回复：【长篇阅读】公子的传记

Ruth was stunned. How could the public appreciate his “lovely profile” that was so very perfect, especially when he was doing a love scene, if he bounced around in a boxing ring? Furthermore, if she did not have to go to a prayer meeting that night, she would call Mr. Mayer and rush to the studio for a long talk with him. Did he know what his studio was doing to her son? And if so, why?
Bob was silent for a moment. He knew Ruth was genuinely concerned and didn’t know quite how to go about putting her mind at ease.
His next movie was Stand Up and Fight, The title alone made her gasp. “O, dear God, dear God . . .”
Taylor put his hands gently on her shoulders—“Please don’t worry about the name of the movie—it sounds awful, that’s all. It has noting to do with boxing.I’m gonna play the part of a guy who just wants to build a railroad. Mr. Mayer picked me, Mother, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Anyway, so far he’s kept us out of the poorhouse . . .” And he laughed.
So did Ruth.
Wallace Beery teamed up with Taylor in Stand Up and Fight and it was Taylor who was seen with blood streaming down his classic face.

The picture was good, but the best thing came out of it was a lasting friendship between Taylor and Wallace Beery.
Ruth was right about the type of pictures her son was making. He was getting acclaim because the public enjoyed seeing him roughed up rather than appreciating his acting ability.
Yet, throughout his long career with MGM he never turned down a role offered to him. He took what they gave him without protest.
Barbara, on the other hand, was an independent rarely under exclusive contract to any studio. She picked her pictures carefully and though not temperamental, she did her fighting beforehand. If the script could not be changed to her liking, she refused to do the movie.
At this time, friends wondered why she did not influence Bob in his career. They felt she could have talked him into or out of anything.
She claimed she was too busy with her own professional problems to worry about his. If he wished to be MGM’s property,she had no right stepping in. But she had no intention of being owned by anystudio, and she had the spunk to handle it. Bob did not.

Chapter 6
In February, 1939, during the production of Lucky Night, with Myrna Loy, Barbara and Bob announced their formal engagement. Louella Parsons predicted it two months earlier when Bob gave his “secret fiancee” a diamond and ruby bracelet for Christmas. He also included a St.Christopher medal (The Saint of Travel) engraved “God Protect Her Because I Love Her.”
They put both ranches up for sale, but otherwise did not discuss marriage.
Clark Gable told Bob, “Baby, betcha Carole[Lombard] and I beatcha to the preacher!”
Taylor took the bet but even he did not know when MGM would give him permission. He had been seeing Barbara for three years and there was no doubt in his mind that he truly loved her, but unlike his frantic begging in 1937, he wasn’t terribly anxious to go through with it now.
He felt very much alone on his trip to England and he knew that A Yank at Oxford was his last chance: his career was gliding nicely at last and he wasn't afraid any more.
But Barbara had done many favors for him and through her he had learned something about sophistication and what life was all about. He would be the first one to admit he had a long way to go, but she definitely had helped put him on the right path.
In fact, she had done more for him than his own mother ever could. When he really needed Ruth she was too engrossed in the spotlight and excitement of being Robert Taylor’s mother to speak to him logically.

MGM was using reverse psychology. Taylor had been seen with the same woman for a long time and though never spelled out, it was taken forgranted he and Barbara were “living together”—an unaccepted and naughty arrangement in 1939.
The cameras were rolling on Robert Taylor and Hedy Lamarr in Lady of the Tropics when Mayer stopped production for twenty-four hours.
MGM had made arrangements for a wedding andon May 13th, Barbara and Bob eloped.
They drove to San Diego to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Whelan. Joining them were Mr. and Mrs. Zeppo Marx; Ida Koverman, L. B. Mayer’s secretary; Buck Mack, Barbara’s godfather; and Dale Frantz, a friend.
The wedding party had a buffet supper and after midnight, to avoid being married on the unlucky thirteenth day, the ceremony began in a room filled with roses.
Barbara was dressed in a new blue silk dress and borrowed hat from her hairdresser, Holly Barnes, whom Barbara had stood up for the day before. Buck Mack gave the bride away.
She was very calm and spoke distinctly.
Taylor, in a brown business suit, was visibly shaken and he mumbled.

Judge Phil Smith was so nervous he cleared his throat several times and by the end of the ceremony he could hardly talk.
The bride’s wedding ring was a slender gold band circled with rubies which matched the bracelet Bob had given her for Christmas.
At 2:00 p.m. that day the Taylors met the press at a reception at the Victor Hugo Café in Beverly Hills. Joel McCrea was the first to telephone congratulations and William Holden sent a telegram—GOSH, WHAT A BLOW!and signed it “Golden Boy.”
The Taylors said they had taken out their marriage license three days earlier under their real names, Ruby Stevens, age thirty-one, and Spangler Arllington Brugh, age twenty-seven. They admitted that at the time they did not know exactly when or where the marriage would take place.
Taylor confessed years later that when MGM eventually gave in to his getting married, they masterminded the whole affair and he wasn’t sure what was happening. “I wasn’t even sure I was in love . . . The only thing I was allowed to say about the whole thing was ‘I do.’”
The Daily News wrote. “The Number One Heart Throb of the movies eloped with Barbara Stanwyck leaving the set of Lady of theTropics and teh beautiful Heddy Lamar. There, there, girls, bear up and try not to take it too hard. You know it was ordained by fate.”

The unwritten consensus of the press and the feelings of those who were close to the newlyweds were that it was Barbara Stanwyck who married Robert Taylor—not the other way around.
Their wedding took place less than a month after Clark Gable and Carole Lombard cracked the ice for the little group of Hollywood stars whose long and close relationships recently caused a fan magazine to describe them as “unmarried husbands and wives.”
After the press reception, Barbara returned to her ranch, and Bob went to see Ruth, who was hysterical, sobbing quietly but constantly. She had called the doctor, who said if she continued to refuse food he might have to put her in the hospital. He gave her a sedative, but when Bobwalked in the door she covered her face with her hands and wept.
They talked—finally—but the word “wedding”was not mentioned: rather, they referred to it as “it.”
Bob knew he would find Ruth depressed and ill. He assured her nothing would change and tried to joke about it. “Gosh,Mother, you know when I’m working sometimes I get so tired I don’t feel like driving all the way out to the ranch. I’ll stay here often!”
They had coffee, but Ruth complained that she truly felt sick and very weak. She’s get some rest but, “Will you check my heartbeat every so often during the night . . . just to make sure?”
The following morning he was back on the set with Hedy Lamarr, going through another wedding in Lady of the Tropics, and Barbara returned to the filming of Golden Boy with William Holden.
With both ranches still up for sale, the Taylors settled down at his place temporarily with Dion Fay who adored his stepfather and referred to him always as “Gentleman Bob.”

Lady of the Tropics was Hedy Lamarr’s great accomplishment. Critics said, “She is more beautiful than Robert Taylor—if you can believe that!”
Remember?, a light comedy with Greer Garson, followed, and Taylor labored at it. With this film came a decided change in him—restlessness, quiet displeasure, lonely valiantness, gallant hopefulness.
The film was so bad that Hollywood press said, “It may have been the very desolation of Remember? when it was released that began appealing to our sense of fair play. We have it if you dig down deep enough!
“Whatever it was, we know you could feel Hollywood mood toward Robert Taylor changing from that day on. What lies in the future for him, none of us can prophesy, but it does seem that he has taken too much punishment.”
Mayer agreed with the press. He told Bob, “You’re in a slump, boy, but it happens to every top star. Spencer Tracy couldn’t get ajob when we put him under contract. Some said he was finished and not a God damn soul thought he was any good. Twentieth Century Fox fired him because he refused to do a film,and I didn't want him because he had been arrested for drunkenness and resisting arrest in Ariona.
“Hell, nobody wanted Spence. He was a trouble-maker like Berry,but Thalberg thought he knew what to do with him. I sure didn’t!
"So there's your great idol,son. If it can happen to Spence, it can happen to you. Have I ever failed you?"
“Nope!”

After a brief honeymoon with Barbara at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home of playwright Moss Hart, Taylor made his next movie, Flight Command, with Walter Pidgeon and Ruth Hussey. He took the part of a cocky Navy Ensign and became so involved with his role as a flier, that in 1940 he decided to take flying lessons.
Barbara was terrified of airplanes, but Taylor spent every minute of his spare time in the air with instructor Max Constant. This new hobby was the beginning of many disagreements between Bob and Barbara. She felt he was already spending too much time fishing with Spencer Tracy or at the Hunt Club with Clark Gable.
She was afraid of guns and was upset every time Bob handled one. Now it was airplanes: “He’s not happy on the ground anymore.” But no matter how much he pleased with her to fly with him, she cringed at the very thought.
When they moved into a house at 400 St. Cloud Street in Bel Air, an exclusive area in Los Angeles, Bob felt very much “fenced in.” He had not sold his ranch in the valley and kept his horses there, but it wasn’t the same. He enjoyed riding at will in the country.
The Taylor’s home was rented to them furnished by Coleen Morris’ mother, and though this was a temporary arrangement, it did not please Bob. He preferred having his own belongings, furniture, gun rack and kitchen designed to his liking.

Barbara was delighted to be back in town.Her career was flourishing and she was among Hollywood’s top ten money-makers in the 40’s. Such movies as The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire were all Oscar material and she was nominated again for the latter, in which she played a flashy night club singer. However, she lost again, to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion.
Taylor’s career was sporadic, and at long last he spoke out about what was happening to him. “I’ve kept my mouth shut because there was nothing I could do. I hoped that A Yank at Oxford would solve my problems and that the tempest would blow over, but when I returned from England, the reporters were there poking their camera at every part of my body.
“My impulse was to poke someone in the nose.
“I think I would have pulled out of that all right if my pictures hadn’t started going to pot. I did what the studio wanted, but I can only blame myself for Lucky Night. I picked that one myself and it was a flop!
“Several times I snuck out to the studio and got them to run off Magnificent Obsession for me. I sat watching the picture that I had made in 1936 trying to figure out what I had then that I’d lost.
“What baffled me was that it had been an instinctive piece of acting when I didn’t know any better. I’d sit there in the darkness, getting myself all pepped up and then the picture would end and—boom!—down I’d go again!”
He emphasized that Barbara had been loyal to him in so many different ways during this period. She knew Hollywood. He did not. There was no explaining why, she said, one gives a polished performance in one picture and yet with a good script is rotten in the next. Bob’s problem was that his career was never on an even keel—rather very good or very bad. Actors, if they are lucky, go along doing “well” and the critics say “good performance” about anything they do, but Taylor was just not destined to follow this pattern.

Bob concluded his statement: “After Barbara and I were married and settled down on the ranch, I’d go walking around the place—God damn happy to be so lucky to just be living there—stop by a flower patch and do a little gardening or exercise the horses. Then I’d be back at the studio—mentally, that is, and I’d go crazy trying to figure out my future . . .if any . . .”
Taylor’s form of courage was “survival”—at least that is what he called it and Barbara agreed. He was taking a beating, but he had survived the initial attack in the Pretty Boy Era, the continued newspaper bombardments that went on for years, and then radio commentators’ poisonous bits. But now he would somehow have to survive the lemons that bore his name on marquees, all coming without any time for one decent breath of fresh air.
When Barbara managed a few days off, she liked to curl up with a good book or script. Bob felt obligated to stay home with her, staring at his fishing equipment and guns.
“He made me so nervous,” she said. “If he couldn’t use his rifles, he was cleaning them. I thought I’d go crazy watching him aiming those things at every dish in my china cabinet so I ‘shooed him out of town to Wyoming to try them out. It was self-protection!”

Yet it was she who added a pair of superb hunting rifles to his collection.
When Taylor wasn’t up in an airplane or courting the forests and streams, he was at the typewriter jotting notes to himself —or he was in the kitchen. It was his favorite room in the house. He always knew what was going on “in there” and loved to cook. He made the meals for himself and Barbara when the cook was off and bought every cookbook, foreign and domestic, that he came across. He could not resist kitchen gadgets. If it had been invented, he had it!
Barbara was good at opening cans.
Some of Bob’s friends suggested that he and Barbara do a movie together. When they were single, His Brother’s Wife and This Is My Affair were both very good and the audiences and critics agreed they liked them together on the screen. But Bob said he didn’t think the public would pay to see a married couple make love to each other in a picture. “Barbara’s awonderful actress though, and she coaches me for all my pictures. You know something? She’s the only actress I ever heard of who learns all of the script before they starting shooting.She just learns it like a play so on the set if they want to add or change a line, she is able to tell them whether it will fit in with the rest of the story.”

Taylor admitted he always had an inward fear of not knowing his lines, but rarely did he forget one word of dialogue. He gave Barbara credit for that, even though at everything he did, he was a perfectionist.
“When I was just about convinced I had been forgotten, MGM handed me the script of Waterloo Bridge,” Taylor said. “It was an actor’s dream and the role fitted me better than a pair of custom-made shoes!”
The movie was a cinematization of Robert E. Sherwood’s play, the bitter-sweet story of a British soldier who falls in love with a ballerina. He is reported killed in action, and his sweetheart, who has lost her job and is desperate for money in war-torn London, turns to prostitution.
When her lover returns, she feels unfit for his love and rather than reveal her past to him, she throws herself in front of a truck on Waterloo Bridge, where they had met for the first time.
Today the film stands out as one of the greats. It was this movie that made “Auld Lang Syne” a love song, and no two people looked better on a dance floor than Vivien Leigh in a white flowing chiffon gown, and Robert Taylor in his British dress uniform.

Perhaps it was the opening scene: Taylor standing in a heavy London fog on the bridge looking down over the Thames, reflecting his dead love—his hair sprinkled with gray—that told the audiences this was the Taylor they had been waiting for—the Taylor he was—Taylor, the actor, the man, the professional.
Since it was the custom of all English officers during the First World War to wear a mustache, he was required to wear one—the mustache he was to shave off and grow again with monotonous regularity through the years.
It did, however, give him distinction and maturity and transformed a juvenile pretty face to one of character.
Waterloo Bridge was the second movie Taylor had made with Vivien Leigh. He always mentioned her as one of the most talented and most beautiful women in motion pictures. “How well I remember,” he said, “one day between scenes in A Yank at Oxford her asking me, in a most interesting manner, what an American Southern accent sounded like.
“When I saw her a few years later giving that magnificent performance in Gone With the Wind, I couldn’t help wondering if, even then, she wasn’t rehearsing for the Oscar she so validly won.”
With the release of Waterloo Bridge Taylor’s popularity was restored. He was back on top, but this time as an established motion picture performer. The reviews were excellent.
More important, his appeal was no longer limited. He still maintained his popularity with the younger crowd, but their parents also flocked to see him, including the fathers! Waterloo Bridge would always be his favorite movie and was the beginning of a series of successes for the nearly forgotten Robert Taylor.

Mervyn LeRoy, who directed Waterloo Bridge,was assigned to Escape, in which Taylor con-starred with Norma Shearer. It was released only a few months after the premiere of Waterloo Bridge and proved to be a good follow-up.
In 1941, Billy the kid was reborn on celluloid. It was Taylor’s first of many Westerns and his first color film.
The only problem he faced was making his blue eyes steely enough in the technicolor close-ups.
Taylor loved playing Billy and said he was damn careful to see to it that everything was as perfect as possible. “Billy gets killed in the end and when we reached the final death scene I wanted the audience to realize and to feel just how tough Billy was. I wanted the camera to pick up the look of hatred and contempt in his cold piercing eyes.
“I wasn’t satisfied. My blue eyes were a handicap, but I wouldn’t give in.
“I went to a doctor and got some drops that made my pupils contract, and when the camera rolled and the lights were trained on me, the camera-man saw my pupils contracting into tiny, needle-steel points.Perfect! Only trouble was I couldn’t see a thing! The lights had made me temporarily blind and we were unable to finish the picture until the next day.I played it straight—blue eyes and all—and died on schedule.
“I’ll tell ya—if I could have lived in another century, I’da chosen somewhere in the West. I’d be a cowboy, and maybe that’s why I liked Billy. I’d probably have been shot to Kingdom Come if I’d lived then, so it may be just as well as I was born in the twentieth century.”
He handled his guns and horses as well as Billy, despite the fact he had to learn a fast-draw with his left hand.

Many said Taylor should not have played Billy the Kid,mainly because—although his playing the outlaw was extremely well done—he was just too likable! The public couldn’t hate him. At the end of the movie when he allows himself to be killed in a duel with his friend the sheriff, portrayed by Brian Donlevy, drawing with his right hand deliberately, the audience was actually disappointed when the despicable renegade was rightfully shot to death.
Warner’s had made Errol Flynn America’s Robin Hood, Twentieth Century’s hero was Tyrone Power as Jesse James, and MGM put Robert Taylor in movie history books as Billy, and with the one exception where a critic wrote that Taylor looked like a little boy with a new cowboy suit, the reviews were excellent.
Barbara had given him the horse he rode inthe movie and from then on he would try to use his own guns, saddle and horse in each and every Western he filmed.
In When Ladies Meet he was reunited with Joan Crawford and Greer Garson. Though comedy was not Taylor’s forte, he came across well as the conceited, frisky and lovable playboy. It was not a difficult movie to make and there was more laughing on the set during rehearsals than in the script.