Barbara Stanwyck Read online

The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Meet John Doe

  Judging 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.

  We then see Kay with her roommate Dot (Marie Prevost), a pleasingly plump fellow prostie in a feather-boaed negligee. Kay has been sitting for Jerry, and she marvels that he hasn’t tried to make a pass at her. We dissolve from a shot of Kay pouring coffee to a shot of Jerry’s dowager mother (Nance O’Neil) pouring tea. Jerry’s father is a railroad magnate, a classic Capra capitalist ogre. Even though the director himself was a right-wing Republican who hated Roosevelt, he allowed screenwriters like Swerling and Robert Riskin to grace his movies with left-wing sentiment because it was fashionable during the thirties and guaranteed that most critics would take him seriously.

  Jerry wants his model Kay to look up at the ceiling and pretend to see stars, but sensible, low-class, uneducated Stanwyck/Kay only sees the ceiling. Capra himself wants to purify his leading actress and present her to us in an unvarnished state, and he includes a close-up of Jerry stripping off Kay’s false eyelashes. This act has the effect of making Stanwyck’s small eyes seem even tinier; Capra wants us to look at this girl closely, intently, to see what character she has. “Do you want me to be homely?” asks Kay. No, not that, but Capra wants Stanwyck to be something as unusual for the Hollywood of that time and place. He wants her to be real. He wanted Stanwyck to show the truth about herself so that he could tell the truth about himself, and that transference takes patience, the same patience Jerry exhibits with all of Kay’s gaucheries and self-protectiveness. Without some of her make-up, Stanwyck’s face is plain, severe, and beseeching, crying out to the man behind the camera for help and love.

  As if freed by this close-up, Stanwyck lets loose with some off-the-cuff “behavior,” little jokey voices and nonsense noises. She’s charting her way, instinctively, to the best kind of naturalistic film acting. Capra let it be known that she was a spontaneous performer, a “primitive emotional.” He quickly realized that she was at her best on the first take, so he didn’t rehearse her with the other actors and used multiple cameras to capture her at her best.

  “That first take with Stanwyck was sacred,” said Edward Bernds, Capra’s sound mixer. Throughout her life, Stanwyck was always best in first takes. “That’s the stage training,” she explained. “The curtain goes up at 8:30, and you’d better be good. You don’t get a retake.” It’s as if she pressed a kind of button in herself, and there it all was, controlled, pure feeling—but it was only available once. To keep this concentration, Stanwyck always memorized the entire script before shooting so that she would know where she was and keep up a kind of emotional continuity.

  “You should shoot for the first time,” she said. “And if you have an emotional scene you only have so much water in you to come out! About the third or fourth take, you start drying up, not because you want to, but it’s a physical thing that happens.” There are a lot of actors who like to rehearse a scene and do a few takes for the camera, and they only get better as they go along. They get more deeply into it, more detailed, more involved. But Stanwyck’s involvement was of the instant kind. She had to believe, somehow, that the scene was really happening. Ask her to do it again right away, and that belief would be shattered.

  On the stage, presumably Stanwyck could believe in the same scenes night after night, but the movies gave her a way to be “in the moment” to the nth degree. When she got older and more experienced, Stanwyck could sometimes joke with the crew before scenes, but generally, if she could, she would withdraw into herself into a kind of self-hypnosis. A writer on the set of Clash by Night (1952) compared her preparation before a scene to that of a prizefighter waiting to enter the ring. That comparison sounds apt; she developed a gallantry that had a distinctly masculine tinge.

  In Jerry’s studio, his pal Bill stares at Kay a little too long. She snaps, “Take a good look … it’s free,” inaugurating the justly celebrated wisecracking style of the thirties Stanwyck, much more direct in its delivery and implications than the quizzical style of a Jean Arthur, the worldly jabs of a Claudette Colbert, the deadpan mistrust of a Ginger Rogers. Stanwyck’s laugh lines hint that there’s a vestige of amusement somewhere in her, but her taunts come from a much darker place than that of the other 1930s film heroines, a place of unspecified trauma that has to remain mysterious and well below the surface. If even a bit of her anger somehow emerges, there can be no more jokes—only murder, suicide, or revenge. As Kay holds her own against Jerry’s snooty fiancée, Capra gives her a few silent close-ups where Stanwyck registers clear thoughts on her face and even makes gracefully smooth transitions between them. “It’s nice to have very nice dialogue, if you can get it,” Stanwyck said (that “if you can get it” is classic Stanwyck, the Stanwyck tough girl “note”). “But great movie acting … watch the eyes,” she continued, a skill she said Capra had taught her.

  Sweetly, the little girl emerges from the party girl as Kay takes a bath, staring up at the ceiling and trying to see the stars but still just seeing a ceiling. The camera dollies back, and with some backward camera movement Walker dissolves to Kay getting dressed—a lovely effect, but one as extraneous to Capra’s vision as Swerling’s often sophisticated and impressive dialogue. Without Capra’s overriding and somewhat inchoate need to get to “the truth” about Stanwyck, about himself and about life, Ladies of Leisure would just be a fine early talkie with a star-making performance from its lead actress. With his
ambition, it’s much more than that: It’s an elating and even exhausting experience. Capra has the nerve and the talent and the actress to make exhortations to feel more and feel deeper seem like a call to arms. The film has the air of having been created in total freedom (Columbia head Harry Cohn left his boy genius alone, for the most part) and with full artistic inspiration.

  Like Stella Dallas, Kay is low-class in looks and manner but high-class inside, a rich dichotomy that Stanwyck mined throughout her career. Kay tells Dot that she went to the opera, and it transported her. She compares listening to the music to being in the middle of the ocean. In 1930, opera was still the music of the Italian people, not the closed-off specialty act it has become, and it proves the perfect bridge for hardened Kay to cross over into the arena of high art. High art here equates with heightened feeling, a heightening that Stanwyck herself expresses in her own acting style, merging the best kind of theatricality (“this is happening right now, in front of you, only once”) with a miraculous kind of freshness. This freshness made for a vivid contrast to the kind of artificial and outdated theatricality running rampant through all the film studios during the period Capra and Stanwyck made their first masterpiece together.

  Capra loved Stanwyck and he identified with her totally, the key combo when it comes to director-actress artistic collaborations. McBride seems to think that they had an affair. “We were very close,” Capra told him. “I wish I could tell you about it, but I can’t, I shouldn’t and I won’t. But she was delightful.” This quote is not typical Capra; he usually outright lied or was too frankly honest, but rarely was he really coy like this. Capra wants to insinuate that they had some kind of affair without actually outright saying so, which strikes me as the gambit of a man who did indeed fall madly in love with his leading lady, but who might not have gotten as far with her as he would have liked.

  Stanwyck, still married to a not-yet-faltering Frank Fay, surely recognized right away what Capra could do for her as an actress. His films made her a star. She was probably fond of him, and she might have encouraged his romantic attentions to a point so that his creativity would be similarly encouraged. Whatever happened between them, for Stanwyck, the wish to be “the best of all” blended any true affection she might have felt for Capra with careful calculation that kept his interest burning through three more films.

  Kay literally finds herself as an artist’s model, and Ladies of Leisure is itself a metaphor for the partnership between Capra and Stanwyck. It’s an intense, almost grueling film, lingering over set pieces as if Capra doesn’t want them to end, as if these set pieces are a kind of lovemaking that he wants to prolong. Take the long scene set late at night in Jerry’s studio. Done painting her for the day, Jerry looks at Kay warming herself by the fire. Walker frames Stanwyck against the light so that it outlines the curve of her behind. This isn’t the crude and unfeeling ass shot we got in Mexicali Rose, but rather the kind of outright sexual idolatry that Josef Von Sternberg brought to his seven Paramount films made in worship of Marlene Dietrich. Capra had fallen in love with Stanwyck, and a love like this includes a love of her body.

  Jerry tells Kay that she should spend the night, and we see on her hardening face that she thinks he only wants her sexually, like all the rest of them. The suspense of this sequence becomes almost unbearable as we watch Kay undress against a rain-spattered window (in his autobiography, Capra wrote that he always found rain erotic). Walker shines adoring light on Stanwyck’s face as Kay waits for the man she loves to come to her and turn her into just one more meaningless lay. We see Jerry’s feet entering the room, and we assume along with Kay that he’s going to force himself on her. (It’s hard to read Jerry a lot of the time. Ralph Graves is stiff in the role, but this quality of his sometimes works to the film’s advantage because he starts to seem like a solid object for Stanwyck to work against, a monolith for her to project on.)

  When Jerry simply pulls a blanket over Kay, the camera holds on Stanwyck’s face as it’s transformed by a look of unadulterated joy. Kay’s joy is compounded because it feels like Stanwyck herself has found a kind of artistic happiness for the first time—a heartening sight for anyone who loves her, or her work, which are really the same thing in her case. There’s something almost pornographic in Capra’s focus on Stanwyck’s newborn, newly virgin whore—if we can take pornography to mean steadily looking at the foundation of all life. Capra’s Italian soul flips out over Stanwyck’s “look to the stars” Irish poeticism, so zealously hidden behind a toffee-like front.

  When Kay looks at Jerry over the breakfast table the next morning, her face is full of love that’s almost indistinguishable from pain. Capra and Stanwyck both understand that when a put-upon, abused woman lowers her defenses and loves someone, this surrender leaves her vulnerable and wide open to attack. Old defenses kick up a fight for dominance and a maelstrom of reasons not to feel love. Old, cruel memories that have been buried come back to haunt Kay and Stanwyck, but both actress and character valiantly struggle to keep them at bay.

  The sound is a bit muffled in Ladies of Leisure (it could certainly use some restoration), and some of its accouterments are unavoidably redolent of 1930 at Columbia, but Stanwyck’s work here will always be modern because it will always be “true to life.” Stanwyck is emotionally raw here, totally exposed, and this raw exposure is disturbing because real emotion is always a disturbance, a call for change. She makes you realize how often the movies and the people in them try to distance us from life, so that we luxuriate in the cradling, annihilating falseness of “it’s only another movie.” Stanwyck at her best—and especially when working with Capra—never just acted in another movie. Her films are a matter of life and death to her, nothing less.

  In the stock scene where Jerry’s mother confronts Kay, asking her to leave him for his own sake, Stanwyck interestingly chooses to play the first part of this encounter coolly and reasonably, as if Kay really doesn’t understand what was happening. When she realizes what is being asked of her, Stanwyck gives us our first glimpse of her force-of-nature, hysterical sorrow, the most impressive of all her modes on screen. Understandably, she doesn’t quite have full control of this mode here; it makes her head tilt back wildly, and there are moments when she’s slightly dried up, as if she needs to try to locate the feeling again.

  What makes this scene more than stock is the way Stanwyck establishes a deep rapport with the mother (kudos to O’Neil for neither under- nor overplaying her hand). After the scene is over, Walker films a spent Stanwyck sitting on a couch with her head thrown back from a highly unflattering low angle. I love this particular shot above all the others because it proves that Capra and Stanwyck do not care a damn about how she looks or about the Hollywood posturing of the time. Let Ann Harding or Norma Shearer or Ruth Chatterton decorously pose against fireplaces in profile; with Stanwyck and Capra, we’re right in the middle of a real tragedy, and there’s no time for artful camera angles or careful make-up. Ladies of Leisure is a major film about learning to live without protection and gambling all on one person. It’s maybe a little shapeless, a little all-over-the-place, like a John Cassavetes film (Cassavetes revered Capra), but it still casts a spell.

  Kay leaves with the likably caddish Bill to get out of town on another “boat of vice.” On board ship, the camera dollies in on her face, which glistens with an almost evil-looking passionate sorrow. An image of water dissolves in under this uncanny face. On the deck, Kay looks up at the stars. Where’s Ruby Stevens’s mother? Where’s her father Byron? Up there? Or down below? Kay jumps off the ship, just as Bresson’s Mouchette rolled herself gracelessly into the water. The end. But not really: Kay wakes up and Jerry tells her everything is all right. The end.

  Well, maybe it will be all right. Maybe Kay will become a kind of Frieda Lawrence in Arizona, where Jerry says he’ll take her, and where she might be the formidable wife of a great, or at least good painter. Ladies of Leisure isn’t a perfect movie; perfection would go against its “l
et it all hang out” grain. A lot of important moments seem to take place off-screen, and we could do with a little less Prevost and Sherman, fine as they are, and get a sharper picture of Graves’s Jerry and what he sees in Kay and what he wants from her. The ending is too truncated, especially in relation to the rest of the film, which positively takes its shoes and girdle off and settles in for a good long soak in the tub.

  Capra’s ambition swelled for his next collaboration with Stanwyck, The Miracle Woman (1931). He was always someone whose reach exceeded his grasp, but his more craven fears flinched from the subject he chose this time. It was based on a commercially unsuccessful play by Robert Riskin and John Meehan called Bless You, Sister, which had starred Alice Brady. A parody of Aimee Semple McPherson’s lucrative religious revival meetings, with their tasteless, show-bizzy underpinnings, it proved too strong a brew for theater audiences, and Riskin himself told Capra that he was being foolish to adapt it to the movies. But Capra had it in his mind that the film might prove both a controversy and a success—and provide a juicy part for Stanwyck.

  A star now, Stanwyck was starting to have trouble with Frank Fay, who was floundering in a series of lover boy parts at Warner Bros. that were unsuited to his talents, such as they were. Capra seems to have pursued her more avidly on Miracle Woman, even planting a line with a press agent that Stanwyck was “so pleased with her last wedding that she can hardly wait for her next one.” In spite of his hopes (and his confused claim in his autobiography that he would have married her after she divorced Fay if he hadn’t loved his wife Lu more), Capra and Stanwyck could never have made a go of it off the set, whatever her feelings for him. He needed a helpmate, a housewife, and a steady booster—which is what Fay needed too, of course—and Stanwyck was not at all suited to that task.

  Swerling did the screenplay for Miracle Woman, retaining much of Riskin’s structure and some of his dialogue. Capra wrote in his autobiography that he had hedged his bets on this project by placing the blame too squarely on the shoulders of a heavy played by Sam Hardy, who’s not quite as objectionable here as he is in Mexicali Rose—but not by much. Capra was being hard on himself so that people would say, “He’s being too hard on himself,” but there can be no doubt that The Miracle Woman begins strongly enough that anything that comes afterward is bound to seem flimsy or half-hearted in comparison. There’s no caution here, as in Ladies of Leisure, no careful handling of Stanwyck. Capra knows what she’s capable of and he just turns her loose, having her start the film on a toweringly high note.