By: Megan McGurk
In the opening scene of She Married Her Boss (1935), Claudette Colbert wears a modified tuxedo, which seems like an inspired choice, since she plays a predecessor to William Powell, who wore a penguin suit to work as a butler in My Man Godfrey (1936). Both Colbert’s Julia Scott and Powell’s Godfrey Park reform dysfunctional wealthy families, a recurring theme in the work of director Gregory La Cava. As an executive secretary to Richard Barclay (Melvyn Douglas), Colbert finagles a deal to run things as smoothly at home as his new bride. The proposal and elopement happen off-camera. After the ceremony, their sexless marriage carries on like a cold business transaction. When Barclay popped the question, I imagine it went something along the lines of ‘Can you buttle?’
Claudette Colbert spends most of the run-time in a quest to consummate their union—to be a wife rather than an employee. As the new Mrs Barclay’s sexual frustration grows, the picture argues that a second shift not only sucks the life from Julia Scott, but commerce in general can be blamed for dousing the fire of her sexual desire. Ultimately she’s left wondering what a woman has to do to get some action.
During the opening scene, she sits behind a desk with two ringing phones and a buzzing intercom. Julia Scott settles a dispute between clerks over which product should receive a better placement in an advertisement for Barclays department store—men’s pyjamas or linens? If viewers hadn’t been convinced by Julia Scott’s name on the door, the image of her dispatching orders wearing a Noel Coward version of office attire clarifies for viewers who really runs the joint.
Robert Kalloch designed the tailored black frock offset by a starched white bib-front, adding extra-wide stiff white lapels and cuffs, and a snappy black bow tie. Colbert’s sleek monochrome look signals a woman who knows her onions. She looks as efficient as an Underwood typewriter with a pulse. Kalloch would later do for Rosalind Russell with chevron striped suits in His Girl Friday (1940) what he does with Colbert in the revamped tuxedo—create upwardly mobile designs for working women.
During his introductory scene as the harried and dyspeptic boss, Mel Douglas as Richard Barclay complains about indigestion from last night’s dinner. Claudette Colbert does four things at once to soothe his irritability: she mixes a bromo, rings a doctor for Barclay’s daughter (also suffering a touch of ptomaine from bad lobster), memorises his request to replace a broken toy piano, and then offers an opinion on the possible acquisition of another department store. Among the list of things Barclay doesn’t know is that his secretary has been in love with him for six years. In woman’s pictures, what men don’t know fills volumes. Julia Scott believes by becoming indispensable to her boss at work and home, he will reciprocate her feelings in time. She’s banking on his affection in an instalment plan. Eventually, he’ll pay off by putting out.
When Julia Scott negotiates a marriage proposal, she expected sex to be part of the deal. Instead of connubial bliss, the heroine discovers a groom who expects a double shift from his new bride. Since she had sorted his office, he now intends she should do the same for his home. Immune to her feminine makeover in ruffles and floral prints, he insists she go back to her business ensembles and join him in the office each day.
In her new role, Julia encounters two obstacles to running a smooth household. Barclay’s daughter and sister compete over who can be the biggest drama queen. Edith Fellows plays Annabel, a pint-sized hellion who holds her family hostage with a series of tantrums. She’s perfectly ghastly in her first scene, where she chases the dog and threatens to cut off its head. Edith Fellows recalled that she loved being able to act like a brat for the camera because her life at home was too strict. When she threw something at Claudette Colbert on the set, she had really been throwing it at her evil grandmother. Annabel’s nurse, played by silent film star Clara Kimball Young, calls the girl ‘Lamby-pie’, an endearment full of wishful thinking. Little Annabel stages a hunger strike on Julia’s first day at breakfast, but meets her match when her new stepmother confiscates a cache of fruit stashed away in a night table drawer.
Katharine Alexander plays Barclay’s sister Gertrude, a society matron whose sole purpose in life is to protect the carpets from fading in the morning sunlight. Alexander builds her performance on a deep well of resentment that women develop when their station in life asks so little of them. No one seems to like or listen to Aunt Gertrude. By way of revenge, Gertrude pays a household staff who serve leathery cuts of meat and spoiled lobster. Hiding behind proper manners, she makes the family eat breakfast with the drapes closed. The carpets are more important than the family’s vitamin-D allowance. If her attack on their digestion or good vision fails, Gertrude resorts to fainting spells to get her way.
Julia finds respite with Jean Dixon, who plays Martha Pryor, a fellow executive secretary who had arranged a job for Julia in Paris, which she nixed because she was hung up on her boss. Instead of leaving well enough alone, and letting a pal continue to moon over the department store owner, Jean Dixon meets with Barclay and uses the job in Paris to speed up his proposal to Julia.
Jean Dixon was born to meddle. She drops by the Barclay pile one afternoon with Lennie Rogers (Michael Bartlett), one of Julia’s former suitors in tow. When Martha meets Annabel, the girl decides she doesn’t like her. Martha fires back that she’s sure she could learn to like her—if she were roasted. Rogers swans in with flowers, undeterred by the gold band on Julia’s finger. Annabel had initially assumed Rogers was her plaything, like everything else in the house. Once he croons a tune at the piano, the girl instantly knows that the song he sings in two languages is nothing more than a cheap seduction gambit aimed at her new stepmother. Next to him on the piano bench, Annabel steals a glance at the singer and Julia, which tells the viewer that she may be tiny, but nothing is over her head.
Annabel blossoms, thanks to the capable Julia Scott. Where other adults saw plain impudence and threw up their hands, the new Mrs Barclay sees an overactive imagination left to spoil. Julia Scott channels Annabel’s creative impulses in song. The minute an adult starts to take her seriously and communicate in a meaningful way, a change occurs in Annabel as quickly as when Julia opens the drapes in the breakfast room. Suddenly, Annabel is bright and animated, itching to share verses that tell a story about Gwendolyn the rabbit.
Reforming a child only takes up so much of her time, leaving Julia’s sexual frustration to grow. Julia’s neglected libido prompts a meltdown in a Philadelphia shop window (the new department store her husband acquired). In a display case for living room furniture, wooden dummies become a stand-in for stolid bourgeois families like the Barclays. The mannequins are bloodless as her marriage. Julia and Rogers sit at the piano that’s part of the living room set, swig from a bottle of gin, singing ‘The Old Grey Mare’ on a loop. The nursery rhyme takes on a larger significance. Taken in context of Julia’s empty bed, the ‘ain’t what she used to be’ is a double entendre for a hot babe left to wither on the vine.
Richard’s prudish reaction to the tabloid photo of his wife deep in her cups is finally Julia Scott’s deal-breaker. Tired of waiting for her husband to come to his senses and get busy in her boudoir, she calls it quits. She’ll join Rogers for a voyage to Cuba. Julia gives Barclay an inspired speech about how much she hates business and stores and everything that turns people into machines. Annabel catches the tail end of Julia’s exit. She laughs at her father, saying that he doesn’t know anything about women. She skips away with a sing-song tribute: ‘Daddy’s a dumbbell. Daddy’s a dumbbell’. Flabbergasted, Barclay reacts by getting plastered.
Richard Barclay calls the butler in for a little feedback. When Franklyn (Raymond Walburn) suggests mildly that the man of the house might benefit by loosening up, the boss orders him to retrieve a hidden bottle of hooch. Alone in the room, hands in pockets, Barclay observes, sotto voce: ‘I was loose before you got one leg over the crib’. He delivers the line with an added ‘humpf’ at the end for emphasis. Mel Douglas minted his romantic leading man status by tossing away this doozy. The idea that a man more tightly wound than piano wire has an inner scapegrace poised to unfurl at a moment’s notice adds a whole new dimension to his character.
In an expedited quest to prove he’s more than a stuffed shirt, and win back his bride, Mel Douglas joins the ranks of 1930s-era swoon merchants. The scene where he drives steaming drunk, may not have aged well, but the prospect of a man who will do anything to show himself worthy of a woman retains its appeal. The picture’s success prompted Harry Cohn to exercise his contract option with Mel Douglas. For years, Douglas shuttled between MGM and Columbia, billed next to a roster of leading ladies including Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Joan Blondell, and Merle Oberon.
More people have talked about Claudette Colbert’s insistence that she should only be photographed on the left side than have noted she snagged an Oscar for playing in a comedy. The famous ‘dark side of the moon’ reference to Colbert’s under-seen right profile nearly always appears in a discussion of her screen credits. Sets were specifically designed to accommodate her preference. Some critics dismiss the camera angle as mere caprice from a film star. But I say it goes with the territory of being billed above the title. From her viewpoint, she had been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anyone else, so she knew what’s best. If she failed to protect her career and image, who else would? Mitchell Leisen, who had directed Colbert in four pictures (Midnight, Arise My Love, No Time for Love, Practically Yours) debunked the claim that there was anything wrong with the right side of her face. Leisen observed a slight dent in Colbert’s nose which was partially visible from the right side (an injury sustained from a car crash years earlier). Even if the camera didn’t pick it up, the bigger issue is that Claudette Colbert knew it was there and preferred not to worry about her appearance. During the studio system, everyone on the set worked hard so that the star could relax and do her job without being self-conscious. A request to favour the left side seems a small price to pay to reassure a top box office performer that she looks her best. Colbert’s preference for the left side was hardly an air-tight edict. Throughout multiple films, the camera shoots Colbert from the front and even the right side.
For decades, from Frank Capra’s The Love of Mike (1927) to Texas Lady (1955), Claudette Colbert played women who were made up of sass, grit, and had a healthy libido. Only a few leading ladies from the transition of sound were still playing romantic leads in the mid-1950s, but Claudette Colbert handily joined them. When she was 52 years old, she played a newspaper boss who makes Barry Sullivan lose the run of himself. Sullivan was nearly ten years her junior, which in Hollywood years probably doubles the length of their age difference. Colbert’s cheekbones are still as sharp and smooth as a diamond necklace.
Claudette Colbert’s box office gave her the ability to work with the best leading men in Hollywood, including Clark Gable, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea, Ray Milland, and Fred MacMurray. She worked with the great directors: Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Dorothy Arzner, Gregory La Cava, Cecil B DeMille, Henry King, Mitchell Leisen, George Cukor, Preston Sturges, and Douglas Sirk among others. If her second film with Capra opened her range with the screwball adventure, her second film with director Gregory La Cava proved Colbert had a feather-light touch in romantic comedy.
Tay Garnett includes a story in his memoir about signing a contract with Columbia at the same time as Gregory La Cava. Garnett was assigned to direct She’s Can’t Take It (1935), a screwball romance about a spoiled society dame (Joan Bennett), who falls for an ex-bootlegger (George Raft). La Cava was hired after the success of Private Worlds (1935), a sensitive picture about humane therapy in a psychiatric hospital, produced by Walter Wanger for Paramount, starring Claudette Colbert.
Garnett and La Cava waited for nearly an hour before their new boss would see them. Ushered into the studio head’s office, the directors had to compete with the radio for Cohn’s attention. The latest race from the track Santa Anita filled the room. Harry Cohn chewed on a stogie while he laid down the law of the land. In his usual blustery style, Cohn told the new hires that he ran the studio as he saw fit—that he was the sole authority in a town where he bent a knee to no one. Garnet recalls that La Cava mildly offered to return the following day when Cohn had more time. Their meeting was interrupted by a call from Louis B Mayer. Cohn took his feet off the desk, stood up, straightened his tie, and changed his tone to greet the mogul of MGM.
La Cava’s reasonable suggestion was characteristic of his method for dealing with front office hot heads over the years. If a producer or studio boss turned up the volume, La Cava took it down a notch. Once the bully tactics appeared, over the absence of a completed script, or falling off schedule, La Cava dug in his heels and remained calm. Instead of rising to meet the testosterone in the room, La Cava took an even pitch. He would let the suits blow their cool and then quietly carry on with doing things according to his own plan. He had his way and the men in the front office had theirs.
La Cava’s first picture for Columbia, She Married Her Boss (1935), defined a string of hits that continued for years. When we talk about standouts among directorial runs, it would be tough to match La Cava’s consecutive gold standards: She Married Her Boss (1935), My Man Godfrey (1936), Stage Door (1937), Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), Primrose Path (1939), and Unfinished Business (1941). La Cava’s lucky streak relied on a method that included off-the-cuff scripts and an improvisational ‘let’s see how it works’ approach that required patience and trust.
Harry Cohn’s bombastic reputation would appear to make him the least likely of the moguls to gel with a director who worked with an unfinished script. Biographer Bob Thomas explains that Cohn expected people to have confidence in a project. They should be able to stand up to him and articulate a picture’s merits. Writers and producers had to believe in what they were doing, not fold under his brow-beating. Screenwriter Sidney Buchman never flinched when Cohn pulled a cigar out of his maw and shouted abuse. The best way to get respect from Cohn was to shout louder or keep an even temperament. If you cowered, your days were numbered in Columbia. Cohn’s association with Buchman was one of the longest professional relationships he had known. Buchman’s rapport with Cohn was so unique that he scored a major victory for writers who were nearing a script deadline. Buchman argued they should be able to finish writing at home, rather than punch a clock, just because the boss liked to see scribes busy at their desk on the lot. Butts in chairs had been a clause enshrined in the studio contract, until Sidney Buchman advised Cohn that if he wanted the ideas he had shaving in the morning, in addition to those on the clock, concessions would need to be made for the creative process.
For his first picture with Columbia, La Cava worked with Sidney Buchman to develop a script adapted from a story by Thyra Samter Winslow (a former chorine turned novelist and screenwriter). The men held a similar outlook which allowed them to remain impervious to the noise from the front office and remain focused on the story. They also shared a ‘soak the rich’ ethos, through a refusal to glorify wealth and privilege. La Cava often anchored his pictures with women who worked hard to get ahead. In La Cava’s cinematic economy, women know their onions. Instead of a bank balance, posh address, or their name on a social register, women in La Cava’s pictures showed men that they should try to earn the love of a good woman. A man without a job might be considered a bum, but a man without feelings is nothing more than a wooden dummy, as in the scene where Claudette Colbert drowns her horny sorrows among mannequins in a shop window.
Eric Hatch, author of the novel Godfrey, recalled La Cava’s screenwriting method while he worked with the director and Morrie Ryskind on My Man Godfrey (1936). Most of the script was developed through discussion rather than written drafts. La Cava preferred to talk each scene through beforehand and made changes once shooting began, according to the dynamics between actors on set. After three months collaborating on the script, Hatch returned to New York. Hatch went to a menswear shop, bought a dress shirt, tore off one cuff, and posted it to La Cava, with a tag labelled ‘final shooting script’.
On the set, La Cava’s commitment to improvisation played a key role in retaining a woman’s point of view, which might have been overlooked by the male screenwriters or the director himself. La Cava knew he was sitting on a goldmine of salty colloquialisms once he assembled the cast of Stage Door, which is why he had his secretary eavesdrop on the women in the Footlights Club when the camera wasn’t rolling. La Cava had on tap what George S Kaufman’s play lacked—the real thing.
Although La Cava receives more attention for the pictures he made with Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, or Irene Dunne, he made two big hits with Claudette Colbert in 1935—Private Worlds and She Married Her Boss. Initially, he had written Colbert off as a ‘nice girl’. The director wrote an article for Photoplay magazine in November 1935, where he explained why he felt nice girls rarely gave exceptional performances. Too wrapped up in convention, ‘nice girls’ hid behind notions of propriety, and lacked access to a rich interior life of emotion. He preferred an actress with a red-hot, inflammable temperament. La Cava noted that Claudette Colbert tended to be worrisome. During production, Colbert worried about her acting, her weight, her contracts, what other people thought, as well as the larger problems in the world.
One day on the set of Private Worlds, he designed a test to see if she could take a joke. Unlike Woody Van Dyke, who pushed Myrna Loy into a swimming pool at a party to see if she would respond like Nora Charles, La Cava pulled a less shocking gag. He hung a sign on the back of her chair with a nickname ‘The Fretting Frog’. The crew braced themselves for an explosion from the star. Colbert surprised everyone and howled with laughter. She passed La Cava’s test by having a sense of humour about herself. The next day, Colbert responded in kind. She hung a prop card on the director’s chair labelled ‘Dangerous Ward, Dr Lucius La Cava’, a reference to the psychiatric hospital where the film was set.
La Cava recalled a day on set when Claudette Colbert argued for what her character would do in a situation. She shouted at him for not being able to see the woman’s point of view. The director confessed in the Photoplay piece that he deliberately provoked an outburst from the leading lady. He wanted Colbert to fight for what she felt was right for her character. By defending the way to play a scene, Colbert deepened her emotional investment.
As a result of the psychology La Cava used in production in a film about therapy, the picture boosted everyone’s stock in the film colony. It set La Cava up to make a string of hits that eschewed the screwball champagne aesthetic for the milk of human kindness. La Cava reteamed with Colbert and continued to showcase a versatile star who was more than just a ‘nice girl’. In their second picture, Claudette Colbert struggles with the problem for ambitious career gals who, in the illustrious words of Tess McGill, hae ‘a mind for business and a bod for sin’.
Edith Fellows joined a crowd of two hundred girls who auditioned for the part of Annabel Barclay. When she walked in La Cava’s office, his friend, comedian Benny Rubin, took one look at her and said ‘this is your kid’. Edith adored working with La Cava. At the time, he was dating Pert Kelton, an actress who could out-Bowery Mae West. Kelton had been taking voice lessons at the time. Once La Cava heard Edith sing, he introduced her to Kelton’s coach, and paid for half a year of lessons.
Among the cautionary tales about children in Hollywood, Edith Fellows experienced one of the worst cases of family exploitation. Edith’s mother left when she was two years old. She was raised by a stage-struck grandmother who had the girl performing when she was only a toddler. After one of Edith’s dance numbers in front of a crowd, a talent scout offered a screen test with Hal Roach studio in Hollywood in return for a $50 publicity fee. Edith’s grandmother paid the man and bought train tickets. Once they arrived, they found an empty lot for the address the agent had written on a card. The grandmother had been swindled. Mrs Fellows took a cleaning job while she sent Edith to a neighbour’s house. The neighbour’s son happened to work as an extra in pictures. One day he had a call in the Hal Roach studio and Edith tagged along.
Starting in 1929, Edith was cast in pictures with Charley Chase, the Little Rascals, WC Fields, Tom Mix, and Laurel and Hardy. She juggled a busy studio schedule and while Edith’s grandmother hovered close by and kept her from making friends. Edith wasn’t allowed to play with other kids because it might leave her with bruises, or in some way damage her chances at an audition. One year, Edith’s grandmother threw her a birthday party but didn’t invite any children. Mrs Fellows invited her own friends and left forlorn Edith sitting alone. If not for Edith’s teacher on the Columbia lot, Lillian Bartley, who became a close friend, the child star would have been completely isolated.
Edith Fellows had another source of support in the studio—from the mogul Harry Cohn. The first time Edith heard Cohn, she was on the set of She Married Her Boss, improvising a scene with La Cava, Colbert, and Douglas. At the time, she didn’t know the sound stage was wired with speakers. Cohn liked to listen in on a production to check if his employees were working or horsing around. The cast must have been acting too off the cuff for Cohn. He flipped on the speaker and shouted at the actors to get to work. Edith thought it must have been the voice of God booming at them.
The first time Edith met the studio boss, she was summoned to Cohn’s office with her grandmother. She remembers the long walk to his desk. Edith sat behind her grandmother, braced for another dressing down. She was astonished when Cohn reserved his salty tongue for her grandmother, chiding her for putting cheap clothes on Edith’s back, which reflected poorly on his studio. Motivated by the dollar signs that always floated in her peripheral vision, Mrs Fellows replied that Shirley Temple’s mother received a salary for taking care of her daughter. Mrs Fellows stuck out a brass neck and said she should have one, too. Harry Cohn had a cigar screwed in his face when he snarled that she would get nothing and like it. Little Edith was delighted. At last, someone was getting back at the woman who made her life a living hell.
Edith earned rave reviews for her role as the reformed brat Annabel. On the strength of her first role for Columbia, the twelve-year-old was given a seven-year contract. While she was filming Pennies from Heaven with Bing Crosby in 1936, Edith’s mother turned up with her hand out. Edith’s mother launched a custody battle claiming that her daughter had been kidnapped by her former mother-in-law. The courts resolved the suit by awarding custody to Edith’s grandmother and ordered that the girl’s earnings be placed in a trust fund. When Edith went to collect the money, which had been estimated at $100,000 the account balance dwindled to $900. After Edith’s grandmother finally died in 1941, she had staged a fainting attack with Lillian Bartley so she could rush away from the gravesite. In the car on the way home, Edith laughed her head off.
If the two female pronouns in the title failed to provide a clue, She Married Her Boss is a woman’s picture and one of the biggest gems from an era when women ruled Hollywood for three decades.