Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  GLITTERING OCCASIONS WERE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN. NANCY SINA-tra hosted Stanwyck’s sixtieth birthday July 16, 1967, and for the occasion invited Barbara’s nephew and family. Gene Vaslett was a successful businessman in Oakland, California, and her grandnieces were artistically gifted, Victoria as a ballerina, Kathleen as a painter. Larry Kleno, who had taken over the Helen Ferguson Agency, became Stanwyck’s press secretary, a position that would grow in influence over the next years.

  Dion divorced and remarried. He was about to marry twenty-four-year-old Rose Bywalski in Las Vegas in 1968. Contacts between mother and son were nonexistent.

  Stanwyck was proud of her independence, of living alone—she called herself a “bachelor woman”—but in 1968 she became in real life the besieged victim she had played to perfection in Sorry, Wrong Number and Witness to Murder.

  It took her a while to realize there was someone outside her home, waiting for hours. One morning when she opened the front door, a man jumped forward, shouting, “I’m here, Barbara, baby, I love you!” She slammed the door, locked it quickly, and on the intercom told him that unless he left, she would call the police.

  He left.

  She waited ten minutes before she opened the door to retrieve her newspaper. From across the street, he came running toward her. She called the police.

  When he came back again and again, she filed charges. Her tormentor was Henry Roy Belmert, a forty-five-year-old transient from Ohio. The judge ordered him to the Atascadero State Hospital for observation. The psychiatric evaluation was inconclusive.

  California law required a jury trial before anyone could be committed as a “mentally disordered sex offender.” The rules of evidence of the day prevented Stanwyck from testifying to the mental anguish she suffered because of Belmert’s unwanted attention. At his Superior Court trial, however, she managed to say, “I don’t know when I’m going to open the door and find him there. I don’t know when he’s going to jump out at me and grab me.”

  When neither Barbara nor Deputy District Attorney John Hoyt presented evidence of an actual sexual advance, the jury found Belmert not guilty. With terms of probation imposed, he was released.

  The next thing police heard was Stanwyck’s hysterical voice on the phone reporting that Belmert was cutting through her screen door. Again, he was arrested.

  Barbara didn’t wait for the wheels of justice to decide his or her fate. She sold the house on Beverly Glen Boulevard and found a small, one-story ranch house on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills, part of the recently developed Trousdale Estates, where tight security was a priority.

  IN JUNE 1969, STANWYCK AND GOVERNOR REAGAN MET UNDER unhappy circumstances, he to read the eulogy for Robert Taylor; she to make an embarrassing appearance at the funeral.

  Not so long before, Bob had jokingly asked Nancy Reagan why the California Republican Party had chosen Ron, not him, to run for governor. Reagan’s funeral speech was affectionate: “I know that some night on the late show, I am going to see Bob resplendent in white tie and tails at Delmonico’s, and I’m sure I’ll smile—smile because I’ll remember how a fellow named Bob really preferred blue jeans and boots. And I’ll see him squinting through the smoke of a barbecue as I have seen him a hundred times.”

  The words were too much for Barbara. She broke down in loud sighs and tears that interrupted Reagan. The stony silence of the other mourners amplified her sobs. Tom Purvis turned to stare Barbara down. Others thought she was heavily sedated or drunk.

  Robert Taylor had spent his last years in the double-feature market, mostly in westerns. “The Detectives” series was canceled in 1962. Bob turned to television, taking over as host and star of “Death Valley Days” after Ronald Reagan left the show to run for governor. Bob refused to admit he had lung cancer. Ursula pleaded with him to undergo surgery. He pushed it off, saying there was no way he would be able to keep hospitalization from the producers of “Death Valley Days.” In 1968, he and Charles Boyer had let themselves be talked into starring in a feeble espionage comedy with a telling title, The Day the Hot Line Got Hot. Shortly after the filming finished, Bob’s lung cancer was diagnosed as inoperable. Doctors told the press he suffered from Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

  Bob’s last months were harrowing. He was in and out of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, insisting on going home, but after a few days yielding to Ursula and physicians’ pleas for hospitalization and cobalt treatments.

  Three weeks before the end, Ursula invited Barbara to come and see her former husband. Barbara had never visited the Taylors, but she came. The ravages of terminal cancer, three operations, and cobalt treatments left him an emaciated ghost of his former self. In May 1969, when Bob was home for the last time, Michael, his never mentally stable stepson, committed suicide. By early June, the news media reported that Robert Taylor was fighting for his life.

  On the morning of June 8, he died.

  The funeral of a Hollywood celebrity drew crowds to Forest Lawn, and Ursula offered the first Mrs. Taylor a seat with the family out of sight of the throngs. Barbara decided she would not attend, but on the morning of the funeral changed her mind.

  She arrived—late. Steadied by two attendants, she entered the chapel in dark glasses, wearing a bright yellow dress that jarred with the mourners’ black. The dress was later explained as fulfilling Bob’s long-ago wish that she not wear black at his funeral.

  Reagan managed to finish the eulogy despite Barbara’s sobs. After the service Purvis and several other old buddies of Bob’s shook their heads in silent protest when Ursula, escorted by her daughter, Mamela, crossed to Barbara and invited her to join a handful of others at the ranch “for a drink on Bob.” Barbara was driven to Mandeville Canyon. When she was ready to leave, Purvis and the others saw Bob’s two wives in a deep conversation in the middle of the driveway. All eyes were on them. No one dared walk up to them.

  The two women talked, neither betraying any emotions. There was no comforting hand touching an arm, no brief hug, no handshake. Barbara got into her limousine. Slowly, the big car eased down onto Mandeville Canyon Road.

  35

  GOLDEN GIRL

  BARBARA SOLDIERED ON THROUGH HER SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES. Cancer—and smoking—killed friend and foe. After Humphrey Bogart succumbed in 1957, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson, William Powell, and Dalton Trumbo, whose screenwriting credit on Exodus marked the end of the blacklist, died of cancer. Massive coronarles felled Harry Cohn and David Selznick, and Sam Goldwyn spent five years bedridden, obese, partly paralyzed from a stroke before dying in his sleep. Barbara was a survivor. There were days when emphysema had her gasping for air, but she kept up her lifelong habit of smoking. “I’m not yesterday’s woman, I’m tomorrow’s woman,” she said, tossing her white mane in a gesture of impatience and flicking cigarette ashes into an empty coffee cup.

  She claimed she hated the past yet, when the golden era was brought up, talked longingly about it. She had never been under long-term contract to a single studio, but she marveled at the security that Bob, Joan, Clark, and Bette had enjoyed. She forgot the flip side, the ruthless meat-market breeding, the straitjacket contracts, and the punishing suspensions of the star system. “Two or three pictures a year written for them by the top writers. It was like a baby being bathed and all wrapped in a blanket. Today, it’s catch as catch can. Today someone buys a book or a play and asks, ‘Who can we go to a bank with?’ not ‘Who’s right for it?’ It was a good system for a while but Hollywood today is like a series of Mobil or Standard Oil stations leased to a distributor.”

  Work rescued her in 1970. Aaron Spelling, the “Zane Grey Theater” writer she had introduced to Nolan Miller, was on his way to becoming television’s most successful producer. Spelling offered her two ABC Movie of the Week assignments. In The House That Wouldn’t Die, she inherits an old house in which strange things begin to happen the moment she arrives. Barbara Michael’s novel, Ammie, Come Home, was adapted by Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte writer Henry Farrell. Next she was cast in A Taste of Evil opposite Barbara Parkins and Roddy MacDow-ell. Looking every inch the regal matriarch in a Nolan Miller creation, she terrorized her daughter, ranting and raving in a supercharged ending.

  Miller was very much part of Spelling’s upward mobility. “Dynasty,” “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” and a half-dozen other glamour shows were still in both men’s future, but Spelling realized that the way to lure film stars to television was to promise designer wardrobes. “We dangled Nolan,” Spelling would recall. “Instead of offering more money, we said Nolan will do your clothes.”

  “Stanwyck taught me not to worry about shoes,” Miller would say twenty years later. “’If they are looking at the shoes,’ she said, ‘everything else is a mistake.’ She thought the top of the dress was the most important, especially in TV where it’s all close-ups. She called them ‘table-top’ dresses.”

  The couturier and his wife, Sandra, became Barbara’s friends. Sandra was the daughter of New Orleans socialite Matilda Streams, one of Nolan’s earliest private clients. Miller did Sandra’s sweet-sixteen party dress, her debutante gowns, and her first wedding dress. “That marriage lasted ten minutes,” he said, “Ten years later I married her. It sounds like a miniseries.” The Millers called Barbara “Missy” and realized her idea of a good time was a quiet dinner with them, Jane Wyman, and Nancy Sinatra, Sr. “Missy thought she ran my life for me,” Nolan would recall. “She’d call and ask what I had for breakfast. She wanted to be sure I had breakfast.”

  Of the old stars, Crawford remained Barbara’s closest friend. Visitors to Crawford’s New York apartment commented that the only photos displayed in the living were one of President John F. Kennedy and one of Stanwyck. In New York, the ladies did lunch at the “21” Club, always at the same corner table at the front of the room so Joan could see and be seen by everyone who entered. “She looks like a million bucks when she goes out,” said Barbara of her friend. “She’s a star, and don’t you forget it.”

  With her take-charge style, Joan usually ordered the menu. Nolan sometimes joined them and would remember Crawford and Stanwyck reminiscing about how wonderful it had been when the studios, however brutally, built careers. Stars were stars back then, one of them would say, disparaging modern-day actors who after one television series thought of themselves as stars.

  If the dinner was at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel’s Don the Beachcomber restaurant, Jack Oakie usually came by to offer a drink and thank Stanwyck for selling him her ranch back in 1940. “Made me a rich man,” he winked. Southern California’s postwar sprawl had swallowed Northridge and made it L.A.’s newest lily-white suburbia of palm-treed, rectilinear streets laced with cookie-cutter ranch homes, swimming pools, malls, freeways, and smog.

  Crawford eventually stopped coming to California. “All of my friends are out of work, it’s so sad,” she said.

  In November 1971, Stanwyck began a pilot for a TV series about a woman lawyer and her young partner, played by James Stacy. She was especially happy to have Lee J. Cobb in the cast. It had been over thirty years since they had worked together on Golden Boy.

  On the second day of shooting, she felt a sharp sting in her left side. Her lifelong smoking had aggravated her bronchitis, but she decided to tough it out. She wasn’t going to hold up production. At the end of the day, she returned home feverish and exhausted. The pain grew worse. In the middle of the night she called Nancy Sinatra, Sr., and asked her friend to take her to the hospital. Diagnosed as suffering from a ruptured kidney wall, she was rushed into surgery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where both Frank Fay and Bob had died. When she woke up in recovery thirty hours later, she was told the kidney had been removed. “Plenty of people survive with one kidney, you know,” she whispered. “I’ll be fine.”

  St. John’s Hospital kept her for two weeks. She apologized to the producers of “Fitzgerald &C Pride” and especially regretted not being able to work with Cobb. Susan Hayward took her place, and the filming was rescheduled. Hayward sent Barbara twelve dozen roses.

  Nolan presented the two actresses to each other. “When I introduced Missy and Susan, they were very formal about it. ‘Hello, how are you,’ in very elegant tones of voice,” he would recall. “At the end of the afternoon, they were both hugging and kissing, with tears and the whole thing.”

  For the convalescing Stanwyck, Hayward was a mirror image of her younger self. Susan told of being born Edythe Marrener on Church

  Avenue, Brooklyn, in 1918, attending the Girls’ Commercial High on Classon Avenue, and dreaming of becoming an actress like her idol, Barbara Stanwyck. Whenever a Stanwyck film played the Glenwood Theatre or the RKO-Kenmore, Edyth persuaded her father to give her a dime so she could go and see it. “I studied the way you walked and talked and dressed,” she told Barbara. “I was forced to wear middy blouses and skirts at Girls’ Commercial, but I vowed that once I got out of school, I’d wear the same smart suits Barbara Stanwyck always wore in movie magazine photos.” She was a pretty, dignified, and scared-stiff twenty-year-old when the David Selznick sweep for Scarlett O’Hara brought her to California, to be screen-tested by George Cukor. An agent got permission to show her failed Gone with the Wind test at Warner Brothers, where she was renamed Susan Hay-ward. She, too, had married twice, her first husband the failed actor Jess Barker, her second the late FBI agent Floyd Eaton Chalkley.

  In January 1973, Barbara was well enough to work in The Letters, a third ABC Movie of the Week. She could grin and bear it during the day, but the kidney forced her to spend most evenings in bed. It was in bed that she watched Mae Clarke, her roommate from Forty-sixth Street, greet James Cagney on stage at the televised American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award dinner in his honor.

  Susan Hayward was diagnosed with brain tumors. Nolan did a forest-green sequined gown for Hayward to wear as a presenter at the 1974 Academy Awards. She was terminally ill and died a few weeks later. In March 1977, Helen Ferguson died. Two months later Crawford was dead.

  “THERE’S A LOT OF GOLD BEING GIVEN OUT TONIGHT, BUT HOLLY-wood will never run out of it as long as we have treasures like the next two stars,” Bob Hope told the audience at the fiftieth presentation of the Academy Awards. “He made his sensational screen debut in Golden Boy, and we’ll never forget his leading lady whose performances were never less than twenty-four karat. The Golden Boy and The Golden Girl are together again tonight. William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck!”

  Looking stunning in Nolan Miller’s rhinestone-studded black gown, Barbara walked down a flight of glittering stairs with Holden at the April 3, 1978, Oscar event. In close-up at the podium, the tuxedoed Holden looked older than his copresenter as he launched into an impromptu speech:

  Before Barbara and I present this next award, I’d like to say something. Thirty-nine years ago this month, we were working in a film together called Golden Boy. It wasn’t going well because I was going to be replaced. But due to this lovely human being and her interest and understanding and her professional integrity and her encouragement and above all, her generosity, I’m here tonight.

  A roar of applause rang through the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. When it died down, she cried, “Oh, Bill.”

  After a deep breath, they alternated reading the nominees for Best Achievement in Sound. Barbara turned to Holden, handed him the traditional envelope, and said, “And here, my golden boy, you read it.”

  CELEBRITY JOURNALISM SOLD MOVIE TICKETS, THEATER TICKETS, books, and records of the famous and the glamorous. Barbara shrugged when magazines called her a near-recluse, but reacted sharply when the New York Times reported fan letters forwarded to her from studios asked where she was buried.

  On Golden Pond ran for 128 performances on Broadway with Tom Aldreidge and Frances Sternhagen as the couple who have been married fifty years and come once again to their summer cottage in Maine. Stanwyck fought to do the 1981 film version with her old
friend Henry Fonda, and so did Greer Garson. Producer Jane Fonda held out for Katharine Hepburn. Barbara accepted a guest appearance on “Charlie’s Angel’s”—to prove she wasn’t dead. The producers floated the idea of a spin-off to be called “Tony’s Boys,” with Barbara as Tony, a female version of Charlie, and three good-looking boys, but the series was ultimately shelved.

  Two MONTHS AFTER HER “PARDNER” FROM CATTLE QUEEN OF Montana was inaugurated as President of the United States in 1981, Ronald Reagan sent a personal message to New York’s Lincoln Center, where Frank Capra, Henry Fonda, and a glittering audience paid tribute to Barbara Stanwyck. “You are a woman whose strength of character, vitality and energy permeate every word you play,” read the White House telegram. “Long before it was fashionable, you were a paradigm of independence and self-direction for women all over the world.”

  Walter Matthau summed her up: “She has played five gun molls, two burlesque queens, half a dozen adulteresses and twice as many murderers. When she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was terrific.”

  Escorted by Holden, she stood on the stage, a vision in white, from her white hair, to her silver-sequined white gown wrapped in a white mink stole, to her white shoes. When the ovation died down, she thanked the Lincoln Center Film Society:

  When the Film Society first notified me about this event, I thought they made a mistake. I thought they meant Barbra Streisand. Well, we got that straightened out. And then I thought that I had to tell them I had never won an Academy Award. So, we got that straightened out. They said it didn’t make any difference to them.

  Back in Los Angeles, Nancy Sinatra, Sr., threw a dinner party for her. Holden came in from Palm Springs and was joined by producer Ray Stark and director Richard Quine. Holden drove Barbara home. Did she know he was losing his long battle with alcoholism? Although he had spent a great deal of the last years in Europe and Africa with Stephanie Powers, they had always stayed in touch.