Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Ed Kennedy was sure she was in love with Mack. Her eyes were not on their playwright-director, however, but on the leading man. Cherryman looked older than his twenty-eight years. Ruby thought he was full of talent. She loved his matinee-idol looks and sense of humor, but, she soon realized, so did other women. Besides, he was married and had a son, although his wife was trying to divorce him.

  The Pittsburgh tryout was a disaster. The society woman’s third-act plea with the Governor didn’t go over with the preview audience. The Pittsburgh Gazette review mentioned that “Barbara Stanwyck, as Dot, did an unexpected bit of genuine pathos.” The Pittsburgh Press called the play “overworked” and never mentioned her. Clearly, there would be no New Haven engagement en route to New York.

  Instead of giving up, however, Mack opted for extensive changes. The preview audience—and perhaps the Gazette’s critic—made him realize the pathos would be more riveting if it is the chorus girl who pleads with the Governor. “It’s got to be the chorus girl who pleads with the Governor,” he told cast and the less-than-enthusiastic financial backers. “She’s got to carry the third act.”

  This was bad news for Ruby. “Naturally the expanded part called for a real actress. I could manage six lines, but carry a big scene through a whole act? No one thought I could possibly do it. No one but Bill Mack.”

  The backers agreed to give Mack two days to whip the play into shape.

  Mack wrote an emotional monologue in which Ruby admits to the Governor that Nickie doesn’t love her. She hopes she will be allowed to bury Nick in a little cemetery and tell his deaf ears all the things she hasn’t dared tell him. Moved, the Governor tells her Nickie isn’t dead, that there has been a stay of execution. Dot begs the Governor not to ever, ever tell Nickie of her visit.

  She would recall the forty-eight hours as living hell. “Bill Mack was going over and over and over the new third act with me. Except for catnaps backstage, I didn’t sleep at all. He hammered every line, every inflection, every gesture of the part into my memory. I was too tired and too terrified to think for myself. All I could do was go, like a robot, through the part as he told me to. Toward the end I broke down and wept from exhaustion and nerves and fright.” It was no use, she told him. He couldn’t expect her to learn to act in forty-eight hours. It was all right when he was there, but what would happen on opening night when she’d be all alone on the stage?

  “You’ll do it when the time comes because you’ll have to,” he answered.

  The rehearsals continued. “He taught me how to walk, taught me nuances, taught me tricks to use and not to use.” Satisfied with the rewrites and recasting the heroine, Mack and his backers aimed for a mid-October Broadway opening.

  THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO VERSIONS OF HOW RUBY BECAME BARBARA Stanwyck. In one account, Mack decided to change her stage name because Ruby Stevens, he told her, sounded too much like a stripper. After glancing at an old poster hanging in the green room of the Belasco Theatre advertising the English actress Jane Stanwyck waving her rebel flag in Barbara Frietchie, Mack coupled the last name of the actress and the first name of the title to make a stage name for Ruby. In her own retelling, she would remember coming into the green room and seeing Mack talking to a white-haired person she thought was a clergyman.

  Mack introduced her.

  “Yes, I’ve been watching you,” said David Belasco. “I’ll give you a new name as a gift. ‘Barbara’ from Barbara Frietchie—on that program there. And ‘Stanwyck’ after Jane Stanwyck, a mighty good actress.” It was the only time Ruby met the then seventy-two-year-old Belasco, who thrust the American theater toward greater emotionalism and realism.

  Ruby liked her stage name and thought it sounded elegant.

  The Noose opened October 20, 1926, at the Hudson Theatre on Forty-fourth Street and Broadway. The new Barbara Stanwyck sent a wire to Mildred to come and see her at the first matinee. The telegram, which was signed Ruby, failed to mention that she didn’t appear until the third act. Since the program listed no Ruby Stevens and her sister didn’t appear in the first two acts, Mildred left the theater just before Barbara/Ruby made her entrance. In another version of the story, Barbara invited several people from her old Brooklyn neighborhood. Tickets were waiting for them at the box office, her telegrams said. When she came onstage and saw strangers in the seats she had paid for, she felt utterly forlorn. The explanation was her new name. Her friends had shown up, but when they didn’t see Ruby Stevens on the playbill, they thought they had blundered into the wrong theater or that they had got tickets meant for someone else. They quickly sold the tickets on the sidewalk.

  The New York Times called The Noose “melodrama of a slightly older model.” The play occasionally lingered too long over situations, the paper said, “but it is good entertainment when it gets going, and is further to be recommended for several good performances.” Dorothy [sic] Stanwyck was mentioned in the last paragraph for her “good work.” The New York Telegram was more generous: “There is an uncommonly fine performance by Barbara Stanwyck, who not only does the Charleston step of a dancehall girl gracefully, but knows how to act, a feature which somehow with her comely looks, seems kind of superfluous. After this girl breaks down and sobs out her unrequited love for the young bootlegger in that genuinely moving scene in the last act, of course, there was nothing for the Governor to do but to reprieve the boy. If he hadn’t, the weeping audience would probably have yelled till he did.” The New York Telegraph published a production photo of Cherryman and Stanwyck. The New York Sun and the Newark Telegraph gave it all to the leading man. The Sun called Cherryman’s portrayal of the convict “warm and sympathetic,” and the Telegraph said, “Cherryman runs away with every part of the play that he appears in despite the sentimental treatment he must give his lines.” Elisha Cook, Jr., who became a “perennial juvenile” on stage and screen, would never forget the new Barbara Stanwyck in The Noose: “She had a scene—she made me vomit—they were going to electrocute her husband [s/c], and she had a scene with the governor, that she could have the guy’s body. I went down to the bathroom and vomited, she was so great in that scene. I’ll never forget it. If anybody influenced me, she did.”

  LOVE IS A LEAP OF FAITH, A RISK NOT ALWAYS WELCOMED BY VERY young women all on their own. Every night the new Barbara Stanwyck declaimed her love for a condemned man who couldn’t return it. Every night Rex Cherryman stood in the wings and listened to her beg the Governor never to let him know the depth of her feelings. Offstage she knew nothing about permanence and everything about ad-libbed happiness and hedged bets. Edward Kennedy wanted to marry her, but The Noose made acting too important for her to consider marriage. Without ever quite saying Rex was her first lover, she would remember him as the first man who understood her, the first man she loved.

  “It was my first chance at dramatic acting and everything enchanted me,” she would remember. “Rex was handsome and young and had great talent and good humor. Ed Kennedy hadn’t quite given me up. He was jealous of Willard Mack, but he was wrong there. If he had to be jealous of anyone, he should have focused on Rex. I adored him.”

  The Noose ran for nine months; 197 performances.

  Barbara and Rex spent a busy autumn together while Rex’s wife, Esther, obtained a divorce. Rex was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He owed his love of the theater to his mother, Myrtle Koon Cherryman, who was a dramatic reader in Grand Rapids. Barbara thought everything about Rex was vital and convincing. Her childhood had taught her that getting close to someone was difficult. But Rex was everything little Ruby had wanted, someone to trust, to depend on. To her he was confidence and energy personified. The ovation that swept up over them when they stood hand in hand and took bows carried her to heights she had never dreamed of.

  Both were eager to please, to see their careers flourish. Rex told her how he had acted in Hollywood movies before being signed to a four-year contract by a San Francisco stock company. His breakthrough had come in Chicago, where he appeared in Topsy
and Eva for one year. Rex had met Esther Lamb when he was twenty-two, and he worked in a bank briefly before deciding to become an actor and take off for Los Angeles. The marriage had been a mistake, but he and Esther remained on friendly terms.

  Mack set to work writing his next play, telling Barbara she could have the lead. A Free Soul would be about a young woman who falls in love with her attorney father’s criminal client. The new drama wasn’t ready when The Noose closed in June 1927, so Barbara went back to the chorus line, this time in A Night in Spain. In August, Rex got the costarring role in The Trial of Mary Dugan opposite silver-blond Texan Ann Harding. His performance of the young brother who successfully defends his sister from a murder charge was called outstanding when the Bayard Veiller drama opened in September.

  FILM COMPANIES TESTED BARBARA. ONE WAS FIRST NATIONAL, soon to be taken over by Warner Brothers. She reported to director Joseph C. Boyle for a screen test for Broadway Nights, a silent movie filming at William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan studio at Second Avenue and 125th Street. Sam Hardy had been chosen to play the leading man, a gambling Tin Pan Alley tunesmith.

  The scenario of this obscurity-to-fame programmer was by Forrest Halsey, Gloria Swanson’s favorite screenwriter, and the first openly gay man Barbara knew. The Broadway Nights story was a portent of Barbara’s relationship with men. Sam Hardy’s character was named Johnny Fay. Johnny and his wife, Fanny, live a roller-coaster relationship of unfulfilled needs and mutual dependence. Fanny constantly implores her Johnny to give up his addiction to dice, and various char-acters make comments on whether Fanny is a nobody without Johnny or she is everything and he nothing more than a stupid gambler. Where would he be without her beauty and dancing talent? Where would she be without his tuneful music?

  Boyle explained the role demanded that Barbara cry. Would she please cry when he yelled “Action”? In The Noose, she had cried every night on cue, but after the director disappeared behind the camera and yelled “Action,” she was unable to get the tears to flow.

  “Cut,” Boyle shouted.

  Would she please try by holding raw onion under her eyes?

  Nothing helped.

  Stanwyck didn’t get the part. Lois Wilson, famous for the 1923 epic The Covered Wagon, did. Barbara, however, accepted the smaller role of the heroine’s backstage pal. Sylvia Sidney, the quintessential proletarian princess of the 1930s, also made her film debut in Broadway Nights.

  Four months after the electrifying premiere of Warner Brothers’ Jazz Singer, studios tried to dispose of millions of dollars’ worth of silent merchandise by adding sound in some form so that theater owners could advertise that their attraction talked. Fans quickly became adept at deducing from the ads the degree to which silents were being made audible. “Sound effects and music” meant recorded orchestral accompaniments plus various bell ringings and door knockings. “With sound and dialogue” usually meant that the players remained silent for five reels, became briefly loquacious in the sixth, only to relapse into silence in the final reel.

  Broadway Nights was released June 28, 1927, with sound effects and background music. Stanwyck never mentioned the picture. Her screen debut, she felt, was in sound films. *

  Besides, why care about Broadway Nights when the real Broadway theater was so much more exciting? Two hundred and sixty-eight attractions were produced on Broadway in 1927—the highest number ever—over two hundred and fifty productions opened in 1928, and the road was in a healthy condition. Cut-rate ticket agencies allowed new plays to attain moderate runs, and promising young players elbowed each other to assure the theater’s future. Ironically, it was Broadway Nights that gave the twenty-year-old Stanwyck her stage triumph.

  Playwright George Manker Waiters had seen the new Barbara Stanwyck in The Noose and suggested her for the feminine lead in the play he and Arthur Hopkins were writing together. Hopkins was the producer of the decade’s most electrifying play—Maxwell Anderson’s and Laurence Stalling’s antiwar drama What Price Glory? Its frank presentation of the profanity and brutality of soldiers had made it the sensation of 1924. With new plays by Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, John Howard Lawson, and George S. Kaufman, Hopkins proved that “new” drama could be produced commercially on Broadway. His greatest feat was putting on a cycle of classical plays, including Tolstoy’s Redemption, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Richard III, which firmly established John Barrymore as the greatest actor of his generation.

  Hopkins leased the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street from Lee and J. J. Shubert. A short, plump man with a round, red face, he summoned Stanwyck to his drab cubbyhole of an office off the mezzanine. When she entered he was seated behind a rolltop desk wearing his trademark derby and bow tie.

  “I sat down and waited,” she would remember. “Had I not been told he was a man of few words, I might have walked out. But he finally leaned back in his swivel chair and told me the name of the play was Burlesque, a backstage drama he had written himself with George Manker Watters. He gave me a copy of the script. He didn’t actually offer me the part, but told me his terms and his production schedule. Apparently, it was up to me to find out when the rehearsals started and to show up on the first day. “

  The heroine of the play-within-a-play is Bonny, the leading lady in Parisian Widows going into rehearsals in a Midwestern burlesque theater. Bonny is married to Skid, the show’s premiere comedian, but when he gets a job in a big Broadway musical, his ardor for his wife begins to wane. Without Bonny, he falls prey to bootleggers and after one notorious party loses his engagement. In the last act, he returns to the burlesque show and is reunited with Bonny. A beefy cattleman puts up the money to revive Parisian Widows, and with the road company’s stage manager, company manager, songwriter, and a fireman, Bonny and Skid whip the show into shape and end up performing it in Pater-son, New Jersey.

  Rehearsals had started when Hopkins hired Hal Skelly to play Skid. Skelly was a gangly song-and-dance man who had studied for the priesthood in Davenport, Iowa, before running off with a musical comedy company. He was a screwy, skinny Falstaff with an enormous appetite for fun and frolics. He had toured Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines and made his Broadway breakthrough in Orange Blossoms.

  Hopkins liked the Stanwyck-Skelly chemistry of the funny hoofer and his proud faithful wife. Barbara knew lots of women in show business like Bonny, women looking after men who badly needed to be looked after. Hopkins thought Barbara had the “rough poignancy” Bonny needed. Later, he would say she expressed emotions more easily than any actress since Pauline Lord.

  Barbara’s old escort Oscar Levant was hired to play the company’s songwriter and quickly talked Hopkins into letting him score the second act. Since Barbara and her friends had made him their mascot, Oscar had been to London, accompanying the classical saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft. Besides cutting records and partying with the Mayfair crowd, he had made a brief appearance in fellow American Frank Fay’s vaudeville act at the Palladium. London and a side trip to Paris had given the already caustic Oscar added brilliance. Burlesque was his first try at acting.

  BURLESQUE OPENED SEPTEMBER 1, 1927, AT THE PLYMOUTH THE-atre. The New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson was favorable. “None of the details of dialogue or background matches the resourcefulness of the acting,” he wrote. “As the comedian in question, Mr. Skelly gives a glowing performance of fleeting character portrayal and a whirl of eccentric makeup and bits of hoofing and clowning. Miss Stanwyck, as his wife, plays with genuine emotion and kicks her way skillfully through the chorus numbers.” In his New York World review, Alexander Woollcott called her performance “touching and true.”

  BARBARA WORKED HARD TO IMPROVE HERSELF. HOPKINS COACHED her for interviews that made her sound mature and introspective. In a New York Review interview she not only analyzed Bonny’s love for Skid, but marveled at the power of stagecraft that could sharpen the acuity of playgoers and make them realize that “life holds a great deal more for us than we thought.”

  She looked good in
a body stocking and modeled a home exercise machine advertisement. With the Health Builder’s oscillator belt around her svelte buttocks for a “massage-vibratory treatment better than a skilled masseur,” the ad identified the model as “Barbara Stanwyck, leading actress in the well-known New York success ‘Burlesque.’” She was insecure when the cast was invited to parties and often begged off. “If we were invited to a chic party such as Jules Glaenzer gave in those days, Barbara couldn’t abide going,” Levant would remember. “Glaenzer would have George Gershwin, Dick Rodgers, half a dozen piano players, all the popular show girls in New York and a generous smattering of Society. They appalled Stanwyck.”

  She was not the first young woman who tried to please by being different, who assigned to herself the role of buddy, chum, and sidekick because she didn’t want to be dependent on men, on their appetites, their whims, their money. In any case, Burlesque’s leading lady and second-banana piano man had plenty of time to get to know each other. The musical ran for 332 performances.

  THE TRIAL OF MARY DUG AN OPENED A WEEK AFTER BURLESQUE, and critics called Rex Cherryman’s performance sensational. His role as the younger brother who defends his sister from a murder charge in Bayard Veiller’s courtroom drama vaulted him to the rank of Broadway’s best-known new actors. Ann Harding received Hollywood offers. Rex had already tried the movies. He wanted to bide his time and settled in for a long run.

  Rex and Barbara were a popular twosome. He found her scrappy, streetwise gumption stimulating and different; she thought of herself as awkward and was flattered by his adult consideration for her. Theater folk assumed they would get married. But as if to undercut her feelings for Rex she would later say that although “everything about him was so vivid,” the reason she fell in love with him was perhaps his ability to act, to project.