Oecasionally, Millie Stevens would take Ruby to see Pearl White “ in her Perils.” “There wasn’t much money for anything,” Ruby recalled. There wers tiInes when, in order to get a hot meal, Ruby would go into a diner, order hot water, and add ketchup to it. Ruby “tended children, washed dishes, ran errands,” she said, anything to earn enough money to go to the serials.
and on Belasco
Mack one day took Ruby to see his longtime associate David Belasco, the maestro, the old master whose name was synonymous with the theater. By 1926, Belasco at seventy-three was considered eternal, a god.
He had produced hundreds of plays and helped to establish even more careers, from Mrs. Leslie Carter and Ina Claire to Maude Adams.
Belasco was seen as a force; he’d led the theater from the nineteenth century into the modern world, from the old Madison Square Theatre on Twenty-Fourth Street to the theater that carried his name on Forty-Fourth Street.
Belasco had started in the theater of gaslight flares forty years before and worked in a time when footlights were the dominant source of illumination on the stage, casting false shadows without control. Belasco had a notion about lighting and saw it as a way to dramatize the mood of a play. His experiments resulted in diffused light. He took a mica slide frosted with emery and oil, placed it on a series of coins, over a beam of light, and, by using silver reflectors, was able to control the spread of a beam of light. The harshness and unreality of footlights were banished from the Belasco stages.
By 1915, Belasco was able to re-create the different lights of a day, from a morning sunrise to the light of dusk, from the threatening light of a storm to the light of the moon. By using manually operated spotlights, sometimes with up to twenty electricians working at the same time, and nonreflecting spotlights, Belasco found a way to project differently colored lights that
didn’t clash on any number of people standing side by side on the stage.
and
Cameras were out of their booths, housed in padded “blimps,” and Were set on wooden frames and rollers, although film was still shot through glass plates. The cameras themselves had been quieted, and for exterior shots only padded camera covers were used to reduce noise.
For his work at Columbia, Walker had had to be inventive; the diffusion and tricks of lighting he used may have looked affected, but his reasons for Using them were practical: the studio’s sets were “cheap and phony [and] photography had to make them look like something.”
The difference for Capra between making silent and sound pictures was enormous, and not just because of the use of dialogue.
“Suddenly [with talking pictures] we had to work in the silence of a tomb,” said Capra. “No one, while a silent picture was being shot, was quiet, Shooting of silent scenes had gone on with hammering and sawing on an adjacent set, the director yelling at actors through a megaphone, cameramen shouting, while everybody howled if the scene was funny.
“With sound, when the red light went on, everyone froze in his position -a cough or a belch would wreck the scene. To the nervous snit of the onstage silent actors-over having to memorize lines for the first time-the funereal hush added the willies. They shook with stage fright.”
One silent-picture star said, “The silence from the studio was unbearable. There wasn’t that help from the director saying, ‘You’re doing fine, now a little faster.’ Nothing.”
and on John Gilbert:
Gilbert and Garbo were to be married in a double wedding at the home of Marion Davies.
On the morning of the wedding Gilbert saw Garbo pulling out of the driveway. She did not return.
While waiting for the wedding to begin, Louis B Mayer slapped Gilbert on the back and said "What's the matter with you Gilbert? What do you have to marry her for? Why don't you just fuck her and forget about it."
Mayer‘s remark gave Gilbert the perfect outlet for his fury. Gilbert went for Mayer, who fell backward through the door of the bathroom, knocking his head on the wall and losing his glasses. Gilbert was hitting Mayer's head against the tile wall as Eddie Mannix, a New Jersey Irish tough and former bouncer and Mayer’s general manager, second in command, and keeper 0? the peace at Metro, quickly pushed his way into the room and separated ths men. Mannix, who had the seemingly jovial manners of a police chief but could just as easily put a bullet in one, picked up Mayer’s glasses and wiped his face with a towel.
“You’re finished, Gilbert,” Mayer shouted. “I’ll destroy you if it costs me a million dollars.”
Mayer was a great hater, and the full force of his hatred would now he focused on John Gilbert and destroying the studio’s romantic idol.
Mayer wanted Barrymore to direct Gilbert’s first full-length talking picture, Redemption. Barrymore was in constant debt to Mayer. He frequently borrowed money against his salary and relied on Mayer to bail him out of tight financial circumstances. Midway through the filming of Redemption, Barrymore was replaced by Fred Niblo. When Gilbert saw the finished product, he tried to buy the prints and negatives with the intention of destroying them in the waters off Catalina Island. The studio refused to scrap the picture but agreed to postpone its release.
Mayer asked Barrymore to direct Gilbert in the movie that the studio now planned to be Gilbert’s first talking picture.
His Glorious Night was based on Olympia, a light comedy by Ferenc Molnar, about Viennese society, in which Gilbert was to play an elegant, romantic cavalry officer, a dashing figure equally adept with women and horses. The screenplay, which was largely Molnar’s script, was written by Willard Mack.
His Glorious Night received positive reviews from the critics, who said Gillbert “was to be congratulated on the manner in which he handles his speaking voice”; that Gilbert “could not have found a more entertaining vehicle for his talking debut than this delightful comedy”; and that “Mr. Gilbert can speak the English language and speak it beautifully.” ‘
But women in moving picture audiences weren’t as accepting of Gilberts performance. Instead of inspiring women to fantasize as they watched Gilbert on-screen, “the love scenes are so intense,” one critic wrote, that "they make the women let out nervous giggles.”
Gilbert was being laughed at by female audiences across the country. In silent pictures he had been looked upon as the essence of male virility. Now: in his first sound picture, he was provoking laughter and discomfort.
“During the picture, Lionel was in physical misery. He had a bad hip and cook drugs to ease the pain. Around four pm. when he’d inch himself out of his chair, it took a good minute before he could start the locomotion of his legs.”
Gilbert’s opening speech in the second reel began with “Oh, beauteous maiden, my arms are waiting to enfold you. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
By then in pictures, said Hopper, “love was a comedy word. Use it too freely,” Hopper said, “and you get a belly laugh. Whether by diabolical intent or accident, Jack’s speech was ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ Jack was young and Virile. He was handsome but his face didn’t ht those words. When sound came on the screen from his lips, a strange meeting took place between his nose and mouth and made him look more like a parrot than a lover. In silent pictures you never noticed.”
Of his supposedly high voice, Colleen Moore, a good friend of Gilbert’s, said, “Jack’s voice was not a deep one, but neither was it a high pitched one. His voice ,was in the middle register-the same register as that of Douglas Fairbanks and many other male stars. What ruined Jack Gilbert were three little words.”
To Colleen Moore, it was the discomfort of the women in the audience actually hearing John Gilbert say, “ ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ right out loud for all the world to hear, [that] disconcerted and embarrassed [them]; those most ordinary but still most profound words that can be spoken between a man and a woman. In their embarrassment they giggled.”
Louise Brooks said of Lionel Barrymore, he “was taking heavy doses of morphine . . . and was hardly responsible for what went on. Anyone could have manipulated [Barrymore] and someone did. It was common talk at the Studio before the picture came out. Everyone knew it but Jack.” In the picture Gilbert’s speech was stiff; the pronunciation of his words, exaggerated.
Leatrice Joy, Gilbert’s former Wife, saw His Glorious Night and said, “I don’t know whether Barrymore deliberately did Jack in, but he couldn‘t have done much worse if he tried. Jack’s scenes with Catherine Dale Owen were dreadful. All that kissing and saying ‘I love you’ looked all the more ridiculous with her because she was such a cold fish . . . She made Jack look ridiculous and Barrymore allowed it.”
Douglas Shearer, the sound engineer for His Glorious Night, told the director Clarence Brown that the engineers “never turned up the bass when Gilbert spoke; all you heard was treble. Of course it was a mistake.” A mistake ordered by Mayer?
and on Joan Crawford:
Mankiewicz said of Joan’s moods, “You'd have to watch the way she came in. If Joan was wearing a pair of slacks, that meant you could slap her on the ass and say, ‘Hiya Kid. You getting much?’ In turn she’d be as raucous as possible. She could come back the next day wearing black sables and incredible sapphires and by Jeses, you’d better be on your feet and click your heels, kiss her hand and talk with the best British accent you had; but never in any way indicate she was different in any respect from the way she was yesterday because the following day she’d come in in a dirndl or a pinafore and you’d be down on the floor playing jacks with her.”
Joan at thirty-one was beautiful. As Peggy Eaton, the young, dewy inn keepers daughter of simple demeanor, supposed to look fresh and innocent, Crawford, with her face framed by ringlets and a wide-brimmed nineteenth century bonnet, belied any trace of modesty or purity. Her head looked too large, her face too square-jawed, her features too hard.
and on Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone:
Mary Benny was beautiful, glamorous, and fun. She was down-to-earth, amusing, strong, the kind of woman Jack was drawn to, women like Barbara, [Um Sheridan, and Carole Lombard.
Mary and Jack were uneducated, but Jack, like Barbara, read and wanted to learn. For Mary, being Mrs. Jack Benny was the be-all and end-all. What interested Mary was learning to buy the right silver, the right jewelry (the bigger, the better), the right clothes (she shopped incessantly). Mary had taste, but most of it was copied from Edie Goetz, older daughter of Louis B. Mayer and one of the leading hostesses of Hollywood.
Mary was Sadie Marks, a shopgirl from Seattle with no credentials and little sophistication. She strove to be a great Hollywood hostess like Edie. Mary wanted to be Edie Goetz (when the Goetz cook died, Edie’s response: “How could she do this to me?”). If Edie Goetz fired her butler, Mary fired hers.
Mary could be cruel and unpredictable; at times she threatened to send her adopted daughter back to the orphanage, and Joanie Benny found it difficult to relax around her mother.
The Bennys lived in a Georgian mansion in Beverly Hills with roses and pansies lining the front walk and a large swimming pool and playhouse in the rear. Mary would look at their spiral staircase and say, “Joan will look lovely coming down those stairs, a bride.”
The Bennys’ parties, particularly their New Year’s Eve celebrations, were lavish, filled with people who to Mary were the right crowd: Barbara and Bob; Frank and Nancy Sinatra; George Burns and Gracie Allen; Jimmy and Gloria Stewart; Ray and Mal Milland; Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; Errol Flynn; Gary and Rocky Cooper; the Humphrey Bogarts; the Robert Montgomerys; the Ronald Colmans; Ann Sheridan; Bob and Dolores Hope and others.
The Jack Benny Hour, sponsored by Jell-O (“Jell-O again,” Jack would say at the opening of each show), had aired on Sunday nights at seven since 1934.
Benny had created 'a radio family that seemed real to his listening audience. His comedy was sophisticated and childlike. Jack was the butt of most of the comedy situations, the guy the others picked on. Benny’s style of comedy had been influenced by Frank Fay; each had headlined at the Palace in New York. Like Fay, Benny sauntered onstage, without props or funny suits hr a Stooge. Like Fay, Jack didn’t tell jokes but told stories around events of the day that seemed ad-libbed. And like Fay Benny took his time and never rushed the punch line.
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