A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Read online

  At the heart of the furor was a play written by and starring Mae West that had opened the previous April. Sex had been written under the name Jane Mast. When it opened at John Cort’s Daly’s Theatre, it was a sensation. Tickets sold for the extraordinary price of $10.00 a seat when the top-priced ticket in the 1926–1927 season was $2.80. The play was making $10,000 a week. No newspaper, including The New York Times, would carry an ad for it; the word “sex” was taboo unless it was used to refer to “the opposite sex” or “the fair sex.” Out of desperation to get the word around, ads were placed on top of taxicabs that read: “HEATED—Mae West in SEX—Daly’s 63rd Street Theatre.”

  Sex was about a prostitute who allows a young society boy, unaware of her past, to fall in love with her and is brought home to meet his family. The boy’s mother is shocked when she finds out the truth about her son’s intended, and a battle of wits ensues between the mother and the prostitute/fiancé.

  Audiences found shocking the open declaration of a woman as a sexual being. The play dared to challenge the accepted standards of marriage, respectability, and convention. (Mae West to the boy’s mother: “I’m going to dig under the veneer of your supposed respectability and show you what you are . . . the only difference between us is that you could afford to give it away.”) At the play’s end the Mae West character is neither transformed, punished, nor spiritually redeemed.

  Forty-four weeks into the run of Sex, in February 1927, under the jurisdiction of the Padlock Law, the police raided the theaters in which Sex, The Captive, and a play called The Virgin Man were running. The charge: obscenity.

  The cast of Sex was placed under arrest. Mae West was held overnight at the Jefferson Market Women’s Prison on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street (“It was no rose,” she said of it, “the very young and perhaps foolish, but certainly some innocent were mixed with foul and decaying old biddies who knew every vice and had invented a few of their own”).

  The twelve actors from The Captive, as well as the writer, Arthur Hornblow, and the producer, Gilbert Miller, were taken from the Empire Theatre to the nearest police station, where they were fingerprinted but not booked.

  Another play, The Shanghai Gesture, was given two weeks to revise its script. The play was written by John Colton, co-author of Rain, was directed by Guthrie McClintic, and starred Florence Reed. The Shanghai Gesture was about an Oriental madam of a Shanghai whorehouse seeking revenge through her drug-addicted son on the Englishman who had promised to marry her.

  The raids were reported on the front page of The New York Times; the headline in the New York Herald Tribune read: “Three Shows Halted, Actors Arrested in Clean-Up of Stage.” Mae West chose to stand trial rather than close down the play. A month later a grand jury indicted her, the cast of Sex, and the theater’s owner, John Cort, on grounds that they had produced “an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama.” The jury handed down a verdict of guilty. The judge applauded the decision, saying, “Obscenity and immorality pervaded this show from beginning to end,” and told West that she had gone “to extremes to make the play as obscene and immoral as possible.” She was sentenced to ten days in prison at the Welfare Island Women’s Workhouse and had to pay a fine of $500.

  The Captive reopened and closed soon after the raid; it was shut down by Adolph Zukor, whose Famous Players owned Charles Frohman Inc., which had brought The Captive to Broadway. The Captive’s translator and adapter, Arthur Hornblow, was fed up with civic-minded groups censoring the theater and left New York altogether to work in Hollywood as a writer for Samuel Goldwyn.

  • • •

  The Noose ran for 197 performances through the first week of April. Each night onstage Ruby broke down and pleaded for the young man she loved and held audiences in thrall. Mae and Dorothy teased Ruby about her emotional performance. “She cried and she screamed,” said Dorothy, “and we got to kidding her about it. But Ruby said, ‘Well, it’s getting me someplace,’ and we couldn’t argue with that.”

  During the run of the play Bill Mack gave Barbara some advice. “He didn’t exactly tell me—he dinned it into me. He said, ‘It’s wonderful to be good on the stage and to be aware of your talent and not be shy about it. If someone gives you a compliment about your work, learn to accept it graciously. But—always remain aware that you are expendable, that nobody is so great they can’t be replaced.’ ”

  Each time Ruby went onstage, she had to “start from scratch,” to prove herself again. There was nothing about her work she could take for granted; if she faltered, she knew she could be fired.

  EIGHT

  Formerly Ruby Stevens of the Cabarets

  1927–1929

  During the run of The Noose a new picture called Broadway Nights was being cast at Cosmopolitan Studios on 125th Street. The picture follows the rise of a jazz-singing chorus girl from vaudeville to nightclubs to Broadway musical star, a story set against Manhattan’s nightlife (it promised to present to audiences “the heart of the great White Way—the bright lights and broken hearts. Night clubs! Cabarets! Speak-easies!”).

  The producer of Broadway Nights, Robert Kane, and his production manager, Leland Hayward, who was casting the picture, were still looking for a leading lady days before they were to begin to shoot. Ruby tested for the part along with a hundred other actresses from Broadway and the screen.

  Ruby’s test didn’t go well. The cameraman, Ernest Haller, turned against her after she rebuffed his flirtation. One of the producer’s press agents who watched the test said Ruby “wasn’t in the market for cameramen, producers or press agents.”

  “She was handicapped further,” he said, “because the scene called for her to cry. The director had the old stand-by method of starting the tears [by using] an onion, a rasping violin and a cracked piano.”

  While Ruby was trying to cry, Ruth Chatterton, also testing for the part, came on the set accompanied by her maid. As they watched the director’s efforts with the onion and the music, Chatterton, the great stage star, began to laugh at the notion of any serious stage actress needing to resort to such methods.

  Ruby “hissed between sobs” for silence. Robert Kane’s press agent walked over to Miss Chatterton and informed her that the girl before the camera was Barbara Stanwyck, whose big scene in The Noose was “bringing the critics back night after night just to have a good cry.”

  From Broadway Nights, 1927. Left to right, center: Sam Hardy, Lois Wilson, unidentified, Ruby in large hat, ruffled dress, and dark bob.

  Miss Chatterton was quiet after that until it was time for her test.

  Ruby didn’t get the part; nor did Ruth Chatterton. Lois Wilson starred in the picture.

  Ruby as “Barbara Stanwyck” appeared in the film in a small part as a nightclub dancer and friend of the Lois Wilson character. Kane was so impressed with the way Ruby came across on the screen that he announced to the press he had put Barbara Stanwyck under contract as a “new find.” The picture introduced other new faces of Broadway, among them Sylvia Sidney, who was starring in A. H. Woods’s play, Crime.

  The Noose closed in New York the first week in April and opened in Chicago ten days later, for a ten-week run at the Selwyn Theatre. Business was slow, and the decision was made to close the play a month early; by June 4, The Noose was shut down.

  • • •

  Ruby, Dorothy Sheppard, and Mae Clarke went back to New York, out of work, and daily made the rounds of all the agencies, going in and out of agents’ offices on Forty-Second Street “as regularly as I breathed and ate my meals,” said Ruby. “I don’t know which there were more of, parts I hoped for that didn’t happen, or parts that happened in shows that closed.” Ruby tried to dress well, to be seen about, to “keep my chin up,” she said.

  After The Noose closed, Bill Mack told Dorothy Sheppard she needed a different name and came up with “Walda” and suggested “Mansfield” to go with it. Dorothy thought the two sounded “so pretty together.” Dorothy Sheppard was now “Walda Mansfield.”<
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  Mae’s moods took hold and tended to last for weeks at a time. During these “spells” she thought too much about herself and “lost all sense of proportion and values.”

  Once her mood abated, Mae enlisted the help of an agent to get her work. Louis Shurr was a top agent in New York who worked with Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, among others. Shurr was a short, funny-looking man who went out with beautiful women, giving his escort an ermine coat to wear at the start of the evening and expecting it to be returned at its end.

  Shurr suggested that Mae put together an act and said he would see what he could do with it. Mae went to Tin Pan Alley, to Irving Berlin’s building, with its row of songwriters and song pluggers, to pick out a song as the basis of the number. She was put in a little cubbyhole with a piano player who sat at “a little straight piano [on] a little seat.”

  Walter Donaldson was a self-taught pianist turned songwriter whose hit songs of the decade included “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm,” “Carolina in the Morning,” and “My Blue Heaven.” Donaldson played song after song for Mae until she picked one she liked, which he then taught her.

  Ruby helped Mae “put a few steps together” and choreographed her dance: “a cartwheel, a click of the heels together on the top, a ring of the bell, ring, a bum-buh. A little step to get you around the floor. Then pull yourself back.”

  Next Mae called her friend Claire Taishoff Muller, now married with a daughter and living on Long Island, and asked to borrow a dress (“Yellow’s good,” Claire said) with little diamonds all over it.

  Shurr arranged for Mae to perform the number one time only at the Club Madrid and brought George White to watch. George White “owned New York,” said Mae. “Besides, he was cute—very cute.” White liked what he saw and hired Mae for his new show, Manhattan Mary, which was to star Elizabeth Hines and Ed Wynn. Mae was given two dance numbers with Harland Dixon, considered, said Mae, “one of the ten best tap dancers of the world.”

  • • •

  After The Noose closed, Rex Cherryman and Ruby saw less of each other. Ruby was looking for work and was seeing Ed Kennedy again.

  Ed was no longer working for Condé Nast; he had a bigger job at a relatively new magazine, a weekly, called Liberty, similar in size and content to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. Liberty paid higher fees for stories and for art and was attracting the best writers and illustrators—Scott Fitzgerald, Ben Hecht, Peter Arno, and Ralph Barton. The magazine’s circulation was growing, and Ed Kennedy’s job was growing with it.

  Ruby and Ed talked about getting married, but they couldn’t come to an understanding about how their lives would work together. Ed could easily have supported Ruby, but he would never suggest to her that she give up her work. Her ambitions of being an actress were as big as his of becoming a magazine publisher.

  Ruby rarely let it show when she was depressed. “The surface was beautiful,” said Ed Kennedy, “but there was depth to this girl.” During difficult times Ruby showed her strength and will to survive, but weeks had passed without her finding work, and Ed saw how upset she was. It was at lunch one day at the Piccadilly restaurant that Ed finally asked Ruby why she wanted “to go through all this[.] Come on,” he said, “let’s go down to City Hall and get married.” They left the restaurant mid-lunch, hailed a cab, and were on their way.

  “This is crazy,” said Ruby, with the cab stopped at a red light. “Our marriage wouldn’t last a week. You have to make your success and I have to make mine.”

  • • •

  During the spring of 1927, George Manker Watters went to see a performance of The Noose. Watters had been a manager of stock companies and was now managing the Astor movie theater. He’d written a play, Burlesque—his first—that, like so many other plays of the time, was about backstage life, about the world Watters knew so well, the world of vaudevillians, hoofers, and down-and-out comics.

  Burlesque had been sent around to producers for several years until Lawrence Weber read the script and, despite its problems, agreed to put it on. The play was given a tryout but was shelved for a few months until August.

  The producer sent the script to Arthur Hopkins, one of the most distinguished and daring directors and theatrical producers of his time. Hopkins thought the play was a muddle but was taken with the two central characters, a burlesque comedian and his soubrette wife, and agreed to work with Watters to fix the script. Hopkins’s experience as a young playwright and staff reporter for a small-town newspaper had taught him how to construct a story.

  Hopkins saw that for most playwrights realism was flat, mediocre. Writing and acting, to Hopkins, were explorations of the unknown self. He yearned for a return to the unconscious, to a poetic dream state, and helped to accomplish this through his long association with the great stage designer Robert Edmond Jones. Jones moved away from photographic and realistic stage designs toward a visual interpretation of mood and meaning using line, color, and light in his stage backgrounds. If theater was going to deal with everyday life, Hopkins wanted it to bring “some new illumination, some new understanding.”

  Hopkins saw the legitimate theater as being in transition and was the first to open a nickelodeon in a rented storeroom on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Second Street in New York. To Hopkins, the theater was no longer the “palace of dreams, of unreality, that lifted people far out of themselves . . . with the actors as liberators, guides to exalted places,” as it had been for more than a century. It was Ibsen who’d changed the rules by giving birth to the intellectual drama and elevating the theater “from the unconscious to the conscious mind.” Ibsen was a poet, and to Hopkins, unlike most playwrights following in his path, the realism Ibsen portrayed was imbued with a symbolism that could touch the unconscious.

  Together Hopkins and Watters worked out a different second act for Burlesque. When Watters came back with something other than what was discussed, Hopkins wasn’t satisfied, and together they outlined another second act. Watters returned with something that Hopkins thought still wasn’t right. After Watters’s sixth rewrite, Hopkins was ready to abandon the play. His notion of the second act was so clear that he finally wrote it himself and, to free up Watters’s response to the material, told him that he had hired a collaborator. Watters was delighted with the new second act, and he and Hopkins entered into an agreement, with the director ultimately rewriting the first and third acts as well.

  Both men went in search of the principals, Skid Johnson and Bonny Kane, each role requiring actors who could play comedy as well as drama and who could sing and dance.

  Skid Johnson is a heavy-drinking comic in a down-and-out song-and-dance group whose talents are being eaten away by too much liquor and too little ambition. Skid is a tall, rawboned, hard-dancing, singing clown in checked baggy trousers, bulbous red-putty nose, trick collar and tie who’s seen it all in musical-comedy road shows. As the play opens, he’s traveling in the sticks in a burlesque show, getting by—barely—with any job that comes his way.

  His wife, Bonny, is hot-tempered. She is young and pretty with golden-red hair, born on the road to an entertainer mother and sent off to her aunt’s to get away from the world of dingy hotels and cold railroad stations only to run away, at sixteen, to join a third-rate musical show. Bonny’s talent and freshness as a singer and dancer propel her out of the chorus into Skid’s troupe as the leading lady, into Skid’s arms, and into marriage. Her sole ambition: to get for Skid the break and recognition he deserves in a Broadway show. Bonny pushes Skid in his work, ignoring his infidelity with a showgirl in the company. When the long-sought offer comes from Charles Dillingham, Skid leaves for New York, leaving Bonny behind, who watches as her husband’s fame, and New York speakeasies, almost destroy him, body and soul.

  Bonny sets her divorce in motion and begins a new life with a devoted, loving cattleman until she is drawn back to New York and to Skid when she is asked to help sober him up for an important opening. Skid finds redemption in his n
eed for his wife and her willingness “to stick” with him.

  On opening night he goes onstage with Bonny watching in the wings, calling to him between numbers, “Atta boy, Skid. Keep it up, Skid. You’re knockin’ ’Em cold.” And then she is with him on the stage, dancing with him in the spotlight before a full house, doing a soft shoe together, side by side, hearing Skid’s labored breath, seeing his straining eyes, and, as they dance, asking him if he can make it.

  “I can; if you stick.”

  Bonny to Skid: “I’ll stick.”

  “For good?” he asks.

  Her yes almost stops him, and then they are in the wings after an encore. Bonny says, “I guess it’s like the guy that spliced us said, ‘For better or for worse.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Skid says. “Better for me and worse for you.”

  • • •

  For the role of Skid, Hopkins hired Hal Skelly, a musical comedian with little experience in serious drama. Hopkins saw in him an “engaging, lovable quality which was essential to the part.”

  Skelly’s life resembled Skid’s. He had toured the circuits beginning at age fourteen; he was studying to be a priest at St. Bess College near Davenport, Iowa, when he’d run away with a troupe of actors. Skelly performed in comic operetta and became a leading comedian, getting to know life on the circuit touring in Honolulu, Shanghai, Tokyo, and the Philippines with Raymond Teale’s musical comedy company. He’d worked as a barker and traveled from Iowa to Oregon with Dr. Rucker’s All-Star Comedians medicine show, selling an elixir for a dollar a bottle that he concocted from port wine, Rochelle salts, and water, while the company performed Hamlet and The Banker’s Daughter.

  • • •

  George Watters had seen Barbara Stanwyck’s performance in The Noose and told Hopkins about her. She had the “sort of rough poignancy” Hopkins wanted for Bonny.