by Axel Madsen
Barbara felt exposed to pity and ridicule. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons phoned her at home for her reaction. When she refused to answer, the two columnists reported her embarrassed fum-blings. To Hopper asking if it was true Bob wanted a divorce, Barbara snapped, “He didn’t say anything about it at breakfast, but wait a minute, I’ll ask him.” In her column, Hopper reported how Stanwyck was back on the phone a few minutes later: “He says not today, Hedda. Sorry. Goodbye.”
Maddeningly, the gossip columnists who predicted the collapse of the Taylors’ marriage waxed heavenly on the Bette Davis romance with Gary Merrill on the set of All About Eve. The two wouldn’t stop kissing when Mankiewicz shouted, “Cut!”
Barbara decided to take Helen with her to Europe. Again, despite Helen’s advice on how to handle the press, Barbara said silly things that only added to the fire. She missed her husband, she told Parsons, but she was not going straight to Rome. She had made five pictures in eight months, she explained, so she would be taking a little vacation. It was so hot in Rome, Bob kept telling her. Besides he was busy with Quo Vadis.
Barbara hated the word “divorce.” It had never been seriously used in connection with her and Bob. Despite occasional sniping and speculation, for twelve years they had been Hollywood’s Happy Star Marriage. As Adela Rogers St. Johns put it when somebody criticized the Tinseltown divorce rate, “Someone else punched a button that lit up a neon sign saying Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck—Their Happy Marriage.”
Barbara burst her bubble of calculated serenity by flying to London. For someone as notoriously afraid of flying as she, getting on TWA’s turboprop for the Los Angeles-Albuquerque-Kansas City-New York-Gander-Reykjavik-Shannon-London journey could only mean acute desperation.
Barbara and Helen’s arrival in London was low-key, but the gossip from Rome wasn’t letting up. The Robert Taylor dalliance followed on the heels of another Italian scandal—Ingrid Bergman’s leaving America, husband, and daughter for Roberto Rossellini. Over thirty American reporters and photographers had stalked the pregnant Ingrid and laid siege to the clinic where her illegitimate child was born.
While reporters waited to cover the expected Bergman-Rossellini marriage, the Quo Vadis set was fair game. Celebrities passing through Rome got themselves invited to Cinecittà to see LeRoy lord it over his cast of thousands. Sam and Frances Goldwyn visited the Quo Vadis shoot, and, more embarrassing to Barbara, so did Mary and Jack Benny. To soothe Barbara and neutralize Lia’s monopoly on press attention, Strickling ordered the Quo Vadis unit publicist to leak reports that Bob was seen “swimming, dining and dancing with numerous Italian beauties.” The name of “starlet” Marina Berti was dropped.
Tom Purvis was staying with Bob in his rented Rome apartment. Enlisted by Bob, if not by Strickling, to try to restore a semblance of propriety, the old navy buddy told the press how, one night when they were relaxing in the apartment, an unnamed actress rang and said she was coming up. Bob told Tom to stay so the young woman wouldn’t get any ideas. Said Purvis, “Seemed to me it was the usual crush-on-a-movie-star thing or maybe she thought he could get her into the movies.”
IN LONDON, GUEST AND DIRECTOR IRVING RAPPER WERE DOING A rewrite to calibrate the script to Stanwyck. Guest agreed to pay her fare to Rome, and, if Quo Vadis finished early enough, to her spending Christmas with Bob and starting Another Man’s Poison after New Year’s. While producer and director fine-tuned Another Man’s Poison, Barbara decided to confront her husband, the Quo Vadis set, and the paparazzi. With Helen in tow, she flew to Rome.
Whether the crisis was the unforeseen slide toward a final parting or the last act of a twelve-year charade neither would ever say. Their private confrontation in Bob’s rented apartment was brief and a total defeat for Barbara. With the intention of bringing Bob to his senses, she decided to frighten him by saying a divorce was in order. To her surprise, he agreed. She exploded in anger and told him that if he divorced her, she’d make him pay for it for the rest of his life.
They had never said an unkind word about each other in public. They were not about to. On orders from Strickling in Culver City, the unit publicists put a happy spin on the reunited man and wife. Press releases told how Bob greeted his wife with $8,000 worth of diamonds, how Barbara’s gifts to her husband included cuff links bearing the likeness of him as Marcus Vinicius, and, when they got home, a Cadillac. Strickling tried to mastermind events with breathless handouts on how Bob was showing his wife the sights of the Eternal City. As the Taylors’ personal press agent, Helen played along, filling in blissful details on how happy Barbara was to see her husband, how “tickled pink” he was seeing her.
Years later details of Barbara’s desperation would come from Guest. The producer would remember her in tears on the telephone from Rome, calling to tell him she couldn’t do Another Man’s Poison. “I’m sorry. My whole life is in shreds after all these years we’ve been married,” she told him. “I’ve got to go right back home and arrange a divorce.”
Guest tried to salvage his picture by saying the best thing for her was probably to work, but she was adamant. She had to go back to California. As she had done in All About Eve, Bette Davis stepped into the breach. In July, she had made Merrill her fourth husband. A part was found for the groom in Another Man’s Poison.
BOB REFUSED ALL COMMENTS ON HIS MARRIAGE, HIMSELF, AND LIA when he returned from Rome, but newspapers announced the Taylors were divorcing. With his mother, Ralph Couser, and Ralph’s wife, Bob moved into a rented house in Brentwood. In Rome, Lia fanned the flames by telling reporters Bob “is tired of her [Barbara] and told me so.” When Louella Parsons got to Stanwyck, Barbara told her Bob and she would be going on a three-month vacation. Instead, Bob went to Palm Springs alone. Barbara refused to meet the press. On November 23, 1950, he was hospitalized for a double hernia operation. Barbara was forced to talk to reporters. She limited her comments to saying her husband’s recovery was progressing “satisfactorily.”
Adela Rogers St. Johns saw through the Taylors’ front. When it was all over she wrote that Bob and Barbara “went around putting on false fronts, about as convincing as the masks children wear on Halloween. Behind them you could see Bob and Barbara, forlorn, lost, lonely, kidding nobody but themselves, maybe, and each other.”
At a hastily called news conference a week before Christmas, Helen Ferguson read a joint statement:
In the past few years, because of professional requirements, we have been separated just too often and too long. Our sincere and continued efforts to maintain our marriage have failed. We are deeply disappointed that we could not solve our problems. We really tried. We unhappily and reluctantly admit that we have denied to even our closest friends because we wanted to work things out together in as much privacy as possible. There will be a California divorce. Neither of us has any other romantic interest whatsoever.
Louella Parsons didn’t buy that and in her column wrote the trouble that led to the Taylors’ decision to part was buried much deeper than in “that Italian girl.”
29
HERSELF
LOOKING CHIC IN A COCOA-COLORED TAILORED SUIT AND MATCHING straw hat, Barbara appeared in Los Angeles Superior Court February 21, 1951. In a brief statement, she told Judge Thurmond Clarke her husband was tired of being married to her. “He said he had enjoyed his freedom during the months he was making a movie in Italy. He wanted to be able to live his life without restriction.” To her attorney David Tannenbaum’s question of what effect Taylor’s request for a divorce had had on her, she said, “It shocked me greatly. I was ill for several weeks and under my physician’s care.”
Barbara did not charge mental cruelty—the popular charge by divorcing actresses. Her petition for a divorce decree was uncontested, and Bob chose not to be present. He was represented instead by his counsel, Lester Lappen. Helen Ferguson was Barbara’s witness, testifying that she received a hysterical call from her friend to come right over to the Taylor house: “When I got there, I f
ound Barbara in a tragic emotional state. She said to me, Ί want to make a statement. I am going to give Bob the divorce he wants.’” Helen said she stayed with Stanwyck until 5:00 A.M. and that it took “two hours for Barbara to calm down.” During that time, Helen testified, “Mr. Taylor said hardly a word.”
Judge Clarke interrupted. “That will be enough. Divorce granted!”
The proceedings were among the shortest in the records of movie divorces. A property settlement was approved by the court but not made public. Pressed by reporters, however, Bob’s lawyer Lappen revealed that his client relinquished to Stanwyck his interest in their Holmby Hills home, valued at $100,000, all furnishings, and 15 percent of his earnings until Barbara remarried or either party died. A judicial award for alimony was rarely made unless applied for, and her request for permanent alimony was exceptional by the standards of 1950s California divorce law. But as she had told Bob in Rome, she would make him pay for the rest of his life.
On the way out of the courtroom, Barbara spotted Harriett Corey. The two women embraced. Barbara cried softly. Reporters in the corridor wanted to know whether Bob had demanded the divorce so he could marry the Italian beauty. “You’d have to ask Mr. Taylor about that,” she answered. Asked whether she had a boyfriend herself, she shuddered. “I’ve had enough. I don’t want any more of that!”
The Los Angeles press reported the divorce as evidence that Robert Taylor had lost his heart to Lia de Leo in Rome. The next day’s Los Angeles Mirror called Stanwyck a graying actress. The Herald-Express quoted her as saying she was tired of being “a long-distance telephone wife.” News photographers hounded Taylor in L.A. and Lia in Rome. He blew up a couple of times. Once at a quiet cocktail party with Rex Harrison, he turned to the reporters and photographers and shouted. “I’m here, aren’t I? Is Lia with me?” In Rome, Lia said it was no doubt for the best if she and Robert remained just friends.
Much later Bob would put it all rather simply. “Let’s just say Barbara is a very strong personality. I respect her deeply and treasure her friendship … I always felt her talent was far greater than my own; it came easier to her, and she made the most of her gifts.” Tom Purvis thought Bob and Barbara had simply tired of each other and of their way of life. “Maybe they should have adopted children,” he said. “Bob loved kids, but Barbara had no time for them. Dion was a sad example. She and Bob had only one thing in common—the movie industry.”
Standing in the entrance hall at North Faring Road the first night as a divorced woman, Barbara wasn’t sure she would make it. As a little girl she had tried to kid away her sorrows by asking who had more fun—kids or cats? Now, she asked the empty house if anyone was home for a game of solitaire. The blow was not only to her pride. For the first time she felt existentially alone. Nothing had lasted in her quick-change life. Whatever their differences, she had wanted the marriage to Bob to last. In her late seventies, when Bob was long since dead, she would say it took her a long time to accept that he had wanted to be a married bachelor. “I remember telling him that every man who lived wants that, wants it both ways. I’m known as someone who takes care of herself, it’s true, but I worked hard at the marriage because I wanted it.”
At the suggestion of Clark Gable and Howard Strickling, Bob began seeing Gable’s recent discard, Virginia Grey. The twenty-eight-year-old actress was a Metro contractée who never made it out of Β pictures. Her romance with Gable had made headlines. Friends suspected Clark had found a successor to the late Carole Lombard and that he and Virginia would marry. Instead, it was the thrice-married Lady Sylvia Ashley who, after a whirlwind courtship, became the fourth Mrs. Gable.
Dating Taylor, Virginia would remember, was in many ways “very strange.”
“At the end of the evening he would manage to disappear without saying goodnight. The first time it happened I spent hours looking for him, thinking something had happened to him. Nothing of the sort. Bob had simply gone home. He did not want to go through that sticky, phony Til call you tomorrow or see you next week’ business, so he left. Then he’d call and nothing was mentioned about his disappearance. He meant well. When he was on location making a film, he wrote to me regularly. Often Bob would say he was sorry I did not come along, but he never asked.”
He insisted on keeping their dating secret. Virginia realized that if she wanted to see him again she shouldn’t talk, and no rumors of Taylor’s “new love interest” reached the gossip columns. Their “dating” ended when he was sent to Arizona to star in Westward the Women, a onetime Frank Capra project directed by William Wellman.
BARBARA TURNED FORTY-FOUR. HER PRIVATE LIFE WAS STILL THE best-kept secret in Hollywood. Exhibiting grief and rancor was not her style, but friends and acquaintances found her moody, bitter, and “very tough.” Did she mean herself or Bob when, in a commentary Helen ghosted for her for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS Radio news show, she said that people who have been hurt lash out? She admitted she had a hard time learning to turn the other cheek. Was anyone to blame? She mentioned Bob’s airplane, perhaps meaning Ralph Couser or Tom Purvis. She wondered whether she and Bob would find a way of reconciling. The self-imposed loneliness made her drink too much, and to get out of her funk she grasped at any chance to work.
Jack Benny said she had nerves of ice: “Maybe it’s hammy, but that old line ‘the show must go on’—that’s Barbara.” The trouper in her showed at the Screen Writers Guild’s annual awards dinner. Since the divorce date practically coincided with the awards dinner, the guild organizers expected her to beg off, but she showed up exquisitely dressed and, facing the appraising stares of gossip columnists and fellow actors, launched into the planned skit, letter-perfect as always.
The divorce might have brought her closer to her son, but even if she had been so inclined, the twenty-year-old Dion had been drafted for a two-year tour of duty in the army that included a rotation to Germany.
Before Dion left for boot camp, Uncle Buck suggested that his mother at least see him. She agreed to a lunch. “When I met her, she just stuck out her gloved hand,” Dion would recall. “She didn’t kiss me, she didn’t hug me. And after some small talk I learned the real reason for breaking the five-year silence—she began to lecture me on how to behave in the Army.”
That was the last time mother and son saw each other.
CLAIMING SHE COULD NOT BEAR TO LIVE IN THE HOUSE THAT HAD been her and Bob’s home since 1940, Barbara auctioned the furniture, movie projectors, and a hundred other items. The auction hit the society pages as Lady Thelma Furness and her sister Consuelo Vanderbilt bought silverware and an unknown bidder carried away a series of ten studies of western pioneer women by Frederic Remington. Two days after the auction, the newly divorced were seen together at Ciro’s on Sunset Boulevard. Letters, telegrams, and phone calls from fans pleaded for a reconciliation.
They continued to see each other. Bob was up for the fictionalized Frank Fay opposite Judy Garland as Barbara in Warner Brothers’ musicalized remake of A Star Is Born (James Mason was the thirteenth and definitive choice). News-agency photos appeared showing Bob and Barbara together in a restaurant booth. Bob was “seen” with Sybil Merritt and Lane Trumbel, a pair of screen ingenues, but when reporters asked Barbara if there were a chance of reconciling, she said it was too early to say. For her July 16 birthday, Bob sent her a heart of diamonds. Always insecure and awkward at one-to-one interviews, he kept Helen as his press agent. As late as 1953, Bob was reported to be “dating” his former wife as well as Debra Paget and Darryl Zanuck’s youngest daughter, Susan.
Barbara bought a smaller home at 273 South Beverly Glen Boulevard, on the fringe of Holmby Hills, and lived with Uncle Buck, Harriett Corey, a cook, and a twice-a-week gardener. Claudette Colbert and Irene Dunne were neighbors. Visitors found Barbara’s new home at once feminine and austere. She sold the Renoir she and Bob had bought but kept a snowy Vlaminck landscape. To occupy herself during the few hours she allotted to leisure, she read ravenously—almost a book a day.<
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Uncle Buck was her only “family.” Her brother, Byron, now a board member of the Screen Extras Guild, had married and lived in Los Angeles with his wife and son, but she rarely saw them. Maud was still in Brooklyn.
The day the Stanwyck-Taylor divorce became final in February 1952, Louella Parsons called Barbara. The columnist expected to hear the phrase she had heard so many times, that the new divorcée was glad it was finally all over. Instead, Barbara told her she and Bob had tried to reconcile. “My divorce from Bob was none of my doing,” she said. “I think our unhappiness started from the time he bought an airplane. Then he went on fishing and hunting trips with other men and was always away from home. I finally asked him if I was making too many pictures and he insisted that I keep on.” Parsons felt there was so much pent-up hurt behind those words that she suggested Barbara would marry again, that with her gray hair and young face she had never been more attractive.
Barbara would have none of it: “I hope I won’t ever marry again. I’m a two-time loser.”
A COUPLE OF CAST-OFF WIVES BECAME HER FRIENDS. JOAN BLON-dell kidded that Barbara shouldn’t complain. Blondell had never abandoned her man, but crooner Dick Powell had left her for June Allyson, and Mike Todd had left her for Evelyn Keyes. Joan exuded a longing for home and domesticity. So did Nancy Sinatra, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three.
Nancy’s marriage to Frank was ending in humiliation. Frank flaunted his tempestuous affair with Ava Gardner and tried to bully Nancy into granting him a divorce. Nancy hoped she could outlast Gardner and told the press, “Frank has left home, but he has done it before and I suppose he’ll do it again.” To save appearances, MGM shipped Ava to Spain to start work on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and terminated Sinatra’s contract one year early.
In August, the crooner forced the issue. With Ava he went on a press-hounded vacation to Acapulco. The news media assumed he would obtain a quick Mexican divorce and marry Ava. It was in Nevada, however, that the Sinatras finally divorced, he capitulating to every one of his wife’s financial demands and Nancy walking out of the court a rich woman. In November, Frank married Ava in Philadelphia.