Barbara Stanwyck (5 page)

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.

The movie begins with two title cards, one of which reads, “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing.” Just so that there's no mistaking the film's intentions, a second card adds,
“The Miracle Woman
is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of religion, seeks to sell for gold God's greatest gift to Humanity—FAITH.” The religious faith Capra is dealing with here can be seen as akin to emotional truth in
Ladies of Leisure
, but somehow this religious faith seems of a lesser order of importance and makes for a lesser film. Capra himself was a religious man, and Stanwyck had a core of religious faith in her somewhere. There was no God on Flatbush Avenue in 1915, but she yearned for Him, all the same. Late in life, she said, “I believe we
must
believe in God. Without God, there would be nothing. Nothing at all.”

A pastor is set to deliver his farewell address. In a brief snatch of gossip, we hear that he has basically been fired from his post. Stanwyck
stiffly enters the church, as if she's entering a cage full of lions. She plays Florence, the pastor's daughter. Florence ascends the pulpit and begins to read her father's last sermon in a cool, dutiful voice that sounds as if it's about to crack under some strain. Then she breaks off. “You can see that he stopped in the middle of a sentence,” she says, and pain and rage start to flood into her face and her voice. “My father is dead,” she says, with a tinge of hysteria in her delivery that will rise up thrillingly as Stanwyck begins one of her all-time great arias.

Her hysteria is a weapon that she uses as a sword but also to whip herself, and it seems to thicken her voice, to make it throb. Watching Stanwyck in
Burlesque
, her friend Mae Clarke said, “I have never heard one person get as many vibrations into her voice as Barbara got into hers then. It was like a symphony chorus in the Hollywood Bowl instead of just one person speaking.” What was the source of Stanwyck's hysteria, and how was she able to channel this quality into her voice? Was it a curse from her childhood that blossomed into a God-given gift for her professional life?

The deacon of the church was instrumental in having Florence's father removed, and the actor who plays him tells Florence to stop, shouting in a stagy, false voice that makes a striking contrast with Stanwyck's natural, air-that-I-breathe acting. “This isn't a house of God, it's a meeting place for hypocrites!” she howls, letting her voice crack into a hundred jagged pieces on the word “hypocrites.” Florence (and Capra) is going to tell these phonies “the truth,” even if it's something they can't hear, even if it's dangerous. The parishioners begin to file out, slowly, but one woman tells Florence to keep going and tell it like it is.

Stanwyck swaggers down from the pulpit. Now she not only has her symphonic voice but also her body to put her points across. She lets her body literally
propel
her forward, one hand on her hip and another hand on a pew as she lands each and every one of her vengeful words against these people who have exploited, over-worked, and destroyed her father. At the climax of the aria, Stanwyck leans back on her heels and throws her head all the way back as she shouts and basks in the full glory of letting herself go—and in the glory of the technique she has acquired that allows her such control over her feelings, which come right from the gut. After this climax, we see Florence run to the church doors and close them; suddenly she's a small, lonely figure, weeping huskily, quietly, privately, like a balloon with all the air let out.

Where can we go from here? No place much, alas. Hardy's crooked promoter takes her up and makes Florence into an Aimee Semple
McPherson star on the revival circuit, where she meets up with a blind aviator (David Manners) who restores the faith she's lost. I suppose it would have made Florence look too unsympathetic if, in her disillusionment, she bilked the faithful deliberately and cynically, but such a turn of events would have added color to a girl who seems to withdraw from us just when she's opened herself up so fully. Hardy's character is a kind of director, cracking down on the down-on-their-luck vagrants he hires as plants to be “saved” by Sister Florence, and he expresses Capra's ill-concealed distaste for his own audience and for crowds in general.

“I'm crazy about you when you're mad, baby, you look more beautiful,” Hardy tells Stanwyck, as she lies down after a performance with a distant look on her face, her hysteria cooled to embers. Against all odds, there is some interest in her interactions with Manners, an attractive, gay, strangely mannered young actor. “On the set, Barbara was tremendously centered in her work,” he later said, “much too much so for any social chit chat. … I see her sitting alone in a studio chair—almost in meditation.” They're charming together, but their scenes go on too long and distract us from what should be the meat of the movie, Florence's crisis of faith.

The Miracle Woman
is an unforgettable first scene in search of a movie to follow it. Perhaps that scene might be more effective at the end of a movie: We could see Florence grow up, see her father belittled and bled dry by his parishioners (Walter Huston could have played the part), and then die of heartbreak, so that his daughter finally goes out to tell everyone off, shuts the doors of the church, and then commits the ultimate blasphemy, killing herself in front of the altar. The movie audience of the time wouldn't have had the stomach for that film, but Stanwyck could have played it for all it was worth.

Capra wrote the story for their next picture,
Forbidden
(1932), a messy takeoff on Fannie Hurst's popular novel,
Back Street
, but most of the Columbia writing staff had a hand in writing the film, and it shows.
Forbidden
is filled with inane dialogue and rushed plot points. The movie represented a kind of last chance for Capra to win Stanwyck as his wife, and it has a distinctive “time is running out” quality that does the muddled narrative no favors. The production was plagued by bad luck. Stanwyck held out for more money from Harry Cohn, which delayed shooting and can't have helped the frayed continuity. On October 4, 1931, Stanwyck was shooting a beach scene on horses with her on-screen lover (Adolphe Menjou), when a reflector flared into her horse's eyes. He threw her, then fell on top of her and kicked her spine, dislocating her coccyx.
Already playing the masochistic trouper, Stanwyck insisted they finish the shot before her legs stiffened. For two weeks, she worked during the day on
Forbidden
, then went to the hospital to spend the night in traction. In 1984, her terse comment on this accident was, “It hurt. It still hurts.” All for a few seconds in a movie. A few seconds in a movie, though, meant everything to Stanwyck.

At this point, a failed Frank Fay was drinking heavily and batting Stanwyck around in public. She took this abuse as she took her onset accident and all her other lousy luck, stoically. Her other co-star on the film, Ralph Bellamy, said that Fay was “a very unpopular guy—he worked at it.” And Fay's jealousy was misplaced: Stanwyck later told Bellamy that Fay had thought they might be having an affair, when in reality Capra was making his last pitch for her.

Forbidden
is a personal movie. Menjou's crippled wife is called Helen, the name of Capra's first, alcoholic wife. Bellamy's character is a newspaperman who pursues Stanwyck throughout the film; rejecting one of his many proposals, she says he's “married to his newspaper.” Menjou's character is a cad of the most selfish sort, and it's clear that Menjou is a stand in for Fay, as Bellamy is for Capra. Stanwyck is playing a woman named Lulu, named after the other woman in Capra's life, Lu, who finally issued an ultimatum to the director and became the second and final Mrs. Capra, a role for which she was eminently suited.

Unfortunately, as any non-doctrinaire auteurist can admit, “personal” doesn't always equal “good” when it comes to movies, and
Forbidden
is a case in point. It begins promisingly with a fast montage of town life. We see a plow, trees in bloom, bees pollinating flowers. A dog yawns, and an older man takes up the yawn. The older man is excited because Stanwyck's Lulu is late for work at the public library for the first time in eight years. She never misses weddings, he says, except “her own.” Lulu is supposed to be a bespectacled, incipient spinster (“Old lady four eyes!” yell some kids as she enters the library), but Stanwyck still walks like a chorus girl, and spring fever swiftly takes Lulu out of town for a two-week vacation in Havana, funded by all her savings. A gamble, life or death.

She cruises around on yet another “boat of vice,” and though Lulu has taken off her glasses and glammed up a bit, she can't seem to snag an escort. In her stateroom, she finds a drunken Menjou and inexplicably takes a liking to him (just as Stanwyck's fondness for the gruesome, abusive Fay looks fairly inexplicable to us now, unless we presume that she felt she deserved trouble). In
The Miracle Woman
, Stanwyck and David
Manners play most of their love scenes with a ventriloquist's dummy called Al, and in
Forbidden
, she and Menjou share their happiest moments on screen when they play around with commedia dell'arte-type masks. It's as if Capra is trying to reassure Stanwyck that she'll be protected and that the exposure of
Ladies of Leisure
needn't be an around-the-clock vocation. And Stanwyck seems uncommonly relaxed in the mask scene. She's always touching when she tries to be lighthearted, because you can see how much effort it takes for her to forget 246 Classon Avenue, where part of her lives permanently, waiting on those steps.

Forbidden
becomes a formula illegitimate baby saga for most of the rest of its running time; a complicated plot twist means Stanwyck has to give up her child to Menjou and his wife. She becomes an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist for Bellamy. Time passes, and we see some grey in her hair (Stanwyck makes her face seem subtly older by holding it more stiffly than she did in the youthful scenes). The musical score goes into overdrive for her big scene with Bellamy, where he threatens to expose her secret and ruin Menjou's career. He punches her in the mouth, leaving a trickle of blood that looks alarmingly
right
on Stanwyck's face.

She shoots him from behind a door, then opens it and shoots some more, jabbing the gun in the air like a knife, just as Jeanne Eagels does at the beginning of
The Letter
. The camera moves close for an iconic shot of her face; there's blood on the left side of her mouth and a jewel-like tear glistening in her right eye. In her last scene with Menjou, he remembers how he called her “the world's best loser,” and that's an apt description of Stanwyck's persona here (in the forties, she might have been dubbed the world's worst winner).
Forbidden
ends with Lulu walking alone down a street, her man dead, her life over, but her mood rather tranquil after all her upheavals.

Capra later told his trusted sound man, Edward Bernds, that his next film with Stanwyck,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1933), “didn't make money, but it has more real
movie
in it than any other I did.” He had reason to boast, for this is his most fluid, audacious, original work as a director. It's the kind of movie even those who don't like the Capra of
Mr. Deeds
and
Mr. Smith
can embrace, for he takes his often confused, touchy talent and applies it not to politics or social messages, but to sexual longings and fantasies, important subjects that suit his brand of impassioned, mixed-up emotionalism.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
cost a million dollars to make, and it was the first film to play Radio City Music Hall; scheduled for two weeks, it was pulled after eight days. Capra underestimated the engrained racism of an American 1930s audience, which couldn't handle
the thought of a Chinese warlord making love to a white woman—let alone the sight of it on screen—even if General Yen (Nils Asther) was a suave, gay Swedish actor in yellowface.