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

  Rex Cherryman was starring with Ann Harding in Bayard Veiller’s new play, The Trial of Mary Dugan, which opened on September 19, 1927, at the National Theatre on West Forty-First Street.

  The play was based on the sensationalized Long Island trial of Ruth Snyder, who murdered her husband. Stories of the Snyder trial filled the newspapers; spectators who didn’t reserve seats paid $100 to sit in the courtroom and watch the trial unfold. Veiller had written two successful plays, Within the Law and The Thirteenth Chair, and the screenplay of Unseeing Eyes. He had written screenplays for Metro and Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures, and watching the spectacle of the Snyder trial, Veiller decided to give the public what it wanted, a courtroom drama with every scene taking place in the courtroom.

  Alexander Woollcott described the opening night audience as “enthralled” by Veiller’s play, a play that no one liked before it was produced, including Veiller’s agent, who refused to read it. Rex Cherryman, Woollcott said, “held the play taut by his own skill and intensity”; Ann Harding, who also hated Veiller’s play from the beginning, was, Woollcott said, “true and sensitive” in the starring role.

  The Trial of Mary Dugan was the hit of the fall 1927 season, bringing in a weekly gross of $25,000 in ticket sales. Burlesque was right behind it as the season’s runner-up hit.

  Two weeks after Burlesque opened, the name Barbara Stanwyck in electric lights went up on the marquee of the Plymouth Theatre, next to Hal Skelly’s.

  Manhattan Mary opened at the Apollo on West Forty-Second Street one week after Mary Dugan. The book, lyrics, and music were by B. G. DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson, William K. Wells, and George White. The New York Times called Manhattan Mary “a gorgeous presentation of everything a musical comedy should have. Great dancing, fine singing . . . catchy tunes and a great glitter and wealth of costumes, sets and backdrops that dazzle, and Ed Wynn.”

  Mae Clarke in her red silk Annette Kellerman bathing suit danced her “five-step,” as she described it. “There-it-is, one, two, there-it-is, one-two-three. Can’t you see we’re the merriest? One, two, three, four—one, two, three, four—five-step!”

  A couple of weeks later, on October 6, a new picture starring Al Jolson opened at the Warner Theatre on Broadway, a little more than a year after the first Vitaphone picture was shown there. The Warner Bros. talking picture was considered a triumph. In New York, audiences began to stand on line at six in the morning to see and hear the picture. The lines went around the block.

  The Broadway play of The Jazz Singer starring George Jessel was a great hit. Sam Warner saw it and optioned it for Warner Bros.

  Darryl Zanuck, the general manager of production for the studio, thought the play was “a real piece of schmaltz . . . pure corn. What makes it go is the music, and the songs.” It was Zanuck’s wife, Virginia, who thought of using the new system being tested by Warner Bros. to put the songs on the soundtrack so “that when the guy opens his mouth to sing, you actually let him sing—and the movie audience hears him.”

  Zanuck agreed. “If we can get him to sing on the sound track we’ll have [the audience] bawling in the aisles.”

  Warner Bros. approached Jessel for the part, but he asked for too much money. Jack Warner then went to Al Jolson, who’d been touring in Big Boy. Jolson agreed to make the movie, which also starred Warner Oland and May McAvoy.

  In the picture, directed by Alan Crosland, who also directed Warners’ earlier picture with sound, Don Juan, Jolson’s voice was heard on the sound track as he sang “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” “Blue Skies,” “Mother of Mine (I Still Have You),” “Kol Nidre,” and “Mammy.” During a rehearsal of the scene when Jolson sings to his mother, the actors and crew were standing around, as was Zanuck, waiting for the music to be played. The microphones were still on. Zanuck came up with an idea: why not have Jolson talk to his mother? Jolson was to turn to her and say, “Mamma, I wanna sing a song for you.” When the engineers played it back, the sound was clear; Jolson’s words were recorded exactly as he’d said them. Talking scenes—four in all—were written into the script and added to the picture.

  Ethel Barrymore’s response to talking pictures: “The public won’t put up with them. People don’t want their ears hurt or their intelligence insulted.”

  NINE

  Broadway’s Favorite Son

  Several months after Burlesque opened, Oscar Levant told Ruby he knew a “fellow” he thought she should meet. “You’ll get a lot of laughs out of him.”

  “Frank Fay’s a great guy,” said Levant, though he thought Fay suffered from “a total self-enthrallment.” Fay was brilliant, spontaneous, smart; what he was doing onstage no one had done before.

  Of course Ruby had heard of Frank Fay; he was legendary, a Broadway institution and had been for more than a decade. He was called “the Great Fay,” “the King,” “Broadway’s Favorite Son,” “America’s Greatest Master of Ceremonies,” and “the Great Faysie”—names Fay mostly gave himself.

  He had headlined at the Palace Theatre, had been held over for weeks at a time, earning the record-breaking salary of $5,000 a week.

  The Keith-Albee Palace in New York was considered “the big time,” “the house that housed two a day”: a matinee and an evening performance. It was a big theater that seated just under eighteen hundred people. Fay had the star position in the lineup; he was “next to shut.” He came onstage in the second half of the show, before the last act.

  Fay was so successful at the Palace and was held over for so many consecutive weeks that he became known as “Albee’s Irish Rose.” He also came to be called “the Chairman.” After a run of eight weeks, Fay celebrated his hundredth consecutive performance on the Palace stage and set a new record. He was credited by many with the theater’s great success.

  • • •

  Fay had a rich baritone voice and in the beginning saw himself as a ballad singer and teamed up with another singer called Gerald Griffin. It was impossible for them to find bookings, and Griffin & Fay broke up.

  Fay joined up with an older vaudeville comedian, Johnny Dyer. Dyer was the straight man, while Fay, dressed in baggy pants and false nose, skated back and forth onstage, making wisecracks. Slapstick was not the comedy for Fay. He wanted to perform onstage the kind of smart comedy that Wilson Mizner personified at the Lambs Club. For Fay, the true wits were Mizner, George Nash, and Eddie Foy. He was in awe of their skill and spontaneity and learned from them. “They never went after anyone,” Fay said. “But if you got in their way or tried to outsmart them, the Lord help you—you were dead.”

  Frank (“Faysie”) Fay, circa 1920, monologist, actor, writer, singer, supreme comedian, who came from a family of stock company troupers and first appeared on the stage at four years old in a production of Quo Vadis. By the time he was fifteen, he boasted that he’d played in every Shakespeare drama except Titus Andronicus.

  Fay had wanted to work in an elegantly tailored double-breasted suit and began to work alone as Frank Fay, Nut Monologuist. At first he told a long story about saving a piece of string. Soon he performed “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” as an opera singer.

  The importance of any act was measured by the amount of time a performer was given onstage. The young comedian George Burns said, “You’d meet a vaudevillian on the street and ask him how he was doing, and he’d answer ‘seventeen minutes’ if he were a top act.” Fay was onstage for more than twenty.

  • • •

  Prohibition was in effect when Fay first played the Palace; he was onstage alone for twenty-two minutes telling satiric stories, such as the one about a drunk regaling a group of people at a soda fountain about how he became a grapejuice fiend. The number was called “The Face on the Drug Store Floor” and became the talk of Broadway.

  Fay’s notion of being the “Chairman” and introducing and remarking on each act before it appeared was not exactly new. In England almost a century earlier, a “chairman” presided at every music hall and
announced the acts in a similar manner.

  By the late 1920s, Fay felt that laughs were “not what they used to be when people were not so wise to everything. They do not roar anymore,” he said, “or even scream; they just laugh like human beings who never go insane.” “The public will not stand for overacting any more. The comedian who used to get his laughs by exaggerating everything has died, right on the stage, quite often.”

  Fay thought the stage had once been “all camouflage.” But by the end of the 1920s it was “wide open with no secrets.”

  When Fay was performing in more than two shows a day, he would walk out onstage for the morning show with a toaster under his arm and plug it into the footlights. Then, as he was doing his act, he would sit down at a table and have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast.

  He was thought of as a wise guy who brilliantly improvised his lines through each performance, never saying the same line twice. When he came onstage, Fay had only a “faint idea” of what he was going to do or say, but he trusted “inspiration” and “always finished up with the cue.” He didn’t tell jokes, use props, or resort to comic makeup. He had “an aversion to clowning.” His comedy worked because he was what he called “natural; a human character, true to life.”

  George Burns once saw Fay do an impression of John Barrymore dancing the Charleston and another of his doing Caruso singing “Stutterin’ Bill.” Burns also saw Fay use the first stooge act ever. In it Fay told the audience that he’d learned some card tricks on a train ride and wanted to demonstrate them, asking for some volunteers from the audience. Three woebegone people came up on the stage to assist him, George Haggerty, Lew Mann, and little Patsy Kelly.

  Fay presented Mann with a deck of cards and asked him to pick one and then replace it. Fay shuffled the deck and picked what was supposed to be Mann’s card. It was an altogether different card. Fay then took a bow. When Haggerty objected that it was the wrong card, Fay dismissed him and went on with the next trick. In another bit, Patsy Kelly would walk out on the stage, disheveled, and stand there looking a mess and slightly lost. Fay would say, “Good heavens, where’ve you been?”

  “The beauty parlor.”

  “I see,” Fay would answer, “and they didn’t wait on you.”

  Fay called Haggerty, Mann, and Kelly his “stock company.”

  Patsy Kelly said that Fay’s “tutelage was the most valuable in the world for an amateur” but that Fay “could be cruel.” He didn’t want her to wear makeup, would yell at her onstage, and fired her weekly. “Fay never had a script and would just spring lines on [me],” she said. “He might start talking about anything from pears to presidents. It always seemed to me that I was standing on the stage with my hand out waiting for my cue to drop. I led with my chin because my knees were helpless.”

  • • •

  After Burlesque opened on Broadway, Fay wanted to meet Barbara and told Levant to bring her to the show and he would leave tickets for them at the box office, one of the few times Fay was willing to pay for tickets for anyone to see his show. Fay was “penurious,” said Levant. He “crossed himself whenever he spent money.”

  Walda went with Barbara and Oscar to see Fay’s performance. “We got hysterical at everything he did,” Walda said. “The way he talked, and his hands were beautiful.” Fay conducted the audience with his hands as if he were conducting a symphony orchestra. He felt he had an advantage over other comedians because of his eyes and his hands. Others watching Fay said, “He could give you an inferiority complex just watching him light his cigarette.”

  Fay underplayed his lines. He spoke slowly, pausing, lifting his eyebrows, with a slight touch of irony around his mouth and a slightly feminine stance. He had a way of making his eyes sparkle.

  Fay’s work was new with its own style.

  His walk onstage was distinctive. It was a conceited swagger, an effeminate saunter that made a strong impression on young comedians watching him work. Bob Hope and Jack Benny adopted Fay’s walk and used it as part of their onstage personae.

  J. J. Shubert and Elisabeth Marbury had taken Fay from the vaudeville stage and put him in his first legitimate role in a show called Oh, Mama. Fay described Shubert’s direction of comedy as “unerring,” saying that Shubert could “put his finger on the sore spot every time and show us how to get the punch into our work.” Fay called Miss Marbury “one of nature’s noblewomen.” In Oh, Mama, Fay had the part of an ex-bartender prizefighter who marries the divorced wife of a New York millionaire. He was a hit on opening night and became featured in the show. In it Fay introduced what became known as the “wristwatch” comedian who appeared to be effeminate in his walk, his stance, and his deadpan stare at the audience.

  “He always worked a little effeminate,” said Milton Berle. “He had a hauteur about him, but he talked to his audience in a way that made them feel that what he was talking about could happen to them. He never did jokes in which he was the butt.”

  The London critics called him “the wistful comedian.”

  If Fay wanted, he could verbally destroy any performer or act; he would simply introduce the act by saying with a slight smile, in his soft voice, “The next gentleman is very, very popular. They say—that he is very funny.” Then he would raise an eyebrow; the act didn’t have a chance with the audience.

  Fay didn’t use one-liners. He talked conversationally, unemotionally. He might take a song and say to the audience, “The music to most songs is generally good, but the lyrics are awful. I can prove it to you. Now here’s a song. Vincent Youmans’s. He was one of the best.” Fay would sing a few lines of a song and deliberately interrupt himself to comment on the lyrics.

  “ ‘Just picture me upon your knee, just tea for two and two for tea.’ ” He would stop, and pause. He might scratch the back of his neck, then his head. Then say to the audience, “ ‘Ain’t that rich? Now, here’s a guy, he’s probably got enough tea for two so he’s going to have two for tea. If the third person walks in, they stab him.’ ”

  Then he would continue. He called it “breaking up” songs. “Just me for you and you for me alone.” Fay might stop there; play with his chin or suddenly point to someone and say, “Alone. I remember that old one about ‘C’mon up to the room, I want to show you my etchings.’ ” Then continue singing, “But nobody near us, to see us or hear us.” Fay would say, “Who wants to listen to two people drinking tea?” The music would start up again and Fay would continue. “No friends or relations on weekend vacations. If I have—well, a vacation without a relation. We won’t have it known dear that we own a telephone here.”

  Fay would be slow and charming. Then he might comment, “Makes a big thing out of it. Now all this guy has is a broken down cup of tea and a telephone he won’t let you use.” The music starts up; Fay would sing, “Day will break and you’ll awake and start to bake a sugar cake.” “The poor woman. What a future,” Fay would comment. “She hops out of bed, washes her teeth and bang, right to the oven. Nobody up but her, feeling around in the dark for flour.”

  Audiences loved these pieces, and Fay became identified with them.

  “We just fell in love with him,” said Walda. “He had to have the whole floor. He was every inch a star. Barbara thought he was wonderful.”

  Performers—comics, actors, singers—saw Fay as the greatest master of ceremonies in vaudeville. Young comedians like George Burns thought Fay was “something to see.” Milton Berle thought he was “incomparable. There was no one like him.” Eddie Cantor said Fay had a knack of making love to his audience and making them like him at the same time that he identified with them. Other comedians, like the young Jack Benny, watched Fay and modified his act. Benny stopped telling jokes; he dropped the use of a prop, a violin, onstage; he built his humor around everyday occurrences to make it seem more immediate, less rehearsed, and, like Fay, Benny slowed up his delivery.

  Following Fay’s years at the Palace, the master of ceremonies became common in vaudeville.
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br />   While Ed Wynn and Raymond Hitchcock acted as masters of ceremonies in musical shows, no one had Fay’s finesse or brilliant comedic patter.

  He often shepherded more than seventy stars who appeared on the bill with him. “Fay would comment on the acts that preceded him,” said Milton Berle. “He’d say, ‘I just want to say, you remember, the acrobat, the lady acrobat in the first act? In the first half that came on? Nobody knows this, only I do—’ Fay would look off to the wings as if it was a secret, and nobody knew what he was about to reveal. Then he would say, ‘She goes with the fellow in the third act. I don’t know if they fool around or not.’

  “Fay was on his feet by himself, talking, unprepared,” Berle said. “He would come on, in the early years, he would be seventh on the show—there were eight acts between an intermission. And Fay looked at the orchestra leader, and said, ‘How has the show been up to now?’ The leader, in the pit, would say, ‘Wonderful.’ Then Fay would take a couple of beats, and say, ‘Really? Well I’ll change that.’ Like a throwaway. And the audience would laugh, because of his style. He had a point of view when he was talking. He worked with an honest method. He talked to an audience like it was private, between himself and the audience.”

  • • •

  Women saw Fay as a young Greek god. He was five feet ten, 150 pounds, with florid skin and blue Irish eyes. For a while he was known as the “blonde young comic”; soon after he became the “auburn haired” comic and kept his shock of rusty hair. He had been a boxer years before and carried two pairs of gloves with him. He said of himself, “I was a pugilist at one time. And what a ham. I was so poor that I myself realized that I was no good. And when a boxer knows he is no good, he is terrible.”

  Fay could ad-lib in any dialect, sing, dance with an unrestrained abandon, and direct dog tricks. “A master of ceremonies must be willing to undertake anything,” he said.