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  Columbia released Ladies of Leisure in May 1930. In the first months of the Depression, audiences loved this sentimental story of a party girl (“Well, brother, that’s my racket. I’m a party girl”) who unintentionally falls in love with the society artist. “It is a really fine picture because of the astonishing performance of a little tap-dancing beauty who has in her the spirit of a great artist,” raved Photoplay. “Her name is Barbara Stanwyck. Go and be amazed by this Barbara girl!” Capra was sure Ladies of Leisure would win Academy Awards for himself, Stanwyck, and perhaps even Best Picture. When the film failed to get a single nomination (MGM’s Grand Hotel won Best Picture; Helen Hayes won for The Sin of Madelon Claudet, a sob story notably teary even by Hollywood standards; and Frank Borzage won for directing Bad G/W), Capra and Cohn sent angry letters to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Capra demanding to become a member, his boss wanting to know why Columbia’s star director had been snubbed. The Academy quickly made Capra its four-hundred-and-forty-ninth member. Still not satisfied, he lobbied to become a member of the Academy board of governors and was elected to a three-year appointment.

  BARBARA LOVED ACTING, LOATHED BEING “IN PICTURES.” SHE hated Los Angeles and the social life of the movie colony. She considered herself a misfit in California and called Hollywood “the papier-maché town.”

  “It isn’t what you do or have done that counts here,” she told the Los Angeles Times’s Muriel Babcock a year after Ladies of Leisure established her with moviegoers. “It’s what happens. That’s why I have never understood the minds of the picture brains. And never will. The same thing is true nowhere else. On the stage if an actress is great she is always great. Alice Brady hasn’t had a good play in five years in New York, but Alice Brady is still considered a splendid actress by the producers. If they have what they think is a fine play, they will call Miss Brady and not somebody unknown and unskilled.”

  Barbara learned that if acting onstage is a matter of mannerism, screen acting is done with the eyes. “Mr. Capra taught me that. I mean, sure, it’s nice to say very nice dialogue, if you can get it. But great movie acting … Watch the eyes.” Range is a matter of looks, in the way an actor makes an audience read his or her thoughts. Acting, her own and other people’s performances, became a lifelong source of satisfaction. Acting means becoming someone else, usually someone quicker, handsomer, and smarter than the Barbara Stanwyck who reported to makeup at 6:30 A.M. and tooled home along Sunset Boulevard ten hours later.

  Earl Lindsay and Willard Mack had given her lessons in professional honesty and taught her that acting was teamwork, that success was something to be earned. Arthur Hopkins didn’t so much direct her in Burlesque as he told her stories and let her imagine how she should feel in various situations. In his review of Burlesque, Alexander Woollcott applauded the twenty-year-old Stanwyck for bringing “much to those little aching silences in a performance of which Mr. Hopkins knows so well the secret and the sorcery.”

  She was surprised by how good she looked on the screen. Capra told her not to go to the dailies or rushes, the screenings of the previous day’s footage. “You never really look at yourself,” he told her. “You’re always looking at the veins sticking out of your neck or how you hold your hands. So never look at yourself while you are working. Only go later, when the thing is done.” She felt he was right because what she had noticed when she did attend rushes was the “dainty things, the feminine things, and missing the larger picture.” Not looking at rushes became a lifelong habit. Over the years, she would find a distance to her screen image that gave her an uncanny ability to look at herself almost in the third person. Her deadpan honesty with herself made her see herself, other actors, the movies, the business not only with objectivity but with a grain of salt. She never forgot where she came from. “When I was a chorus girl, I made people sit up.” The years of her debut were very much an integral part of her.

  Her Kay Arnold in Ladies of Leisure was the first role that allowed her acting to hint at unexpected substance under the brassy, wised-up veneer that 1930s audiences wanted. In a quintessential Stanwyck scene, she tells pal Marie Prévost she isn’t falling in love with her Pygmalion portrait painter. But a soft tremolo in her voice negates her denials. Much of the delight of seeing Stanwyck act is to see her play a woman who has no idea how alluring she is. “She can give out that burst of emotion,” Capra would recall decades later. “She played parts that were a little tougher, yet at the same time you could sense that this girl could suffer from her toughness.”

  Stanwyck’s 1930s roles demanded this kind of double-edged acting. The characters she was asked to play are social mavericks, women armored up in carnality, cynicism, crass logic, and steely confidence. The heroines she incarnated step outside conventions to survive. They dodge bullets and rich men’s mothers, have children out of wedlock, wield power in bank boardrooms, fight their own urges but know what to do next. With her dancer’s figure and sassy demeanor she was perfect casting for down-on-their-luck-but-with-hearts-of-gold Depression characters. In the “weepies” Warner Brothers put her in, her acting movingly bared grief and loneliness beneath her tough and efficient facade. Her women often have to keep their feelings in check because they know men are no good. Typically, the hard-as-nails lady she plays has no parents, but the moment she gets involved with an upper-class chap, his father or, more often, his mother swoops down to beseech her not to ruin the son’s life. By the 1940s, when more mature sophistication enters the mix, the Stanwyck heroine is more surefooted. Men are either heels or suckers, and the trick is to elude the former and take the latter to the cleaners. When she is typecast as a tough broad, she seems to promise men as much pain as pleasure. Her dance-hall belle with criminal connections in This Is My Affair is totally different from her Ball of Fire stripper on the run from the mob and her File on Thelma Jordan murder suspect.

  “If the part calls for a glamorous appearance, then I want to look the very best that a cameraman can make me look,” she said. “If I’m supposed to be an old bag, then fine, let’s go. I’ll do anything at all to make it real.”

  8

  LOW-BUDGET LIFE

  THE GOLDEN ERA WAS A TIME WHEN ACTRESSES’ MENSTRUAL PERIods were tracked on a posted chart, when MGM maintained an in-house abortionist, Clark Gable’s false teeth and Gary Cooper’s impaired hearing were closely guarded secrets, and the studios knew whose hair was truly straw-colored. To prove herself an authentic blonde, Carole Lombard—along with Jean Harlow—reportedly bleached their pubic hair.

  The studios taught, groomed, and managed new faces with the efficiency of prime-rib stock breeders and endlessly molded and manipulated careers. If box-office returns justified a thrust in a certain direction, a studio chief had at his fingertips the pool of writers, directors, and stars to put the hunch on film. The bosses easily persuaded themselves that they had some mysterious insights into public tastes. Although Irving Thalberg often guessed wrong—he felt talkies would never catch on and took longer than most to realize the stage was often a poor source for screen material—he was the first administrator with a craving for “creative input,” a precedent that David Selznick would carry to Byzantine extremes. The studio system was ruthless. Studios loaned out contractées to each other no matter what the actors, directors, or cameramen under contract might say. Such “loanouts” sometimes worked in the performers’ favor. To punish Clark Gable for refusing a silly picture with Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer farmed him out to Columbia. The loanout picture was It Happened One Night, the Capra classic that gave Clark his first Oscar.

  Before Ladies of Leisure was released, Cohn loaned Barbara to Warner Brothers’ Darryl Zanuck for a sophisticated love story. Illicit followed Little Caesar and, like the gangster classic, expressed contemporary smarts spiked with a touch of sentiment and a heart tug of honesty. Zanuck liked ticklish propositions, and Illicit told the story of a lover who foolishly insists on becoming a husband. The source material was a play by Ro
bert Riskin and his lover and writing partner Edith Fitzgerald. Warners publicity called it “a smart, sophisticated story of ultra moderns.”

  Zanuck assigned Archie Mayo to direct Illicit. Mayo was a rude, fat man, who, despite a somewhat redeeming sense of humor, was in the habit of pinching the buttocks of his leading ladies. Dolores Del Rio, it was said, turned right around and slapped his face; Barbara grabbed his arm the first time he tried.

  Movies were made fast and cheap at Warners. “I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday” was Jack Warner’s oft-repeated order. Like Columbia’s Cohn, Jack Warner operated as a “totalitarian godhead”—one observer called him “a bargain-basement dictator,” others called him the “Clown Prince.” He was vain, ignorant, conceited, pretentious, and fond of telling bad jokes and flipping ashes from an extravagantly long cigar. He had risen above his brothers by pushing the Vita-phone sound system to its phenomenal breakthrough. WB might be in its nouveau riche phase, but the studio retained its underdog culture. There was no coddling of talents—even the brightest stars were made to punch time cards.

  In Illicit, Barbara played Anne Vincent, a girl deeply in love with James Rennie. While agreeing to live with him, she nevertheless refuses to marry him. They share an apartment, although society drunk and best friend Charles Butterworth tells them that isn’t done. Anne isn’t keen to tie the knot with her roommate, but he is persuasive. Marriage, inevitably, means spats and misunderstandings. The appearance of Joan Blondell as his former flame and Ricardo Cortez as Anne’s former swain complicates matters. Bruised egos lead to a planned trip to Bermuda by the wrong twosome followed by more misunderstanding and a cliffhanger reconciliation.

  Blondell and Stanwyck became fast friends. The blond, apple-cheeked Joan with her chesty voice, china-blue eyes, and self-deprecating humor was the daughter of itinerant actors. She had lived on the road till she was nineteen and knew all about sawdust, bare stages, back alleys, and hard work. She belonged to WB’s stock company as much as the first bread-and-butter talents of Rin-Tin-Tin and Wesley

  Barry, dog and boy. She had married a cameraman, George Barnes, and, like Barbara, she was less than happy with her husband and Hollywood. Unlike Barbara, however, she had little ambition. “This town hasn’t got into my blood,” she said. “I like it—it has been good to me—but I’m my father’s child, and if the callboard for happiness ever indicated any other place, well, a Blondell has never yet been afraid of ‘the big hike.’”

  A FEW STAGES FROM ILLICIT, FRANK FAY WAS FILMING BRIGHT Lights with the beautiful Dorothy Mackaill. Mixed reviews and box-office returns had greeted Fay’s back-to-back pictures during the spring and summer of 1930. Frank was praised for the humor he lent to Under a Texas Moon, but The Matrimonial Bed was considered a mess. He had not wanted to play the foreign-type lover; he wanted to play himself, a redheaded, red-blooded Irish American, so Zanuck gave him Bright Lights, the story of a vaudevillian whose success goes to his head. Warners still thought Fay was a promising discovery. Playing on Elinor Glyn’s famous pronouncement that Clara Bow was the “It Girl” supreme, the studio dubbed Fay the “It Man” and billed him as “the 1932 model lover—built for speed, style and endurance.” Frank hated every minute of Bright Lights because Michael Curtiz never took breaks. The director paced the stage floor while his actors and crew went to lunch, devising what he should have them do when they got back, and at the end of the day, hated to go home. “They were squeezing as much out of us as they could—eleven-, twelve-hour days—frequently working nights right through to sunup,” James Cagney would remember of the early 1930s WB days. As Curtiz and Mayo never finished a day’s shooting simultaneously, Barbara and Frank returned home separately at all hours.

  To Frank’s dismay, the studio teamed him with Curtiz again before Bright Lights was even released. The new picture was God’s Gift to Women, and the title said it all. Frank played a Frenchman again, a boulevardier with a gift for separating pretty women from their better judgment. His ladies were Blondell, Louise Brooks, and Laura La Plante.

  The Fays had Louise Brooks out for a Sunday at the beach. Frank knew her from her Ziegfeld chorus days. She came with a dress designer, plunked herself down in a deck chair, and made everybody understand she longed for Germany and her silent triumph in Pandora’s Box. The Fays found her lazy and arrogant and didn’t invite her again.

  Frank kept talking about his Broadway, but the news from back east was disturbing. The legitimate theater suffered far more than the movies during the 1930-31 season, the first real winter of the Depression. Theaters were so empty that Joe Frisco coined the joke, “Do you have change for a match?” Investors had disappeared with the Wall Street crash, sending the Shubert organization, the giant of the theater operators, into receivership. The Palace Theatre was losing $4,000 a week, and one by one the playhouses along Forty-second Street were converting to movie theaters. For as little as a quarter, cinemas offered a main attraction, a newsreel, an animated cartoon, and possibly a second feature. Frank was sure, however, that it would be SRO if he returned to the Palace.

  Barbara thought they should stay right where they were. Five thousand theater people were out of work on Broadway. At least the picture business seemed immune to the recession. We do not know what the Warner contract paid Frank, but Columbia had paid Barbara $1,000 a week in period dollars for the five weeks they filmed Ladies of Leisure. The box-office result spoke for itself, and Cohn offered her a new, three-picture contract. Now that her name had box-office allure, Art Lyons drove a hard bargain. Cohn agreed to pay Stanwyck $12,000 for the first film of the three-picture deal. Barbara never stopped working and Frank never stopped grumbling, but they lived nonchalantly in Malibu. So nonchalantly that the Internal Revenue Service attached a $6,102 lien to her wages for nonpayment of income tax.

  A week after Barbara finished Illicit, Cohn had the first picture of the new contract ready to go. Ten Cents a Dance got its title from a Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart song that former Ziegfeld Follies star Ruth Etting had made a hit. The script concocted by Dorothy Howell and Jo Swerling told the story of a dance-hall hostess and her lustful employer who will forgo pressing charges against her embezzling husband if she surrenders to him. Howell and Swerling laced the script with punchy lines for Barbara: When a man asks what he has to do to get to dance with a taxi girl, Barbara snaps: “All ya need is a ticket and some courage.” Ten Cents a Dance teamed Barbara with Ricardo Cortez again.

  Their director was Lionel Barrymore. In his early fifties and looking his years, the once swaggering oldest sibling of the Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore dynasty was seeing sound renew his career. Barry-more liked Barbara’s Brooklyn accent, which came in handy for the taxi dancer role. He also liked her vitality and took pains directing her.

  During the shooting, she suffered a fractured pelvis and was partially paralyzed for several hours. She was out of the hospital in two days and back on the set. She hated being passive, had no physical fears, and repeatedly refused to use a double. Over the years, she was seriously injured in several filming accidents.

  Warner Brothers had no picture for Fay after God’s Gift to Women. On weekdays, Frank sat brooding and drinking in the beach house, waiting for Barbara to come home. On Sundays, he went to church in the morning and invited at least twenty people for the afternoon. Their bootlegger’s bill soared.

  COHN SENT STANWYCK BACK TO WARNER BROTHERS TO DO NIGHT Nurse opposite WB’s own Joan Blondell and another loanout—MGM’s Clark Gable.

  The director was William “Wild Bill” Wellman, a tempestuous charmer with a sharp eye, a keen ear, and a quick fist. Actresses often found him too intent on creating a personality, but Barbara—and Ida Lupino—adored him and felt secure on his sets. The former flying ace with curly hair, piercing blue eyes, and checkered career was fun to be with. When Barbara first met him he sat in an enormous chair, feet on the desk, his hair windblown as if he just landed an open cockpit plane. A wound in a Great War dogfight had resulte
d in the implantation of a steel plate in his forehead. People called him Wild Bill because they believed the steel plate made him crazy. He possessed strength of character, quickness of mind, and a crooked sense of perspective and as a director was a jack-of-all-trades who did adventures, weepies, swashbucklers, thrillers, and comedies. His first wife, Helene Chadwick, was a former Goldwyn Studios ingenue, and he was a friend of Barbara’s Burlesque costar Hal Skelly.

  “Directors are very vain, and I admire them for it,” Barbara would remember. “Of course, as soon as a director became powerful or established, the producers started thinking of ways to get rid of him, but not Bill Wellman. He was too smart for them, a wonderful man. Never thought he was a genius, like Cecil B. DeMille or King Vidor. I don’t know what ruined him, but I don’t think it was booze.”

  Ben Lyon and Stanwyck had top billing in Night Nurse, with, in descending order, Joan Blondell, Clark Gable, Blanche Frederici, and Charlotte Merriam. Gable was not yet the biggest thing to hit the movies since Garbo, but he was the busiest. He appeared in twelve films in 1931—three pictures with Joan Crawford—and in movies with Fay Wray, Norma Shearer, Constance Bennett, Madge Evans, Dorothy

  Jordan, Jean Harlow, and Garbo. Night Nurse did a lot for the big-eared lumberjack whose crackling voice and takeover style made him the new screen lover. Moviegoers suddenly found the stylized romanticism of the silents’ Lotharios passé. MGM had just released A Free Soul, for which Lionel Barrymore would win an Oscar, but it was Gable’s shoving Norma Shearer back into a chair that gave the picture its charge. Men cheered and women loved to see a poor guy making a dishonest buck and giving it to a rich dame. In Night Nurse, Wellman dressed Gable in black and had him punch Barbara in the nose and steal food from two little girls.