Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Barbara and Nancy were daughters of New York-area working-class parents—Nancy Barbato grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. They had both married entertainers, and both tried to hang on to their husbands. Much separated them, too. The Sinatra marriage had been a traditional one, Frank as breadwinner, Nancy as homemaker. As a mother, Barbara had been a disaster; Nancy brought up her daughters, Nancy and Christina, and her son, Frank Jr., in the tradition of second-generation Italian-Americans. When Frank won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity, it was Nancy he phoned, not Ava. By 1954, Frank and Ava separated. Over the years, Stanwyck would become closer to the Sinatra children than she had ever been to Dion.

  Oscar Levant would remember Barbara and Nancy arriving together at a party at the Ira Gershwins. “I hadn’t seen Barbara in twenty years and out of what I think was a desperate loneliness, she came over and kissed me,” he would write in his memoirs. “We had never kissed, good friends though we were. I was very touched. I had always pulled for her and had never forgotten her.”

  STANWYCK’S CIRCLE OF FRIENDS WAS SMALL. IT INCLUDED FELLOW actors and their wives, Jack and Mary Benny, the MacMurrays, the McCreas, and William and Ardis (Brenda Marshall) Holden. Barbara remained close to Peter and Renée Godfrey, who had named their eldest daughter after her. Stanwyck lobbed gifts on the three-year-old girl and followed the development of her twin sisters, Jill and Tracy. Barbara described herself as serene. “I’m concentrating on work, and this is what it takes: serenity, beauty, quiet, friends when I want them, and the valuable state of being alone which a creative person must have in between,” she told Hedda Hopper.

  In fact, she was scared. She commanded top money—$150,000 per picture. Even if veteran stars were still working, how big was the demand for forty-four-year-old leading ladies? Stars younger than she had retired or were deemed passé. Rita Hayworth had left to marry Prince Aly Khan, and MGM had fired Judy Garland. Joan Fontaine’s only film since 1948 had been the trashy Born to Be Bad, Katharine Hepburn had not worked since 1949, Ava Gardner’s last picture had been East Side, West Side, and Jennifer Jones was used mostly in the vanity films her husband, David Selznick, produced.

  With Bill and Ardis, Barbara attended a private studio screening of Sunset Boulevard. Previews in Evanston, Illinois, and Long Island, New York, had proved disastrous. Paramount postponed its release. As the Holdens and Stanwyck entered the screening for film luminaries, there were rumors the studio might shelve the film permanently.

  Gloria Swanson was right behind them, making her entrance wearing a floor-length silver lamé dress. Once the lights dimmed, the audience saw Swanson play Norma Desmond ruthlessly, without regard for sympathy. The 111 minutes the film lasted went by in a hush, and after the shattering climax, silence greeted the end credits. When the lights went up, there was thunderous applause. Louis B. Mayer was in a rage. “You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you,” he yelled at director Billy Wilder as he stalked out. Barbara had tears streaming down her face as she pushed her way forward to congratulate Swanson.

  THE NOVEMBER PREMIERE OF ALL ABOUT EVE AT GRAUMAN’S Chinese Theatre and the studio party at Ciro’s turned Bette Davis into the actress of the year. Hedda Hopper called Bette Davis’s performance the most thrilling comeback in 1950: “A succession of bad, yes, mediocre pictures had proved that not even the queen was immune to the skids … For my money, her performance in All About Eve tops anything she ever did.” Two months later, All About Eve racked up a record fourteen Oscar nominations. Sunset Boulevard was listed eleven times.

  Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert sat together at the Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on March 29, 1951, watching Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman, Jr., pick up Oscars for the Sunset Boulevard screenplay and Franz Waxman the Music award. But it was Zanuck, Mankiewicz, and Sanders who stood grinning in their tuxedos with All About Eve’s Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Supporting Actor Oscars. Judy Holliday scored as Best Actress in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday.

  At the post-Oscar party, Colbert told Mankiewicz a knife of jealousy was going through her heart. Barbara paid Davis a convoluted compliment that she might have meant for herself. Playing an older woman now, she said, meant Bette would never have to cross the age bridge again.

  The ever-cynical Wilder embraced Barbara and, for hovering news-hounds, came up with an unprintable Barbara Stanwyck story. To prove she was earthy he told of a poolside risposte of hers. An aging actress complained to Barbara and Wilder how her young lover was spending $100,000 of her money on sports cars, jewelry, and clothes for himself. “Tell me, darling,” Wilder quoted Barbara as telling the lady, “is the screwing you’re getting worth the screwing you’re getting?”

  Barbara might have financed Frank Fay’s Broadway comeback once, but no man could be said to have screwed her out of money. On the contrary, the divorce obliged Bob to pay part of his earnings to her as long as she lived or remarried. She felt cheated nevertheless, bought off, defrauded, not of a shared bed, but, as Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve dramatized, of the respect without which a maturing woman cannot live.

  STANWYCK EMBARKED ON A DECADE OF FILM ACTING OF LITTLE distinction. She was not alone. Davis might have had the guts to accept All About Eve, but in a fit of rage, she had fired herself after eighteen years with Warners. After clashing with King Vidor during the shooting of Beyond the Forest in 1949, she called Jack Warner to the set. “Jack, if you don’t get another director, I want to be released from my contract,” she screamed. “It’s him or me!” Warner released her from her contract. Her departure left Joan Crawford as the reigning WB queen, but, like Barbara, she had to play domineering shrews in thrillers and westerns. In the fall of 1952, she was out of a contract. She announced her return to Broadway, backed out, and a year later was back at MGM for a two-picture deal with her old studio. Torch Song was a rip-off of All About Eve in which Crawford played an aging, neurotic musical comedy star. After undergoing slight surgical improvements to get the part, she told costume designer Helen Rose, “The face and the breasts are new, but my ass is the same, as flat as a twenty-year-old’s.” The second picture was never made.

  Barbara and Joan remained friends. Shirley Eder called it a strange friendship, but Joan really liked Barbara. “It was always a kind of bond between them,” writer Carl Johnes would recall. Every year on Joan’s birthday, Barbara sent a big floral gift.

  IN MARCH 1951, THE HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMIT-tee returned to Hollywood, where, four years earlier, it had struck gold. The cold war was at its chilliest. The Korean War was entering its second year, Americans were building fallout shelters in their backyards, Senator Joseph McCarthy warned of communists in every nook and cranny of the U.S. government, and the spy hunt nailed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as the first civilians who would suffer the death penalty for espionage. Screen Actors Guild president Reagan announced the guild would not defend members who defied the committee. “It is every member’s duty to cooperate fully,” he proclaimed. Following the American Federation of Musicians, the guild decided it would not take union action against any studio denying jobs to an actor whose “actions outside of union activities have so offended American public opinion that he has made himself unsalable at the box office.” At the Directors Guild, a refusal by Joe Mankiewicz to insist on loyalty oaths for every member nearly cost him his career when Cecil B. DeMille led a move to unseat him.

  Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, East Side, West Side screenwriter Isobel Lennart, and twenty-seven others named three hundred of their colleagues as members or former members of the Communist Party. Ward Bond was nicknamed “The Hangman Ward” because he could smell a “commie-Jew a mile away.” The Alliance’s Roy Brewer said, “Communists created the blacklist themselves” and jeered individuals’ desperate and often unsuccessful attempts to save their jobs. In July, Dashiell Hammett was arrested for refusing to reveal the names of contributors to a bail fund. When Edward G. Robinson sent a $2,500 check to help the de
stitute Trumbo, he was scolded by right-wing Hearst columnist Sidney Skolsky. The actor was not accused of anything, but his case turned Kafkaesque. Job offers declined until he begged the HUAC to hear him: “Call me as a witness,” Robinson cried “Swear me in. I will testify under oath.” On a visit from his Bucks County lair, humorist S. J. Perelman called Hollywood a terrible combination of boomtown gone bust and Nazi Germany in 1935.

  The HUAC hearings continued until 1953, but the blacklist didn’t begin to unravel until 1960, when Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas admitted the screenwriter of Exodus and Spartacus was Dalton Trumbo.

  William Wyler filmed Carrie, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, but Liberty Film partner Frank Capra refused to help cut the script because he considered its portrayal of a girl who chooses an illicit liaison with a wealthy man over working in a sweatshop to be a Marxist slur on the capitalist system. Very few of Barbara’s director and producer friends dared to target political controversy. William Wellman showed a trapper marrying an Indian girl in Across the Wide Missouri, while Billy Wilder made media sensationalism the subject of Ace in the Hole. Barbara herself tiptoed around any subject that could be considered radioactive. Self-preservation made her turn down a parable on McCarthysm called The Library.

  The Library was about book burning and guilt by association. It told the story of a New England librarian who resists pressures by vigilantes and elected officials to remove a controversial book, only to see the library burned down. The original screenplay was by Daniel Taradash, imported from New York in 1938 to help rewrite Golden Boy. Taradash had won an Oscar in 1953 for his From Here to Eternity script and was such an outspoken opponent of the renewed witch hunt that Hedda Hopper wondered in print why anyone would even consider something as un-American as The Library.

  Bette Davis felt the story had much to say about true un-American-ism and the need for a free and open society. She agreed to play the small-town librarian. Taradash directed, and after Harry Cohn blew hot and cold for three years, the film was made in 1955. Columbia renamed it Storm Center and nervously released it in 1956. More ominously, Davis did not work for three years afterward. It was rumored that Hopper and her conservative friends applied pressure to keep her from getting decent offers.

  STANWYCK’S FIRST PICTURE IN 1951 WAS THE MAN WITH A CLOAK. The limp period thriller was filmed on MGM’s choicest sets with Joseph Cotton and the new French sensation Leslie Caron. The Man with a Cloak takes place in New York in 1848. A mysterious stranger who turns out to be Edgar Allan Poe enters two women’s lives and helps Caron’s character keep her inheritance. The director was Fletcher Markle, a Canadian TV writer-director who had graduated to the big screen directing Ronald Reagan’s soon-to-be wife, Nancy Davis, in Night into Morning.

  Barbara ran into Mae Clarke at the studio commissary. Her roommate from the days of the cold-water flat on Forty-sixth Street was under contract to MGM and up for a minor part in Because of You, a crime yarn starring Loretta Young. Barbara didn’t have to fear running into her former husband during the filming because Metro sent Robert Taylor to England, this time to star in Ivanhoe. The big-budget adaptation of the Walter Scott novel was a pet project of Dore Schary’s. Bob was Ivanhoe, Joan Fontaine the heroine, and Elizabeth Taylor the woman who doesn’t get him. Fontaine would remember Bob nursing his vanity over his divorce.

  The success of Quo Vadis, released in November 1951, turned Bob into MGM’s hottest male star. The film was Metro’s all-time hit, generating the greatest cash flow since Gone with the Wind—$25 million worldwide. Bob and Deborah Kerr vaulted past Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor as top stars. In his next film, Above and Beyond, Bob was in tune with the times and his aviator passion, playing Colonel Paul

  Tibbetts, the B-17 Enola Gay captain who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  Barbara rang in 1952 with Bill and Ardis Holden. Nancy and Ronald Reagan were there. So were Eleanor Parker and her husband, Paul Clemens, and Bill’s lawyer, Robert Lerner, and his wife. At midnight, Bill put on a 78 rpm record of “Auld Lang Syne,” and husbands and wives kissed. Since Barbara had no husband to kiss, Bill did the honors. New Year’s Eve at the Holdens in Toluca Lake became a ritual after that.

  CLASH BY NIGHT, STANWYCK’S FIRST FILM IN 1952 AND HER FIRST for RKO since Ball of Fire, was touched by the witch hunt. The studio was now owned—and mismanaged—by Howard Hughes. The millionaire paid Warners $150,000 for the remaining months of producer Jerry Wald’s contract so he could make Wald and former screenwriter Norman Krasna the day-to-day studio chiefs. Hughes was so gung-ho on the two “whiz kids” that besides weekly salaries of $2,500 each, he agreed to a profit-sharing contract with them. But the “wonder boys” couldn’t get Hughes to okay any decisions.

  In signing on for Clash by Night, Stanwyck again put aside her politics. The writing credits on Clash by Night were ticklish, and its director was on an unofficial blacklist. Fritz Lang, however, convinced Howard Hughes that calling him a communist was just too ridiculous and obviously the workings of personal malice. Questions about Lang’s political correctness had popped up when he objected to an upbeat rewrite of Clifford Odets’s 1930s defeatist ending.

  The source material was Odets’s panting play about jealousy, The Lie. A dozen writers worked on the script, including producer Harriett Parsons. Louella’s daughter had been an in-house producer at RKO since 1943. The screenwriter of record was Alfred Hayes, favored by Darryl Zanuck for his clipped, realistic Hemingwayesque dialogue. He had spent several years in Italy writing novels and collaborating with Roberto Rossellini on Paisan. The first thing Parsons and Hayes cut out was the social dimension of 1930s unemployment in Odets’s original drama. A “Commie” scene that supposedly belittled religion by showing a priest blessing a fishing fleet was excised when Tiding, the Los Angeles Archdiocese weekly, objected.

  Lang’s Hollywood career had never matched the experimental pyrotechnics of his Berlin years of Metropolis and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. He was obliged to labor in Β pictures—he said he preferred lower-case “programmers” where he could create hostile noctur-nal worlds full of ambiguity and incongruity. Movies, he told Barbara, must deal with people caught by fate, they must be about honest men or women driven to seek revenge in ways that turn them into criminals. Lynching was the theme in Fury, false accusations the focus of You Only Live Once. In While the City Sleeps, a newsman investigating homicides becomes a murder suspect himself. In The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson becomes a murderer, and in The Big Heat Glenn Ford’s wife is killed by a bomb meant for him. Clash by Night was Lang’s second picture for Hughes. The first was the just-completed western made to order for Marlene Dietrich as an aging femme fatale operating a hideout for outlaws. Hughes reçut the picture and changed the title from Chuck-a-Luck to Rancho Notorious, but the film remained an unappetizing western and a disaster for Dietrich.

  Matching Lang with Odets’s The Lie was a better fit. Stanwyck plays Mae Doyle, the hardened city girl and small-town adulteress Tal-lulah Bankhead had created onstage in 1941. Paul Douglas is her husband, Robert Ryan the wrong guy she can’t help falling for. The characters’ complexity helped the film overcome the eternal triangle. Stanwyck’s Mae is both a woman with a dubious past and a liberated individual who comes to see her own flaws. Pain constantly flickers beneath a sardonic mien in Ryan’s anguished performance. A caustic cynic, he tells Mae that in every decisive circumstance “somebody’s throat has to be cut.” But he also cries out to her, “Help me, Mae, I’m dying of loneliness.”

  Lang knew how to play on his stagy continental impertinence and suave authority. One morning when Barbara complained that the scene they were about to shoot was so badly written she couldn’t play it, the director asked if he could talk frankly and openly to her. She said sure. “I think the scene reminds you of a rather recent event in your private life,” he told her, “and that is why you can’t play it.” She looked at him for a second. “You so
nofabitch,” she snapped and went out to play the two-and-a-half-page scene so well Lang ordered no retakes.

  On a loanout from Twentieth Century-Fox, Marilyn Monroe had a subplot part as Barbara’s good-natured sister-in-law. By the time the movie reached neighborhood theaters Monroe was featured on the marquees. To promote the picture, RKO publicity chief Perry Lieber leaked the fact that Monroe had posed for a nude calendar in 1949. He supplied United Press International’s Aline Mosby with a copy of the calendar. When Mosby’s story became front-page news, Darryl Zanuck instructed Monroe to deny she was the honey-blond girl stretched out on a sheet of red velvet. Barbara encouraged Marilyn to face the music. She did and at a news conference told how the $50 she had been paid for the photo session paid her rent. Monroe’s honesty paid off in supporting fan mail.

  In the middle of the shooting, Hughes started a communist hunt at RKO that Variety suggested was an excuse to enable the millionaire to lay off people, cut production, and perhaps unload the studio. After Hughes removed Paul Jarrico’s name as the screenwriter of The Las Vegas Story, a melodrama intended for Jane Russell and Victor Mature, the writer answered with a $350,000 damage suit. Incensed, Hughes challenged the Screen Writers Guild to call a strike against RKO, and, while he installed a “screening” system, placed some one hundred “loyal” studio employees on leaves of absence. “We are going to screen everyone in a creative or executive capacity,” he said, “to make RKO one studio where the work of communist sympathizers will not be used.” Jarrico was one of the writers of the now infamous Song of Russia. Hughes had him blacklisted.

  Four months later, after RKO’s 1952 losses reached $4 million, Hughes sold to a five-man syndicate. On October 16, the Wall Street Journal revealed that three of the new owners had been involved with “organized crime, fraudulent mail-order schemes and bigtime gambling.”