A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 14
Mae was having a successful run in Manhattan Mary and one evening was introduced at a cocktail party to Lew Brice, brother of Fanny.
“It was instantaneous,” said Mae. “He was so funny and so cute . . . He was tall and slender, agile, a wonderful dancer . . . He carried himself like royalty, without being snobbish.”
Lew Brice was considered one of the ten best tap and ballroom dancers in the world but had no interest in show business. He was “a handsome dresser,” Mae said. “He was a club man. He was a gambler, and he played cards all night long.”
Brice left for Chicago and called Mae in New York. “It’s snowing here,” he said. “And I’m cold. And I want you.”
Mae said, “Under what terms?”
“Mrs. Brice.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Mae was seventeen. She wrote a note to her mother saying, “I’m in love. I’m going to marry him no matter what you do, or say . . . I will scrub floors . . . go through fire . . . I have got to be with him.”
She wrote to the show’s producer, George White, saying, “I’m in love . . . I can’t think. I can’t do anything without him. He’s waiting for me in Chicago. And yet, if I give you my two-weeks I’ll miss the whole thing. I’ll be unhappy the rest of my life. What’ll I do?”
White answered her on the play’s program. “Get on that train,” he wrote. “You are dismissed. God bless you. G.W.”
Mae said good-bye to Barbara, to Walda, to White’s Manhattan Mary, and left for Chicago. When she got to the hotel, the front desk had no word of her arrival. A bellboy opened the door to let Mae into Lew Brice’s room. He was asleep on the bed. “You could see he had been drinking. Old, half-filled glasses, cigarette butts.” Mae’s impulse was to turn around and go back to New York, “but I couldn’t face George White then. And my mother . . . I was disgusted . . . I thought . . . ‘I’ve got to marry this fool and get tired of him and get divorced from him in order to get rid of him.’ ”
Mae and Lew were married in Chicago that day, February 6, 1928, “even with his hangover and the snow and the wind.” For a wedding present, Fanny Brice had Billy Rose write a vaudeville act for her brother and new sister-in-law. The act was a musical comedy with “songs, dances and dialogue” and a cyclorama, “hung just so,” and a horse race was projected onto the screen. The Brice and Clarke act was about bookmakers and long shots with singing and dancing and gags, though “not too gaggy,” Variety said, and went on to call the whole playlet “first-rate class Vaudeville.” “Our whole act was our own personalities and how funny and cute we were,” said Mae. “And how beautifully we danced together.”
Lew Brice (1938), brother of Fanny, with whom he appeared at the Palace. He knocked around as tap dancer and singer and beginning in 1909 as part of various vaudeville acts, appearing at the Winter Garden in The Passing Show (1915) and the Shuberts’ Maid In America. He didn’t have his sister’s talent or focus and was undone by gambling.
• • •
Barbara signed a contract with the J. Walter Thompson Company in conjunction with Lever Brothers for the use of her name and photograph in advertisements for Lux Toilet Soap. In exchange for the publicity, the ad would show a photograph of Barbara Stanwyck, co-starring in Burlesque; accompanying her picture was a block of type that read: “People are especially critical of your appearance if you are on the stage, which makes a smooth, youthful skin doubly important. I care for mine faithfully with Lux Toilet Soap—it keeps my skin so beautifully smooth.”
Barbara was now an endorsement.
• • •
Walda had made up her mind; she was leaving for California. She had been thinking about it for three years, and now she was going west. She didn’t know what she would do there, but she was ready to take the chance.
• • •
Fay had recently been signed by the Skouras Brothers to a twenty-week run at the Missouri Theatre in St. Louis. He asked Barbara to marry him and gave her a ring made from his Master of Arts pin.
One night they began to argue about nothing. In the midst of the argument Frank said, “If that’s the way you feel, perhaps it is just as well that I’m leaving town next week.” Fay was set to begin his tour.
“In view of that,” Barbara said, “it would be silly for us to keep up any pretense of an engagement. You go around with other women—I’ll go with other men.”
“You mean it’s all over with us?” said Frank.
“Why not?”
“We aren’t going to write—or telephone each other—or anything?”
“It would be silly under the circumstances,” Barbara said.
Frank took the train to St. Louis.
Barbara stopped going out with friends. Those who had seen her with Frank telephoned her repeatedly, but she didn’t answer and declined all invitations.
The curtain for Burlesque went up each evening at 8:30. Each night Barbara, as Bonny, said, “It’s got to be that way with me. For I’ve only loved one man and I’ve got a hunch that I won’t ever love anyone else.” After the performance Barbara walked home, made some coffee, and read for an hour or two. What she said as Bonny was true for Barbara. Her friends told her to go out and meet other men.
“Not for me,” she said.
• • •
In mid-July, Hopkins closed Burlesque because of record heat. The show was set to go on tour in late August. The Trial of Mary Dugan also shut its doors in New York to begin its national tour. Rex Cherryman had been with the show for more than ten months and was exhausted; he had recently divorced his wife and needed to take a few weeks’ leave to travel abroad.
Cherryman boarded a steamer to Le Havre on August 1 to tour the Continent with plans to return to the show in September, when it was to begin its run in Chicago. During the crossing he became ill; he had missed the last performance of Mary Dugan due to a mild flu the night before he left New York, but it was a small wound that was the cause of his illness, a wound that could easily have been operated on and cleared up. When the boat docked in Le Havre, Cherryman was taken to a hospital and died there of septic poisoning at the age of thirty-one.
“Barbara’s relationship with Rex had ended, but she was shocked when she learned of his death,” said Walda. “We never thought of him dying. He was so young, so alive.”
• • •
The 1928 presidential race was in full force. After the overwhelming vote at the Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri, Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate, was running against Governor Al Smith. Smith was the first presidential candidate of the Catholic faith; Hoover, the first Quaker. Their platforms were distinct: Hoover had been secretary of commerce for seven years under President Harding and, after Harding’s death, under President Coolidge. Coolidge was a conservative as well as a religious fundamentalist whose puritan New England upbringing informed the way he governed. His sense of thrift was embodied in his tight hold on government expenditure and in his unwillingness to take action to ward off trouble. Coolidge believed that “if you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one.”
Hoover, as secretary of commerce, had warned Coolidge about the easy money policies that encouraged stock speculation; the president dismissed Hoover’s concerns and said the administration should not interfere with the stock market.
Some worried that if Al Smith was elected along with a Democratic Congress, there would be a depression the following year. Others felt there was no cause for worry; the “Coolidge prosperity” would continue.
Hoover was concerned about a depression as well; he’d been born a year after a great depression and began his career in the midst of another. As secretary of commerce, he’d warned the Federal Reserve Board that it was a mistake to allow speculators to buy stocks on mostly margin—ten cents down for a dollar’s worth of stock. He’d written to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in 1925 that the conti
nued wild stock speculation “would bring inevitable collapse which will bring greatest calamities upon our farmers, our workers, our legitimate business.” The secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, pronounced Hoover “alarmist,” his comments “unwarranted.”
“Leave it alone,” Mellon told Coolidge. Mellon’s simple formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.”
• • •
It was two o’clock in the morning when Barbara’s phone rang. It was a long-distance call from Ace Beery, a theater manager and friend of Fay’s. Beery was calling to say that Frank was drinking himself to death.
“Let him drink as much as he likes,” Barbara said, though she was worried about him. Ace called the following morning to tell Barbara that Frank was in terrible shape. “He can’t work or sleep.”
“If he’s near the phone, I want to talk to him.”
Frank sounded drunk.
Barbara pleaded with him to stop drinking.
Fay, in a drunken voice, said, “Can’t shhtop drinking. Can’t shtop. My heart is broken.”
“So is mine,” said Barbara. “Please stop drinking, and everything will be all right. We’ll be engaged again.”
“You mean we’ll start all over again? Mean you’ll marry me?”
“Sure.”
“Then listen, you can catch a train out of New York at nine tomorrow morning. You’ll be in St. Louis by one. We’ll be married. You can leave here at four and be in Newark at eight for the evening show.” Fay’s words weren’t slurred. He sounded cold sober.
Barbara boarded the train for St. Louis on a hot August Sunday morning and arrived at Union Station by 1:00 p.m. Fay was there to meet the train. Instead of looking wasted and alcoholic, as Barbara feared, Fay looked fit and trim. Despite his drunken calls at two o’clock in the morning and the concern for his well-being, Fay “hadn’t had a drink in four months.”
Barbara and Frank rushed off to Magnolia Avenue in south St. Louis, to the home of William Tamme, the recorder of deeds, and were issued a license. Harry Pfeifer, the justice of the peace, performed the ceremony. With them was Spyros Skouras, one of the producers of Fay’s show. Margaret and Harry Niemeyer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were witnesses. Margaret Niemeyer was Barbara’s matron of honor. Spyros Skouras stood up for Fay.
Ruby Stevens was now Mrs. Frank Fay. Before leaving St. Louis, Barbara announced to reporters that she would retire from the stage as soon as Burlesque had finished its winter run in Chicago, as had the first Mrs. Fay when she became the third Mrs. Fay. By 5:00 p.m., Barbara was on the train back to New York and to Burlesque, which was to begin its road tour the following night.
Barbara couldn’t have cared less that Arthur Hopkins said his star’s wedding to Fay was “a bad marriage.” She believed she was “nothing” until Fay had come into her life. Everything she knew “of etiquette and the niceties of life, the correct way to talk and walk and meet people and entertain: everything [she knew] of books and art and people and the world around [her]” she learned from Fay.
• • •
The tour was due to begin in Newark. Hal Skelly had stayed with the show, as did Levant, but many in the company were new, including Barbara Robins, who played the “other” girl, and Marjorie Main, who played Gussie, “a Beef Trust girl.”
Barbara and Fay had their honeymoon via airmail, telegraph, and telephone, and, she said, “it was no way to conduct a honeymoon.”
• • •
Burlesque played in cities across the country from New Jersey to Pittsburgh and St. Louis, never playing longer than two or three weeks in each city. The physical demands of the show and the tour began to affect Barbara’s health.
The troupe was traveling by train from Kansas City on its way to its run in Detroit, where Burlesque was set to open at the Shubert Theatre. The train was derailed, and Barbara was thrown from her berth. Her head grazed the side of the metal compartment, but she was only slightly scratched. It was an icy-cold night; men were in their nightclothes, and women with curling papers frantically ran through the vestibule of the car shouting about how they were going to sue the train company. Barbara was in a nightgown and thin robe and stood in the corridor of the partially destroyed car attending to her understudy, who had had the flu when they set out from Kansas City and was hurt in the wreck.
The train got under way again. Barbara took care of the young actress and ignored the symptoms of her own oncoming illness. By the time the train reached Detroit, Barbara had influenza and a high fever and was so ill she was taken off the train and driven to the Book-Cadillac Hotel in downtown Detroit. The doctor advised her to skip the evening performance, but she was determined to get to the theater. When it was time to leave, Barbara descended the grand staircase leading to the hotel’s lobby and began to feel light-headed from the fever. When she came to, she had fallen to the bottom of the stairs. “It was very dramatic,” said Barbara. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get up in time to hear the applause.”
Barbara had weighed 118 pounds at the start of the Burlesque tour; now, in the Detroit hospital, she weighed 98 pounds. It was clear she wasn’t strong enough to return to Burlesque. After staying in the hospital for five days, she, along with her German maid, took the train back to New York and to Fay, who met her at the station and was “wild” with worry about how his wife might look. Barbara said that when she got off the train, Fay thought she “looked more like a corpse than a bride” and took her back to his hotel on Fifty-Seventh Street. A doctor and a nurse were in attendance for the next few weeks as Barbara regained her strength and the weight she had lost. Burlesque was due to close, and Barbara’s understudy finished the run of the play.
During the next three months as Barbara recuperated, she felt strong enough to accompany Fay on his tour of the Keith Circuit. He was about to play in Chicago for three weeks, and Barbara prevailed upon him to let them appear together in his act. It was agreed that Fay would bring Barbara onstage late in the show, and with a piano accompanist Mr. and Mrs. Frank Fay would perform the final number. Word of the success of their act got back to the New York Keith office, and they were hired to perform at the New York Keith-Albee Palace Theatre.
• • •
Walda had found work in the movies, as a featured player at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Eddie Mannix, one of the executives at Metro, and his wife welcomed Walda into their family and invited her to live in their guesthouse.
Mae Clarke and her husband, Lew Brice, had finished playing the Fox Theatre in Philadelphia and were set to come into New York with the now successful act that Mae’s sister-in-law, Fanny, had built for her brother and his bride.
Back in New York, Mae received a telegram from a Hollywood agent telling her to “report to the studio on Long Island and make a test . . . there’s something cooking there.” It was a picture called Big Time, a backstage story that needed “a girl who could sing and dance but who’d never done one of these films before because they were all too much alike.”
Lew realized “it was the beginning of the end for Jewish comedians,” though he thought he might be able to get work if he went to Hollywood with Mae. Mae was adamant; she was not going to go to Hollywood for a picture if it meant breaking up the act. Lew called his sister Fanny and asked her to intervene.
“Are you out of your mind?” Fanny said to Mae. “You have to do it, my dear. There isn’t any question about it. You’re big time now. And I’m coming with you!”
At Fanny Brice’s suggestion, for the screen test Mae sang a torch song, “My Man,” with Fanny telling Mae how to sing it. Fanny said, “I lean against the post, but my eyes aren’t seeing. They don’t go directly to the middle of the audience or to any one person, but they pick a spot and never leave it. That’s who I’m talking to . . . Then you have your audience concentrating. When is she going to look away? The only way you get their involvement is through the eyes. Think it first and don’t blurt the words out just because they a
re there.”
Fanny Brice with Julius W. “Nicky” Arnstein, mostly cropped from the photograph, circa 1918.
For the test, Fanny lent Mae one of her long dresses and pinned it to fit Mae’s body. Fanny suggested that Mae dance in short velvet pants and perform a dramatic skit. Mae couldn’t think of anything and used Barbara’s big scene from The Noose.
The test was put on the train west. It took four days to get to Los Angeles. The word came back that Mae was to report to Fox Studios on Western Avenue to sign a contract.
Mae and Lew and their wirehaired terrier, Max, traveled cross-country on the Chief for three days before they reached California. Mae was frightened of what she was leaving behind and of what she was going toward, but Lew assured her that if she failed in pictures, he would bring her back to New York.
Fanny had traveled west ahead of them. She was living in a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel and had another suite reserved for her brother and his wife. When the Chief pulled in to the Pasadena station, Fanny was there to greet her family. Mae ate her first dinner in Los Angeles at the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel.
• • •
Barbara was concerned for her brother, now called by his middle name, Byron, when she learned that his wife, Elizabeth, had contracted “the great white plague,” tuberculosis, and was being treated in a sanitarium in the Bronx. Byron was devoted to Elizabeth and spent every hour he could with her. Gene, Mabel, and Maud traveled there to visit Elizabeth, who looked wasted. They left the sanitarium thinking it would be the last time they would see her.
• • •
Barbara had brought Frank Fay to Avenue L to meet her family. It was a big event for the Merkents and for Mabel. Gene, who was eleven, had never heard of Frank Fay, but he was excited about his aunt Ruby’s marriage.
Both families were charmed by Fay’s storytelling. Fay called Ruby “Barbara,” and Maud, Mabel, and Bert tried hard to remember to address Ruby by her new name.
The moment Gene saw his aunt, he couldn’t stop noticing the large pendant she was wearing. At the end of the evening, after Barbara and Fay went back to Manhattan, Gene asked his mother and Maud why his aunt was wearing a large silver cross on her neck. Gene attended Kings Highway Methodist Episcopal Sunday school each week; neither the Vasletts nor the Merkents were Roman Catholic, and he was upset by the religious object and by the size of it. Maud and Mabel didn’t want to make too much of it and tried to assuage Gene’s concerns by telling him that their mother had worn a cross around her neck, and that was the end of it.