by Axel Madsen
Her long career offers insight into the trajectory of women in pop culture. In the 1930s, she was, with Joan Blondell and Carole Lombard, a favorite of male audiences. Nobody played a saucy dame better than she. Women moviegoers didn’t quite know how to accept the tart, direct females in wisecracking comedies or the tough ladies in the action movies and often preferred to see Bette Davis, Helen Hayes, and Ruth Chatterton give up “everything” for the man they loved.
Today’s young women see Stanwyck as one of them, as someone who challenged the notions of what a woman could be and do long before society thought of redefining feminine parameters. Today,
Madonna tries to capture the Stanwyck allure that made the screen sizzle with carnality and cynicism. In Hero, Geena Davis reprises Stanwyck’s classic tough gal reporter, Bette Midler remakes Stella Dallas, and Dyan Cannon stars in a TV remake of Christmas in Connecticut.
Barbara talked about the women she played in the third person and, once a shoot was over, how she hoped she had breathed life into them. “It’s gone and done and you did it and you feel a little bit of emptiness after it’s over. You thought it had left you, but it hadn’t. You say to yourself, Ί hope she lives.’”
2
BROOKLYN
SHE WAS BORN RUBY STEVENS.
Her place of birth was 246 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, the date July 16, 1907. She was the fifth, and last, child of Byron and Catherine McGee Stevens, both working-class natives of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Catherine was the daughter of Irish emigrants, Byron of English parents. As an adult Stanwyck played up the Irish heritage. She knew how to glide like the leprechauns, she said, and besides the Irish brashness also possessed the Irish quietude. Ernest Hemingway said she had “a good tough Mick intelligence.”
Catherine had raven-black hair and violet eyes. She was twenty when she married Byron, a handsome, red-haired part-time fisherman and construction worker. Children followed in quick succession. They all had names beginning with M—Maud, Mabel, Mildred, and Malcolm Byron.
Chelsea offered few opportunities. When Stevens heard bricklayers were making fifty cents an hour erecting row houses in New York’s expanding boroughs, he ran off one night in 1905. By questioning the men he had worked with, Catherine managed to find her husband. She packed her four children and their possessions and in Brooklyn found Byron. The family lore would have it that he was less than pleased when Cathy showed up with the kids. But bricklaying was a trade in demand and the family settled at 246 Classon Avenue, a long street running north-south from Myrtle Avenue to Prospect Park, where their last child—Ruby Katherine—was born.
Maud and Mabel were teenagers, Mildred eight, Malcolm Byron six, and little Ruby going on three during the winter of 1909-10, when their mother became pregnant again. Cathy was stepping off a streetcar when a drunkard lurched forward and knocked her to the ground. Her head struck the curb. A month later she was dead.
Ruby walked behind the coffin with her father, three sisters, and brother. Two weeks after the burial, Byron enlisted to join a work crew digging the Panama Canal. His children never saw him again.
The two eldest daughters shifted for themselves and soon married. It eventually fell to the third daughter, Mildred, to bring up Byron, as Malcolm Byron was always called, and Ruby. Little more than a child herself, Mildred became a showgirl. When she went on the road, she shuttled Byron and Ruby from pillar to post, farming them out to a shifting cast of relatives and neighbors. She couldn’t always “place” the two siblings together. Each time little Ruby ran away from a foster home, Byron knew where to find her—on the stoop on Classon Avenue, where she’d be sitting “waiting for Mama to come home.”
In order not to hurt Byron and Ruby, Mildred never mentioned their mother and father, but only talked about “the family.” In one year, Ruby boarded with four different households. Her fear was that if she made the wrong move the people who took her in would send her to an orphanage. Adopted children grew up being told, “You’re lucky.” The message Ruby grew up with was that inside hurts didn’t really matter, that the outside appearance—looking good and having nice clothes—is what counts. She was keenly aware that she was different. She told herself she was an orphan. “I’ll always be an orphan,” she’d say until her fighting spirit snapped. Then she’d sniffle and say, “Cats and dogs are orphans, and who has more fun—kids or cats?”
For the next eight years, Byron and Ruby clung to each other. Being boarded out meant that they were never part of anybody. Trust and distrust became exaggerated. One way little Ruby learned to handle people was not to get too close to them. A little bundle of rejection, she shut out her feelings and made sure she showed her disinterest before anybody had a chance to abandon her. Late in life, she would say, “At least nobody beat me. Where I grew up, kids existed on the brink of domestic or financial disaster.” She chose to remember that as a result, the children were “alert, precocious and savage.” She would remember little of her parents, but imagined she had her mother’s eyes, that her father was someone who “squared his shoulders against circumstances, too young, despairing sometimes.” She never talked about how she felt. Memory and fantasy remained intertwined and hard to differentiate. Ambivalence colored her recollections of childhood. Being poor led both to the idea that it was all a big mistake and to I’ll-show-you spunk and motivation. Maybe it wasn’t her mother who had died. Maybe their father would come home. Millie knocked the bottom out of Ruby’s daydreams when she pointed out that the Panama Canal had been opened to shipping since 1914.
A hard-nosed view of life counterbalanced the yearnings of her daydreaming, which she came to regard as utter folly. Teeming immigrant Brooklyn sent forth a robust generation ready to bend the American Dream in its direction. She later chose to remember her neighborhood’s and her generation’s swagger and optimism. “Growing up in one foster home after another didn’t give me any edge on the other kids or any excuse for whining, protesting, demanding. Besides, why whine? Too many neighborhood kids were already making it big. Their accomplishments were inspiring facts—the promise and proof that we weren’t puppets. Hapless, maybe, but not helpless, not hopeless. We were free to work our way out of our surroundings, free to work our way up—up as far as we could dream of.”
Mildred didn’t want her kid sister to become a showgirl. Quick on her feet, Ruby nevertheless learned Millie’s show routine by heart. Byron didn’t approve. To annoy him, Ruby scrawled her name in chalk on the neighborhood sidewalks, “to show everybody how it’s going to look in electric lights.” During the summer of 1916 and 1917, Millie took her kid sister with her on tour. Ruby watched every show from the wings and picked up more routines.
TEACHERS IN P.S. 15 DIDN’T TOLERATE CHILDREN OUT OF CONTROL, kids cursing and fighting. Ruby was defiant and resentful. She hated to do what she was told, picked arguments, teased classmates. For want of attention, she was alternately seductive and aggressive, provocative and infuriating, always quick to lose her temper. “I didn’t relish the disciplines of my childhood,” she would say when she was sixty, “I hated them.” Her grades were appalling, and she would admit she was “the stupidest little brat in school.” Threats from the principal that misbehavior would get her in trouble left her indifferent because things couldn’t possibly get any worse.
She wanted to be like the other girls who had mommies and daddies who came home after work. Why had it happened to her? She was resentful, took everything personally. Why her? She couldn’t bring herself to make friends with anybody, and the neighborhood kids in turn were suspicious of her. In school, she learned never to volunteer information about the people with whom she lived, never to invite classmates home. Girls didn’t care for Ruby, and she had no close friends. For a while her brother made the boys on the block tolerate her in their games.
When Ruby was going on twelve, Millie was in the chorus of Glorianna, the 1918-19 musical starring Eleanor Painter. James Buck McCarthy, known professionally as James “Buck” Mack, was one h
alf of the show’s song-and-dance team. He became Millie’s boyfriend and soon got to know her kid sister. Ruby called him “Uncle” Buck. She loved to sneak into the wings of the Liberty Theatre and watch rehearsals. Invariably, when Buck came to work, she’d stop him in the hallway and shout, “Hey, Uncle Buck, watch this.” Oblivious to chorus girls and musicians rushing to get ready for the first performance, Ruby launched into a tap routine she had watched in the afternoon and learned to perfection.
Ruby’s biggest disappointment was that Millie refused to take her with her when Glorianna went on tour. Ruby couldn’t go, Millie decided, because it was in the middle of the school year. Left with a family in the Flatbush section, Ruby flirted with religion as a calling. The inspiration was the Reverend William Carter, pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church on the corner of Flatbush and Church avenues, who inscribed a page of a book to “Rubie [sic] Katharine Stevens: In all the ways acknowledge Him. Prov. 3:6,” and dated it January 5, 1919. “No one in my family was Dutch Reformed, but he was very kind and their church was the prettiest I had ever seen. I heard tales about the gallant women who were making enormous sacrifices for the heathen. That, I decided, was for me.”
Religion was to remain peripheral to her life, however. Twelve years later, she played an evangelist and a missionary in a pair of Frank Capra movies and came to hate the hypocrisy of a churchgoing husband. During the McCarthy era, she talked up the wholesomeness of godly beliefs, but she never became a practicing Christian herself.
RUBY QUIT P.S. 15 WHEN SHE WAS THIRTEEN, ALTHOUGH EARLY biographical thumbnail sketches had her attend Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School. Still a small person, she looked older than her years and was quick to lie about her age. By fourteen she had mastered every dance step she had ever seen. Her first job, however, was as a wrapper of packages at Brooklyn’s Abraham &c Straus department store. “The plain wrapping, not the fancy,” she would specify. Next she answered a newspaper ad for a girl to file cards at the Brooklyn telephone office on
Dey Street. The job paid $14 a week and became an early milestone because she never again depended on her family for financial support.*’
“I knew that after fourteen I’d have to earn my own living, but I was willing to do that,” she would say in 1937. “I’ve always been a little sorry for pampered people, and of course, they’re very sorry for me.”
Escape was going to the movies and reading trashy novels. “Once in a while my sister Millie would take me to a stuffy little movie theater to see Pearl White in her Perils of Pauline. It was not money wasted. Pearl White was my goddess and her courage, her grace and her triumphs lifted me out of this world. I read nothing good, but I read an awful lot. Here was escape! I read lurid stuff about ladies who smelled sweet and looked like flowers and were betrayed. I read about gardens and ballrooms and moonlight trysts and murders. I felt a sense of doors opening. And I began to be conscious of myself, the way I looked, the clothes I wore. I bought awful things at first, pink shirtwaist, artificial flowers, tripe.”
Ruby followed telephone card filing with work as a dress pattern cutter. She persuaded Vogue that she was the right person to help customers cut material. For the first time she found herself in a situation she couldn’t handle. Complaints of paper patterns for sleeves laid sideways on material with up-down designs, of ruined fabric, piled up. She was fired.
She went to live with Maude in Flatbush while she looked for another job.
She had hated selling patterns as much as she had hated wrapping packages and filing cards. “I gave up trying to follow the ‘sensible’ advice of my sister, who knew all the hazards and heartaches of show business and tried to save me from them,” she would say forty years later. “I hated those three little jobs. I knew there was no place but show business that I wouldn’t hate.” Millie, however, won one last time. They needed whatever steady money Ruby could make, and she applied for a typist’s job in Manhattan.
The moment Ruby walked into the Jerome H. Remick Music Company on Twenty-eighth Street she felt a surge of excitement. Several pianos were going at once as song pluggers and vocalists tried out for auditions. It was at Remick’s that fifteen-year-old George Gershwin had found a job as piano demonstrator; it was Remick’s that published his first song, “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em.” The manager, Will Von Tilzer, sent Ruby upstairs to the business office. She was hired and quickly learned that the company’s all-time hit was “Till We Meet Again” and that Von Tilzer’s brother Albert provided the music for the current Broadway musical hit, The Gingham Girl.
Typing letters above the bedlam was the next best thing to being on Broadway.
Ruby spent her free time with Millie and Uncle Buck. Perhaps at his urging, Millie gave up trying to shelter her kid sister from show business. He taught Ruby the rudiments of the business, how to try for a job on Broadway.
Uncle Buck and showbiz became her family—for life. From the mid-1930s, he would live on her ranch and various estates and run her household. When old age and emphysema prevented him from climbing stairs, she would sell her house and buy a one-story bungalow.
EITHER UNCLE BUCK OR VON TILZER GOT HER AN AUDITION WITH Earl Lindsay, the manager of the Strand Roof, a nightclub over the Strand Theatre in Times Square. A few months short of sixteen, Ruby borrowed her sister’s dress, rouged her face, painted her lips, and presented herself at the Strand audition. She already had a deep, experienced voice, but Lindsay was more amused than convinced by her grown-up airs. “I’ll always love Earl Lindsay, though there was nothing gentle about the bawling out he gave me when I was fifteen and working in my first job,” she would say thirty years later. “I owe everything to his teaching. It made me a professional. I started in the back row of the chorus where it was easy to give something less than your best. He never let me get away with that. ‘You’ll never get ahead if you’re sloppy, out of the spotlight or in it,’ he said.”
Lindsay hired her at the princely salary of $35 a week. She was as elastic as a rubber band, could kick higher than anyone in the chorus, and made a point of doing it. “My idea was that everybody would say, ‘Look at that girl who can kick higher than everybody. I very nearly kicked myself out of a job. Lindsay pulled me out of the line and told me off in blistering terms. ‘You’d better learn right now that if you can’t learn to be part of a team, you better get off the stage. You’re spoiling everybody’s work by thinking of yourself and not the show.’”
Ruby loved it. Lindsay’s scolding meant he cared. To be a dancer made her feel confident, and to repeat the routine and to see Lindsay watching in the wings every night gave her a sense of stability. Frank Capra would remember her telling how gangsters controlled New York’s nightlife, how being an underage chorus girl was tough. Her own memories, however, mellowed over the years: “Some people call night spots a pretty bad environment; maybe they are. I had to earn my living and I was grateful for work I loved as much as dancing.
“Then pretty soon I heard that there were better salaries in road shows, so I went after a job in a road show … and got it. The day we left New York for Columbus, I had a new suitcase. I think I packed and unpacked it fifty times. I’d never been on a train before. I sat up all night in the Pullman just to see the towns and the country go by.”
3
“STARK NAKED, I SWEAR”
SHE WAS SIXTY AND SURE THERE WAS NO AGE SHE WOULD WANT TO BE again, when she remembered her days as a chorus girl and relented. “I might, just might, be tempted to be fifteen again—but if I were fifteen again, I couldn’t get the jobs I got then. What with work permits, compulsory education, union wages, that whole carefree, on-your-own adventure is not attainable. But how my memories of those three years sparkle! My chorine days may not have seemed perfect to anyone else, but they did to me.”
She was only a few weeks from her sixteenth birthday when she obtained a bit in the 1922 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies.
The 1922 Follies at the New Amsterdam Theatre headlined
Gilda Gray, the new shimmying sexpot attuned to the pace of the dizzy, jazzy Roaring Twenties. The breezy Mary Eaton, who the next year would be Eddie Cantor’s costar in Kid Boots, contributed the glamour, and Vivienne Segal was the show’s vivacious ingenue. Ruby was in the first-act finale that had the young women on a golden staircase, marching through golden gates.
The Follies gave an opulent illusion of sin. As Brooks Atkinson, the dean of theater critics, would put it, “For a quarter of a century, the Follies represented the businessman’s ideal of a perfect harem. Everything about the Follies was beautiful, plump, mysterious, and equivocally erotic. Ziegfeld created the formula; no one could make it work after he went.”
Rivals, however, were crowding in on the legendary showman. Earl
Carroll and Ziegfeld’s former employee, George White, made him testy with copycat shows. To sustain his notoriety, Ziegfeld resorted to increasingly silly publicity stunts. A showgirl’s complaint to the press that she would rather have dinner with a pig than with some of the men she knew led to a Central Park dinner at the Casino, where a select group of authors, actors, and society people dined with the showgirl and a white pig tied to a highchair. To launch the shimmying Gilda Gray, Ziegfeld arranged for an employee, pretending to be a Texas oil tycoon, to toss a $100,000 necklace into her lap on the stage.
The dressing rooms in the New Amsterdam were peculiar because the theater was the only one in New York allowed by fire laws to be sheathed in an office building. Offstage on the ground floor was a single star’s dressing room. The floor above was for Ziegfeld’s showgirls—the tall beauties who did not dance but paraded across the stage in elaborate costumes or stood immobile and naked to the waist in various tableaus.* The principals dressed on the third floor. As a chorus girl, Ruby belonged on the fourth floor.