Frank Capra wrote the first draft of Ladies of Leisure, before Jo Swerling took over. According to his interview "I went to my hotel, locked myself in my room and for five days pounded out a rewrite story of the plot I'd heard, interrupting the writing only long enough for black coffee, sandwiches and brief snitches of sleep. I was simply writing a newspaper yarn with a longer deadline than usual. The result was Ladies of Leisure."
According to Frank Capra's autobiographical book, he dismissed using Barbara Stanwyck when their interview went badly. Frank Fay, Stanwyck's husband at the time, called Capra up, furious over Stanwyck's having come home from the interview, crying. Capra blamed Stanwyck, saying she acted like she didn't even want the part. Fay responded, "Frank, she's young, and shy, and she's been kicked around out here. Let me show you a test she made at Warner's." (The test was for "The Noose," a Broadway play Stanwyck starred in and also a film made without Stanwyck in 1928 by John Francis Dillon for First National.) Capra was so impressed that he left the screening immediately to get Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia, to sign up Stanwyck as quickly as possible.
Several sources list Graves' character name incorrectly as "Jerry Strange". (Perhaps his name was spelled thus in the silent version?) But in the soundtrack of the talkie version, spoken dialog clearly identifies his surname as "Strong", including the crucial phone call (trying to save the heroine's life), in which he says, "I'm Jerry Strong."
The play "Ladies of the Evening" by Milton Herbert Gropper opened at the Lyceum Theatre in New York on 23 December 1924 and closed in May 1925 after 159 performances. The opening night cast included Beth Merrill as "Kay," and James Kirkwood as "Jerry Strong." The play was produced by David Belasco