Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  In May 1961, the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences gave her an Emmy award for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Series for “The Barbara Stanwyck Show.” Two weeks later, NBC canceled the series.

  “I never even got a free shampoo,” she jeered at her hair-grooming sponsor Alberto-Culver. “Don’t these guys send out samples?” She vented her spleen on her other sponsor, the American Gas Association, by saying, “I guess I should be happy the gas company was kind enough not to send me any samples, huh? I never even got a phone call. Whatever happened to manners?” Viewers sent her letters telling her how sorry and angry they were. When a coworker suggested the mail be redirected to NBC, she sneered, “What for? Nobody at NBC can read.” The demise of her show inspired a round of second-guessing along broadcast row. When someone suggested a woman wasn’t strong enough to hold down a prime-time slot, she threatened to Indian-wrestle any network vice president saying that to her face.

  “As I understand it from my producer Lou Edelman, they want action shows and have a theory that women don’t do action,” she told Joe Hyams. “The fact is, I’m the best action actress in the world. I can do horse drags, jump off buildings, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.” Only Donna Reed was left as a prime-time headliner, she said. Besides her own show, the networks dropped “The Loretta Young Show,” “The June Allyson Show,” “The Ann Sothern Show,” and in 1963 “The Dinah Shore Show.”

  “I hated playing the role of hostess every week,” she told columnist Kay Gardella. “I know Loretta Young loved it when she had her show on, but I couldn’t stand it. I was lousy at it. I find I have to hide myself behind something. I can’t just play myself.”

  Survivors of the fast-disappearing studio era returned to the stage, commuting between Los Angeles, New York, and summer-stock towns. Barbara, too, thought of returning to Broadway. At the end of 1961, she was reading Ira Wallach’s The Mistress of the Inn, which had been given a tryout at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1957. Since then, Wallach had scored on Broadway with his comedy Drink to Me Only.

  It was not the first time she had thought of returning to the stage. While married to Bob she had hesitated because Broadway producers insisted on run-of-the-play agreements, not, as she wanted it, a six-month contract. “It would have been great to go back when I was young,” she said in 1981. “I know that now. Hank Fonda went back again and again and he’s as big a star as ever, and look at Katharine Hepburn! It’s just one of those things that didn’t work out for me.”

  Nothing came of The Mistress of the Inn.

  STANWYCK HAPPILY ACCEPTED A ROLE AS THE LESBIAN OWNER OF A whorehouse on the big screen when, in April 1961, producer Charles Feldman offered her the fifth lead in Walk on the Wild Side. The screen adaptation of Nelson Algren’s novel followed on the heels of William Wyler’s remake of The Children’s Hour. Lillian Hellman maintained her 1934 play was not so much about lesbianism as about slander, what a lie can do to people. Filmed with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn as the maligned schoolteachers, the 1962 version of The Children’s Hour was the first major Hollywood film about lesbianism, that is, the first movie with a major, visibly gay character. However, nothing is ever seen, the word “lesbian” is never pronounced, and, for a “moral” ending, MacLaine kills herself. A nervous Wyler nevertheless told a news conference they weren’t trying to make “a dirty movie.” MacLaine, who would say a few years later everybody is inherently bisexual, explained that she had researched her part by questioning psychiatrists.

  Stanwyck’s lesbianism in Walk on the Wild Side was thrown in for the effect. Feldman, who had produced the screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire, felt Walk could stretch the kind of material acceptable on the screen. “We’re updating the story for 1960s audiences, who want more spice in stories about girls who go bad,” he explained. By the time filming started, little was left of Algren’s novel about the self-destruction of a young Depression-era Texan who finds the love of his childhood working in a New Orleans brothel. Louella Parsons was on the phone to Stanwyck when Columbia announced Barbara had been cast as Jo Courtney, the bordello madam who lusts after one of her girls. “I hear you’re going to play a madam and a lesbian,” the columnist said. “I’m shocked.” Barbara snapped, “What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?”

  The picture was directed by Edward Dmytryk, a son of Ukrainian emigrants who had been one of the young hopefuls of the 1940s, directing Dick Powell in two brilliant thrillers, Cornered and the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder; My Sweet. Accused of being a communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was the only Directors Guild member to go to jail. Like Joseph Losey he found work in England, returned to Hollywood, and, after naming names at the 1951 HUAC hearings, was allowed to work at Columbia Pictures.

  Walk on the Wild Side was a mess.

  During the shooting, Feldman kept sending Dmytryk soft porn scenes that had no chance of passing the Production Code. Columbia’s advertising and publicity staff breathed hot and heavy about the controversial nature of the film. To make Walk on the Wild Side both titillating and demure enough to pass the Breen Office, five writers worked on the script. Stanwyck’s love for her best bordello worker, for example, was watered down to the point of unintended implications. Instead of insinuating that Stanwyck lusted after Capucine, their interaction came across as an employer’s admiration for a productive employee. Ultimately, Capucine is killed accidentally during a shoot-out and vice queen Jo Courtney is hauled off by police.

  The stars were a mess.

  Laurence Harvey, who had helped Elizabeth Taylor win an Oscar in Butterfield 8 and Simone Signoret in Room at the Top, fought with Dmytryk. Jane Fonda was in open rebellion against her father, her childhood, and her upbringing and came on the set every day with a Greek athlete she called her secretary. In danger of becoming a vapid sex symbol, she made everybody uneasy flaunting her newly acquired Actors Studio training. The twenty-eight-year-old Capucine (née Germaine Lefebvre) was Feldman’s mistress and the producer’s spy on the set. Anne Baxter, who played a man-hungry Mexican widow, was afraid her pregnancy would be discovered.

  Feldman kept sending rewrites and added scenes that Dmytryk would show to the actors involved and, with their consent, throw out. Harvey, sullenly gay and fighting private demons, stalked off the set and made everybody wait until Barbara let him have it. “One day, he kept us waiting one hour and a half,” Baxter would remember. “Highly professional Barbara was furious. So was I. But I had lied rather badly about my increasingly pregnant self and was keeping a rather low profile. Well, when he finally drifted back on the set, Barbara chewed him out with such icy grace that I wanted to cheer. He never did it again. Never.”

  Capucine, Fonda, and her Greek secretary formed their own cabal. “I didn’t blame Capucine,” Dmytryk would remember. “She was living with Charlie [Feldman] and had to go home every night to face his questions. There they were often joined by Jane and company, who added fuel to their fire.” The inevitable blowup came one morning while they were filming Capucine’s death scene and Dmytryk had to throw Fonda’s secretary off the set. Fonda might not remember being bounced on Stanwyck’s knees during The Lady Eve, but Barbara was so much of her father’s generation that when it came to filming their confrontation Jane couldn’t bring herself to spew her raw lines into Barbara’s face. Dmytryk rearranged the setup so Fonda would not have to look at Stanwyck while delivering the offending dialogue.

  The reviews were devastating. Playboy called it “a walk on the mild side, a soupy saga, and only a half-Nelson, adding that “Stanwyck, as a lesbian madam, seems made of chromium.”

  Barbara returned to television, where Sheila Kuel, the star of “The Zelda Gilroy Show,” was dropped after she was found out to be a lesbian. The McCarthy era, during which thousands of lesbians were fired from jobs in libraries, schools, and the military, the FBI infiltrated the Daughters of Bilitis, and the postmaster gene
ral of Los Angeles confiscated lesbian magazines, left a legacy of suspicion. Barbara belonged to a generation that perfected the techniques of hiding innermost emotions and had no intention of leaving the twilight. In Walk on the Wild Side, she played the stereotypical lesbian villain, a woman whose acceptance of her sexual preference is what makes her the villain. Barbara was uncomfortable with anyone who so much as broached the subject of lesbianism. When asked about her part, she was dismissive and said playing Jo Courtney “was a chance to get back into pictures and see what would happen.”

  ON THE BIG SCREEN, 1963 WAS THE YEAR OF THE FIRST JAMES BOND film, of Irma la Douce and The Great Escape. For Barbara, the year meant guest-starring in episodes of “Rawhide” and “Wagon Train.” Her costar in Remember the Night, Double Indemnity, The Moonlighter, and There’s Always Tomorrow found a new career on television and told her how to make it tolerable. As the widowed father in “My Three Sons,” Fred MacMurray worked only three months a year. All his angles and close-ups were shot first, and the other actors did the rest of the scenes later. In addition to his high salary, he had a partnership. The series would run in prime time until 1972 and many more years in syndication.

  Barbara made two appearances on “The Untouchables.” Producer Quinn Martin wanted to spin off her guest-starring role in the top-rated ABC show into a new series. “The Seekers” would have her as the head of an FBI Missing Persons Bureau. The network found the case histories too grim, however, and passed on the idea. Another disappointment was the no-go former child star Jackie Cooper received for a series called “Calhoun,” which inspired Merle Miller’s hilarious Only You, Dick Darling: Or How to Write One Television Script and Make $50 Million.

  Her brother died in 1964. Byron had suffered a first heart attack in 1959. The fatal coronary thrombosis felled him while he was filming a TV commercial at the El Caballo Country Club. He was sixty and was survived by his wife, Caryl, and his son, Brian. Three years later, Millie was gone, leaving seventy-nine-year-old Maud Barbara’s only living relative. Barbara hated to talk about any of this and claimed she had said it all before.

  She went out with people whose company she enjoyed and kept up her own two annual dinners, at Christmas and the Fourth of July. She never allowed journalists into her house, although Renée Godfrey managed to have Shirley Eder invited to 273 South Beverly Glen Boulevard one Friday evening. “I can still hear Barbara saying, as I came through the front door that night, Ί don’t know what you’re doing here; I never let press come into my house,’” Eder would recall. “Apparently some sixth sense told her that once I came through the front door, nothing that I ever heard in her house would reach print without her express permission. For some reason she trusted me.” Eder became a friend.

  Helen Ferguson faded out of Barbara’s life. Even before illness confined Helen to a wheelchair and forced her to relinquish her publicity agency, Barbara had tired of Helen’s increasingly autocratic ways. Helen was still a confidante, but Barbara now called her “Mommy” Helen. Larry Kleno, a young man in the Helen Ferguson Agency, eventually took over the office. Helen went to live with a niece in Palm Springs.

  Nancy Sinatra, Sr., remained Barbara’s closest friend and, as such, perhaps the only person who could hurt Barbara if she sensed neglect in their friendship. Every July 16, Nancy gave Barbara a “surprise” birthday party. One year Barbara failed to show up. When Nancy called, an offended Barbara said she hadn’t been invited. She never was, Nancy reminded her. Who ever heard of a birthday child being formally invited to her own party? Wasn’t it always understood that she simply showed up?

  Barbara’s friend Peter Godfrey was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His wife, Renée, stood by him, got a job as a secretary, tried real estate, and went back to acting to help pay for a difficult operation. After she died a short time later, Stanwyck was appointed legal guardian of the Godfreys’ seventeen-year-old daughter, Barbara, and the fourteen-year-old twins, Jill and Tracy. Friends like Shirley Eder had learned never to talk about Dion and, if the subject of children came up, only to talk about their own. As far as Shirley could tell, Barbara’s devotion to the Godfrey daughters had less to do with affection for the girls than with a wish to right an injustice Barbara perceived in the parents’ will. Although Stanwyck never told Eder what upset her after Renée’s death, Shirley would remember Barbara not liking what she found in the personal papers.

  Barbara kept up her self-deprecating humor, saying that for Academy Awards nights or other functions she felt obliged to attend, she relied on Cesar Romero. “I just call good ol’ Butch Romero and he says rather reluctantly, ‘Well if you have to go, I’ll take you. He does that for all of us old broads.”

  33

  THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

  DORIS DAY WAS THE STAR OF 1964, FOLLOWED BY FOUR MEN—Jack Lemmon, Rock Hudson, John Wayne, and Cary Grant—followed by Shirley MacLaine. George Cukor’s My Fair Lady was the film of the year and Julie Andrews the Oscar winner for Mary Poppins. Robert Aldrich, a paunchy film noir director with a knack for money-spinning “concepts,” wanted to do an encore to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? His gamble that audiences would love to see Bette Davis and Joan Crawford debase themselves as a pair of crazy hags had paid off so wonderfully that dozens of copycat producers pitched imitation scripts to aging first ladies, demanding they look their worst.

  Aldrich asked Henry Farrell, the author of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, to come up with the sequel. The Grand Guignol script about a pair of aging cousins Farrell delivered six weeks later made Aldrich think of Stanwyck. He had been assistant director on The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and tried to get Barbara for The Big Knife.

  Hal Wallis got her first, however. Calling her one afternoon, the producer of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Sorry, Wrong Number, Thelma Jordan, and The Furies said he was sending over a script he wanted her to read. She asked what it was about. He said she’d love it. He’d have it delivered to her house by messenger. She insisted. Before hanging up, he said it was an Elvis Presley movie.

  Barbara didn’t know what to believe. “I thought, well, if he’s calling me, there must be something in it.” She had never seen an Elvis Presley movie.

  She quickly found out that Mae West had turned down the part. Still, the idea of playing to a young audience flattered Barbara. She was Maggie Morgan, the never-say-die owner of a traveling carnival who hires wandering tough guy Elvis as a handyman. He makes assorted trouble for everybody, but, by singing in a honky-tonk on the midway, he saves Maggie’s circus from bankruptcy. He falls in love with Maggie’s daughter, coolly portrayed by Joan Freeman, and becomes the featured attraction. Playing Elvis’s boss wasn’t too bad. In Flaming Star; Dolores Del Rio had played his mother.

  By the time Roustabout started, Wallis had had enough of Presley and Elvis enough of Β pictures. Wallis was the first producer to put Presley under contract, and Elvis respectfully called Hal “sir.” But John F. Kennedy’s Camelot dated Elvis—the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were shooting up the charts, and the national hysteria that had surrounded Elvis Presley’s meteoric rise in the late 1950s was evaporating. His record sales were down, and he was no longer trailed by squealing groupies. He blamed the “travelogue” movies he allowed himself to star in and his middle-of-the-road repertoire of songs. He was grinding out three movies a year, all cheap rock ‘n’ roll pictures that exploited him as much as his hard-core audience. Viva Las Vegas, his last one, was an exception, and the reason was Ann-Margret. For the first time, he had a talented, vivacious costar who nearly counterbalanced the cheap lewdness that was characteristic of most Presley formula movies like Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, G J. Blues, and Blue Hawaii.

  In Roustabout, Presley sang eleven numbers and, said the critics, acted more convincingly than in any of his recent vehicles. Edith Head did the wardrobe. In a compliment that made Barbara blush, the designer told reporters Stanwyck was as well shaped as she had been on The Lady Eve in 1940.
“Barbara looks terrific in a pair of blue denims, so I had no qualms about putting them on her,” Head told the press. “She has so much presence that no matter what she wears, she owns the screen. Teaming her with Elvis was a stroke of genius. It gave him credence as an actor and it brought in some older audiences who would never have watched a Presley film otherwise.”

  Elvis hated Roustabout. He was in such a funk that his handlers feared he might crack up if he didn’t find something fresh to live for. On the set, there was no doubt who the star was, but Barbara pretended she enjoyed making the Hal Wallis Production, directed by TV graduate John Rich. Elvis was restless, and if a scene or a conversation didn’t concern him he walked off. Barbara discovered she had one thing in common with him—they were both scared stiff of airplanes. Before the picture finished, a low-profile hippie spiritualist named Larry Geller became Elvis’s swami.

  To commemorate the wrap in April 1964, Elvis and his famous manager, Colonel Tom Parker, sent Barbara an enormous box of stuffed animals.

  Aldrich and his screenwriters’ follow-up to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was a piece of Southern Gothic they called Whatever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? Bette Davis hated the title, calling it cheap and revolting. Aldrich relented. The new picture in which Bette would star along with Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead, Cecil Kellaway, and Victor Buono was renamed Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

  With Bette as Charlotte, Cotton is the family doctor who was once the lover of both Charlotte and her cousin Miriam. A flashback opening establishes the cousins’ tenuous relationship in their youth by showing the meat-cleaver murder of Charlotte’s fiancé, a murder that unremittingly casts suspicions on her. Back in the present, we see the doctor and Miriam conspire to drive Charlotte insane so they can share her inheritance. When she overhears them below her balcony scheming to commit her, Charlotte pushes an enormous cement planter pot over the edge, crushing them. Vivien Leigh turned down the role, saying there was no way she could face Bette at seven o’clock on a movie set every morning. Aldrich signed Crawford to play Miriam.