by Ray Hagen
Her third movie that year was You Belong to Me, another comedy with Fonda, not bad but not a patch on The Lady Eve. “Stanwyck can act the hell out of any part,” Fonda later said, “and she can turn a chore into a challenge. She’s fun, and I’m glad I had a chance to make three movies with her. The Lady Eve was the best. She’s a delicious woman.” (The 1978 AFI Salute to Henry Fonda prompted Barbara to make one of her exceedingly rare appearances, delivering a lovely Fonda tribute. When it came time for Fonda to speak, he expressed delighted surprise that Barbara had shown up, adding, “I fell in love with Barbara when we did Lady Eve. I’m still in love with her, and [his wife] Shirlee can live with it.”)
Ball of Fire (1941) solidified her new glamour girl image, her naturally thin upper lip now enlarged and reshaped with artfully flared lipstick. (She retained this lush-lipped look for the next 15 years.) She was Sugarpuss O’Shea, a leggy, bespangled showgirl tootsie on the lam from the cops, hiding out in a houseful of stodgy professors and falling for the youngest of them (Gary Cooper). Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote the delightful script, Howard Hawks directed, and Barbara’s hyper-energetic performance was a critical and popular triumph, earning her another Oscar nomination.
Her two 1942 releases weren’t quite as successful. The Great Man’s Lady was meant to be the epic tale of a woman in the pioneer Old West, aging on-camera from 16 to 101 (“and looking 35 throughout,” as one critic sniffed), but in black-and-white and at a mere 90 minutes, it didn’t really jell. It was a great personal disappointment to Barbara. Her other ’42 release, The Gay Sisters, was an overlong soap opera that just came and went. (No, the title didn’t mean that, she was one of the three Gaylord sisters.)
She was a sassy stripper, Dixie Daisy, in Hunt Stromberg’s Lady of Burlesque (1943), based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1942 backstage mystery novel, The G-String Murders. It was a most agreeable, if not earth-shaking, comedy-mystery, briskly directed by William Wellman. Barbara dipped freely into her chorus girl past, singing “Take It off the E-String, Play It on the G-String” and dancing with the accomplished moves of a star showgirl, replete with full splits and cartwheels. Surrounded by a battalion of wisecracking floozies, Barbara seemed to be enjoying herself enormously.
After appearing opposite Charles Boyer in one third of the three-part drama Flesh and Fantasy, Barbara got the role of her life, the one that permanently redefined her star image. And she didn’t want to do it. In a 1968 TV documentary, Barbara Stanwyck: Portrait of a Star, Barbara told of her initial reservations after Billy Wilder sent her the script of Double Indemnity: “I had played medium heavies, but not an out-and-out killer. I was a little frightened of it, and I said, ‘I love the script and I love you, but I am a little afraid, after all these years of playing heroines, to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer.’ And Mr. Wilder—rightly so—looked at me and said, ‘Well, are you a mouse or an actress?’ And I said, ‘Well, I hope I’m an actress.’ He said, ‘Then do the part.’ And I did and I’m very grateful to him.”
Wilder assembled a perfect star trio: Barbara as the definitively amoral Phyllis Dietrichson, an icy schemer with the conscience of a cobra and a heart of pure anthracite, Fred MacMurray as the chump insurance salesman Phyllis seduces into knocking off her husband (whose first wife she had already knocked off), and Edward G. Robinson as MacMurray’s suspicious boss. Double Indemnity (1944) is now regarded as the quintessential film noir and Barbara’s chilling, uncompromising performance is the standard by which all femmes fatale have come to be judged.
Lady of Burlesque (UA, 1943): “Take It Off the E-String, Play It on the G-String.”
But then there’s the matter of that wig. Barbara was saddled with one of the cheapest, least convincing blonde pageboy wigs ever slapped on an actress’ head. When Paramount production head Buddy DeSylva came on the set and saw it for the first time, he said, “We hired Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington.” The wig was Wilder’s idea, and he later ruefully admitted that it was a mistake.
Bad wig or not, Double Indemnity was a smash, and audiences loved seeing Barbara in that sort of role. She scored her third Oscar nomination, but Gaslight’s weepily sympathetic Ingrid Bergman took home the prize.
By now she was mainly hopping back and forth between Paramount and Warners and working non-stop at a height of popularity she’d never before attained. In 1944, the U.S. Treasury Department listed Barbara Stanwyck as the highest-salaried woman in America.
She had another hit in 1945, Christmas in Connecticut, an ingratiating comedy (released that summer, oddly), co-starring Warners’ resident crooner, Dennis Morgan. A thespic lightweight compared to Barbara, they nonetheless made a charming and believable couple, thanks in no small part to her flexibility as an actress. Barbara never overwhelmed her leading men, instead adapting herself to their energy and rhythms, working with them, not merely at them. Frequently paired with lower-key leading men (Morgan, Joel McCrea, George Brent, Herbert Marshall), she never rode roughshod over them. Rather, they were often at their most effective when working with her.
Paramount’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) was a gleeful return to the shady world of noir, her Martha looking gorgeous—no wig this time—as she killed and schemed her way to her own eventual destruction. She now had no reservations about going the limit and her performance was neurotically succulent and corrupt. With her dancer’s grace, economy of movement and venomous eyes, she was certainly by now the most dangerous woman in movies and the poor saps who got tangled in her web paid a fearsome price. No it isn’t so pretty what a dame without pity can do. If Double Indemnity started that engine, Martha Ivers put it into overdrive.
Her next release that year couldn’t have been more dissimilar. In My Reputation (actually filmed in ’44, right after Double Indemnity), Barbara is a widow and mother of two sons who has to deal with a hidebound mother (the great Lucile Watson), lecherous neighbors and gossipy friends as she slowly begins a romance with a soldier (George Brent) while fighting off her own loyalty to her husband’s memory. It was a mature, beautifully controlled and multi-faceted performance, never descending to the mawkish or the obvious. A big hit with audiences, it was one of Barbara’s favorite roles.
In the middle of these high-grossing hits, The Bride Wore Boots emptied out many theaters. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, lousy, and, sadly, was to be Barbara’s final comedy feature. But she made another friend-for-life in leading man Robert Cummings. “When we were waiting to go into our scenes for The Bride Wore Boots,” said Cummings, “she’d whisper, ‘Come on, Bob. You know you’d like to fuck me. Admit it. You’d like to fuck me.’”
Nineteen-forty-seven wasn’t her most successful year, even with five Stanwyck films in release. California was a big, overstuffed Western with Barbara in the sort of lady-with-a-past role that Claire Trevor had made her own. It was, if nothing else, her first Technicolor film. Variety Girl was an all-star extravaganza with Barbara guesting as herself. The Two Mrs. Carrolls was a wasted chance to co-star with Humphrey Bogart with both stars wildly (in Bogart’s case hilariously) miscast. She matched wits with Errol Flynn in another mystery drama, Cry Wolf, and neither won. And in The Other Love, Barbara was a famous concert pianist confined to a Swiss sanitarium where her doctor (David Niven) has fallen in love with her even though she’s dying of—well, something or other, that thing Ali McGraw had. She don’t ask, he don’t tell. She escapes, running off with ne’er-do-well playboy Richard Conte and coughing a lot. The good doctor tracks her down and she dies, not in his arms but at least in his chalet. It didn’t help that Barbara never looked more radiantly healthy or more serenely beautiful. Ania Dorfman dubbed Barbara’s piano playing and coached her so she’d appear believable. She practiced the pieces three hours a day for a month.
Also in 1947 she and Robert Taylor visited New York. Frank Fay had just made a high-profile comeback in the new Broadway hit Harvey and a reporter asked if she’d planned on seeing it. “No,” she
replied, “I’ve seen all the rabbits Mr. Fay has to offer.”
About this time, while still a certified superstar, Barbara’s auburn hair started slowly turning gray. What did she do about it? She did what no other name actress in America dared to do—absolutely nothing. The press reported this shocking decision with continuing wonder. Her standard line when questioned about why she didn’t hit the dye-pots: “Only the young dye good.” She’d never lied about her age and wasn’t about to start now, and beauty parlors weren’t her style. “I simply couldn’t face sitting there six hours every two or three weeks.” She’d wear a wig if a script called for one, but otherwise her hair grew publicly grayer by the year until finally turning snow white. For the rest of her life, Stanwyck was the only star actress of her generation who wasn’t a blonde, a brunette or a redhead.
By 1948 Barbara, along with every other female in America, had succumbed to the New Look, the fashion revolution that wiped out the ’40s’ padded shoulders, long hair and short skirts, substituting padded busts, short hair and long skirts. Her new short bob pretty much transformed her lushly glamorous appearance into a more mature, even matronly look (though she never lost her trim dancer’s figure). The new Stanwyck was seen that year in B.F.’s Daughter as the wealthy and overly ambitious wife of a struggling economist. He was played by Van Heflin, her Martha Ivers co-star, and they paired beautifully. As with her last half-dozen films, it wasn’t much of a standout.
A sorely needed hit came along that year with Sorry, Wrong Number. It had been an extremely successful half-hour radio play by Lucille Fletcher, featuring Agnes Moorehead as a bedridden invalid who, through an accident of crossed wires, overhears her own murder being plotted over the telephone. A one-woman monologue, it tracked her futile phone calls for help and her realization that it was her husband who’d arranged the murder, which does take place exactly as planned. So successful was the first broadcast that Moorehead repeated her live performance many times, but producers felt a star name was needed for the film version, and Barbara got it.
The attempts to “open up” Sorry, Wrong Number with other characters (including a miscast Burt Lancaster as her weak, vengeful husband) rather diluted the suspense, and a series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks further muddled matters. But Barbara pulled out all the stops as the doomed, frantic wife trapped in her bed, the telephone her only lifeline. It’s those bedroom sequences, now scattered amidst the flashbacks, that were the heart of Sorry, Wrong Number, and for her wrenching tour de force she was Oscar-nominated for the fourth and final time. Jane Wyman (Johnny Belinda) won.
She closed out the ’40s with The Lady Gambles as a lady addicted to, yes, gambling, and East Side, West Side, a glossy soap opera with Barbara as James Mason’s wronged wife, who finds comfort in the arms of dependable Van Heflin.
The ’50s were a difficult time for Barbara, as they were for all her contemporaries. There was an entire generation of younger stars by now and veterans from the ’30s were having a hard time maintaining their film careers. And, then as now, women over 40 were not among Hollywood’s top priorities. Barbara did keep working, but there would be fewer highlights.
Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck considered Barbara as a possibility to play theatrical barracuda Margo Channing in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, but Claudette Colbert was finally signed (and due to a back injury was replaced, definitively, by Bette Davis). Though Stanwyck had perhaps a wider acting range than either Davis or Colbert, it’s difficult to imagine her as Margo, a role calling for self-deluding grande dame artifice on an epic scale.
Instead, she had four films in release in 1950. The File on Thelma Jordon furthered her image as a preying mantis of easy conscience (one of her lines, “Maybe I am just a dame and didn’t know it,” became the tag-line of all the ads) but in No Man of Her Own she was an uncharacteristically passive victim of bizarre circumstances. To Please a Lady promisingly teamed her with Clark Gable, but the script was an eye-roller. The Furies was easily the class of the lot, a big-budget psychological Western in which she and Walter Huston (in his final role) were superb as bitterly competitive but fiercely loving father and daughter, fighting tooth and nail for each other’s land and love. When he brings his intended new bride (Judith Anderson) to the ranch, Stanwyck hurls a pair of scissors at her, disfiguring her for life. The Furies is a wildly perverse masterwork.
In 1951 she divorced Robert Taylor. His infidelities had become common knowledge and her most passionate fidelity had long been to her profession. (In 1954 he married German-born actress Ursula Thiess and the following year she gave birth to a son, his first child. He died in 1969.) Barbara never remarried.
Clash by Night (1952) gave Barbara a chance to work with director Fritz Lang, and it was a rewarding matchup. She got to play the sort of hard-as-nails, seen-it-all woman she’d by now played so often but this time she’s more weary and disillusioned than coldly vengeful, returning to the drab fishing village of her youth after messing up her chances for success in the big city. (“Home is where you come when you run out of places.”) And for once she was evenly matched with not one but two powerful leading men, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan.
Fourth-billed was starlet Marilyn Monroe, very much on the rise and very much in the news. The story of her nude calendar broke during Clash by Night’s production and the press was in a frenzy. Lang recounted his memories of this period to Peter Bogdanovich for Fritz Lang in America: “Barbara had a very difficult scene in a courtyard, hanging clothes from a laundry basket and speaking her lines … and Marilyn had one or two lines in the scene which she fluffed constantly. I never heard one bad word from Barbara; she was terribly sweet to her … Newspapermen came during lunch hours and, since Barbara was the star, everyone tried to make sure she was interviewed. But the reporters said, ‘We don’t wanna talk to Barbara, we wanna talk to the girl with the big tits.’ Another woman would have been furious. Barbara never. She knew exactly what was going on.”
Barbara’s work in Clash by Night was outstanding, and even better was Titanic (1953). Much like the more recent megahit, it told of the disaster through the fictional stories of its passengers, chiefly Barbara and Clifton Webb as a mature couple, parents of two children, whose marriage had now collapsed. Both should have been Oscar-nominated for their beautifully modulated work but there was just a bit too much soap opera to Titanic, and too much melodrama to Clash by Night, to merit serious evaluations of her work. With her voice now deepened into the cello range, Barbara had by now slipped into the “dependable” category and even her finest performances were routinely being shrugged off with such comments as “fine as usual.”
Titanic’s release was bracketed that year by a pair of just-okay programmers—Jeopardy, a tight little thriller, and All I Desire, a period weepie. The supporting cast of the latter featured Maureen O’Sullivan, with whom star Barbara apparently had problems. O’Sullivan later said: “She was always so popular and everybody adored her, but I found her a cold person, and she was the only actress in my working experience who ever went home leaving me to do the close ups with the script girl, which I thought was most unprofessional. I was quite surprised. There, that’s the only unkind thing that’s ever been said about Barbara Stanwyck.”
Of the rest of her seven 1953-54 films, the only one worth mentioning is MGM’s all-star Executive Suite (1954), her final big-budget prestige release. Barbara happily accepted the smallish part because it was her first opportunity since Golden Boy to work again with William Holden.
With Clifton Webb in Titanic (Fox, 1953).
For the next three years she lowered her price and ground out mostly bottom-of-the-bill Westerns, by now her favorite genre, delighting in doing all her own stunts. Her three “moderns” were notable for about one reason each; These Wilder Years (1956) finally co-starred her with James Cagney, but their characters allowed for no romantic connection; There’s Always Tomorrow (’56) was a weepy soap that co-starred her with Fred MacMurray for the fourth and fina
l time; and Crime of Passion (’57) was the last in her gallery of overwrought, steel-eyed noir killers.
Television was now where the work was. She’d made her TV debut on The Jack Benny Show (CBS, 1/27/52) in a live spoof of Gaslight, titled Autolight. They made delightful hash of the Bergman and Boyer roles, though Barbara actually seemed to be sending up her own melodramatic movie image rather than spoofing Bergman’s performance.
Late in ’56 she began appearing as guest star on episodes of drama and comedy series (Ford Theatre, Goodyear Theatre, The Real McCoys, The Untouchables, The Joey Bishop Show, The Dick Powell Theatre) and dived full-tilt into her beloved western genre, appearing on Rawhide, four Wagon Trains and four Zane Grey Theatres.
She was frequently offered her own series but never the kind she really wanted, a Western that celebrated the strong women of the Old West. The network suits wouldn’t go for it, so she eventually agreed to host and star in an anthology series, much like the successful Loretta Young Show. The Barbara Stanwyck Theatre debuted on NBC September 19, 1960, with Stanwyck starring in 32 of the 36 half-hour shows. She did mostly dramas and a few comedies, as well as sneaking in some Westerns. The opening and closing spots for each episode had her immobile, posed like a fashion model, and she was damned uncomfortable doing them. By the time she won an Emmy as Best Actress in a Series (May 17, 1961), the show had already been cancelled after only one season.
Her hair was now completely white, and she looked sensational.
Barbara was quite honest about why she was appearing on television instead of on the big screen, telling interviewer Eli Weinstein: “It isn’t that I don’t want to work [in movies]. The trouble is nobody asks me. Some actors and actresses in my position say they can’t find the right roles, but I can’t fool myself so easily … I don’t let it get me down, I couldn’t retire to a life of leisure, that would drive me mad … Acting is the only thing I’m good for. I’ve never been much for hobbies. I get a kick out of some stars who are afraid of growing old. How silly, everybody has to grow old … Life is a pretty difficult thing to get through. But I’m not an unhappy person. Maybe everything hasn’t worked out exactly the way I hoped it would, but I’ve had more than my share of good times. I’m very contented now. I have my health and all the money I need, and this comfortable house. True, I live here alone.”