Barbara Stanwyck (3 page)

Aside from a few trips here and there, including a disastrous vacation in post-war Europe, Hollywood is where Stanwyck stayed for the rest of her long life. There's a lovely picture of her perched on Fay's shoulders on the beach at Malibu, where they had a house, a picture in which her face is ecstatically open to the warmth and air and freedom of California after the cramped heat and cold of Brooklyn and Broadway. It would take some time to get going in movies, and she would have to let go of some of her resentment and feeling of social inadequacy, but the story of Barbara Stanwyck in Hollywood is a triumphant story, not personally triumphant most of the time, but professionally so in every way.

Her film career didn't begin smoothly. Joe Schenck had signed her to United Artists to do one picture,
The Locked Door
(1929), an adaptation of a play by Channing Pollack called
The Sign on the Door
(Schenck's wife Norma Talmadge had filmed it as a silent). George Fitzmaurice,
the director of
The Locked Door
, reportedly screamed on the set that he couldn't make Stanwyck beautiful. “I staggered through it,” she said. “It was all one big mystery to me.” And later, showing her skill with the telling wisecrack, she added: “They never should have unlocked the damned thing.” She just missed being cast in the film of
Burlesque
, which was renamed
The Dance of Life
(1929) and directed by John Cromwell for Paramount. Skelly reprised his role, while the female lead went to Nancy Carroll, another talented Irish girl from New York (and the niece of Billy La Hiff), whose career foundered because of the kind of temperament Stanwyck never allowed herself.

The Locked Door
has a bad reputation, mainly deserved, but it's fairly well filmed for such an early talkie, especially the opening scenes on a “drinking boat” filled with whoopee-making extras. Stanwyck is second-billed under Rod La Rocque, under the title, and Fitzmaurice has a pretentious “signed” title card to himself in the credits; he tries to earn that signature with some fancy camera moves, courtesy of cinematographer Ray June, including an impressive crane shot over the party and a tracking shot across a bar, as the revelers shout for gin and more gin.

We first see Stanwyck in a two shot with mustachioed La Rocque; he asks her how she likes the party. Cut to her close-up: “It's like being on a pirate ship!” she says, a forced smile plastered on her face, as if Fitzmaurice has just told her that she isn't pretty enough for him. In this first scene, and some of her others in
The Locked Door
, Stanwyck has the air of someone trying hard to have the correct reaction to things. This early effort allows us some insight into her real life at the time, when her “make the best of it” attitude wasn't invigorating, as it would later become, but instead slightly sad.

The camera catches her in an amateurish, “we're talking, we're talking, and now I'll laugh!” pantomime blunder, as the lecherous La Rocque ushers her into a private room for dinner. When he offers her caviar, she repeats this word with a British or standard American style
a
, which must have been drilled into her by Willard Mack. Stanwyck's British-sounding
a
lasted the rest of her career, defiantly emerging from her Brooklyn purr to prove that she's as much a lady as anybody—even more so, because she's had to earn it.

La Rocque reads his lines in such a sour, affectless way that he'd be right at home in an Ed Wood movie. Stanwyck is forced to draw into herself, but she's not able to do this as deeply as she will in later films. We see her character starting to wonder if she's made a mistake by entering the room with La Rocque. When he starts to attack her, she gets her Irish
up, rather sketchily, and he cracks, “I like you in a temper!” (The whole world, of course, would eventually love Stanwyck in a temper.) The boat is raided, and there's a cut back to the private room: Stanwyck's hair is mussed and her dress is disarranged. It's unclear just how far La Rocque's cad has gone with her, but as they exit the boat, dodging a newspaper cameraman and the police, Stanwyck projects a powerful sense of shame. It is the shame of Ruby Stevens after one of her first nights at a mob-run nightclub, when she has gauged just what will be expected of her and what parts of her body and her soul she can manage to keep for herself.

Eighteen months pass: Stanwyck has married her new boss (William “Stage” Boyd) and tells him “I love you” with all sincerity, the reliable mark of a great movie actress (even if this mark means that she might never be able to say those three words quite so sincerely away from the camera). Her line readings can be a bit wooden here; strangely, Stanwyck always kept a vestige of this stilted delivery, which she used as a kind of control or safety valve for her explosions of emotion. For some reason, the word “to” was always her wooden word. When she tries to divert La Rocque from her sister-in-law (Betty Bronson), she says, “And you promised not
to
see Helen again?” Did Mack scare her when he heard her saying a Flatbush “tah” for “to”? It's as if Stanwyck had some kind of verbal or mental block about the word, but she learned to use this block to her advantage, just as she learned to bring up and then tamp down her Brooklyn accent like she was raising and then lowering a light—or the hem of her dress.

In early talkies like
The Locked Door
, the actors are trying out many different styles. Almost none of these styles are valid now, but they're so alien that they exert a kind of fascination. No one knew yet just how different a talking picture was from a silent picture or a stage play, so actors from the stage, like Stanwyck and Boyd, jostle up against former silent stars, like La Rocque and Bronson, and everybody tries out a little of the others' techniques until you can barely keep track of the weird pauses, ringing declarations, and inward emoting in close-ups. Bronson, who was an incomparable Peter Pan on screen in 1925, is a hopeless case here, a wilted gamine waiting for title cards that never come, and La Rocque sometimes seems like he's trying to be deliberately funny despite his villainous role.

Stanwyck is too young and vulnerable yet wised-up for her noble, oblivious part; the later Stanwyck would have known not to enter that stateroom with La Rocque, but this later Stanwyck also had a knack for
attracting grueling filmic ordeals. She survives her first one here when her husband shoots La Rocque in his hotel room, and she finds herself trapped with his body behind the titular locked door. Stanwyck makes a fuss in the dark and pretends that she shot La Rocque, which brings some welcome comedy relief in the form of Mack Swain, the hotel proprietor, and ZaSu Pitts, the lobby receptionist. When Stanwyck tries to pull up the strap of her torn dress, a horny cop yells, “Stop that! The way your dress is now is … evidence!” The DA (Harry Mestayer) sneaks a shameless look at her left breast before grilling her in a way that feels more than a little vengeful and sexual. In the middle of this exploitative stuff, Stanwyck tries to convince her husband to be quiet, jumping off a couch and grasping at the air, a graceful, original gesture that signals her still-embryonic talent.

Whatever its failings,
The Locked Door
at least offered Stanwyck a clearly defined role in a clearly defined story. Her second film,
Mexicali Rose
(1929), at Columbia, is a bottom-of-the-barrel programmer of the worst sort, the kind of movie where no one has given much thought to anything. It runs all of sixty minutes and features a scenario by head Columbia writer Dorothy Howell (working under the pseudonym Gladys Lehman) that makes little sense. In a capsule review, Pauline Kael wrote, “Barbara Stanwyck called the film ‘an abortion,' and she wasn't being too rough on it”—one wisecracking dame quoting another's wisecrack and then amplifying it, a neat trick. Seen today,
Mexicali Rose
is the kind of picture so primitive and so muddled that it defeats any effort to mock it.

It opens with another barroom scene, this time set south of the border. In a tired running gag, a drunk is always running to the bar whenever a free drink is offered. Stanwyck's first close-up shows her beautifully lit and made-up, decked out in a flowing gold robe that opens strategically at the legs. It swiftly becomes clear that the film is only interested in her as a sex object, and in a limited way, at that. After she sits down on husband Sam Hardy's lap (“Gee, I could go to the devil in your arms!” she cries), the camera comes to a full stop when she gets up so that it can stare at her behind.

Later on, when she's exiting a boat, the camera is placed low and again lingers on her rear end as she walks down a gangplank; it's a “forget your acting, let's see your ass” part that forces Stanwyck to place her hands on her hips a lot and sashay around. Hardy buys her an anklet, a harbinger of double indemnities to come, and she has him tie it on her. You can practically hear the director barking, “We've done her ass, now let's do her legs,” behind the camera. But whenever the camera gives her
a close-up, Stanwyck is clearly a star already, so that we want to watch any emotion that she cares to show us on her hard little face, with its tiny, mistrustful eyes.

Hardy discovers bruises on her leg and another man's tie in her room, so he sends her packing. Rose has a few lines about how a married lover turned her into a tramp, but Stanwyck can't do either the manipulation or the anger of such a moment yet. Yet green as she is, she's Eleonora Duse compared to Hardy, who has a lot of laugh lines that fall flat, and to the inept William Janney, who plays Hardy's young charge. Stanwyck marries Janney, and it's not made particularly clear, either in the script or in her playing, if Rose does it for revenge or out of genuine love. When we hear Rose has killed herself off-screen, this development feels as bewildering as the rest of the film; it seems that everybody just wanted to get this turkey finished.

These two bad experiences with movies—the second far worse than the first, which was no prize—thoroughly demoralized Stanwyck and undermined her confidence. Fay was getting a big build-up from Warners, where he did his emcee act for their revue,
The Show of Shows
(1929). At this point, he was still the star in the family, and he could still afford to be solicitous of his wife because she was having a hard time getting started.

There were no more offers after the sleazy
Mexicali Rose
, and Stanwyck was stuck at home for a few months. Finally, she made a color test of her scene from
The Noose
with Alexander Korda, who gave her some encouragement, even though she knew she was being given the brush-off and might even be washed up. “At twenty-two, they had me on my way to the Old Ladies' Home,” she later said. Harry Cohn at Columbia still had an option on her services, and he asked Frank Capra, the studio's wunderkind director, to meet with Stanwyck and see if she might do for the lead in his film
Ladies of Leisure
(1930). She muffed the interview, and Capra called her “a porcupine,” but then Fay got him on the phone and urged him to look at her Korda test. We owe Fay a lot for that phone call.

Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Meet John Doe

J
udging by Joseph McBride's surely definitive biography of the director, Frank Capra lied about a lot of things, appropriating credit whenever he could, but he could also be brutally frank about others and about himself. There's something of Elia Kazan about him—but even messier, less calculating. An Italian immigrant, Capra was filled with hate and resentment, and these served as fuel for his work and as a link to Stanwyck, whose own hatred was the slow burning, quietly bitter kind. Capra was more open about most of his feelings. “Mr. Capra was not afraid to show emotion,” she said. “He understood it.” And so did she. Together, they made five films that are devoted to the most extreme expression of emotion, which acts as a fire of purification on both threadbare plots and audience expectations.

Ladies of Leisure
was based on a play by Milton Herbert Gropper called
Ladies of the Evening
, which had been produced by David Belasco, and Capra himself did a first draft of the film script. Jo Swerling, a newspaperman and committed leftist, nervily told him that his adaptation was bad, and so Capra nervily told Swerling to do his own version of the material. “It's the old Camille story, but it needs a new twist,” said Swerling, who polished off his draft quickly. Shooting started eleven days after Swerling turned in this draft, on June 14, 1930.

Stanwyck is still billed under the title, and Capra is billed as “Frank R. Capra” (he thought the initial might give him an aura of respectability). Joseph Walker's camera pans up a tall skyscraper and into the middle of an arty sort of party, where Bill Standish (Lowell Sherman), a soused dauber, is painting a girl's bare back. It's clear that we're a world away from the “whoopee” boat of
The Locked Door
. It's 1930 now, and the
Depression is on, seeming to depress most of the revelers, including the party's host, Jerry (Ralph Graves), who complains of a headache. Jerry takes off in his car and gets a flat tire; from across a lake, he sees a girl in a boat hitting the shoreline.

The lady of the lake is Stanwyck's Kay Arnold, a gum-chewing, self-described “party girl,” with mascara running down her face. Talking to Jerry, Kay flashes an intensely angry look at him. She's been on a boat filled with men; she's a hooker, but it seems like something happened on this boat that has thrown her for a loop. Kay, like Stanwyck, is a wearer of masks, a person who hides her feelings, so she immediately tries to fall into a practiced wisecracker persona with Jerry in order to blot out that questioning look of rage and contempt she couldn't help but lay on him. A party girl, that's her racket, see? She asks if Jerry “totes a flask,” and he says no. But he wants to paint her portrait, and she accepts in a “why not?” sort of spirit.