A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson

Author:Victoria Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780684831688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936. (PHOTOFEST)

Similar letters of warning were sent to Elizabeth Allan, Rosalind Russell, and Claire Trevor.

Barbara didn’t respond to the guild’s threat.

Finally, the guild sent Barbara’s name to Actors’ Equity and requested that the Equity Council suspend her. She had no choice but to join the guild, and soon after she, along with Claire Trevor and John Barrymore, were elected senior members of the guild with the guild’s board of directors, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Harvey, and others, conducting the guild meeting.

• • •

During the day Barbara was in production making Banjo on My Knee as the simple bride in the world of shanty boat people living life along the banks of the Mississippi. At night she was a young Frenchman besotted with the most glamorous courtesan in the nineteenth-century Paris demimonde, as she spent her evenings helping Bob prepare for the crowning role of his young career.

Taylor was bewildered, overwhelmed, when he learned that Thalberg had picked him for the part of Armand Duval in Camille opposite Greta Garbo’s Marguerite Gautier. Garbo, at thirty, was at the height of her career, worshipped by most of the Western world as the greatest actress of her day. She’d made twenty-eight pictures on two continents during a career that spanned almost two decades; she was idolized as “a revelation of exquisite beauty and artistry,” proclaimed by critics “a flaming genius,” celebrated for her intelligence, unerring instinct, grasp, and control as an actress.

Bob had played Armand in the Pomona Masquers’ production at the Padua Hills Playhouse; that was Pomona, and this was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Bob was new to Hollywood, new to fame, new to acting. “The whole thing’s like a madhouse,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. Most of the time you don’t know where you stand—or how!” At twenty-five, he’d made eleven full-length features in two years, playing romantic leading parts of spoiled adolescent men thrust into adulthood.

To cope with the rush of it all and the idea of working with Garbo, Bob took a plane to Salt Lake City, boarded a bus, rode to the end of the line, and started walking. He stopped at a ranch where he wasn’t recognized, asked for a drink of water, and spent the rest of the day talking about farming, the world, anything except Hollywood, and left feeling like a human being.

• • •

Irving Thalberg had offered George Cukor his choice of pictures with Greta Garbo: Marie Walewska, the mistress of the emperor Napoleon I who bore him a son; or Marguerite Gautier, of Dumas fils’s La dame aux camélias, based on Alphonsine Plessis—Marie Duplessis—mistress of Dumas and Liszt and the most cultivated courtesan of her day, who died of consumption at the age of twenty-three.

“Napoleon stumps me,” Cukor said to Thalberg of the first choice. “He’s fascinating to read about but he’s a Great Man—and they all come out like waxworks in the movies.” Cukor chose to make Camille. “I’d seen the play,” he said, “and I felt it would be a perfect meeting of the actress and the role.

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