Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Warren—and Lew Wasserman—were not encouraging. Television audiences weren’t interested in Barbara Stanwyck on a horse. She insisted that was what she wanted to do. “People say it’s not feminine. It isn’t! Sure those women wore guns and britches. But don’t kid yourself. They were all female.”

  She was back in the saddle in Forty Guns, playing a frontier tramp who, with the backing of forty gunslingers, makes her own law in corrupt Cochise County. Forty Guns was a Fox film, and Barbara’s initial satisfaction was that she aced out the studio’s own Marilyn Monroe. Writer-director Samuel Fuller told Darryl Zanuck he had always had Stanwyck in mind. That was it. Barbara got the part.

  Fuller was a character. Zanuck enjoyed this director of baroque Β pictures, who pointed his long Havana cigar at people like a .45 caliber pistol. Zanuck saw Fuller as a soulmate, a fellow delinquent in a corporate Hollywood increasingly obsessed with tax angles and bottom lines. Trashy material never bothered either of them. Fuller made wildly physical and intense movies full of jagged inconsistencies and technical virtuosity, and no matter how far out he would go, Zanuck went along.

  Fuller had a knack for dressing up the commonplace, for writing compressed dialogue, filming powerful close-ups, and setting up outrageous situations only to play them out quietly. His most famous western was I Shot Jesse James, his cruelest Run of the Arrow. He was a passionate right-winger, and Pickup on South Street was his heady mix of crime, violence, and anticommunism. He told Barbara that in Forty Guns she was Jessica Drummond, a composite portrait of two historical characters—Dora Hand, the most gracious sinner of the West, and Big Nose Kate Fisher, the girlfriend of the murderous dentist Doc Holliday. Her love interest was a peace officer who might have been Wyatt Earp. Barbara’s Maverick Queen partner Barry Sullivan played the hard-ridin’, square-dealin’ sheriff, Gene Barry his brother who is eventually killed by Jessica’s trigger-happy brother (John Ericson).

  Forty Guns included the dizziest of Fuller’s trademark crane shots. When Cahiers du Cinéma, the fiery French film magazine, crowned him, along with Howard Hawks, the essential American auteur, Fuller lovingly described his longest, most complicated take: “It opens in a bedroom with one of the brothers talking. He comes out of the bedroom, walks down the stairs and meets the other brother. They start to talk. They meet the sheriff. They walk four blocks. They go to the telegraph office, send a telegram. Barbara Stanwyck passes them with the forty horsemen, and then they walk past the camera. That’s the longest dolly shot in Hollywood!”

  As for Barbara, he would remember her as a trooper. “The stunt-men refused to do the scene where the Stanwyck character is dragged by horse. They thought it was too dangerous. So Stanwyck said she’d do it. We did it the first time and I said, Ί didn’t like it. It was too far away from the camera truck. We’re not getting what I want.’ So we tried it again, and I didn’t like it. She made no complaint. We tried it a third time, and it was just the way I wanted it. She was quite bruised.”

  For an encore Fuller wanted Barbara to play Evita Perón. But Juan Perón, Argentina’s dethroned dictator, was very much alive in exile in Paraguay. From the Cannes Film Festival, Zanuck telegraphed his veto, and Fuller soon abandoned the idea.

  Barbara turned fifty shortly after Fuller called it a wrap on Forty Guns and celebrated her birthday by turning down the female lead in Henry King’s This Earth Is Mine. Unlike so many of her actress friends and rivals, she was rich. Crawford was one step ahead of the bankruptcy courts when she married the president of Pepsi Cola, Alfred Steele. Cameo roles were the death of stars, but Bette Davis was so crippled financially that she accepted $50,000 for two days’ work in John Paul Jones. Gene Tierney, whose beauty had bewitched moviegoers a decade earlier, was found working in a dress shop in Topeka, Kansas. Paulette Goddard gave up on the movies in 1954 and became an expatriate in Gstaad, Switzerland, not far from her former husband, Charlie Chaplin. To be out of the reach of the 1RS, Ava Gardner was living from hand to mouth in Spain.

  Barbara was a millionaire. Her self-discipline and the years of Morgan Maree’s management of her finances at one point made her the biggest stockholder in Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.

  MILLIONAIRE OR NOT, THE FEAR OF FACING HER EMPTY SELF, LONE-liness, and boredom made her consider ever more seriously the booming world of television. Fuller had been fun to work with, and westerns were a genre she loved. By 1958 thirty western series were in prime time, dominating all three networks. Even Ronald Reagan, who had not had much work since he finished “G. E. Theater,” was the host of the half-hour “Death Valley Days.” On a trail blazed by Hopalong Cassidy, Lash La Rue, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Tex Ritter came “The Californians,” “Cheyenne,” “The Ciso Kid,” “Colt. 45,” “Davy Crockett,” “Frontier,” “Gunsmoke,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Jim Bowie,” “The Lone Ranger,” “The Restless Gun,” “Sugarfoot,” “Tales of the Texas Rangers,” “Tales of Wells Fargo,” “Tombstone Territory,” “Trackdown,” President Eisenhower’s favorite, “Wild Bill Hickok,” “Wyatt Earp,” and Zane Grey Theater.

  Stanwyck considered herself the only unemployed cowboy in Hollywood. Although actresses appeared in single episodes of running shows, there were no women leads in TV westerns. Barbara went to “Zane Grey Theater” producer Dick Powell to suggest a series on frontier women. Powell forwarded the idea to CBS, which carried “Zane Grey Theater.” The network agreed to let her star in a “Zane Grey” episode called “The Freighter” and to consider the result a pilot, perhaps for a “Barbara Stanwyck Theater” series. For source material, she wanted James D. Horan’s documented stories of such colorful frontier women as Belle Starr and Pauline Cushman or Alice and Calamity Jane.

  Belle was a bandit queen and the first woman tried in the courtroom of Isaac “Hanging Judge” Parker for being the leader of a band of horse thieves. After her husband was killed in a bar brawl, Belle took up with a handsome Cree Indian, only to die herself in an ambush. Pauline was an actress from New Orleans who served as a Union spy in the Civil War, married the wild and handsome Jere Fryer, and tried to hold on to him by substituting an infant born to a girl in a Casa Grande, Arizona, whorehouse as her own. The proud father stopped running after other women, but the sickly child died. The real mother exposed the plot, and a humiliated Pauline left her husband and Casa Grande to return to the stage, only to end up scrubbing floors in San Francisco theaters. Barbara was especially intrigued by the real Calamity Jane, who was so successful in playacting a man that she joined George Crook’s 1876 expedition against the Sioux as a muleskinner. Louise Dresser had played a mannish Jane in Caught in 1931, and Doris Day played her as a tomboy in the 1953 Calamity Jane. Neither had caught the tragicomic figure Horan described: “There is no doubt Jane was tragically miscast by nature. Her figure was definitely not feminine. She was a good rider and could handle a mule team with ease. She lived to drink, and lived her short and merry life with a rowdy sort of happiness.” In old age she joined the circus, like Annie Oakley, and sank into alcoholism. When she was dying, she asked to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok.

  Barbara adopted some of the frontier women’s fearlessness. When the network failed to schedule “The Freighter,” she persuaded Powell to take the telefilm directly to the advertising agencies in New York. When he came back empty-handed, she angrily went public. “Dick calls me a frustrated stuntwoman,” she told the Los Angeles Mirror-News. “My one big frustration is that Duke Wayne never asked me to costar with him. Anyway, nobody would buy it for a series. The boys in the flannel suits said they didn’t see how we could go for thirty-nine episodes. That’s silly. I’ve got enough books on western lore at home for a hundred episodes.”

  Before “The Freighter” aired, she went back and did two more “Zane Grey” episodes and for Dick Powell’s company a “Goodyear Theater” story of a vengeful woman. But she wasn’t giving up on a western series: “I don’t even want to have the big-cheese role in the series. I’d have guest stars like they
do on ‘Wagon Train.’ In fact, that’s the kind of series I wanted but nobody liked the idea. Then they turn around and do it with my friend Ward Bond.”

  Nolan Miller was a new friend. Miller was the strapping grandson of a Comanche and the son of a Louisiana oil rigger fresh out of Los Angeles’s Chouinard Design School. He wanted to be another Travis Banton, Adrian, or Orry-Kelly, but the studios were not hiring. Television wardrobe departments were. It was while Miller was working for Dick Powell on “Zane Grey Theater” that he met “Missy,” as he would always call Stanwyck. She introduced him to Aaron Spelling, a young writer on the show. “He’s a terrific designer, you’ve got to use him,” she told Spelling. The two men became friends, and Spelling vowed that when he became a producer, he would hire Miller.

  UNCLE BUCK DEVELOPED SERIOUS EMPHYSEMA. WHEN HE COULD no longer care for himself, Barbara placed him in the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, visiting him twice a week.when she wasn’t filming and on Sundays when she was working. He’d remember the old days when she was “a funny little girl with shining shoe-bottom eyes and brown pigtails.” In September 1959, he died. She called a brother in Ohio, but the man was too sick to come to California. She arranged for Buck’s burial.

  Frank Fay died at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The probate showed he had excluded Dion from his will and bequeathed everything to two Catholic institutions. Dion contested the will, and in 1962 a Superior Court ruled in his favor. However, half Frank Fay’s $200,000 estate went to cover “debts, liens and other obligations.”

  32

  “THE BARBARA STANWYCK SHOW”

  For an actress who valued work more than leisure, the late fifties and early sixties were like crossing the desert. Barbara didn’t get a picture for four years. When people asked why they hadn’t seen her for so long, she was disarmingly candid. “Because nobody offered me a part.” If the questions became more probing, she said there were no parts for women her age because America had become a country of youth.

  Hollywood remained mired in the boring ethos of the fifties well past the end of the decade, but by 1965 even Tinseltown caught on to other times, moods, and assumptions. The readjustment was painful. The message of the chaotic 1960s was fractured spontaneity, emotional overloads, and the exaltation of the self. “New films” failed at the box office as often as the big, almost ritualistic, Hollywood productions that tried to have it every which way and relied on the time-honored values of bestseller source material and starry casts. The Aquarian Age demanded intense, visionary trading on an amplified “now” that was—cinematically and emotionally—the opposite of the perfection Barbara Stanwyck believed in. Intense new filmmakers made offhand movies full of distance and “cool” that nipped audiences in surprising ways. The charm of imperfection had creators preoccupied more with what they hinted at than with what they achieved. Youth openly displayed its strength, allure, and power. The forward thrust in the arts was measured in zap and complicity with the young.

  Stanwyck hated it all.

  She could be gracious and say she was going with the new trends or, as the divisive decade wore on with its political assassinations, Vietnam, Woodstock, and burning cities, lash out against “the great unwashed,” as she called longhairs, hippies, draft dodgers, and young women in miniskirts. She loathed the drift in society, its permissiveness, lack of purpose, people’s attitudes toward sex, women, business. The lodestar of her existence had been self-discipline. She saw the young take privileges and opportunities as their birthrights.

  The distinction between cinema and television was increasingly a question of different mental landscapes. The big screen gave the decade form, style, and meaning. Television was the playback device, the mass media.

  Barbara’s idea of an anthology series on frontier women was not far off target. The August 1959 Nielsen ratings showed “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun Will Travel” on CBS and ABC’s “Rifleman” as the three most-watched shows. After “I’ve Got a Secret,” “Peter Gunn,” “You Bet Your Life,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and “The Joseph Cotton Show,” “Wyatt Earp” and “Frontier Justice” rounded out the Top Ten.

  Both the networks and her agents at MCA said she deserved something classier. Lew Wasserman suggested TV westerns were peaking. She countered that “from six [P.M.] on it sounds like the last frontier. On Monday it’s ‘Restless Gun’ and ‘Wells Fargo.’ Tuesday it’s ‘Cheyenne,’ ‘Sugarfoot’ and ‘Wyatt Earp’—and so forth.” She wanted to play a real frontier woman, “not one of those crinoline-covered things you see in most westerns. I’m with the boys. I want to go where the boys go.”

  CBS PROGRAMMING COULD NOT SEE THIRTY-NINE EPISODES OF frontier women. Negotiations continued over content and format. In the meantime, her former husband hit it big in “The Detectives.” Bob told the press the reason he surrendered to television was money. Besides, he added, he had no idea how he looked on the small screen because he didn’t own a TV set.

  More important than appearing in Jack Benny’s court-delayed Gaslight spoof, Dick Powell series, and Four-Star movies-for-TV, Barbara had substituted for Loretta Young twice in 1955 on “The Loretta Young Show.” The half-hour NBC anthology series was popular and much copied. With her gown swirling, Young opened the show with a dramatic entrance. After she described the night’s offering to her live audience, the drama of the week was presented, half the time starring

  Young herself. At the end she reappeared to say good night. Barbara played hard to get when NBC and the Sam Jaffe talent agency offered her a series that would emulate Loretta Young’s anthology show. “The Barbara Stanwyck Show” would not be all about frontier women, but several western-themed segments were a possibility. Fearing inferior scripts, she insisted she be given script approval or, failing that, completed teleplays before she committed to anything. On its own, the Sam Jaffe agency bought and developed half-hour teleplays. In January 1960, NBC announced the start of “The Barbara Stanwyck Show” Monday nights at ten for the 1960-61 season. The series would shoot at the Desilu (formerly RKO) studios.

  The network gave her a news conference at which she was much too forthright for the insipid celebrity reporters and the TV Guide interviewer. Asked by the TV weekly why she was getting into television, she said because she was bored and wanted to work. “What else is there to do?” she asked. “I have no hobbies. I suppose that makes me an idiot, but there it is. You’re supposed to paint or sculpt or something. I don’t. I like to travel, but a woman can’t travel alone. It’s a bore. And it’s a darned lonesome bore.

  “People keep asking me what’s the difference between doing pictures and TV, and I really can’t see any difference. You’re making film. The techniques are exactly the same. In television you work a little harder and a lot faster, that’s all.”

  Her producer was Louis F. Edelman, a former WB and Fox executive active in both big-screen and TV production. To ensure a solid success for “The Barbara Stanwyck Show,” producer and star offered top prices for scripts. “The foundation of any good show is the story, not the star,” Barbara told reporters. “We have found several potential stories for our series, and I hope I don’t louse them up.”

  Taking a swipe at the big screen, she said that although there were great roles for men in the movies, the film industry no longer seemed to make movies for female stars like Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and Irene Dunne. “For my series, I hope to locate scripts with meaty roles for women, but that doesn’t mean I intend to avoid stories centering on the male lead. If the story is good, I’ll be happy to play an also-ran. I have no particular desire to be 98 percent of the script. In fact, I’d rather have a 50-50 situation, because then there would have to be an awfully good actor with me, and I need all the help I can get.”

  Veteran filmmaker Jacques Tourneur directed the initial presentation. In “The Mink Coat,” Stanwyck played a lady on the skids. To cling to the high society she once belonged to, she uses her mink coat, her last vestige of wealth.
Her make-believe world faces collapse when a baggage checkroom clerk loses the coat. The cast featured a young actor named Jack Nicholson.

  The show made its debut September 19, 1960. Of the thirty-six episodes filmed for the black-and-white series, Stanwyck starred in thirty-two, usually opposite Lee Marvin or her friends and costars from the 1930s, Joan Blondell and Ralph Bellamy.

  Four western scripts and three anticommunist stories were included. Albert Beich who had written The Yellow Cab Man for Red Skelton in 1950, came up with the script for “Dragon by the Tail,” in which Stanwyck defended the United States against a communist agent. The segment was praised in Congress by Francis E. Walter, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Communists were moving back into the entertainment industry, Walter said, praising such efforts as “Dragon by the Tail.”

  “The Barbara Stanwyck Show” was not a success. As herself, Barbara was stiff and awkward. Introducing segments and players at the opening of each half hour was torture for her. It was a sharp reminder of Willard Mack mocking her insecurity back in 1926. It was doing a Frank Fay, huckstering the audience. For nearly thirty-five years she had escaped into roles, into made-up characters, always letter-perfect not only with her own lines but her partners’ dialogue as well.

  Introductions to several segments were shot simultaneously. Since episodes were in various stages of readiness, Edelman didn’t know in which order the segments would run, which meant Barbara could not learn her lines in advance. Already self-conscious saying, “I’m Barbara Stanwyck, your host tonight,” she was even more uncomfortable reading off a teleprompter.