Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  And on and on, until a Scotland Yard detective arrests Benny, ties him to a chair, and Barbara screams her husband has turned everything upside down, including an upside-down cake he turned right side up. The show was one of Benny’s all-time favorites.

  Before the skit could get on the air, however, CBS and Benny were embroiled in a lawsuit with MGM. Metro insisted the network and the veteran comedian could not spoof Gaslight without its permission. Both sides saw the case as a matter of principle—CBS and Benny as a free-speech issue of the right to satirize, MGM as an infringement of copyright—and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. MGM won and accepted a $1,000 payment, saying it didn’t want to hurt Benny, just make the point. The skit was broadcast in 1959.

  Television was booming. More than a hundred series were on the air or in production in 1956. Almost all were Hollywood products, and most were episodic series. The various family comedies copied “I Love Lucy,” and crime action series followed the “Dragnet” formula. A genre that continued to surge—and impress network programmers—was the western. Since Annie Oakley, Barbara had acted in seven westerns, many of them second-rate. Echoing President Eisenhower’s sentiment that everybody should know who Wild Bill Hickock was, she said the desperados, rustlers, and outlaws were America’s nobility. “That’s our royalty, our aristocracy. All the immigrants coming over on the covered wagons and atop the trains, the little Jewish peddler with his calico and ginghams on his back, the good men, the bad men, they all made this country.”

  Women, too, were part of the Old West. Maybe the way to propel her career forward was to play Calamity Jane, Belle Starr, or one of the other frontier legends on the little screen.

  31

  SHARP REMINDERS

  FICTION, REALITY, AND THE PAST SHARPLY AND PAINFULLY CRASHED in on Barbara on June 18, 1955. She was on the set of MGM’s Somewhere I’ll Find Him, playing the head of an adoption agency fighting for all the good she had never given Dion, when a loudspeaker proclaimed the studio’s very own Robert Taylor was the proud father of a baby boy. Robert and Ursula Taylor, the loudspeaker cooed, had decided to name their son Terry. Barbara rushed to her dressing room. Director Roy Rowland called a ten-minute break. Cast and crew stood around.

  With Barbara, Bob had been impotent. Now, four years after their divorce, he had fathered a son. A decade earlier, Frank Fay had sired Bette Kean’s child. It was there for all to see. If the men in her life could have children with other women, it must be her, not they, who was infertile. Against increasing odds, she had hoped that she and Bob could somehow reconcile, that he would see the error of his ways and come back to her. She chose to remember the best of their life together, their joshing camaraderie, the politics they shared, Bob with smoke in his eyes at the barbecue pit, the two of them at Santa Anita, the impression they made as a couple, the respect they earned from the community. How many second movie marriages lasted? Not her own to Bob, but his to Ursula. The woman might have given up her career for Bob. But Barbara imagined she had given up her son for Bob. Tiny Terry seemed to snuff out Barbara’s last hopes.

  Plunging into work to forget was unnerving for Barbara because

  Somewhere I’ll Find Him was all about people’s responsibility toward children, toward the kids they abandon and those they adopt. Her Ann Dempster character is the principled director of an adoption agency who opposes self-made millionaire James Cagney’s attempts at tracking down the illegitimate son (Don Dubbins) he fathered and repudiated twenty years earlier. In the court fight to prevent Cagney from bursting into the life of the boy he once claimed couldn’t be his, Frank Fenton’s script gave her lines like these:

  ANN

  Even an animal feeds its young—and fights and dies for it.

  (to the Judge) I found homes for them, among human beings who didn’t just exist for themselves, who gave them names and the love without which nobody grows into somebody with faith and decency.

  If playing scenes like this affected Barbara, she didn’t let anyone see it. On the set, Cagney and Stanwyck waxed nostalgically about their respective vaudeville days and, between setups, entertained cast and crew with dance improvisations. Like Barbara, Cagney was the child of a wayward Irish father who had died when he was sixteen. He told her he was going to play Lon Chaney next in Man of a Thousand Faces. In studying the private life of the silent screen star, he had discovered a story of abandonment. Lon’s wife and the mother of Creighton Chaney—later Lon Chaney, Jr.—deserted them. Her name was unusual—Cleva. Trying to find his mother, the adult Creighton followed a lead to a desolate ranch. When he asked for Mrs. Cleva Fletcher, the woman who answered through the screen door said there was no one there by that name. A second later, a voice from inside the house asked the woman, “Who is it, Cleva?”

  Children and parental responsibility were a subject Barbara rarely broached. She had given Dion little more than slapdash attention when it suited her. Unlike Ann Dempster, she had never given him her stage name. He might have been Skip Stanwyck to Joan Benny. Legally, he remained Dion Fay.

  Robert Taylor had pretended indecision to Barbara, and she played on his guilt. Until his marriage to Ursula, he had tried to appease Barbara, to be disillusioned and world-weary, and to repeat after her that no more than she was he looking for a significant other. The birth of Terry Taylor altered that, although Bob still didn’t have the courage or the heart to sever all ties. Whatever the Taylors’ financial arrangements, it was not until Bob died that Ursula discovered he was paying alimony to his former wife. Not that Ursula would have objected. Viege Traub, the psychiatrist, found Ursula to be a shy woman. “She wouldn’t do anything that Taylor didn’t approve of,” said Traub.

  Barbara didn’t need 15 percent of Bob’s earnings, but she took the money, one last grip on him. Precisely because their marriage now seemed irrevocably lost, it took on an afterglow of regret that she would nourish with increasing solicitude.

  The existence of Bob’s baby made her feel lonelier than ever and in need of a stiff drink or two or three after work. On days off, she insisted that Uncle Buck mix her a very dry gin and tonic for lunch. Eleven days after learning of Terry Taylor’s birth, she fell down a flight of stairs at home and cracked a vertebra. Whether the concoctions Uncle Buck mixed for her on Wednesday, June 29, 1955, were exceptionally potent or her irritation at having to flesh out her day with housework made her carelessly clumsy, she tripped over a clothes hanger while carrying an armload of clothing to the second-floor service stairs. The stumble sent her sprawling ten feet down the stairs. Her cries attracted Uncle Buck, who called an ambulance. Taken to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, she was X-rayed for fractures. Dr. George W. Ainlay’s worst fears proved correct. She had suffered a cracked vertebra and torn ligaments in the fall. The hospitalization, which caused her to miss Dwan’s next film, Pearl of the South Pacific, allowed the press to pierce her carefully veiled existence.

  Uncle Buck was getting on in years, but, with Helen Ferguson, remained one constant in her bachelor existence. He stayed in contact with Dion. It was Buck who told her Dion got married in Las Vegas. His bride was Jan Porterfield, a showgirl. What former showgirl Barbara thought we do not know.

  Fatherhood changed Bob. Airplanes and hunting trips with the boys were no longer the focus of his life. In 1959, Ursula bore him a second child, a daughter they named Tessa. Bob became a strict disciplinarian. The children had to work for “wages” around the Mandeville Canyon ranch. Chinks, if not deep psychological scars, developed when Ursula’s children, Mamela and Michael, reached their teens. The stepchildren had a harder time adapting than the Robert Taylor studio profiles and magazine write-ups would have it. In 1963, the eighteen-year-old Michael was sentenced in Munich for attempted murder—for trying to poison his father. Taking a leaf from Barbara’s handling of Dion a decade earlier, Bob refused to let his stepchildren set foot on the ranch.

  Dion worked for the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica for a while. In 1958, he and h
is wife had a son. Four years later Dion was arrested for selling pornography to teenagers. “Yes, I’m Barbara Stanwyck’s adopted son, but we don’t speak,” he told the press. “The last time I talked to my mother was in 1952 when I left to go into the Army. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.” Listed as an unemployed shipping clerk, he admitted he had sold the books to “tide me over until my unemployment compensation check arrived. I have never been in trouble before.”

  When people asked Barbara about her son, she brushed away all questions, usually with “Oh, he’s long since gone.” Only Uncle Buck kept in contact with Dion.

  MGM HELD OFF RELEASING SOMEWHERE I’LL FIND HIM UNTIL the early fall of 1956. To boost its chances at the box office, the title was changed to These Wilder Years. Critics dismissed it as slushy, mawkish, and hackneyed, politely saying only the veteran cast saved a very modest drama.

  Ambitious, nervy, and original projects were hard to find, and not just for Barbara Stanwyck. The directors of her triumphs were mostly laboring in the also-ran categories. While Rouben Mamoulian was satirizing Hollywood as much as Communism in Silk Stockings, a musical rewrite of Ninotchka via a Broadway show, and Billy Wilder was shooting a Marilyn Monroe comedy, The Seven Year Itch, Frank Capra was making Riding High and Here Comes the Groom, a pair of Bing Crosby vehicles, back to back. William Wellman was making movies for John Wayne’s independent company, two aviation suspensers starring the Duke, an outdoor adventure with Robert Mitchum, and, with Wayne again, a tacky escape-from-Red-China thriller. Howard Hawks reigned over ten thousand CinemaScoped extras, 1,600 camels, and 104 specially built barges in Land of the Pharaohs. Preston Sturges was an expatriate living in France shooting Les Carnets du Major Thompson, released in America as The French They Are a Funny Race. Paramount remade The Lady Eve, with Sidney Sheldon rewriting Sturges and Norman Taurog directing Mitzi Gaynor, David Niven, and George Gobel in the former Stanwyck-Fonda-Coburn roles. Barbara refused to see The Birds and the Bees, as the charmless reworking was called.

  Producers with challenging scripts also passed on Bob. David Selznick called Taylor completely out of the question for the film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant, flawed Tender Is the Night.

  Money, again, obsessed the Hollywood mind. Mary Pickford followed Charlie Chaplin in selling her share of United Artists, which they had created with Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith in 1919. And although the studios kept blaming the small black-and-white tube for their troubles, Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century-Fox sold their pre-1948 films to television.

  By the end of 1955, Dore Schary was given a $1 million golden handshake and fired. With his departure, MGM’s efforts to sustain a centralized production system unraveled, and with it the contract system. Four years later, Bob Taylor was the last actor to be let go. By then, he no longer ate lunch at the studio commissary, he recalled, “because there are too many ghosts.”

  Corporate wisdom remained unchanged—only color, size, and casts of thousands could stop the alarming slump in cinema attendance. But the heirs to classic Hollywood were neither Selznick Jr., Louis B. Mayer II, nor the descendants of the stars, producers, and directors, but the agents and attorneys of the Beautiful People. As the studios decimated their stables of players, writers, and technical personnel, talent agents, who had to find work for their clients, seized the initiative. After acting as counselors-at-law, contract and tax experts, and general court jesters, the Beverly Hills “ten percenters” and lawyers were taking over the entertainment business. Jules Stein, Barbara’s own agent since 1937, and Lew Wasserman took the logical step of becoming the producers of the “packages” of scripts, directors, and talents they themselves put together. First they set up MCA’s Revue film division and next bought Universal Pictures.

  COLUMBIA WAS STILL A ONE-MAN OPERATION. HARRY COHN WAS the absolute ruler on Gower Street, although, he, too, was trying to trim his list of contract players, notably by making life miserable for Rita Hayworth. It was twenty-six years since Cohn had hired Barbara on a one-picture deal to play a bordertown temptress in Mexicali Rose. Now, she wanted him to give her the female lead in Pal Joey.

  George Cukor was set to direct and Marlon Brando to star as the nightclub charmer-heel that Gene Kelly had played in the 1940 Broadway original with its gorgeous Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart tunes, “I Could Write a Book” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Barbara wanted to play Vera, the Chicago socialite who falls for Joey, the part Vivienne Segal had created on the stage. Dorothy Kingsley was doing the screenplay, and, from what Barbara heard, she was softening the story and changing the title role from hoofer to crooner to fit a new contender for the title role, Frank Sinatra. Kingsley was the writer of MGM’s Kiss Me, Kate, the brisk, bright screen version of The Taming of the Shrew. George Sidney had been the director and, when Cukor couldn’t come to an agreement with Cohn, Sidney won the Pal Joey assignment. Sidney brought along Kiss Me, Kate’s choreographer—Hermes Pan. That was Barbara’s chance. Cohn didn’t have to make accommodations to cast her. She could dance. Ask Hermes.

  Choreographers don’t cast million-dollar productions. Cohn hedged when Lew Wasserman pitched Stanwyck, saying he wanted Marlene Dietrich. He ended up using his in-house stars, Rita Hay-worth and Kim Novak, opposite Sinatra. Hayworth’s performance was painstaking, Novak’s singing had to be dubbed, and the result was a smart but sugary replica of the profane hymn to racy nightlife.

  STANWYCK KNEW WHAT IT TOOK TO MAKE A GREAT MOVIE. “FIRST of all comes the story,” she said. “It’s like building a house. That’s your foundation, the basement, the cement. That’s solid. That’s the important thing. Then your interior decorator is the second thing—that’s the director. That I want. The third thing is all your decorations. That’s my actors. But without the story, goodbye. I think the little things will take care of themselves. If your story is good, and your direction is good, and the other actors, you have a chance.” Unfortunately, these elements did not come together in a pair of low-budget, black-and-white programmers she made for United Artists.

  Crime of Passion had all the ingredients for a superb thriller. The script was by Jo Eisinger, the writer of Gilda, the archetypal film noir, and of the disturbing thriller The Sleeping City. In Crime of Passion, Barbara is a San Francisco writer of a newspaper agony column who gets her big break when she convinces a murderess to give herself up. On her way to a better job in New York, she stops off in Los Angeles. A dinner with a LAPD detective leads to deeper involvement, marriage, and to her giving up her career. Realizing all too soon that life as a cop’s wife in suburbia is a bore, she connives to socialize with her husband’s boss as a way of increasing the prospects of promotion. Sterling Hayden is her husband, and Raymond Burr the inspector she almost has an affair with before she shoots him. It is left for her husband to discover the truth and arrest his wife.

  Crime of Passion never lived up to Eisinger’s ingenious premise: A writer who has only contempt for the pathetic letters from her lovelorn readers ends up in a sordid melodrama of her own making far more outlandish than anything she ever wrote about.

  The cast included Royal Dano as a rival officer and, as his wife, Virginia Grey. It was five years since Virginia and Bob’s odd dating, and Barbara apologized for her angry reaction during the Clash by Night shoot. Virginia, too, was an orphan. Virginia, too, was living alone on a ranch in Encino because she had never found a man who could or would take Clark Gable’s place.

  Filmed during the early summer of 1956, Crime of Passion was the third directing effort of longtime assistant director Gerd Oswald, whose direction was soft where the thriller format demanded relentless intensity. When Los Angeles Times reviewer Philip K. Scheuer called the film unworthy of her, Barbara lashed out with a mixture of resignation and anger. Maybe she was through, she complained. “I can’t stay up there forever. It’s a man’s world and it’s getting worse. I don’t know, they aren’t writing beautiful adult stories anymore. In the past three years I hav
en’t been sent any scripts, period. Oh, I know stars who say they can’t find anything they want to do in films. But I couldn’t lie like that. I just haven’t had any offers.”

  TROOPER HOOK COULD HAVE BEEN A LATTER-DAY BITTER TEA OF General Yen, miscegenation and racism on the range. Its director, Charles Marquis Warren, was the grand specialist of westerns, from the big-screen Arrowhead to television’s “Gunsmoke” and “Rawhide.” Besides directing Trooper Hook, Warren had a hand in writing the offbeat sagebrush drama that reunited Barbara with Joel McCrea, she as Cora, a white woman with a half-breed son, he as the cavalry officer who discovers her among the squaws. Rodolfo Acosta was the cruel Apache chief who fathered Cora’s child. The cavalry sergeant takes Cora back to her husband (John Dehner) who rejects her half Apache child. When the Apache chief sets out to reclaim his son, both he and Cora’s husband are killed, leaving her and the child to find comfort in the gallant cavalry officer’s arms.

  Between setups, Barbara discussed television with her director. She was interested in doing a TV series based on Desperate Women, James D. Horan’s history of frontier women. Horan’s title was silly. The frontier women weren’t desperate. Some were good, some were bad, and they were all real. “In all the westerns these days the women are always left behind with the kids and the cows while the men do the fighting,” she said.