of the silent screen.

  Leisen put as much gusto into filming hospital scenes as the train wreck. Helen is wheeled in to undergo surgery for her injuries, and her baby is delivered prematurely by cesarean section. The script cleverly teases the audience, revealing how Helen Ferguson is carried deeper into her own deception, how each time the new mother is on the verge of telling the truth, she is held back. Sooner than she thinks, however, Lund discovers the deceit, but she ingratiates herself in his and his family’s favor. When evidence points to her as the murderer of her blackmailer, her new “family” staunchly defends her. For a happy ending, Bettger is revealed to have been killed by another woman altogether. Before its release, Paramount renamed the film No Man of Her Own, a title used in a 1932 Gable-Lombard comedy. Cue magazine suggested somebody should start a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Actresses and make Stanwyck a charter member. Getting the ending of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers wrong, the magazine wrote “For the punishment they’re dishing out to her these days is murder. If she’s not strangled to death (in Sorry, Wrong Number) she’s being beaten to within an inch of her life (in The Lady Gambles), or shoved into suicide (Thelma Jordan) or left to die of tuberculosis (in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers).”

  BARBARA WAS THRILLED WHEN HAL WALLIS INVITED HER TO MATCH wits and acting tricks with Walter Huston. Ruby Stevens had watched Huston in Desire Under the Elms at the Greenwich Village Theatre in 1924. Now he would play her father, Wallis told her on the phone. “I’d carry a spear and hug the backdrop just to be in one scene with that one-in-a-million actor,” she said.

  The Furies was the first Freudian western, and Stanwyck’s character a twin of her Polly Fulton part in B. F/s Daughter. The McCarthy era explanation for a strong, aggressive woman was that her heart really belonged to daddy. Whether he was an arrogant industrialist, a ruthless politician, or a hardened cattle baron, a father brought up his (usually only) daughter in his own image and swains had better beware: With her will and her money she would geld any suitor who tried to compete with her old man.

  The Furies told the story of a cattle baron and his fights with the only person who dares oppose his iron will, his daughter. Huston played T. C. Jeffords, the tyrannical widow-father to Stanwyck’s headstrong daughter. Their director was Anthony Mann, a former set designer who loved the big outdoors and made superb westerns. Inexplicably, Wallis vetoed Technicolor for this major production with its colorful cast and Arizona desert setting.

  Wendell Corey was cast as a local gambler who dunks Barbara in a washbowl, bats her around, and then kisses her. Gilbert Roland played a squatter on the rangeland who becomes her lover, and Judith Anderson the “other woman,” a scheming widow old T. C. Jeffords brings home as his new wife. When Jeffords hangs the squatter for horse stealing, his daughter sets out to ruin her father. It’s an easy job since Jeffords has plastered the New Mexico countryside with “T.C.’s”—his own brand of currency redeemable in dollars he doesn’t have. In the hate saga’s most harrowing scene, Barbara forever alienates her father by disfiguring her stepmother with a well-aimed pair of scissors.

  Niven Busch had adapted his own novel. Busch was an ex-rancher who came to Hollywood via sports reporting, and was an old hand at writing flamboyant westerns (Duel in the Sun). He was married to Teresa Wright, the star of his best screenplay, Pursued.

  What he saw on The Furies set didn’t impress him.

  “I thought Stanwyck should have been better directed,” he would remember. “And I thought the outdoor sequences should have been much better handled. They put Stanwyck on a miserable, fat-assed palomino that could hardly waddle. They were afraid she would get tossed off or something. They could have put her on a really good horse; she was a good horsewoman. I thought Gilbert Roland was good, but Wendell Corey was very insipid. They needed a very vital guy for that. That was a major weakness.”

  Barbara and Walter Huston, however, had a good time. They celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday on the set, and egged each other on. Do
ubles were ready to do a dangerous riding sequence one day, when Barbara decided she’d do her own riding. “I’m not going to let any broad show me,” Huston shouted, hoisting himself into the saddle. Barbara said: “Thank God for the privilege of pitting all the skill I could beg, borrow or steal against Walter’s greater skills in scenes we played together. I never won. But it was an honor to lose every scene to a guy like that.”

  After the shoot, John Huston invited Barbara to the birthday party he was arranging for his father at Romanoff’s. Walter begged off that night, not feeling well. Twenty-four hours later he died of a heart attack.

  Mann went from directing Barbara in The Furies to directing her husband in The Devil’s Doorway, a pro-Indian western about a Shoshone who fights valiantly in the Civil War but returns to Wyoming to find himself hated and threatened.

  Barbara finally joined Clark Gable on To Please a Lady. Clarence Brown’s set-side manners surprised her. Garbo’s old no-nonsense director never raised his voice. In fact, he never told her and Gable what he wanted, but let them rehearse on their own. He spoke so softly they had to cross to the director’s chair to hear his suggestions. Without explaining what engineering and directing had in common, Gable attributed Brown’s skills as a director to his having started out as an engineer. To Please a Lady was Gable’s and Brown’s eighth film together.

  After thirty years of studio filmmaking, Brown was discovering the fun of location shoots. He had just filmed William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, with locals in bit parts and crowd scenes. To shoot authentic car racing, he took To Please a Lady to the Indianapolis 500 track.

  Everything in Indiana was uneventful but for Barbara’s brush with racial discrimination. She demanded a bedroom and bath for herself and the same for her longtime maid, Harriett Corey, with a sitting room between. Indianapolis’s best hotel did not accommodate black persons. Barbara had MGM squirming when, as an alternative, she suggested the production make reservations for her and Harriet in the best “colored” hotel. When the company got to Indianapolis, Barbara and maid stayed in the city’s best hotel.

  Bob returned from The Devil’s Doorway location in the deepest funk, not because of his director or location photography, which he said was exceptional, but because his career was going nowhere. It showed on the screen. His manner looked increasingly cantankerous.

  He resented Metro’s new stars—Van Johnson, Cornel Wilde, Frank

  Sinatra. Big was still big, of course—and with Annie Get Your Gun, Father of the Bride, and The Asphalt Jungle MGM-Loew made big money again. But movie attendance slumped to 60 million a week, the lowest since 1933. The falloff was sharpest in weak-to-medium attractions like Ambush, Conspirator, and The Devils’ Doorway, precisely the pictures Bob starred in.

  28

  FALSE FRONTS

  DARRYL ZANUCK TOLD JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ TO SEND COPIES OF HIS new script to Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, and Gertrude Lawrence. Barbara was shooting To Please a Lady, but read All About Eve in one evening. There were in-jokes in this cruel and cynical backstage story (the virago heroine’s director-lover is preparing to leave Broadway to direct a film in Hollywood for Zanuck) and swipes at television (“That is all television is, dear—just auditions”). Barbara shuddered when she read a speech Mankiewicz gave Margo Channing:

  Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder—so you can move faster—you forget you’ll need them when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common whether we like it or not. Being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter what other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner—or turn in bed—and there he is. Without that you’re not a woman. You’re someone with a French provincial office—or a book full of clippings. But you’re not a woman. Slow curtain. The end.

  Mankiewicz knew more about women than any man Barbara had ever met.

  As Zanuck’s fair-haired boy—and president of the Directors

  Guild—Mankiewicz was another producer-writer turned director to control his material. All About Eve explored the compulsion, camaraderie, cruelty, and self-indulgence of theater people, the skulduggery and bitchcraft of actresses, the neuroses, wit, fascination, and atmosphere of the backstage. When Zanuck phoned Barbara, she discovered Mankiewicz had already objected to having Marlene Dietrich as Margo, but the cast included Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, George Sanders as the venomous and snobbish critic, and Fox contract player Gary Merrill as the director-lover. MCA’s Lew Wasserman, Barbara’s new agent, informed her the picture would start in San Francisco in mid-April 1950.

  Getting Wasserman to represent her had been Jack Benny’s idea. The dynamic, rail-thin Wasserman, who rose at five in the morning and spent his evenings screening features in his Beverly Hills mansion, was fast becoming the most powerful figure in the business. He rarely surfaced on the public record, opting instead for occasional appearances on the society pages. As president of MCA Artists, Ltd., he was gracious and soft-spoken, yet he was considered one of the most aggressive men in a business full of aggressive men. He had not only negotiated Benny’s contract with the American Tobacco Company but advised Jack on his radio program. Barbara liked the fact that he had been married to the same woman for twenty years.

  As Barbara pondered Margo, Bob flew in through the door to announce goddamn Louis B. was giving him the lead in goddamn MGM’s biggest picture ever! Barbara hadn’t seen her husband this excited since he went into the navy.

  Bob had Louis B. Mayer down pat. “Yes, son, you are going to star in the biggest of them all. Quo Vadis will have everything in Technicolor, persecuted Christians, Rome in flames, a cast of thousands and you loving Deborah Kerr.” The director would be their friend Mervyn LeRoy.

  Barbara told her husband he’d better start taking fencing lessons.

  Quo Vadis had been in the works for over a year. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1896 worldwide bestseller had been filmed as a silent three times, and the script of this fourth edition was the object of a fierce battle between Mayer and his production chief, Dore Schary. Mayer wanted a Technicolor religious epic. Schary had hired John Huston, who, with a classics scholar, wrote a screenplay that stressed the parallel between Nero and modern dictators. Preproduction had started in Paris, and after seeing a screen test, everybody approved Peter Ustinov for Nero. Also okayed was the casting of Gregory Peck as the Roman aristocrat who eventually leads a revolt against Nero and Elizabeth Taylor as the Christian maiden he falls in love with.

  Eager to show that he, not Schary, was still in charge, L.B. fired Huston and everybody else except Ustinov and gave the starring roles to Taylor and Kerr. The screenplay confected by John Lee Mahin, S. N. Behrman, and Sonya Levien was pure imitation Cecil B. De Mille.

  MGM chose to film the colossal—the adjective was part of the billing—movie in Rome. Cinecittà’s new studio offered bargain-price facilities and crowds of thousands. Five thousand extras would be used in the triumphal march to Nero’s palace. Twenty lions would eat Christians, and two cheetahs would flank Patricia Laffan, who would play the jealous Empress Poppaea. Bob would be flying to Rome just a few weeks after Barbara started All About Eve in San Francisco.

  Was it Bob’s boyish enthusiasm that tipped the balance and made Barbara say no to Margo Channing? Or superstition, fear of playing the loser, the actress on the skids, the sharp-tongued star who realizes too late she hasn’t learned to be a woman? Something in Mankiewicz’s dazzling, corrosive story made Stanwyck wonder about her marriage and made her decide to stay closer to her husband. Telling Wasserman she had decided to say no to All About Eve, she asked her agent to look for a film she could do in Europe.

  Wasserman came back with one possibility. Another Man’s Poison would shoot in London. It was a thriller about a blackmailer who has proof that a woman murdered her husband. The author was the En
glish writer-producer Val Guest.

  Colbert got All About Eve. A back injury, however, forced her out. When Gertrude Lawrence insisted Margo’s drunken scene be eliminated, Bette Davis read the script, thought it brilliant, and, ten days before shooting started, signed on. She wasn’t Margo Channing, she said, but she understood her all too well. “I knew Margo felt every one of those years hitting her, and I felt down here in my gut every word she said when she told her lover, Ί hate men!’ She hated them for staying attractive forever. From the day I was forty, I screamed every time I saw a mirror.”

  BOB LEFT FOR THE QUO VADIS LOCATION. THE SUMMER OF 1950 proved to be one of the hottest on record for Rome, and the huge, complicated picture soon fell behind schedule. The feedback Barbara got from Cinecittà was positive. Bob didn’t look silly in plumed helmet and short toga, and the fencing lessons had given him a kind of ease and grace he had never had before. Everybody was pleased with Bob as

  Marcus Vinicius and Kerr as the Christian maiden, even if Ustinov’s Nero going mad ran away with the show. On the transatlantic telephone, Bob warned Barbara that principal photography was expected to stretch into October, perhaps even November.

  But other rumors from Rome spoiled Barbara’s preparations for her train-to-New-York-ocean-liner-to-Southampton-train-to-London voyage to start Another Man’s Poison. Los Angeles newspapers published Rome-datelined wire service stories saying Robert Taylor was having an affair with a redheaded slave girl. Barbara ignored the gossip, but as the filming dragged on the slave got a name. She was Lia de Leo, a twenty-five-year-old Roman divorcée. Barbara began to panic when Howard Strickling swore he had nothing to do with it, that the rumors were certainly not publicity “plants.” Los Angeles newspapers printed wire service stories from Rome quoting Lia as saying she was “Robert Taylor’s big love.”