6

SHOPGIRLS AND SEX VULTURES

In 1932, Garbo told John Barrymore, “I want to be alone.” Bette Davis told Richard Barthelmess, “I’d really like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair,” and Dietrich told Clive Brook, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” The new woman had arrived and was creating her indelible roles.

Movies continued to grow more adult, which usually meant more risqué. In 1932, Ann Harding described herself in The Animal Kingdom as a “foolish virgin—well, foolish, anyway” … Claudette Colbert bathed in milk in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross … and Jean Harlow bathed in a rain barrel in Red Dust. And when a woman exclaimed “Goodness! What beautiful diamonds,” Mae West, in her film debut, set her straight: “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” With the Depression finally cutting deep into box-office receipts, 1932 was a bad year for the movie industry, but it was a glorious year for actresses. By year’s end, the influx of talent was complete, and a classic was hitting theaters virtually every week.

Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, who would make their greatest contributions after the Code, had their first leading roles. Kay Francis emerged as a major star. Joan Blondell came into her own as a leading lady. Clara Bow became a contender again with Call Her Savage, her penultimate outrage; and The Animal Kingdom broke Ann Harding’s box-office dry spell. Tallulah Bankhead made her best pre-Code (Faithless), as did Constance Bennett (What Price Hollywood?). And Dietrich, in addition to Shanghai Express, made yet another signature film: Blonde Venus.

Colbert became Colbert. Miriam Hopkins proved herself one of the most versatile and delightful of screen actresses. Jean Harlow went from being a sex joke to becoming a sexy comedienne. Even B-movie leading ladies, like Madge Evans and Karen Morley, made strong impressions. And nineteen-year-old Ann Dvorak emerged overnight to make a slew of memorable movies, one after another.

Right at the top of the heap in 1932 was Joan Crawford. She had endured third-string status behind Garbo and Shearer only to emerge as their box-office equal. In Grand Hotel, she held her own in the same film with Garbo, though the two shared no scenes in it. As a result, there are two ways to watch and experience Grand Hotel, as a Crawford film or as a Garbo film. To Crawford’s credit, both ways are equally good.

For those who receive Grand Hotel as a Crawford film, Garbo’s performance looks like something from Neptune—histrionic, operatic, and bizarre. Yet those who experience it as a Garbo movie will still find much to enjoy in Crawford. She is perhaps a bit lip-quivery and insincere in emotional moments. But for the most part, she is a pleasure to watch, and she brings to the film welcome humor and a light touch.

It had not always been thus.

It had taken a long time for Crawford to get good. “How can I compete with Norma?” she often complained. “She sleeps with the boss.” This has gone into history as perhaps the most well-known quote about Shearer. The image it conjures is of the entitled “First Lady of MGM” pushing aside the more worthy, scrappy, hard-working Joan. In fact, to contemplate Crawford in any of Shearer’s roles from 1925 to 1931, the period of Crawford’s loudest complaining, is to contemplate a horror. The early Crawford—with her practiced facial expressions, self-conscious speech, and false energy—would have annihilated The Trial of Mary Dugan and The Divorcee, films she desperately wanted. And the thought of what she might have done to Private Lives or Strange Interlude is gruesome.

Crawford once recalled that as a starlet at MGM she would spend “hours every day, standing on the sidelines, watching the stars at work … And when I went home that night I would stand in front of the mirror, acting out the scenes I’d watched them do.” Some of her early performances retain traces of that self-study. One can see Crawford looking through her costars to the mirror inside her mind. In her first talkies, she developed the mannerism of nodding and smiling in a knowing way, while widening her eyes and sucking in her cheeks. She fit that expression into scenes whether it made sense or not.

At other times, her aping of other performers is unmistakable. In Montana Moon (1930), she adopts the big blinking eyes and baby talk of Marion Davies, at moments even assuming her speaking voice. The theft is so obvious—and so damning in what it indicates about Crawford’s approach to her craft—that moments are embarrassing to watch seven decades later.

It is not just that Crawford found it hard to come into her technique as an actress. They all struggled, even Garbo, and they all had moments that they hit too hard or too gracelessly. Crawford’s problem went deeper. She had trouble coming into her authenticity. When Jean Harlow is bad in a film—and in her first films, she is as bad or worse than Crawford ever was—she still looks like a human being trying to act. Crawford looked like an act trying to impersonate a human being. Emotional problems certainly contributed to this, but her image didn’t help. Crawford’s public image, in her first years of stardom, was a desperate lie.

Crawford had been the happy flapper when the talkies arrived. She had catapulted to stardom, shaking it up as an impetuous young thing in the youth film Our Dancing Daughters. In The Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which she made her first appearance in a sound film, emcee Conrad Nagel introduces her as “the personification of youth and beauty and joy and happiness.” Imagine any actress being saddled with that. The personification of everything carefree and splendid claimed to be twenty-one. In fact, she was twenty-five, with so many miles on her spirit that the odometer had already turned over twice. In The Hollywood Revue, she sings in a low voice that keeps wobbling out of tune and then dances, stiffly. As any ambitious person might be, Crawford was surely happy to be a star on any terms, but she was too smart not to know that the happy flapper ruse (not to mention flappers, in general) was bound to get old quickly. No wonder she wanted The Trial of Mary Dugan and The Divorcee.

Frederica Sagor Maas, an MGM screenwriter, recalled Crawford’s appearance when she first arrived in Hollywood in 1925. “She was a gun-chewing dame, heavily made up … wildly frizzed hair. An obvious strumpet … Crude as she was, everything about her seemed to say, ‘Look out. I’m in a hurry. Make room!’”

Her first assignment was doubling for Shearer in Lady of the Night. (Her face is visible for a split second in the scene in which Molly and Florence embrace. Crawford is made up as Molly.) Having to play a fake Shearer could not have sweetened her attitude toward the real one. Maas, who wrote two of Shearer’s silent vehicles, recalls that Crawford’s dislike of Shearer was immediate. “They were complete opposites. As warm and outgoing as Norma was, Joan was cold and reserved. Norma was generous in spirit; Joan was calculating.”

It wasn’t just a case of opposites not attracting. It was also a case of like types banging heads. Both were monumentally ambitious, but while Shearer’s ambition was fueled by a confident nature, Crawford’s was fueled by insecurity and aggression. Sensing in Shearer some of the same appetite to eat the world that she herself possessed, how could Crawford not see her rival’s warmth as a big act, a privileged girl’s veneer? While Shearer grew up in comfortable surroundings and only knew hard times when she became a teenager, Crawford was weaned on abuse and rejection. Two daddies deserted the family before she was ten. While still a child, she cleaned toilets in a boarding school for girls and was disciplined with a broom handle.

By the time she made it to Hollywood, by way of the chorus line in New York City, she was determined to make it, determined as no one had ever been determined. “No one decided to make Joan Crawford a star,” says Maas. “Joan Crawford became a star because Joan Crawford decided to become a star.” Crawford didn’t just want it or need it. She believed in it. For Crawford, it wasn’t about money. It was about finding love, the only kind she hadn’t been ruined for.

Silent audiences loved Crawford’s smiling, frenetic energy, and her first talkies suggest a struggle to adapt that silent image to the talking screen. Impulsive but virtuous—that was Crawford’s image. At times it became absurd. In This Modern Age (1931), for example, she is breezy and sexy (and blond), smokes constantly, knows all the dances, knows all the come-ons, and acts like a modern girl. But the second any man flirts with her, she insists on a marriage proposal. Later, when she finds out her mother is a “kept woman,” she throws Mom out of her apartment: “You’re not welcome here.”

Perhaps because Crawford’s essence was so tough, it was necessary to define her as virtuous. In Our Blushing Brides (1930), she was the chaste shopgirl, whose life is contrasted with that of Anita Page, who kills herself after getting rejected by her lover. In Paid (1930), she is a shopgirl turned con woman, but the picture goes out of its way to assure us she is a virgin. (Gangster Robert Armstrong kisses her and says, “You ain’t never—you know what I mean—that’s right, ain’t it?”) She does manage to find her way to the bedroom in Dance, Fools, Dance and in Laughing Sinners (both 1931), but the movies make a point of establishing her as a one-man woman, and in the latter she atones by joining the Salvation Army!

Crawford had little nuance as an actress, even later in her career. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked as an MGM screenwriter in the late thirties, once described the difficulty of writing for her. “She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face.” But after Possessed, in 1931, her deficiencies didn’t matter. Possessed was the turning point. With that film, Crawford connected with her audience in a real way, and with her true self.

“What’s inside—the character stuff—has a way of coming out,” Dorothy Mackaill once said of screen acting. As the small-town drudge who uses her beauty as her ticket to adventure, Crawford in Possessed found a way to come out from behind the screen—to show her longing, her values, and her toughness, and to make them matter to people.

That toughness had worth, even if it eventually became a cliché. Crawford portrayed the desperation and the aspiration of the underdog woman on her own in the world. In many of her films, there’s a moment in which her manner falls away, and she suddenly reveals a core of scalding bitterness. In those moments, she never rings false. Even in still pictures, her hardness has a velocity to it. In the many portraits she made with photographer George Hurrell, she looks like a woman trying to stare down time. In seventy years, she hasn’t blinked.

The flip side of cynicism is hope, and Crawford knew how to convey the hope of a woman in need of rescue. Her portrayal of the prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain (1932) is so exaggerated as to throw doubt on the persistent rumor that Crawford once spent time as a streetwalker. But when she opens up to the preacher (Walter Huston) who is determined to break her spirit, Crawford is marvelous, letting us see the childlike simplicity of this woman.

Later, Dancing Lady (1933) would find her as a chorus girl who tells Broadway director Clark Gable, “I’ve got good legs, Mr. Gallagher.” She says it so earnestly, it’s touching. Later, she gets a charley horse, and Gable massages it out of her. The scene may have been intended to give a titillating glimpse of Crawford’s legs, but the moment is rather one of pathos, a chance to see from what a slender thread the whole great weight of stardom hangs: youth, good health, a nicely-shaped leg. If Crawford is telling us here that she is a brave girl, she has the right. She really is one.

In Possessed, she traded respectability for glamour, yet held on to her human decency. A small-town factory girl sees a train going slowly by and looks as the scenes in each first-class compartment spell out a different vision of wealth and sex and splendor. She sees her destiny, and so did many of the young working-class women in Crawford’s audience, at least in their fantasies. That Crawford herself shared those fantasies, with complete solemnity and no irony, was the bond between her and her audience.

No matter that in a Crawford movie it was axiomatic that all a woman had to sell was her body. She sells it again in Grand Hotel, as the stenographer who trades sex for travel and adventure. Crawford, in life and on-screen, accepted a world run by men and did her best to survive. Her body wasn’t all she had. It was just all she had to sell.

*   *   *

IN 1932, CRAWFORD FOUND someone new to hate—and not a moment too soon, with Shearer about to leave the screen for a year and a half. According to then-husband Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Crawford now “developed a controlled detestation” of Jean Harlow. Crawford even went so far as to make a mutual friend, writer Dorothy Manners, drop Harlow.

Hating Shearer was misplaced, but it was not outside the realm of normal human accomplishment. Hating Harlow took real talent. It was like hating puppies, babies, or flowers. People adored Harlow. Like Buster Keaton or Marion Davies, she was someone about whom no one had a bad word. By all accounts, she was a sweet person, and she remains—decades after her tragic death in 1937—one of the most endearing figures of the screen.

With Garbo, sex was a sacrament. With Shearer, sex was emancipation. With Crawford, sex was a commodity. With Harlow sex was just sex, and that’s refreshing. She had a beautiful body and didn’t mind showing it. When Harlow wore a dress, the dress wanted to come off. Biographer David Stenn reports that, with the cameras running for the rain barrel scene in Red Dust, Harlow stood up, topless, and shouted, “Something for the boys in the lab!” Yet “exhibitionist” isn’t the right word for her. She was unselfconscious and without shame, like Eve before the fall. In every other aspect of her life, she was passive and retiring.

On-screen she played whores, floozies, molls, gold diggers—“sex vultures,” she called them. “She is the only star I know … who is completely different from what she appears to be on screen,” wrote Gladys Hall. “The on-screen glamour is transmuted off screen to a gentle gravity. The hard-boiled character of the blonde bombshell … is the girl who is timid before people she doesn’t know.”

As her career progressed, the floozies she played became more like Harlow; that is, they took on that mix of innocence and brazenness that was in the actress herself. She started her career playing bad women. Then the whores had hearts of gold; later, rings of gold, too. If Garbo made the vamp into a martyr, Harlow, working on a smaller but no less pleasing scale, made the floozy marriageable.

At her most natural, Harlow conveyed the impression of someone who’d been adored since she was a baby; and she was. Her origins were far from low-down. She was born into comfortable surroundings in Kansas City in 1911. There was money on her mother’s side, and her father was a dentist. Harlow married young, and at seventeen, she and her new (and soon to be ex) husband moved to Los Angeles. For a lark, she did extra work in silents and talkies, which led to a big break, her role as a free-spirited party girl in the Howard Hughes aerial epic, Hell’s Angels.

So it came to pass that in 1930 Hollywood and the world got its first glimpse of an unabashedly American, unabashedly sexual young woman who could not possibly have arrived a moment earlier. Harlow played Helen, who is engaged to one aviator and sets about seducing his brother (Ben Lyon), just for fun. Harlow—seven years younger than Crawford, nine years younger than Shearer, and about ten thousand years younger than Garbo—didn’t play Helen as a nasty vamp or as modern woman trying out her freedom. She played her as a happy-go-lucky sensualist.

In her big scene, she brings the brother home and asks a question that has been repeated and misquoted many times since: “Would you be shocked if I changed into something more comfortable?”

“I’ll try to survive,” he answers.

She emerges in a loose-fitting dressing gown, with nothing on underneath. “Life is short. I want to live while I’m alive,” she tells Lyon. When he tries to leave, she presses up against him. From the innocence and verve of her performance, Harlow seems to have no clue why anyone would find Helen objectionable. That, combined with her amateurish acting, made audiences of the time laugh out loud.

“I was at the premiere for Hell’s Angels,” MGM story editor Sam Marx recalled in 1990:

She came to the line, “Would you be shocked if I changed into something more comfortable?”—at that point, you had to pick the audience up off the floor. They didn’t take her seriously at all.

At least they noticed her. Adela Rodgers St. Johns recalled going to a party the night after the Hell’s Angels premiere. “Everyone was talking about Jean Harlow … Everyone agreed she was probably the hottest number anybody had ever seen.”

Having been introduced to the public in this way, it took a while for audiences and casting directors not to see her as a bimbo. Her first films, made on loan-out to other studios, didn’t indicate a talent much beyond her “platinum blond” hair. She was a cold-blooded moll in The Secret Six (1931), a mercenary wife in The Iron Man (1931), a virtuous moll in The Public Enemy (1931), and in Goldie (1931) she achieved the distinction of playing one of the first women ever to be called a “tramp” on-screen. She was a society girl in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931), a good picture, except for Harlow. Yet, interestingly, Mordaunt Hall, the New York Times film critic, reported that when he saw the film, the audience was filled with young women with platinum blond hair. Harlow, even before she could act, had struck a chord.

She was learning her craft. She was also, though no one knew it, suffering from miscasting. Harlow was not about the dark side of sex. She was a happy pagan, with a face unmarred by any jadedness or dissipation. When Harlow complained about her roles and said she wanted out of her contract with Hughes, Picture Play predicted she’d be forgotten within six months. Harlow was willing to risk it. “You can’t guess the pictures I’ve turned down because the moment I’m signed on they change the script to undress me,” she said in the fall of 1931. “I’ve decided I’m going to become an actress, not a professional sex vulture.”

Her miracle year was 1932. In February, The Beast of the City opened, and suddenly Harlow could act. She played another gangland moll, but there was something natural and relaxed about her quality—and sympathetic, too. On the strength of her performance, MGM bought out her contract. The producer Paul Bern had the insight that Harlow’s métier was comedy, and she was cast in Red-Headed Woman (1932).

Again she was a sex vulture, but this time she was a lampoon of one. She was Lil, a gold-digging secretary who sets out to seduce her boss and ruin his marriage. When she meets a richer, older man, she seduces him, too, and behind his back, carries on with the old fellow’s chauffeur (Charles Boyer). “Sex! Sex! Sex!” a local censor from Atlanta complained. “The picture just reeks with it until one is positively nauseated.”

Lil’s wheels are always turning. When the boss (Chester Morris), enraged by her efforts to break up his marriage, slaps her, Harlow’s face lights up. “Do it again! I like it! Do it again!” she exclaims. She is unstoppable, a man’s nightmare presented in comic terms by a woman screenwriter (Anita Loos) and acted by a sharp comedienne. Red-Headed Woman, in addition to proving that Harlow was funny, revealed her as a valiant performer. In this and subsequent films Harlow throws herself into scenes, unguarded, in a volatile free-fall.

November of that year saw the release of Red Dust, the first of Harlow’s signature films and one of her best. With the sex vulture finally buried in satire, the full distillation of the Harlow image emerged. In Red Dust, she is the loose woman capable of loyalty and devotion. She is a pal, a partner, an embodiment of the life force, with no self-pity, lots of humor, empathy, and even wisdom. She plays Vantine, a wise-cracking Saigon prostitute, who shows up at a rubber plantation run by Dennis, a handsome hard case played by Clark Gable at his most virile. He wants to know who she is. “I’m Pollyanna the glad girl,” she cracks.

The wise-cracking prostitute. The good-hearted slut. These are creations of the male imagination, but Harlow inhabits the character with enormous good nature and frankness. Twice in the movie, Gable pulls her onto his lap. It’s hard to imagine another actress looking so comfortable on a man’s lap, without seeming like a professional, even as she’s playing a professional.

In Red Dust, Harlow is contrasted with Mary Astor, as a prim woman who comes to the plantation with her husband, only to fall in love with Gable. Astor is the woman from civilization, and she impresses Gable. But Harlow has her outclassed. She is the more mature and womanly, and her ability to transcend sentimentality allows her to see and appreciate her surroundings. Harlow not only sees Gable. She sees his parrot, whom she talks to. (“What have you been eating, cement?” she asks, as she cleans its cage.) She has a casual and friendly relationship with Gable’s looney servant and with “Gramps,” one of the plantation workers. She can even talk to Astor.

There is a nice moment in the last scene, after Astor and her husband have gone back to where they belong, and Harlow and Gable are alone again in paradise. Reminded of Astor by an item in the newspaper, Gable has a moment of silent brooding. Harlow tells him, “Shake out of it, Fred.” It’s a glimpse of her as a survivor. She appreciates what he has suffered. At the same time, she is without pathos. The moment is funny (his name isn’t Fred), but tender, too. It’s what people like about Harlow.

The breeziness and rightness of Harlow’s performance might come as a surprise when one realizes that in the middle of shooting … there was a shooting. Producer Paul Bern, whom Harlow had married after the release of Red-Headed Woman, blew his brains out over the Labor Day weekend. Entire books have been written about the Bern suicide—some have speculated that he was murdered. The best evidence seems to suggest that he killed himself to avoid being blackmailed by a deranged common-law wife who’d resurfaced in his life. The explanation suggested at the time was that Bern, married to one of the most desirable women on the planet, had killed himself because he was incurably impotent—the sexual equivalent of going around with a million-dollar check and never being able to cash it.

Whatever the reason, the resulting scandal did no harm to Harlow’s career. A week after Bern’s death, she was back in front of the cameras. She went from triumph to triumph in the next five years, and her health gave out before her popularity did. In 1934, while on strike for better wages, she wrote a not-bad novel and said that when her screen career was over, she hoped to take up writing:

When I see the name Jean Harlow in electric lights, I feel the same as I do when I see the name Madge Evans in electric lights. That girl up there is not me. That girl on screen is not me. I have nothing to do with her … We all want to perpetuate ourselves a little … I feel that I can perpetuate the me that is me on paper.

Harlow never got the chance to become a writer. She died at twenty-six of kidney disease. But if the women she portrayed on-screen were not like the real Harlow, the part of them that was special certainly was. The humanity under the brazen exterior, the unexpected gentleness and consideration that went hand-in-hand with adventurousness—that was Jean Harlow. She’ll never go away.

*   *   *

AMERICA WAS BECOMING A country of city dwellers, and the movies were going in for urban types. Ann Dvorak was one. She came from New York and it showed, not in the slangy, lowbrow way of caricature but in a middle-class no-nonsense way. Born into the business in 1912—her father was a Biograph studio manager—she kicked around in bit parts and suddenly emerged as a substantial leading lady in 1932. Slim and dark-haired, Dvorak was like a tough kid sister, the type who knows the score without anybody ever having to explain it to her. It was in the air.

She played a kid sister in her first important role, in Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). Three things distinguished the title character, costar Paul Muni, in that film: 1) a big scar; 2) a predilection for whistling the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor before every gangland rubout; and 3) an incestuous obsession with his sister. Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake of Scarface made the incest more overt; for example, the line, “Do you want to fuck me, Tony?” is not said in the original. But the incestuous feelings were hardly subliminal in the 1932 version. They were there and unmistakable, one more example of the latitude pre-Code Hollywood had in presenting human relationships.

Dvorak had an amazing spring. Scarface was released April 9. The next week, she was the leading lady in the James Cagney vehicle, The Crowd Roars. In May came one of her best films, The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, about an unwed mother who runs afoul of the law. In June, in Love Is a Racket, she was part of the circle of Broadway gossip columnist Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He was the star, but Dvorak was so cool and urbane that she set the atmosphere.

She could do more than that. Later in the year, at the grand old age of twenty, she proved it with Three On a Match, about a wealthy wife and mother who chucks it all for a life of sex, adventure, and cocaine. Dvorak played it like an addict, every nerve raw.

Costarring with Dvorak in that film was Joan Blondell, as the nice woman who marries Dvorak’s ex and steps into her cushy life. Blondell was another urban type and an always welcome pre-Code presence. There is no such thing as a movie so good that it could not be made a little better by Joan Blondell. At least that’s true of movies with urban settings.

Blondell was also from New York. A Broadway actress (she too had a role in The Trial of Mary Dugan), she came to Hollywood for the talkies and can be seen in solid feature roles from 1930 on. But the first of the memorable Blondell roles came a year later. In Night Nurse, she costarred with Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck was the night nurse, and Blondell was the day nurse, in a sordid story about two women who uncover a plot to starve two children to death and collect on the insurance. One of the more twisted pre-Codes, the film’s cynicism was so extreme that it went beyond pain into a kind of demented romanticism.

Blondell was one of the workhorses of Warner Brothers in the pre-Code years. Between 1931 and 1933, she made twenty-seven pictures—as many as Garbo made in her entire career. Yet, for all that overwork, Blondell hardly ever had a false moment. Self-possessed, unimpressed, completely natural, always sane, without attitude or pretense, Blondell was the same at twenty-two as she would be at seventy, in Grease (1978): the greatest of the screen’s great broads. No one was better at playing someone both fun-loving yet grounded, ready for a good time, yet substantial, too.

Her best pre-Code role would come in 1933, with Blondie Johnson, as a gangland crime boss. At the start, she is just a girl struggling to find work, so she can care for her sick mother. She can’t get a job, can’t get government assistance, and one day she comes home and finds her mother is dead. The truth of Blondell’s reaction, her wild grief and sense of betrayal, underlies and gives dimension to the melodrama that follows.

While Blondell might get angry, she was too placid by nature ever to plumb the depths and heights of rage. For scorching, burning, blinding fury we must turn to Blondell’s colleague, Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck was the fighter. No one but Stanwyck had such reserves of hurt and humiliation. Yet, conversely, no one was as unflappable. Stanwyck inhabited as wide an emotional range as James Dean, twenty-five years before Dean’s first film, and she could access any of her emotions at a moment’s notice.

As with Dean, Stanwyck’s stillness was a veneer for an inner life of sensitivity and pain. She had a great way with a cutting remark. “You’re not a man,” she calmly tells her husband in Ten Cents a Dance (1931). “You’re not even a good sample.” Yet, with no inconsistency of character, she could erupt, seconds later, into blind hysteria—into tear-spraying, drool-spitting, shrieking, racking wrath. In almost every one of her pre-Codes, there is a moment when that wire gets tripped and the floodgates open. In Ten Cents a Dance, the husband is on the receiving end; in Night Nurse, it’s a corrupt doctor; in The Miracle Woman (1931), a hypocritical church congregation; in Shopworn (1932), a vicious lawyer; in Forbidden (1932), a married lover; in Ladies They Talk About (1933), a muckraking reformer. The most sordid context for a Stanwyck outburst would come in 1933, with Baby Face. Her father calls her a tramp. She turns on him:

Yeah, I’m a tramp, and who’s to blame? My father! A swell start you gave me. Nothing but men! Dirty rotten men! And you’re lower than any of them! I’ll hate you as long as I live!

What is it about Stanwyck’s rage that makes us like her more, while Crawford’s does not? Perhaps it’s that Stanwyck takes the audience into her pain, while Crawford is all bitterness and self-pity. Stanwyck is not hardened, just hard-boiled enough to fight for herself, and when she does, it’s always at some emotional cost. Strong enough to do anything, she also has the integrity to remain uncorrupted in her essence.

Stanwyck had known poverty and loss. Born in Brooklyn in 1907, she was orphaned as a child and brought up by friends and relatives, mainly by an older sister. She quit school at thirteen and broke into the Follies at age fifteen, a couple of years after Ziegfeld had closed the door on a young Canadian girl named Shearer. She made a Broadway success of herself, and after talkies arrived, went to Hollywood with her husband, Broadway star Frank Fay, whom she married in 1928.

At United Artists, a producer told her that her crooked front tooth would keep her off the screen, but he had a suggestion: “That one crooked tooth can be removed and a false one put in,” he told her.

“Not if you give me the whole studio, I won’t,” she answered. It sounds like a moment from a Stanwyck pre-Code—a snappy comeback covering deep outrage and distress, from a woman with her back to the wall and only one thing to use in her defense: her adamant sense of self. Fortunately for Stanwyck, she also had her talent to rely on. Soon after, crooked tooth and all, she signed non-exclusive contracts with both Columbia and Warners, and the rest is history.

Yet another urban dame emerged in 1932 who must not go overlooked, Oklahoma-born Glenda Farrell, one of the dynamic personalities of the era. Farrell was salty, sexy, cheeky, and irreverent, brassy and blonde, with a sumptuous bad-girl mouth—she looked like she sucked her thumb too much as a child. The mouth gave her a mischievous and libidinous look that was at the same time not the least bit coarse. In an era of fast-talkers, Farrell talked the fastest. Sometimes she was the lead—as in The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), in which she played a reporter. Most often she was the best friend, the girlfriend, the gold digger, the moll, the randy wife. In Life Begins (1932), about women in a maternity ward, she had a supporting role as a pregnant showgirl who hides bootleg whiskey in her hot water bottle and talks a mile a minute about how she wants no part of motherhood. Glenda Farrell’s name in the credits is always good news. Usually comic, always a tough cookie, she is a delight in everything she’s in.

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PARAMOUNT WAS THE MOST sophisticated of the major studios, so it’s appropriate that two of its premiere pre-Code actresses—Miriam Hopkins and Claudette Colbert—emerged in a Maurice Chevalier musical, directed by the Continental master, Ernst Lubitsch. In The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), Colbert played the lover of an officer (Chevalier), who is forced into marriage with Hopkins, a frumpy, love-starved princess. After marriage, the officer refuses to share his wife’s bed, until the lover generously gives the wife a beauty makeover.

In reality, it was Colbert who at this stage needed, if not a makeover, some finishing touches. Colbert would soon transform herself into a vivacious and self-assured screen presence, her mellow voice dripping with worldly amusement and ease. But in 1931 she was still an apple-cheeked ingenue, while the blond and spirited Hopkins was fully formed.

Miriam Hopkins is one of the undiscovered joys of the pre-Code era. She didn’t make many films, but she made a disproportionate number of first-rate ones. She was kittenish and seductive, a mischievous belle from Bainbridge, Georgia, with a sneaky smile, and she could play anything. Hopkins was busting with energy—not the Crawford-like energy of a woman dancing fast to keep the whorehouse customers happy—but the kind of energy that comes from being smarter and faster than everyone else.

She could talk. “The most important thing in life is to have friends who sit around the fire with you and talk—and talk—until someone says, ‘My Lord, it is dawn!’” she once said. The novelist John O’Hara used to go to Hopkins’s parties, which were unlike anyone else’s in Hollywood:

Most of her guests were chosen from the world of the intellect [and were there] because Miriam knew them well, had read their work, had listened to their music, had bought their paintings. They were not there because her secretary had given her a list of highbrows.

She is remembered by film buffs for her feud with Bette Davis during the making of Old Acquaintance (1943), but Hopkins was more than a temperamental scene stealer. Certainly, men liked her. “When I can’t get to sleep, I don’t count sheep, I count lovers,” she said, years after her Hollywood heyday. “And by the time I reach thirty-eight or thirty-nine, I’m asleep.” Hopkins’s charm also inspired this rare rhapsody from Gladys Hall: “She has the most glorious hair I have ever seen, the kindest heart, the keenest wit and the talkingest hands.”

She had a wide range. In 24 Hours (1931), the dowdy princess from The Smiling Lieutenant became a glamorous and world-weary chanteuse. “I’m yours for the takin’/That’s what’s makin’ me rave,” she sings (no voice, lots of gusto). “Baby come and get me/You’re the one I crave.”

By 1932, she was the favorite of two of Paramount’s star directors, Rouben Mamoulian and Lubitsch. (In the forties, she’d pick up another fan in Tennessee Williams, who called her our finest Southern actress.) In Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde she was both adorable and pathetic as Ivy, a sluttish dance hall girl who tries to seduce Dr. Jekyll. Giggling, she removes her stockings and throws them at him, then strips naked (off-camera) and gets into bed, barely covering herself with a thin bed sheet. Hopkins ended the year in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, playing a jewel thief—the lover, partner, and competitor of fellow thief Herbert Marshall.

The end of 1932 was also kind to Claudette Colbert, who came fully into focus in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross. She played the “wickedest woman in the world,” Nero’s wife, Poppaea, who loses her lover to a Christian girl and does what many jilted lovers would do if they had the power: She has her rival thrown to the lions. One might picture a vamp in the role. Instead, we get the warm, knowing Colbert who’d remain virtually unchanged, in manner and look, for the next thirty years; the Colbert with the smile in her voice, who always sounds like it’s midnight and someone just opened the champagne. Colbert’s essence was inescapably twentieth century, and in The Sign of the Cross, she wisely doesn’t bother adjusting her manner for ancient times. She simply plays Poppaea as a breezy modern gal with a temper. She likes to dress up and isn’t particularly religious.

Moralists and religious groups found a lot to object to in The Sign of the Cross. They especially didn’t like the scene in which the Christian girl (Elissa Landi) is humiliated by pagans and a woman tries to sexually arouse her by doing an undulating lesbian dance. TV prints of the film, up until 1993, omitted that footage—and also the sight of Colbert’s breast bobbing up from her sensuous milk bath.

Jewish groups, Protestant groups, and especially Catholic religious and lay organizations throughout the country blasted the film. The Southern Messenger, a Catholic publication, called the picture “downright filth,” and it was condemned from many pulpits. Hollywood had gone too far, and the call went out for boycotts and for concerned citizens to unite to bring Hollywood into line.

The bad news is that this ultimately happened. The good news is that it took a year and a half for them to get their act together. In the meantime, the pre-Code era enjoyed its greatest flowering.