Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  To BOLSTER STANWYCK’S IMAGE AS A STAR, HELEN FERGUSON talked Barbara into letting Collier’s do a cover story on her. To write the profile, the magazine sent former New York Times film critic Frank Nugent, who in his time had disparaged many of her performances.

  Nugent got to observe his subject at home and at work. Stanwyck refused to wear hats offscreen, he noticed. She hated jangling jewelry and had little interest in food. “Her dinner almost invariably is a small steak and a salad or a green vegetable,” he wrote. “She can’t stand hearing a telephone ring and invariably beats her maid to the phone. She likes a good story, but rarely tells one herself. She has a great laugh, right from the stomach.”

  She lived a cloistered life. A painting in her bedroom depicted a chorus girl in her dressing room, massaging her feet. “I know her;” she said. “My feet have ached that way too!” Nugent interviewed Buck McCarthy. Uncle Buck told him Barbara could be impulsive, that her moods “come on her all of a sudden, and the only thing to do is to wait until she gets over them.”

  On the set, the former critic discovered that she was known to crew members as Queen Barbara, or, more affectionately, as Queen Babs. Watching her work, he likened her to the former boxing champion Joe Louis when he relaxed in his corner before the bell. “There is the same air of cool detachment, casual assurance,” he wrote. “She sits on the doorstep of her dressing room—knitting occasionally, or reading a book, or sipping one of the 14 cups of coffee she consumes in the course of a studio day. She looks more like a housewife listening to the radio while shelling peas than an actress about to take off into the emotional stratosphere. Then the bell rings—and it’s Killer Stanwyck in the ring, knocking the audience dead.”

  Lang called working with Stanwyck a pleasure. “She’s fantastic, unbelievable, and I liked her tremendously. When Marilyn missed her lines—which she did constantly—Barbara never said a word.”

  Without identifying Marilyn Monroe, Nugent recounted how “an actress famed chiefly for her beauty and curvaceousness” was two hours late for her first scene with Stanwyck. To illustrate Barbara’s grace and deadpan humor, Nugent reported how the actress blew her lines twenty-six times and how Barbara was as calm on the twenty-seventh take as on the first. Later when visitors to the set were milling around Marilyn, a crew member asked Barbara what she thought of Monroe. “With a figure like that,” Barbara smiled, “you don’t have to act.”

  It was Barbara, however, who caused a ten-day shutdown when she caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. They had been shooting the final scene at midnight. Barbara had been on the set since six that morning and the next day kept a scheduled appointment with Nugent. In the afternoon she was rushed to a hospital by ambulance.

  It was not easy for Helen to convince her reticent friend to give interviews. Shirley Eder, the young columnist for the Detroit Free Press, had to agree to limit her questions to the present and the future and not ask about Stanwyck’s past before she could have fifteen minutes with Barbara at the Helen Ferguson Agency. But the occasion of Eder’s interview also revealed Helen’s overprotectiveness of Barbara and her wish to control Barbara’s every contact with the press. The interview was for NBC’s “Monitor” radio show and while Eder was setting up her tape recorder and microphones, Helen was called to her private office to take a long-distance call. Stanwyck and Eder proceeded without the press agent. When Helen came back forty-five minutes later and said, “I’m sorry I was away so long; now you can begin,” Barbara told her friend the interview was over and done. “Well,” said Helen. “Shirley, you’ll stay and play the tape for me, won’t you?”

  “No, Helen,” Barbara cut in. “Shirley doesn’t have to play the tape back to you. What’s more, she has to leave, and so do I.” With a wink to the journalist as if she had pulled one over on Helen, Barbara left the office. Helen called the columnist at her hotel a few hours later and asked for a copy of the tape. Shirley half promised to send it to her, but never got around to it.

  30

  B PIX

  AS A YOUNG ACTRESS, BARBARA HAD TOLD HERSELF SHE WOULD retire at forty. She was going on forty-six when she finally made an attempt to withdraw from the business that was her lifeblood. “I didn’t work for one whole year,” she would remember. “I went to Europe, but just how many cathedrals can you see? I simply didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went back to work.”

  Work was a “panic thriller” about a woman who lets herself be ravished by an escaped killer so he will help save her husband from a rising tide and inevitable drowning. Jeopardy was directed by John Sturges, who was considered a master of the contemporary western. Barry Sullivan was the man trapped under his stalled car on a deserted beach and Ralph Meeker the escaped convict. Critics decided Sturges gave Jeopardy enough pace, Stanwyck and Meeker enough conviction to give the wildly improbable story enough spin to make its very short sixty-nine minutes seem like a cartoon or a documentary. MGM didn’t expect much from the film, but Jeopardy turned out to a box-office winner.

  The hit of 1953 was Roman Holiday and its scintillating newcomer, Audrey Hepburn. William Wyler’s most romantic film was a fairy tale, where, for once, the prince doesn’t marry the princess. It would be another twenty-five years before it leaked out that the script was by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. During the summer of 1952, when Wyler shot the film in Rome, the screenwriter of record was John Dighton. Wyler loved the freedom of shooting in Rome. No sets, no back transparencies, nothing of the stage and back-lot Hollywood romances. Instead, twenty-three-year-old Hepburn and Gregory Peck rode through Roman streets and alleys on a motor scooter, danced on a Tiber river barge, hopscotched down the Spanish Steps, and kissed in front of the Barberini Palazzo. Darryl Zanuck had started the transatlantic migration in 1948 by sending Tyrone Power and Orson Welles to Italy to star in Prince of Foxes, a costume epic about the Renaissance Borgias. The power of the dollar and the tax implications of living and working abroad for part of the year soon became obvious to top-bracket showbiz people. Hollywood unions furiously opposed “runaway productions” and tried to stop the trend.

  Stanwyck was no runaway. She was not alone. Edward G. Robinson was another maturing star who refused to uproot himself for London or Rome. What neither realized immediately was that staying at home meant a soft slide into Β pictures. Under the pressure of television, the power structure was crumbling. Louis B. Mayer lost a fight with Dore Schary for control of MGM, resigned, and in 1957 tried a corporate finagle to seize control of Loew’s, Inc. Two months after his coup failed, he died. The end of the contract system accelerated the decline of stars of Stanwyck’s generation. Instead of being told to report to director so-and-so on Monday to start shooting such-and-such, they were suddenly in charge of themselves. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Gary Cooper lacked the objectivity, judgment, or discipline to pick winners among the scripts agents and producers were pitching. Crawford did the ossified-star vehicle called Torch Song. Cooper was the fourth choice—after Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Charlton Heston—for High Noon and almost refused the role that saved his career because the script was written by blacklisted Carl Foreman.

  As Barbara had done to prop up Frank Fay twenty years earlier, Judy Garland played scenes from her own movies on the stage of New York’s Palace Theatre. Claudette Colbert returned to the Broadway of her youth. Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward appeared in Las Vegas. Katharine Hepburn went to London to star in George Bernard Shaw’s Millionairess and didn’t make a movie until 1955. William Boyd had lost his big ranch and was flat broke when television asked him to play Hopalong Cassidy on the small screen. Bob Hope was getting $40,000 per each TV show, and David Niven and other “names” picked up grocery money by doing guest shots on the Hope and Jack Benny shows. Fear of offending the aging studio hierarchy, however, held back many stars. Charles Boyer and Dick Powell nevertheless formed a company to make films for television. Niven joined them and although Boyer, Powell, and Niven were unable to recruit a fourth st
ar, they optimistically called their firm The Four-Star Playhouse. The idea was to have well-known actors appear once a month in an anthology series. During the 1953-54 season, Ronald Colman, Joan Fontaine, Merle Oberon, and Ida Lupino headlined Four-Star TV productions. Henry Fonda, who even had the guts to blow froth in beer commercials, became the show’s host the following season. The fifth year they bought a series of Zane Grey western pulp novels and launched “Zane Grey Theater.” Stanwyck appeared in Four-Star productions. She tried to be breezy with the press: “I’m an actress and an actress acts.” In early 1956, she formed her independent production company, called it Barwyck, and looked for material suitable for television.

  IF BARBARA WAS IN Β PICTURES, HER FORMER HUSBAND WAS HOT again. Robert Taylor had never received an Academy Award, and MGM and his admirers thought he deserved an Oscar for his Above and Beyond portrayal of Colonel Paul Tibbetts, but only the picture’s writer, Beirne Lay, Jr., and its composer, Hugo Friedhofer, were nominated. William Holden’s cynical POW in Stalag 17 won the 1953 Best Actor Oscar, but in playing Sir Lancelot to Ava Gardner’s Guinevere in Knights of the Round Table, Bob gave his studio a blockbuster hit.

  Barbara saw Bob now and then. Columnists reported he was going to marry a German divorcée with two children. Bob denied he planned to marry Ursula Thiess. When reporters asked for Barbara’s reaction, she said she was tired of media speculation. “Bob and I didn’t stay friends, we became friends again,” she said. To put an end to speculation, she added, “Bob and I go to a nightclub or have dinner and talk. I know what I know, Bob knows what he knows. Other people don’t.”

  The raven-haired Ursula was a former model brought to Hollywood by Howard Hughes. After polishing her English with RKO’s drama coach Florence Enright, the studio had sent her to India to star in Monsoon, paired her with Robert Stack in the costume drama The Iron Glove, and loaned her to Universal to costar in Bengal Brigade with Arlene Dahl and Rock Hudson. Bob’s old friend from their Illinois naval base days was getting married by his studio. Universal was rumored to be paying off Confidential magazine not to publish an exposé on Rock Hudson’s homosexuality. His bride was Phyllis Gates, his agent’s secretary. Ursula’s agent introduced her to Bob in April 1952. To bolster her up-and-coming status, they made the social scene.

  ~ ~ ~

  WHILE BOB WAS IN EGYPT PLAYING AN ARCHEOLOGIST IN VALLEY of the Kings and the Howard Strickling office hinted at an offscreen romance with his costar Eleanor Parker, Barbara kept herself busy playing a passenger on the S.S. Titanic.

  She and Clifton Webb played a socially prominent couple on the brink of divorce in Titanic. Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen won Best Story and Screenplay Oscars for the reenactment of the 1912 maritime tragedy. Romanian-born Jean Negulesco directed the Twentieth Century-Fox production and managed to create suspense despite the all-too-well-known ending of the doomed ocean liner. Richard Basehart played a defrocked priest, Allyn Joslyn a meddlesome bore, Thelma Ritter a salty lady, and Brian Aherne the ship’s captain. The cast also included twenty-three-year-old Robert Wagner.

  Barbara took him under her wing, as she had done William Holden and Kirk Douglas. “She changed my whole approach to my work, made me want to learn the business completely,” Wagner would remember. “She started me thinking. It means a lot when someone takes time with a newcomer.”

  Columnists hinted at a May-September liaison. As compared to dating someone Barbara’s own age or older, a man in his early twenties possessed a blush, a kind of gauche innocence and capacity for bursting into flames that flattered her and reminded her of Bob when they first met. She called the rumors ridiculous. Press photographers caught them in a restaurant with Clifton Webb one night. In the published photo, Webb was cut out. Barbara tried humor when she was “seen” with Jean-Pierre Aumont. “I keep reading about these romances and it’s embarrassing—to the other party,” she told the Los Angeles Daily News. “A nice guy takes me out to dinner and then reads we’re going to be married. To a sophisticated person I can say, ‘Look, I don’t want to get married,’ but others might not understand. Another fellow might think I expect a proposal. He’s not sure. So he doesn’t call again. Paul Gregory, a producer, called to ask me if I would do a play for him. We had dinner, and the next day I read we’re having a romance. He’s a wonderful dinner companion but after those items, I don’t know what he thinks.”

  She had little time for a love life, she added. “I only go out on Saturdays with the Jack Bennys and Nancy Sinatra.”

  Zanuck demanded a convincing sinking of the Titanic, and art directors Lyle Wheeler and Maurice Ransford created the fateful nighttime encounter of ship and iceberg in the studio’s huge outdoor tank. Negulesco had Barbara swinging in a lifeboat high above forty extras in whirlpool-agitated waters. The realism of the scene made her think of the men and women drowning in the icy waters off Newfoundland forty years earlier. Did she think of Rex Cherryman dying in his ocean liner cabin twenty-five years earlier? “I burst into tears,” she would remember. “I shook with great racking sobs and couldn’t stop.”

  ALL I DESIRE PUT HER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DEADLIEST 1950s combination of producer and director. Ross Hunter was a Harry Cohn graduate without the inspired crassness of the Columbia boss. Hunter had signed a long-term contract with Universal in 1951, and his first production there was Take Me to Town, a piece of stale schmaltz containing every known cliché stitched into a plot. The director of this Ann Sheridan-Sterling Hayden vehicle was Detlef Sierck, a Dane who spent his most creative years in Germany. Since his arrival in Hollywood, he styled himself Douglas Sirk. Hunter liked the cultivated director because Sirk could turn his hand to any genre, and he signed him for All I Desire. Sirk had attended Sergei Eisenstein’s lectures in Hamburg, and, like the towering director of the Soviet cinema, his favorite dramatic prop was a set of stairs. The turn-of-the-century set of All I Desire was built so that the action unavoidably was centered on a staircase.

  Stanwyck’s character, Naomi Murdoch, echoed Mae Doyle of Clash by Night and Stella of Stella Dallas. “I’m playing the type of part I’ve played many times—a bad woman trying to make up for past mistakes,” Barbara told a press conference. “Namby-pambies have no interest for me. I’d rather not act at all than do a Pollyanna. I’ve got to play human beings. I think I understand the motives of the bad women I play.” Her Naomi was superb. Her costars were Richard Carlson, a stage actor and friend of Bob Taylor’s, Maureen O’Sullivan, Lyle Bettger, Richard Long, and Lori Nelson. Virginia Grey was also in the cast. Hunter considered her his good luck charm and put her in virtually every film he produced.

  How Stanwyck knew Grey dated Bob Taylor remained a mystery to Virginia, but on the first day of shooting there was a confrontation Grey would never forget. Barbara resented any woman Bob dated, Virginia realized. “She let me have it with words I cannot repeat,” Grey would recall. “There was no mention of Bob, but she had no other reason to dislike me so intensely. I had done the unpardonable. I had gone out with Robert Taylor.”

  Stanwyck’s straight talk made her a choice interview. In March 1953, Helen and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association got her to sit still for a group press conference that revealed how tired she was of routine Hollywood fodder. Federico Fellini continued Italy’s triumphant neorealism with I Vitelloni. In France, Henri-Georges Clouzot directed Wages of Fear and made Yves Montand a star. Japan made an impression with Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari, and the whole world hummed the tune from Brazil’s O Cangaciero. Barbara knew why these films received such praise and did so well commercially: “Because they recognized life for what it is and attempted to depict it that way on the screen. Their approach was adult, and the result was adult.”

  She thought Clash by Night came close to the grown-up nerve of the best foreign films. “I play a woman who for reasons which she feels are justified commits adultery,” she said. “The audience may sympathize with me to an extent, for I am a woman who has a lot of go
od reasons for doing what is contrary to accepted social behavior.”

  “My entire role is written and acted, I hope, along the line of the European realistic approach to a situation which is not uncommon among people,” she said. “It’s offbeat, at least by Hollywood standards, and it is this, if anything, that sets it apart.”

  She returned to Warner Brothers for The Moonlighter Jack Warner didn’t think enough of the story of cattle rustlers and bank robbers to shoot it in Warnercolor, but it was filmed in 3-D. If CinemaScope and Cinerama were the winners of the lure-’em-into-the-tent studio gambles, 3-D was the big loser. The novelty of wearing tinted glasses to see a film faded quickly. The director was Roy Rowland, a jack-of-all-trades who had cut his teeth at MGM and made a reputation in westerns and thrillers. Barbara would make three movies with him. Fred MacMurray was her leading man, and the cast included Ward Bond, who later became famous in the TV series “Wagon Train.” For Stanwyck and MacMurray, The Moonlighter was no reprise of Double Indemnity. The script gave them little to work with. Barbara enjoyed riding horses and doing stunts, including sliding down a waterfall, but called The Moonlighter a “dinky little western.”

  Still at Warners, she agreed to star in Blowing Wild, a movie Lauren Bacall had turned down. Barbara had known producer Milton Sperling since he was Darryl Zanuck’s secretary in 1930. Sperling had Gary Cooper and Anthony Quinn lined up for Blowing Wild when he asked Barbara to play the wicked, scheming, power-crazy woman between the two men.

  Blowing Wild was a lurid melodrama bursting with situations, scenes, and rewritten dialogue lifted from Cooper’s current hit, High