Pieces of My Heart (6 page)

By 1952 I was regarded as a rising young star. Darryl Zanuck’s daughter Susan liked me—she liked me a lot. She was just getting out of high school, and I began to take her out. I really enjoyed her company, but I wasn’t in love with her, and the problem was that she was obviously enthralled—when she went to Paris, she brought me back a beautiful gold watch.

I sensed that this could be a very dark part of the woods, with obvious potential for disaster, at least in relation to my career. My father, on the other hand, thought marrying Susan Zanuck was a great idea. He liked the dynastic implications and thought the marriage would mean job security for me. Darryl knew what was going on, and since he liked me a lot, he was perfectly happy with my being involved with Susan. I wrote Darryl a letter, explaining the awkwardness I felt, and I told him I certainly didn’t want to hurt Susan, or myself.

Darryl was a class act. “I will always be in your corner,” he wrote in his reply, and he assured me that “this has nothing to do with your career.” He continued to invite me down to the Zanuck house in Palm Springs, where I got to know his wife, Virginia, and the rest of the family. Virginia was a lovely, tenacious woman who took great pride in being Mrs. Darryl Zanuck. Despite all of Darryl’s wanderings—and they were legion—she never gave up. In the end, she got him back.

F
or a time I went out with Debbie Reynolds, just before she went over to MGM and made
Singin’ in the Rain
. She was a contract player at Warner’s, and I was a contract player at Fox. We never had an affair, although I think it’s fair to say that she liked me very much. Basically, we were kids together.

As if Susan Zanuck wasn’t enough potential trouble, along came Bella Darvi. Her real name was Bayla Wegier, and she had spent time in a concentration camp during the war. Darryl met her in 1951, placed her under contract, then placed her in his bed. Now that I think of it, it might have been the other way around. Anyway, he paid off her gambling debts, decided he would make her a star, and changed her name. Darvi came from the first letters of his name and Virginia’s. I understand that for a time she even lived in their house.

Bella made three movies for Darryl, none of which was very good. I met her on the lot, and she made it very clear that she would like us to have some private sessions that would have nothing to do with acting. I never thought she was particularly beautiful, but she did have great personal presence that didn’t quite come across on camera.

Did I consider going to bed with her? God Almighty, no! Aside from my affection for Darryl as a man, I also respected him as my boss, and I would never have poached on his territory. Plus, Bella was obviously unstable—she gambled away vast amounts of Darryl’s money. Mrs. Wagner didn’t raise a fool; I went on my way.

W
ith my career gathering momentum and my contracted raises clicking in, it was easier for me to indulge in my passion for music, specifically jazz. I had been brought up on American music because my mother played the piano and we always had plenty of 78-rpm records of the big bands of the thirties—Benny Goodman and so forth.

But my introduction to jazz came courtesy of Herbert Stothart Jr., who had been with me in one of the many military academies where I was interned. His father was a former professor, head of the music department at MGM, and had composed some famous operettas in the 1920s before he came to Hollywood. Stothart was a serious musician, and he had passed his passion on to his son, who exposed me to people like Chick Webb, who had a young girl named Ella Fitzgerald working as his vocalist.

In the early fifties in Los Angeles, there was a lot of jazz being played at clubs like the Crescendo and the Interlude. Chet Baker was always around, as were Jeri Southern and Frances Faye. I became a fan of Stan Kenton and all the people Norman Granz was recording. Supremely, I became a fan of Billie Holiday. Basically, I followed her from gig to gig. And if I was in New York, I always made it a point to go to a place called the Embers, where Peggy Lee liked to work.

I got to know Holiday, who was a tiny little thing; it was like meeting a doll. I thought she had the most fantastic talent of any singer of her time—or ours. Sometimes she was on drugs, and you weren’t sure she was going to be able to make it to the end of the song, let alone finish the set, but she always did. And even if she hadn’t made it, it wouldn’t have mattered, because she sang every note from her soul, and the emotion trumped the notes. (In a sense, Judy Garland was the same way.) I was in New York when it was announced that Holiday was dying, and I tried to get into Bellevue to see her, but I was too late.

I sat there for hundreds of nights listening to these men and women, amazed at how they got to those notes, got to that emotion. Jazz became very beneficial for me. I came from a background where if something was set, it was set in stone. And here were artists, people who were communicating emotion—the same thing I wanted to do—who worked with freedom, who were open, who joined together in an attitude of community and made things happen with great musicality, and who did it while maintaining their personalities. You can listen to three or four notes on the trumpet and know it’s Louis Armstrong—there are thousands of trumpet players, but nobody else has that unique Armstrong sound. It’s the same thing every actor strives for—a tone that’s all their own.

Barbara and me in our only scene alone in
Titanic
. It wasn’t much of a scene, but it sparked one of the most intense and rewarding relationships of my life. (
© TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX/EVERETT COLLECTION
)

B
arbara Stanwyck and I began our relationship on
Titanic,
although we had actually met years before. For a time, my father had an eight-acre ranch in Chatsworth, across from the racetrack. Martha Scott also lived there, and I used to take care of her horse. We’d go riding, and I would see Barbara and her husband, Robert Taylor, riding. I would go trotting along with them, never thinking I’d be involved with her someday.

Later, Barbara had a beautiful ranch at the corner of Devonshire and Reseda, with her agent, Zeppo Marx. It’s now a shopping center, but when Barbara owned the ranch, it had paddocks that were impeccably maintained and run, like everything Barbara touched.

As
Titanic
began production, there was an immediate chemistry between Barbara and myself—a lot of looks across the room. At this point Barbara Stanwyck was a legendary actress, universally respected for her level of craft and integrity. She also had the most valuable thing a performer can have: good taste. Besides a long list of successful bread-and-butter pictures, Barbara had made genuine classics for great directors:
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
and
Meet John Doe
for Frank Capra,
Stella Dallas
for King Vidor,
The Lady Eve
for Preston Sturges,
Ball of Fire
for Howard Hawks, and
Double Indemnity
for Billy Wilder. Barbara carried her success lightly; her attitude was one of utter professionalism and no noticeable temperament. As far as she was concerned, she was simply one of a hundred or so people gathered to make a movie—no more, no less.

Titanic
was a heavy production logistically, but a pleasant shoot because of the director, Jean Negulesco. Jean had a light, very pleasant personality—whenever I think of him, I think of champagne—and was very helpful to a young actor. He was also a talented artist and asked me to sit for a portrait, which I still have on my wall.

After the picture had been shooting for a couple of weeks, Jean had a party at his house on a Saturday night. I escorted Barbara and stayed close to her throughout the evening. I was enthralled by her and terribly attracted to her, but I couldn’t tell if she returned the favor. She was friendly, but not overly so.

When the party was over, I drove Barbara back to her house on Beverly Glen and took her house key to open her front door. I had to bend over to find the lock, and I only opened the door a crack. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Would she invite me in, or would she just take her key, pat me on the cheek, and thank me for a lovely evening? And then I straightened up to look at her with what I’m sure was a hopeful expression, and I saw something I hadn’t seen in her eyes before. It was a magical look of interest…and appreciation…and desire.

I immediately took her in my arms and kissed her. I had never had a reaction from a woman like I had from Barbara. A different kiss, with a different feeling.

We went into the house; we opened a bottle of champagne; we danced. I left at dawn.

After that, things happened very quickly. She gave me a key to her house, and I gave her a key to my apartment. If we were in town, we spent every weekend together. She cooked for me—she was good in the kitchen, but then she was good everywhere. We watched the Friday night fights on TV, and on Saturday or Sunday afternoons we’d go for long walks in the mountains above Malibu. Occasionally we would go to a movie, slipping in after the lights went down. Whenever we went out, Barbara would wear a scarf over her head, or a kind of hat, so it would be hard to tell who she was.

For the next four years, we became part of each other’s lives. In a very real way, I think we still are.

Barbara proved to be one of the most marvelous relationships of my life. I was twenty-two, she was forty-five, but our ages were beside the point. She was everything to me—a beautiful woman with a great sense of humor and enormous accomplishments to her name.

As a person, she was a great deal like the character she played in
Ball of Fire,
a stripper called Sugarpuss O’Shea. She had a wonderful, free, open quality in that picture, and that’s what she was like as a woman. Reclusive by nature, she was happy to just stay home, but she read everything. She got me reading books as a way of life and, if I asked her, would help me out with my acting. We only had one scene together in
Titanic
—I played her daughter’s boyfriend!—so there was a limit to what I could learn by working with her. She taught me what to do with my hands, how to get over my self-consciousness, and how to lower my voice, which I thought was still too high. And she taught me to be decisive with things like entrances.

“When you walk in,” she told me, “be sure you’re standing up straight. Walk in with confidence.” She didn’t want me to sidle into a scene as if I were ashamed to be in the movie. Make the entrance! Take the scene!

But I wasn’t going there for acting tutorials. I was in love with her. She was very loving, very caring, very involved with me, and highly sexed. Making love with her was an entirely different thing than I had ever experienced. I had been with girls, and I had been with women, but I had never been with a woman with her level of knowledge, her level of taste. I was so incredibly taken with her, taken by her.

We were both at turning points in our lives. She had been married to Robert Taylor for over ten years when he went to Italy to make
Quo Vadis
and had an affair, at which point Barbara threw him out. She was bitter about Taylor; she acted very quickly, almost reflexively, although I don’t know that she thought it was too quick. I don’t know precisely what went on between them; we never got into it. In fact, I went hunting with Bob Taylor a few times, and I think he might have known about us.

At any rate, she had just gotten her divorce when we met. She was at a very vulnerable moment in her life and career. The forties are a dangerous time for any woman, and especially so for an actress whose work is her identity—definitely Barbara’s way of life. The transition to playing middle-aged women has unnerved a lot of actresses—some of Barbara’s contemporaries, such as Norma Shearer and Kay Francis, quit the business rather than confront it—but she faced it straight on because that’s the kind of woman she was. The continuity of her career was more important to her than any individual part. Like so many people in show business, she was a prisoner of her career. Because of my youth, I suppose in one sense I was a validation of her sexuality.

She had an old friend from the vaudeville days named Buck Mack who lived with her. Buck had been part of a vaudeville team called Miller & Mack and had been an extra in
Citizen Kane
. In modern terms, he was a personal assistant: he ran the house, kept everything running smoothly, and watched over her. At first, Buck regarded me as an interloper, but it wasn’t long before he saw that Barbara and I genuinely loved each other, and he and I became good friends.

Because of the age difference, neither of us wanted to have our relationship in the papers, and with the help of Helen Ferguson, her publicist and one of her best friends, we kept it quiet. There were only a few people who knew about us. Nancy Sinatra Sr. was one of them, because she and Barbara were close friends. I didn’t tell anybody at Fox about our affair, although Harry Brand might have known, if only because Harry knew everything.

Likewise, I always assumed that Darryl Zanuck knew, although he never said a word about it to me. That might have been because Darryl and Barbara had something of a history, a bad one: Barbara told me that Darryl had chased her around his office years earlier, and I got the distinct impression that she hadn’t appreciated the exercise.

And my parents knew, because Barbara called their house a few times looking for me. I finally told them we were seeing each other, although I didn’t give them all the details. They met her once, at a party at Clifton Webb’s house, and my mother was upset that I was in love with an older woman. As for my father, as with most other events in my life, he was not in my corner.

And I eventually told Spencer Tracy about it. All he said was, “Wonderful! Are you happy? If you’re happy, that’s all that matters.”

Because I was so involved with Barbara, I was off-limits for other women, which was something of a problem for the studio. They wanted to promote the image of a carefree young stud—never my style—so I had publicity dates with young actresses around town like Lori Nelson or Debra Paget. This was a relic of the days when the studio system was in its prime. The studio would arrange for two young stars-in-waiting to go out to dinner and a dance and assign a photographer to accompany them. The result would be placed in a fan magazine. It was a totally artificial story documenting a nonexistent relationship, but it served to keep the names of young talents in front of the public. As far as I was concerned, it was part of the job, and usually pleasant enough.

When reporters would ask me about my romantic life, which they did incessantly, I had to say things like, “If I go out with one woman a few times, it’s considered a romance. If I date a lot of girls, I’m a Casanova. It’s one of those ‘heads-you-win-tails-I-lose’ deals. I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what I do.” The last sentence contained my true feelings.

In most respects, Barbara was a man’s woman, although her home was lovely. Like me, she was an animal lover—she kept poodles. Her son, Dion, was in the service at this point—I never actually met him—and she was hopeful that the Army might help him. She had adopted Dion when she was married to Frank Fay, one of the most dreadful men in the history of show business. Fay was a drunk, an anti-Semite, and a wife-beater, and Barbara had had to endure all of that.

I don’t think she was going to an analyst at this point, but she did make regular visits to a man who gave her sodium pentothal. It wasn’t like the LSD therapy that came later, which Cary Grant tried and got so much out of. Barbara had a lot of things going on in her head, but she didn’t put it out there for conversation, let alone public consumption.

When I was with her, it was all about us. There wasn’t a lot about anybody else, not Frank Fay, or even Bob Taylor. She had a small scar on her chest, where someone had once put out a cigarette on her. I think it was Al Jolson, speaking of sons of bitches. Jolson had been crazy about her back in the New York days, when she was a young actress on Broadway. She would talk about him once in a while, mainly about what an asshole he had been.

Spending time around her house, I came across a cache of 16mm movies in her basement. It turned out that Barbara had a lot of her own movies, and I convinced her to spend some time watching them with me. I ran the projector. She had prints of
Union Pacific, Ball of Fire,
and
Baby Face,
among others. She didn’t particularly like watching them, but she did enjoy reminiscing about their production: how she got the part, what the location was like, that sort of thing. She liked people with humor and always spoke highly of Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, and Frank Capra. Oddly enough, she wasn’t crazy about Preston Sturges; she seemed to feel that he expended all his charm and humor for his movies and that there wasn’t anything left for his actors.

In broad outline, all this sounds a little bit like the scene in
Sunset Boulevard
where Gloria Swanson sits with William Holden and watches a scene from
Queen Kelly,
rhapsodizing about her own face. But Barbara couldn’t have cared less about how she looked; as I watched her films with her, it was clear that, for her, the movies were a job she loved, as well as a social occasion for a woman who was otherwise something of a loner.

Barbara and I were together for four years. What ultimately broke it up was the fact that it couldn’t go anywhere—it was a classic backstreet romance. I was going on location to make movies, she was going on location to make movies, and there was no chance of a marriage in that place and time, so it was bound to run out of steam. She finally sat me down and told me that it was too difficult for her. She loved me, but….

I couldn’t argue with her reasoning. There was simply no way we could have been married at that time. I would have always been Mr. Stanwyck, and we both knew it.

And that’s how it came to an end.

She was an enormous influence in my life, and still is. I remain immensely grateful. I gave her things, nice things, such as a four-leaf clover necklace made out of platinum and diamonds, a piece of jewelry she always set special store by. But the things I gave her were dwarfed by the things she gave me. If I had to limit it to just one thing, I would say she gave me self-esteem. To have a woman of her beauty and accomplishment see value in me and give herself totally to me couldn’t help but have a powerful impact on my psyche. Barbara was the first savior in my life.

More concretely, she gave me values I never had before. I’ve mentioned that she gave me a love of reading, but she also taught me to appreciate art. I still have two landscapes she gave me, one of San Francisco, the other of Paris. Without her, there’s no doubt in my mind I would have gone in a different direction, and not a better one. For one thing, I would have spent more time with my contemporaries, and frankly, none of my contemporaries were in Barbara’s league.

I always kept in touch with Barbara. I don’t know who the men in her life were, although I’m sure they existed. I know she had escorts, although I assumed most of them were gay.

Toward the end of her life a burglar broke into her house and pistol-whipped her. She was an elderly woman by then, and it sent her into a downward spiral. When she was in the hospital dying, I called, and she asked me not to come and see her; she wanted me to remember her as she was. I felt I had to honor her request. As we talked, she told me she was wearing the four-leaf clover necklace I had given her. Barbara was cremated wearing it, and her ashes were scattered over Lone Pine. The fact that a piece of me remained with her at the end was and is some consolation for her loss.