Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Noon, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Cooper and Ward Bond are a pair of oil prospectors stranded in a Mexican town without a peso to their names. After being double-crossed by a white-suited, cigar-puffing Ian MacDonald, Cooper teams up with Mexican oil driller Quinn. Stanwyck is Quinn’s no-good wife who wants to resume an affair with her husband’s partner. When Cooper seems to be more interested in a stranded showgirl (Ruth Roman), Stanwyck shoves her husband to his death in some throbbing machinery, only to be blown to bits herself after screaming to Cooper, “I committed murder to get you!” The director was a friend of Cooper’s, Hugo Fregonese, a wandering Argentine who made movies in half a dozen countries.

  As usual, Barbara gave her all. She told Cooper not to fake it in a scene in which he chokes her. She wanted her eyes to pop and the veins of her neck to stick out. To make him sufficiently mad at her, she made snide remarks about his acting. Fregonese yelled action, and a livid Cooper grabbed her throat. “Her veins swelled, her mouth contorted,” Cooper would remember. “The director yelled ‘Cut’ and she slumped. It was two days before Barbara could talk, and three days before I could stop worrying.” Cast and crew were filming in Mexico when Barbara’s two costars became Oscar winners—Cooper for High Noon, Quinn for his supporting role in Viva Zapata!

  Jack Warner, Rowland, and Stanwyck convinced themselves that Witness to Murder could beat the thriller Alfred Hitchcock was shooting at Paramount. In the opening scene, Stanwyck looks across an apartment courtyard and sees George Sanders choke a young woman to death. Police lieutenant Gary Merrill doesn’t believe her, but the murderer does. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which wheelchair-bound James Stewart convinces himself he is seeing Raymond Burr murdering his wife across the courtyard, had a brilliant script by John Michael Hayes based on the short story by Cornell Woolrich. Witness to Murder had an attractive cast but floundered in producer-writer Chester Erskine’s screenplay.

  Barbara spent time with Merrill. He and Bette Davis were trying to build a new life in Connecticut. With few Hollywood offers, Bette tried a musical revue, but osteomyelitis of the jaw closed Two’s Company early. It would be a year before she could work again. To solidify their marriage, they had adopted a newborn girl. Margot was found to be brain-damaged from birth.

  When United Artists released Witness to Murder on April 15, 1954, the publicity promotion claimed it was “topping the thrills of Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number:” Rear Window came out May 4, won the critics’ applause, cleaned up at the box office, and gave Oscar nominations to Hitchcock, Hayes and cameraman Robert Burks.

  ON MAY 24, 1954, BOB MARRIED URSULA THIESS. THE WEDDING took place aboard a cabin cruiser in the middle of Wyoming’s Jackson Lake, ten miles south of the Yellowstone National Park. Ralph Couser was the best man. Helen Ferguson was still Bob’s publicist, but she got the news too late for the next morning’s newspapers. Fearing Barbara would somehow interfere, Bob only phoned Helen hours after the wedding. When photographers showed up at Colter Bay, Bob at first refused to pose with his new bride, but relented and allowed one picture of the two of them in front of the mountain cabin. Two days later, he reported to the location of MGM’s Many Rivers to Cross.

  Barbara was in shock, but steeled herself to send a congratulatory telegram to the newly weds. Why Ursula? Forgetting that her own much-papered-over studio-engineered marriage to Bob had begun to fall apart within months, forgetting Bob’s eternal male hangers-on, his for-show affair with Lana Turner and for-real time with Ava Gardner, Barbara wondered why he had let himself be seduced by this thirty-year-old divorcée. It was the classic case. Ursula engineered a misunderstanding, refused to see Bob, and, while he was in Egypt on Valley of the Kings, made sure he heard she was dating other men until he begged for a minute of her time on a temperamental overseas telephone connection.

  What Stanwyck didn’t understand was that in marrying Ursula, Bob discovered a new way of relating and a manliness in himself that Barbara had never allowed him. For the first time he didn’t disown his own strength, didn’t have to feel a lot of guilt, hurt, and shame. Ursula was not consumed by ambition. She was ready to put Bob ahead of everything and everybody. If she continued to work it was only to make sure her children would not be a burden on Bob.

  Like Barbara, Ursula came with a ready-made family. All comparisons with Dion and Barbara stopped there, however. Ursula’s ten-year-old Emanuela—Mamela to everybody—and nine-year-old son, Michael, were with their mother. Their father was the Hamburg producer Georg Thiess. Younger than Bob, Ursula was more secure. The initiative in the relationship was totally his. “If I’m in love with a man, he doesn’t have to know it,” she told interviewers. “I can enjoy that feeling all by myself. My continental tolerance will keep my marriage from getting on the Hollywood divorce merry-go-round.”

  Ursula stayed in Los Angeles in 1955 when MGM sent Bob to England and France to shoot Quentin Durward. Sir Walter Scott’s romantic tale set in Renaissance France was squeezed into the familiar screen mold. Absence made the heart grow fonder, and as Bob had done with Barbara during the shooting of A Yank at Oxford, he spent a good chunk of his per diem on transatlantic telephone calls. He wanted to be head of a household, with Ursula and the children included. He thought Ursula and he might have children of their own. When he came back from Europe, he bought a 113-acre ranch in West Los Angeles’ Mandeville Canyon.

  Ruth Brugh foundered in religion and spoke of the evils of Hollywood. Bob rented a small house for his mother on Selby Street in West Hollywood. She met her son’s new family on birthdays and on Christmas. Slowly going senile, Ruth was an embarrassment to him. In a nursing home she outlived her son, although in such a vegetative state she never knew he died.

  With an MGM contract that made him the longest-lasting contract player in Hollywood history—twenty-five years—Bob spent the next ten years trying to play his younger self.

  STANWYCK MIGHT KNOW HOW TO ENDOW HER ROLES WITH A strength of purpose, but the politics she supported made scripts offering bold, fully realized women a rarity. There is a measure of irony in her slide into mediocrity during the Eisenhower years of guarded rectitude. She read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which explained woman not as essence—mysterious or otherwise—but in terms of her situation, particularly her financial dependence or lack of economic emancipation. As a veteran star, Barbara was still big, and she was a millionaire, but the characters she was offered were one-dimensional, usually women with guns locked in deadly battles of the sexes. Flaunting her white hair and her small, shapely body, she lent her sneer and throaty laughter to wayward, evil women who, by the fade-out, were usually dead, unless they shared the reins with the one man who dared stand up.

  Executive Suite was a happy exception. Her role as a corporate tycoon’s neurotic daughter, major stockholder, and embittered mistress of the just-deceased top executive was not the largest part, but it was a strong one and a release from B-picture mediocrity. Moreover, the eight-week shoot in the fall of 1953 turned into two months of exhilarating work with energetic and ambitious behind-the-camera people and, in front, a team effort with talented players. The director was

  Robert Wise, the team players William Holden, June Allyson, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Shelley Winters, Paul Douglas, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Nina Foch, and Tim Considine. Most intriguingly, Executive Suite had a brilliant producer.

  In Barbara’s experience, producers were, for the most part, expendable. With the exception of Warners’ stalwarts-turned-indepen-dents Hal Wallis and Jerry Wald, she repeated the old saw that a producer is an executive wearing a worried look on his assistant’s face. In the emerging perspective of the director as the person whose emotions and viewpoint shape a film, David Selznick’s craving for “creativity” appeared as little more than pathological interference. Even Irving Thalberg’s uncanny gift for divining what audiences wanted appeared in retrospect as an eccentric example of middle-period baroque.

  John Housem
an was different.

  The Romanian-born theatrical producer, director, and actor who with Orson Welles had founded the Mercury Theatre in 1937 lent his nervy intelligence and ability to inspire confidence to the project, his second for MGM, following the Vincente Minnelli-directed Hollywood “in” picture, The Bad and the Beautiful.

  Houseman spent three quarters of the $1.25 million budget on actors, chosen for their ability rather than their box-office recognition, and saved on everything else. The picture had no music. Instead of giving in to designers suggesting new sets, he decided to rely on MGM’s vast reserves of stock scenery. An existing interior needed only slight alterations to become the executive suite and boardroom of the title. The same was true of Holden’s fashionable home and Stanwyck’s sumptuous family mansion.

  To direct the picture on Houseman’s tight budget, Wise demanded exceptional rehearsal time for dialogue-heavy scenes. June Allyson, as Holden’s wife, had a crucial scene with Stanwyck, who confides her unhappiness over never having been able to marry the deceased. Barbara jeered when Allyson walked in late not knowing her lines. Houseman received a phone call from Allyson’s agent that night, saying the actress was in hysterics, that the cast hated and persecuted her. The next day, she was letter-perfect. The script included an explosive scene with Holden that forced her to unleash her pent-up emotions.

  The theme of Executive Suite is ambition. Ernest Lehman’s screen version of Cameron Hawley’s novel made the power struggle for control of a company when the top man dies as tense as a thriller. The action takes place in a sparse twenty-four hours. Performance was paramount, as the eight characters do not appear together until they meet in a somber, imitation-Gothic boardroom, “nailed to their chairs,” as Houseman would remember, “while the camera turned, twisted, and hovered around them in an endless series of master shots, two-shots, and closeups.”

  Nina Foch, who had just starred in a ho-hum MGM drama called Fast Company, played the “office wife” wedded to her husband’s career. She thought Stanwyck and Holden might have been lovers once but not any longer. Working with the always letter-perfect Stanwyck was a pleasure. Watching her in a scene was a treat. “She was very sportsmanlike,” Foch would remember, “and when I got an Oscar nomination for my part, she sent me a congratulatory telegram. I thought that was awfully nice.” Foch lost the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront.

  EXECUTIVE SUITE WAS BARBARA’S SEVENTIETH MOVIE. As HER SEV-enty-first she accepted the title role in a western to be filmed in Technicolor in Glacier National Park, Montana. The director of Cattle Queen of Montana was Allan Dwan, an old-timer she had long wanted to work with, her costar Ronald Reagan.

  “Gives us a chance to play tourists on company time,” said Reagan.

  “Most of it on horseback,” Barbara answered. She had read the script.

  “Of course, in those days, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t fly. Neither would [director of photography] John Alton,” Dwan would remember. “So they came to location by train—took them three days to get up there from Los Angeles.” Dwan made no mention of how airplane-shy Barbara reached Glacier National Park, but everybody marveled at the splendor of the northern Rockies.

  Dwan was another Willard Mack, a Canadian-born jack-of-all-trades whose narrative flair could transform the most expendable genre material into something personal. Going on seventy, Dwan had been making movies since 1909, two-reelers in Arizona in the pioneer days, swashbucklers with Douglas Fairbanks, and high-society romps with Gloria Swanson in the high 1920s. Always the problem-solver producers hired to apply brains to idiotic projects, he had made fifty-three talkies since 1929, from Shirley Temple flicks and spy movies to war pictures (Sands of Iwo Jima). He had just finished a dazzling western, Silver Lode.

  Dwan didn’t share his two stars’ right-wing sentiments. Like many artists working under oppressive regimes, he smuggled his protests into his films. His villain in Silver Lode is named McCarthy, a man who falsely accuses a character called Dan Ballard (John Payne) and dies of a bullet that ricochets off a liberty bell.

  The blacklist was still a reality, but the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was dying. The organization lost all credibility in 1955 after its members couldn’t agree on whether to expel Screen Writers Guild members who took the Fifth Amendment when testifying before Congress. By three votes, the proposal failed.

  Reagan’s memories of the two months in Montana would be congenial. “Somehow working outdoors amid beautiful scenery and much of the time on horseback never has seemed like work to me,” he would recall. The production rented horses from local ranchers and hired forty men as the Cattle Queen posse. On days when Reagan wasn’t on call, he toured the scenic valley on horseback looking for real estate deals. There was money in land, he told Barbara.

  Reagan’s weather-beaten career was going nowhere. His agent wanted him to try Las Vegas. Since he could neither sing nor dance, he could only serve as master of ceremonies, telling a few jokes onstage before introducing the next act. Two months after they finished the Montana locations, he became the on-air host of “General Electric Theater,” a CBS Sunday-night half-hour show. The $125,000-a-year “G.E. Theater” contract not only gave him the security he had never dreamed would be his, but brought him into a corporate world that would influence his political future. With The Last Outpost, The Cattle Queen would remain the future president’s favorite western.

  Stanwyck was Edward G. Robinson’s faithless wife and Glenn Ford a Civil War veteran looking for peace in The Violent Men, another sprawling Technicolor, CinemaScope western. The director was Rudolph Maté, her cinematographer on A Message to Garcia and Stella Dallas. Ford’s cavalry officer has achieved peace on a western ranch and figures on going back east when he runs into Robinson, a crippled but ruthless cattle baron, full of old Colt slugs and greed, who drives small landowners from his valley. Brian Keith was Barbara’s scum of a brother-in-law.

  Robinson was the incarnation of iron stoicism: He had had lost his son to suicide attempts, drugs, and mental disorders. More honest with himself than his costar, Robinson said The Violent Men was a Β picture that clearly established him as a has-been.

  For a reunion with Dwan, Barbara played an indomitable American in a trite jungle drama, in which, as she remarked, the animals were better than the picture. Escape to Burma was Dwan’s first wide-screen film. Robert Ryan was the costar of hated plantation owner Stanwyck, playing a murder suspect who has a way with elephants. The eighty-eight-minute film mixes her and Ryan with elephants, tigers, and jungle bandits. “Even the title is a puzzle,” wrote the New York Times. “It says ‘Escape to Burma.’ Yet everyone is in Burma, or a back lot decked out by industrious ‘green men’ to look like Burma, and how can you escape a place you’re already at? Even the monkeys seem bewildered.”

  STANWYCK PLAYED THE “OTHER WOMAN” OPPOSITE FRED MAC-Murray and Joan Bennett in a remake of a caustic, intelligent 1934 Universal picture. Ursula Parrott was the bestselling author of the original tale of emotions lying dormant in respectable, middle-class hearts. Without changing the title, Douglas Sirk filmed There’s Always Tomorrow with MacMurray playing a toy manufacturer with bratty kids, Bennett his self-absorbed wife whose life is given over to the teenage children, and Stanwyck the old flame who comes back into his life. Binnie Barnes, Frank Morgan, and Lois Wilson had played the trio in 1934 with Robert Taylor as the eldest teenager (William Reynolds played the son in the new version). “There’s Always Tomorrow enlists Barbara Stanwyck in Hollywood’s tear jerking division,” wrote the Los Angeles Mirror-News’ s Margaret Harford. “As an expert in womanly woe, she has few peers. The suffering is several cuts below her customary flashy style, but tears glisten often in Barbara’s eyes and her admirers will find several opportunities to join her in a good cry.”

  How about a rip-roarin’ western?

  Barbara had her agent, Lew Wasserman, sign her on to play a lady rustler and owner of the Mave
rick Queen Saloon in South Pass, Wyoming. The Maverick Queen was a Republic picture, an adaptation of a novel by Barbara’s favorite western author, Zane Grey, who had invented the immensely popular western story with its distinct codes of valor and toughness.

  Republic was the small San Fernando Valley studio where Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were singing cowboys. The studio might be known as “Repulsive Productions” in the trade, but it was nevertheless the lot where John Ford directed Wayne and a brace of Abbey Theatre players in the superb The Quiet Man and Nicholas Ray made the cult western Johnny Guitar, which featured a butch Joan Crawford and an even more mannish Mercedes McCambridge.

  The Maverick Queen was Republic’s first excursion into the wide-screen process. Naturama, as it called its proprietary anamorphic system, had a projection aspect of 2.35 to 1, which made it narrower than CinemaScope. Stanwyck plays Kit Banion, a lady who likes cowboys who can handle themselves in a poker game and a shoot-out. Republic stock actors Barry Sullivan, Scott Brady, Mary Murphy, Howard Petrie, and Wallace Ford fleshed out the rest of the cast. Joseph Kane was Republic’s veteran action director who knew how to shoot fast—The Maverick Queen was his fourth in 1955.

  Republic sent Joe Kane, cast, and crew to Silverton, Colorado, to shoot the exteriors. Thirteen years later Fox would send George Roy Hill, cast, and crew to the same location to shoot Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both were variations on the same true story of the Pinkerton’s National Detective agents hired by the Union Pacific Railroad in 1900 to go after the Hole in the Wall gang. In The Maverick Queen, Barry Sullivan is the Pinkerton agent Kit falls for, Howard Petrie is Butch, and Scott Brady is Sundance. Kit admits she is “part of the gang run by Butch Cassidy.” Justice will out, and in the last-reel shoot-out she dies in the arms of the Pinkerton man.

  AS A FAVOR TO HER FRIEND JACK BENNY, BARBARA TESTED THE waters of television with a parody of the Victorian suspense play. Their sketch was a takeoff on George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight, with Jack in the Charles Boyer role and Barbara playing Ingrid Bergman. Since his radio days, Benny had satirized movies. The studios loved the publicity, and producers and executives constantly invited “The Jack Benny Show” to make fun of their latest release. In a satire of Charles Boyer driving Ingrid Bergman crazy and getting her committed so he can find the jewelry hidden in the attic, the skit opened with half-demented Barbara eating marinated salami while parts of the house collapse around her. To protect herself from falling plaster she cooly opens an umbrella and goes on munching. As the evil husband, Benny tries to drive her crazy by moving furniture, dimming lights, and turning pictures and things upside down. When he enters, she berates him for doing strange things. “Yesterday, Charles, you came back from the fox hunt, hung your riding habit in the stable and put the horse in the closet.”