Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  A respiratory infection contracted during exterior filming in Louisiana landed Joan in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital in June 1964. Aldrich continued filming and shot all Bette’s scenes in which Crawford didn’t appear. When Joan didn’t recover quickly, he sent copies of the script to Stanwyck, Olivia de Havilland, and Mary Astor. Treacherous cousin Miriam was drawn all black, but it was nevertheless a plum of a role. Barbara hesitated, as she had done when Joe Mankiewicz offered her Margo Channing.

  Before she could decide, Joan improved enough to go back to work. Working three hours a day still proved to be too exhausting, however, and she was hospitalized again. The original $1.3 million budget escalated toward the $2 million mark, and the insurance company demanded Crawford be replaced. In the face of Stanwyck’s vacillation and Astor’s half-serious claim she was really retired, Aldrich closed down the production and flew to Switzerland, where de Havil-land was vacationing. Olivia had played a murderess once before in The Dark Mirror and hated every moment of it. But Aldrich was desperate—and persuasive enough to make her agree to play Miriam. Stanwyck was offered the part of Jewel Mayhew—a little old lady sitting on her verandah waiting to die, but in her youth the meat-cleaver murderess who started all the trouble. Barbara said no.

  When Astor grabbed the Jewel part, Barbara found herself in the uncustomary position of denying Aldrich had offered her the juicy Miriam role. “He did not offer me the part, and I didn’t turn it down,” she told a Hollywood Foreign Press luncheon. “But had he offered me the part, I certainly would have checked with Joan first, because Joan is a friend of mine, as to whether she was able to carry on or not.”

  Moviegoers loved Bette Davis’s encore as a madwoman and de Havilland as the back-stabbing cousin. Producers were sure that what the public wanted was to see yesterday’s screen goddesses exhibit themselves as demented, repulsive women. Tallulah Bankhead starred in Fanatic, a Columbia knockoff shooting in England and titled Die, Die! My Darling! in America. Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon followed in Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?

  After hesitating on Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Barbara agreed to The Night Walker. She insisted this was a “shocker,” not a horror film: “There’s a difference. Horror is with the heads rolling and the blood and gore and all that sort of thing. This is a shocker-suspense film.” The producer-director was William Castle, a cigar-chomping specialist in cheap horror flicks whose greatest triumph was three years in the future—producing Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Castle belonged to the carny type of moviemakers. For The Tingler he had vibrating seats installed in selected cinemas, for Macabre he insured his viewers at Lloyd’s of London in case of sudden death. His latest was Strait Jacket, in which Joan Crawford played a deranged woman who, when she finds her husband and his mistress in bed, chops their heads off. The gimmick Castle had in mind for his newest chiller was to get Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor together.

  The Night Walker was about a woman trapped in a dream so starkly real that her days and nights blend into a nightmare. The script was by Robert Bloch, the author of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Castle’s Strait Jacket. When Stanwyck went to discuss it with Castle, he asked how she would feel if Taylor played her leading man. She tried to make her reply casual. “I think it would be a wonderful idea, but you’d better ask him and Mrs. Taylor.” Castle had directed Ursula in the 1954 costume piece The Iron Glove. Bob wasn’t keen on doing the picture, but Ursula convinced him it was a good idea.

  Castle convinced Stanwyck and Taylor to invest in the picture, that is, to work for Screen Actors Guild minimum or “scale” in exchange for percentages of its future earnings. Without mentioning the money angle, he invited the entire Hollywood press corps to the first day’s shooting. Louella Parsons wanted to know if the first Stanwyck-Taylor love scene wasn’t a little bit embarrassing for Bob and Barbara. Castle answered for his stars. The scene was played across a table for two in a fashionable restaurant, he explained. As Taylor and Stanwyck took their seats, Bob said it all reminded him of a little place in Chicago. Barbara chimed in with “Do I remember! We ate ourselves out of shape there.”

  The jokes were window dressing. Bob looked terrible. His chainsmoking had given him lung cancer, and the counterculture he despised was claiming his stepchildren. Mamela was arrested for drunk driving and drug possession in California and in Germany.

  The Night Walker started shooting during the late summer of 1964. Barbara played a somnambulist who keeps having a weird dream in which a stranger (Lloyd Bochner) tries to woo her away from her jealous, blind husband (Hayden Rorke). Bob played the family lawyer who helps her get to the bottom of her husband’s disappearance in an explosion and fire. The stranger turns up again in a dream and takes her to an undertaker’s chapel, where, in the presence of wax dummies and a model of her burn-scarred husband waiting to leap at her, the stranger insists she marry him. Barbara carried the picture.

  Castle and Universal Pictures threw a premiere party at which photographers snapped pictures of Bob and Barbara standing together but never touching. She went on a promotional tour for The Night Walker; explaining that along with Bob and Castle she owned a piece of the film. “The whole thing would not be worth reporting,” the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther said, “if it didn’t have Barbara Stanwyck in the role of the somnambulist and Robert Taylor as her husband’s lawyer who tries to help. Miss Stanwyck, silver-haired and seasoned, does lend an air of dignity to the otherwise unbelievable tale. And Mr. Taylor, lean and wrinkled, does at first make the lawyer seem something more than the spurious character he finally turns out to be.” Because of the movie industry’s Byzantine bookkeeping, most stars who “participate” in their movies’ financial fortunes walk away feeling cheated. Barbara and Bob’s investing in The Night Walker actually turned out to be a successful venture.

  Castle got Crawford for his next suspense-thriller, I Saw What You Did. When Joan’s character was killed off near the beginning of the film it was alleged the producer-director couldn’t afford her. The rumor was deliberate, one of Castle’s publicity stunts. Producers sent Barbara screenplays in the shocker-horror vein. She sent them right back, saying she was tired of scripts “about grandmothers who eat their children.”

  Barbara was in New York in the fall of 1965 for ten days of shopping, theatergoing and seeing old haunts. Shirley Eder and her husband, Ed, joined her. Shirley would recall the crowds waiting outside the Plaza Hotel to see Stanwyck and the audience at a Golden Boy revival with Sammy Davis, Jr., in the title role chanting, “Barbara Stanwyck!” as she stood up and acknowledged the applause. At the end of the stay, Shirley was with Barbara at her hotel suite one night when snow began to fall. Barbara sat at the picture window overlooking Central Park, her feet on the radiator, and began to reminisce about her youth.

  “You know, Shirley, I can remember when I was poor—oh so poor and so cold because my coat was too thin to give warmth. But as cold as I was, I loved being outside when the first snow fell on New York City. It was magic time for me then, and it’s still magic, except now, with my feet on the radiator, I’m so nice and warm.”

  34

  MATRIARCH

  THE TELEVISION SERIES ON FRONTIER WOMEN NEVER GOT OFF THE ground. Being her naked self on TV hadn’t worked. Playing a western matriarch did. From 1965 to 1969, Stanwyck was the matriarch of a western clan on “The Big Valley” television series. “They don’t write strong women’s parts in movies or television,” she told interviewers when the popular ABC series began its third season. “It just isn’t like the great days when they had strong men stars and strong women stars—William Powell and Myrna Loy, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo. The wheel turns, so we’ll probably get back to that. But meanwhile I like to work.”

  She could be even more emphatic. “I would go mad if I retired. I’m ready to work anytime. I’ll take any part that comes along. I don’t care about the money or the size of the role. All I care about is working.” />
  Making a television series reminded her of touring vaudeville shows. There was never enough time. Before signing on with Levy-Garner-Laven Productions, she held out for a fully fleshed out character. What she wanted—and got—was rewrites that turned her matriarch character, Victoria Barkley, into a vital, frankly mature woman as active as her children. “I’m a tough old broad,” she told the producers. “Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. If you want someone to tiptoe down the Barkley staircase in crinoline and politely ask where the cattle went, get another girl. That’s not me.”

  Hour-long segments were filmed in six days, averaging twelve pages of screenplay a day. Three pages a day had been the average even for Warners: eighty-to-ninety-minute “working-girl” programmers. In movies, the hours were civilized compared to TV. Back in the studio days, everybody was home for dinner. On “The Big Valley,” she was up at four and sometimes on the set till nine at night. “We do twenty-six shows in twenty-six weeks,” she said, “twenty-six very fast movies, and no one bothers counting the hours. The script is here, the cameras are there, and you are here.”

  End-of-day aches had their own kick of adrenaline for her. “Late afternoons you feel you’re so hot and tired—particularly on those hot locations—that you just can’t do a thing. But somehow you always do. At night, you have a pot of soup and go to sleep. It’s a brutal life.”

  She loved it.

  During the nine months the series was in production each year nothing else existed for her. The three months when “The Big Valley” was in hiatus, she didn’t know what to do with herself. When she was tired of reading, she went to the movies, sometimes staying all day. She joked that a script was much more dependable than a man.

  As Victoria Barkley, she played the widowed matriarch of a powerful ranching clan in California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1870s. Barbara characterized Victoria Barkley as an old broad combining elegance with guts. Much of the series’ drama centered on Victoria’s fights with her sons. Richard Long played the eldest. Peter Breck and Charles Briles played the other two sons. Linda Evans was the only daughter and Lee Majors the bastard son of Victoria’s late husband. Guest stars included Anne Baxter, Colleen Dewhurst, Katherine Ross, Carol Lynley, Leslie Nielsen, and Milton Berle.

  STANWYCK FOUND WORKING WITH EVANS AND THE OTHER YOUNG TV players less than thrilling. “Most of these young people have no idea of what their obligations are; they don’t know what an actress is supposed to do,” she told writer-producer Robert Blees. As an example she said the actresses on the show ran to the makeup tables as soon as a scene was blocked. “That’s the most important part of their performance—their hairdos. After that, their makeup, then wardrobe. Finally comes remembering their lines—A and Β and C and D—and just that monotonous is how most of it comes out. Last on their list is the performance.” When one of them asked why she was so blasé about her own makeup, Barbara answered that there were experts on the set who could do her in three minutes, that she had no interest in looking at herself in the mirror to pencil an eyebrow or a lower lip. What she was interested in was to start being the character. Evans cooed about their mother-daughter relationship. During the first season, however, Barbara scolded her young costar for being unprepared and late.

  Linda Evans considered Stanwyck the greatest teacher. When Evans’s character in a “Big Valley” scene needed more presence, Stanwyck told Evans she’d show her in the next take. “As the rehearsal went on,” said Evans, “I waited for an explanation from Stanwyck about ‘presence,’ but she didn’t say anything. I had to walk in this door and walk into the scene, but she didn’t come over. Finally the director said, ‘Action!’ She came over behind me just as we were supposed to walk in the door. I thought, ‘When is she going to tell me what to do?’ Then, as I opened the door, she picked up her boot and kicked me in the butt! I went flying onto the set with my eyes wide open and she said, ‘Now, that9s presence.”

  Frankly sixty and passably untroubled by playing the “blood and guts” matriarch, Barbara saw no point in trying to turn off the years. “There is no age in my life I want to be again! Certainly not thirty,” she told Pageant magazine. “I have yet to understand the percentage, the advantage, the rhyme and reason, the necessity and/or compulsion to be never-older. Maybe I’m just too lazy—it seems much more practical to me to eat properly and to be too busy to be facialed, massaged, chin-strapped, and all the other time-consuming pampering age-fearing ladies submit to—not to mention hair dyes, face lifts, and the expense. At least the samples of the nice, youth-impelled, but I think, misguided ladies I’ve seen have made me think all the fretting, fussing, stewing, lying, and dyeing, all the tensions created by wanting to be forever young, age one faster. They look what they are—battle-scarred veterans of their lost war against time. I decided not to enlist in that war three years before I turned forty.”

  WHILE THE MEDIA WERE STILL LARGELY DEAF TO THE POLITE protests of homosexuals, a new lesbian movement emerged, made up of politically aware women. If these younger, assertive lesbians had a heroine it was “Big Valley’s” Barbara Stanwyck and the sense of control she radiated. To many younger lesbians, her Victoria Barkley seemed genderless. Unlike Stanwyck’s earlier roles in which the men always won or the situation got to her in the end, here she was a woman in full possession of her powers—no man needed. “You just knew,” said Dana Henninger. “We weren’t too impressed with her earlier career, Stella Dallas. She was a little too coy back then, but in her westerns, yes. And “Big Valley!” There was no male testosterone in her Victoria Barkley. We were all just crazy about her.” Anyone trying to tell her as much was met by a crushing brush-off. Boze Hadleigh, a committed homosexual journalist, was more or less thrown out of her house when he dared ask if she was gay.

  Her elegant and gutsy aura was heightened by her affection for stunt work. Virgil Vogel, who directed her in forty-five “Big Valley” episodes, said no physical action ever frightened her. “She had great confidence. I would give her all the protection possible. I checked each stunt carefully, but in her extreme dedication to her work she always gave a little more than she was instructed to. If I asked her to jump eight feet, she would do ten.” Over the “Big Valley’s” four-year lifespan, Stanwyck appeared in all but seven of the 112 episodes.

  HER WHITE MANE BECAME A TRADEMARK AND MADE HER RECOG-nizable off the tube. During an L.A. visit of Ed and Shirley Eder and their young son and daughter, Barbara said she had never been to Disneyland. Once in the Anaheim theme park, Stanwyck was quickly identified. While she and the Eders queued up for the Matterhorn roller-coaster ride, public relations people swooped down to tell her they would move her and her party to the head of the line. To the Eder children’s chagrin, Aunt Barbara snapped, “Not me, you don’t.” Later in the day, a group of Japanese businessmen spotted her. When their leader asked if they could snap a picture of her, she posed, movie star-style, for the shutterbugs and was rewarded with a bow and a respectful, “Thank you much, Miss Streisand.” She never let on that she was not the thirty-five-year-younger La Streisand, and the Japanese went home convinced they had photographed the Funny Girl.

  Barbara’s aching back and emphysema gave her a no-nonsense respect for those who fought back illness and won. She attended the West Coast premiere of The Subject Was Roses, Patricia Neal’s first film after recovering from a severe stroke. At the after-screening reception, everybody remarked on Neal’s stunning comeback, on how her dramatic powers were not only intact but seemed intensified. Still, apprehension clouded her face as Stanwyck came up to her. The Foun-tainhead was long ago, but Jack Warner and King Vidor had given Neal the role Barbara had so much wanted.

  Barbara betrayed no rancor. She smiled and said, “You’re gorgeous.”

  “Oh,” Neal laughed, “you finally saw The Fountainhead?”

  Barbara had no use for jokes. She looked the younger actress squarely in the eye and said, “I admire you very much.”

  The Screen Actors G
uild wanted to honor Stanwyck. Those who knew her on the SAG awards committee feared she would not show up if she was told she would be the recipient of an award. So they told her to come to the November 21, 1966, annual membership meeting to hand an award to newly elected California governor Ronald Reagan.

  She was in the wings waiting for her cue when Reagan walked out onstage and began telling the audience the Screen Actors Guild award “is not presented just for longtime excellence on-screen. It should be called, perhaps, an above-and-beyond award, because it is given for outstanding achievement in fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession.”

  Barbara was totally confused as Reagan went on extolling the evening’s recipient. “We have known her in this profession as truly a professional and an exponent of our art and craft of the best… “

  At Reagan’s “… Barbara Stanwyck,” she covered her face. To the roar of a standing ovation, someone shooed her onstage and walked her to the microphone and an embrace by Reagan.

  “It’s the first time I’ve been kissed by a governor,” she began. “I am very, very proud of this moment. I love our profession very much. I love our people in it. I always have and I always will. And whatever little contribution I can make to the profession, or to anything, for that matter, I am very proud to do so. It is a long road. There are a lot of bumps and rocks in it, but this kind of evens it all out, when an event like this happens in your life. From a very proud and grateful heart, I thank you very much.”