Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  When he bid her good night on her doorstep, she said, “Good night, golden boy. Take care of yourself.” Three weeks later Holden was found dead in his Santa Monica apartment. A friend called Barbara. “N-n-no, it can’t be. Are you sure it’s Bill?”

  THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION PLEDGED TO WAGE WAR ON CRIME. On March 30, 1981, the president, his press secretary, james Brady, and two police officers were wounded in a fusillade of bullets. Twenty-five-year-old John W. Hinckley, Jr., was arrested. He seemed to have acted from a desire to impress Jodie Foster, the teenage movie star he had never met. Seven months later, Barbara was terrorized by a pistol-packing burglar.

  It was 1:00 A.M., October 27, when she was awakened by someone standing in her bedroom door and shining a flashlight in her face. Before she could turn on the light, a man’s muffled voice asked where her jewelry and purse were.

  She switched on the light and saw a man in a ski mask pointing a gun at her. He ordered her not to look at him and to turn out her bedside lamp.

  “I want your jewelry or I’ll kill you,” he said.

  She decided jewelry was not worth her life and told him her valuables were in the top drawer in her dressing room. Beverly Hills police lieutenant Russ Olson would later report the robber was confused as to the location of the jewelry, that when she turned her light on again, she was hit with a blunt object.

  “I told you not to look,” the burglar shouted. “I’ll kill you.”

  After taking diamond rings, a diamond necklace, earrings, and the cigarette box Robert Taylor had given her, he grabbed her and threw her into a bedroom closet, and slammed the sliding door shut. He did not lock it, but shouted, “If you come out, I’m going to kill you!”

  For what seemed an eternity, the seventy-four-year-old actress lay bleeding in the closet. Blood trickled down her forehead and into her eyes. She told herself to stay calm, and when everything was silent, she stumbled out and called police. An ambulance took her to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was treated and released.

  The psychological repercussion was worse than the night’s ordeal or the loss of jewelry, estimated by police at $5,000. The thief had cut the glass on the living-room window, noiselessly and professionally. BARBARA STANWYCK SURVIVES NIGHTMARE ATTACK, read one headline. Another said, ACTRESS RELIVES ROLE IN BURGLARY.

  She was too distraught to attend Edith Head’s funeral two days later. Larry Kleno told reporters how calm and cool she had been, how after being released from the hospital she had joked about the disinfectant “painted over my hair.” No one was arrested. Did that mean a repeat of the Belmert ordeal? From neighbors police pieced together a description of the street that night suggesting the burglar had an accomplice. Barbara wondered if Henry Belmert had discovered her new address, whether he was the accomplice? Now two men who had threatened her were on the loose.

  Stanwyck spent $10,000 on an elaborate security system. Racoons, squirrels, and chipmunks always rattled the swank hillsides of the Trousdale Estates by setting off alarms. Now, the slightest nighttime noise had her freeze in fright. Invitations from friends went unanswered. When they called, they found her changed. In November, Nancy Sinatra managed to convince her to come to dinner one night. Barbara had to be picked up and delivered back to Loma Vista Drive by trusted friends.

  SHE WAS TORN WHEN THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS and Sciences decided to give her an honorary Oscar. Her impulse was to stay holed up at home, but Hollywood had been good to her. How could she refuse?

  The March 29, 1982, presentation was a night of upsets. Chariots of Fire was the unexpected winner as Best Picture, but Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda were the evening’s sentimental favorites, winners of the Best Acting awards for On Golden Pond. Neither was present, Hepburn performing in Washington, Fonda too ill to attend.

  “Four years ago, William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck came on this stage to present an award,” John Travolta began. “When they did, Mr. Holden departed from the script to speak from the heart. He said that his career derived from the lady standing next to him, that all he was came from her generosity, her support, her abiding belief in him. Barbara was completely surprised by this. She listened, her public face letting her private face show … but only for a second.”

  Introducing scenes from her career, Travolta mentioned she had been nominated four times—for Stella Dallas, Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity, and Sorry, Wrong Number—and, to a standing ovation, brought her onstage.

  For a moment she seemed to fight back tears. Then she took a deep breath and said, “A few years ago I stood on this stage with William Holden as a presenter. I loved him very much and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish.”

  Backstage, the honorary Oscar winner told the press, “Of course I was disappointed those times I was nominated before and lost. Anyone who says they’re not is lying. I’d like to do more as an actress, and better. It might be in a wheelchair but what the hell.”

  DEPENDING ON HER MOOD, HER ANSWERS TO ADULATION TENDED toward the wry or the blasé. “Look, believe it or not, I don’t walk on water,” she liked to caution. She lived in the present, and her complaints were about now. “Some actors and actresses in my position say they can’t find the right role, but I can’t fool myself that easily. Why lie about it? I just don’t get many offers. There is a whole new team at the studios, and I’m just another aging woman to them. They are more interested in new faces. And let’s face it—mine isn’t new.”

  A month later, her face filled the TV screen in The Thorn Birds.

  She created an imperious portrait of a wealthy and spiteful matriarch in the miniseries. Colleen McCullough’s sprawling saga, with its hammer blows of fate, was Australia’s Gone with the Wind, and in scope, passion, and tribulations the bestseller matched Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War novel. Barbara had read The Thorn Birds without casting herself as Mary Carson. Yet she knew she had no competition for the role when Herbert Ross was hired to direct it as a feature.

  A year after Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had essentially bankrupted United Artists, however, the $21 million price tag producers David Wolper and Stan Margulies came up with for a big-screen Thorn Birds was too steep. Scaled back and, ironically, blown up to a ten-hour miniseries for a worldwide TV audience, the project looked financially realistic.

  Stanwyck’s portrayal dominated the first three hours of Carmen Culver’s screenplay. “I do four takes—that’s all,” she told director Daryl Duke. Richard Chamberlain, who was cast as Father Ralph de Bricassart, the handsome parish priest, was sure no more would be needed. Drogheda, a prosperous Aussie sheep station, was re-created on a spread in the Simi Valley not too far from the Northridge of Stanwyck’s rancher days. The cast included Rachel Ward as Mary Carson’s granddaughter and Father Bricassart’s earthly love, Jean Simmons as Fee Cleary, Richard Kiley as Paddy Cleary, Christopher Plummer as the archbishop, and Mare Winningham as Barbara’s great-granddaughter. Duke filmed the interiors at Burbank Studio—as the merged Warner and Columbia studios were now called.

  The Thorn Birds gave Barbara a chance to play a woman of seventy-five assailed by sexual urges. Widowed and embittered, Mary Carson wants only one thing—the passionate embrace of the young priest. Her yearning is played out in a verandah scene in which she comes upon the priest getting out of wet clothes after a storm.

  Duke told Barbara to stroke Chamberlain’s bare chest, and for once she flubbed her line.

  “Cut!” shouted Duke.

  “What the hell,” she grinned. “It’s the first time in twenty years I’ve had a naked man in my arms.”

  Like a trouper she finished a house-burning scene on the Simi Valley set. Film technicians added special-effects smoke to the controlled fire. She was not the only one to gag on the thick, black smoke that Duke and cinematographer Bill Butler said would give the picture a special beauty, but she took several lungfuls. She stayed on the assigned spot in the wooden in
ferno until Duke yelled Cut!” Gasping for air, she was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital.

  Her lifelong smoking habit added to the gravity of the smoke inhalation. She had seen what emphysema had done to Uncle Buck, but refused to believe the disease, brought on by her heavy smoking, could turn her into an invalid. The hospital kept her for three weeks of breathing exercises, twice-daily deep-breath therapy. When she returned to work, cast and crew gave her a champagne welcome and, as a gag, a bottle of special-effects smoke.

  Nine months later she was still suffering bronchial aftereffects. She watched The Thorn Birds in bed. Broadcast over four nights in March 1983, the ABC miniseries proved so popular it ranked as the runner-up to the highest-rated-ever miniseries “Roots.”

  The Television Academy gave her an Emmy for her Mary Carson portrayal. Although she had never won an Oscar for any of her big-screen performances, the Thorn Birds Emmy was her third, following her “Barbara Stanwyck Show” and “Big Valley” awards. She walked briskly onstage to accept the Emmy, but in the wings two minutes later she had trouble catching her breath. Four times she was rushed to the hospital, gasping for life. Doctors told her a cold could kill her. A virtual prisoner of emergency equipment at home, she lived in fear of smog, chills, and dampness developing into crippling pneumonia. She was forced to say no to offers for appearances in her friend Richard Quine’s remake of Hotel for TV and “The Love Boat.”

  36

  CLOSING NUMBER

  QUEEN BABS WAS, IN HER LATE SEVENTIES, ONE OF THE BEST-LOVED stars. For over fifty years she had played the women that a new assertive feminist agenda took as models—women who lit their own cigarettes, opened their own doors, and ran their own lives. Cable TV and home electronics gave a second life to many of her films and inspired new appreciation. Her screen persona was a woman who knew how to survive without feminine wiles but was not above using them. Her dancer’s figure and sassy demeanor illuminated her Depression-era dames, and poise and independence entered the mix with her 1940s screwball comedies and film noir cynicism. In the long view, her emotional range and lack of pretension gave her life on the screen honesty and sarcasm, toughness and warmth. Film historian Stephen Harvey thought her acting technique so deceptively simple and elusive that he called her the least mannered and pretentious of the major stars of her period. Pauline Kael, the doyenne of American film critics, called The Lady Eve “a frivolous masterpiece.” Richard Schickel unearthed The Miracle Woman and praised Stanwyck for never being “ditsy, cuddly or passive—modes that the reigning conventions of romance of the period encouraged” in The Mad Miss Mantón, The Lady Eve, “and maybe best of all, Ball of Fire.” Not all reassessments were that flattering. Gavin Lambert, whose Inside Daisy Clover was becoming a cult film for its subliminal homosexuality, told a UCLA cinema class that Stanwyck in Double Indemnity “comes across like a drag queen,” that “there is something simply ‘too much’ about her.” New hotshot director Lawrence Kasdan came out with an imitation of Double Indemnity, Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner in the Stanwyck role and William Hurt as the Florida lawyer with whom she plots to murder her husband. For Christmas-New Year’s 1984-85 holidays the independent Los Angeles station, KTLA-5, put on a Barbara Stanwyck Week, with a like celebration periodically scheduled on other stations.

  DION SURFACED IN PRINT TO TELL HIS SIDE OF THE STORY OF A lifetime of hurt and rejection. Prodded by a tabloid and a would-be biographer digging into the marrow of Stanwyck’s life, the fifty-one-year-old Dion remembered the mother who was never there, the father who beat her up in raging arguments. He remembered turning freckled-faced and heavy when he was five or six, his bad grades, and being shipped to a military academy. He remembered how she never phoned, never sent for him on weekends.

  “She never touched, kissed or held me—except when cameras flashed,” he told the National Enquirer, pouring out a litany of blame as he detailed his unhappy childhood and adolescence. “I want to see my mother again—even for just half an hour—and experience just once more what it feels like to be a son,” he told the tabloid. “Mother, perhaps if we meet once more, we can both live the rest of our lives in peace.”

  Had she agreed to see him earlier, had she given him an explanation that might salve thirty years of misunderstanding, perhaps Anthony Dion Fay might not have taken the Enquirer’s money to spill his story. However exploitative the Enquirer’s editing, the interview was all the more pathetic as it was addressed to someone who had spent her own childhood in foster homes, rejected and kicked around.

  Was Dion after her money? He admitted his life had not been exemplary, that he had brushes with the law, that he had passed bad checks when hurting for money, but that was decades after she had cut him out of her life. People who knew Barbara admitted she had always treated her adopted son with indifference bordering on contempt, that it was all very tragic.

  She refused to see him.

  Reporters trying to get her side of the story were rebuffed. Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford’s harrowing memoir of her mother, was a bestseller, and now Dion was dragging his mother through the tabloid press, telling of abandonment and lifelong antagonism. Larry Kleno said there was nothing to explain, that Stanwyck considered Dion “an unfortunate situation.” Asked to elaborate, the press secretary said Dion had never learned from his mistakes. Stanwyck had gotten him out of so many scrapes when he was young that she had just given up on him. She was deeply hurt, but Dion was a closed issue.

  “She wouldn’t talk about him,” her friend Shirley Eder would recall. “She kept a picture of him in a closet. She had a way of shutting off things, to close the door behind her.”

  TO BARBARA’S MENTAL ACHES WAS ADDED THE PHYSICAL INDIGNITY OF GROWING BLINDNESS.

  Four months after the Enquirer article, she was losing her sight. In May 1984, she was diagnosed as suffering from cataracts on both eyes, with the left eye by far the worst. In early December, she was hospitalized for surgery. After removing the cataracts in both eyes, doctors inserted a plastic lens inside the left eye. She was pronounced legally blind, but doctors said her vision would improve. The recovery was slow. By the summer of 1985, however, her right eye healed sufficiently for her to see well enough to read.

  She shunned formal affairs, and her favorite evenings were spent at the house parties given by Nancy Sinatra, Sr. Aside from her few women friends, Barbara kept to herself, easing her pain and loneliness with drink. “Life is a pretty difficult thing to get through,” she said. “But I’m not an unhappy person.” When she turned eighty and was asked if she liked what she had made of herself, she said, “Let’s say I did what I was supposed to do. Okay?”

  HER PRIVATE EXISTENCE WAS ONE OF THE BEST-KEPT HOLLYWOOD secrets, and publishers wanted the Stanwyck story. Over breakfast at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the William Morris Agency’s Norman Brokaw broached the subject of an “as told to” Stanwyck autobiography to Shirley Eder. He was sure he could get a huge sum for a book written with Stanwyck’s collaboration.

  When Eder mentioned Brokaw’s idea, Barbara said that the complete honesty and openness with which she would have to approach such a project would be too wrenching. “I had a scrapbook as a kid, but I never wrote down the bad things that happened,” she told her friend. “Since I’m not about to let it all hang out—which could be dull reading even if I did—I’m not going to do it.” As an afterthought that spoke volumes, she added, “Besides, it would be too damn painful for me to go back through so many personal experiences.” She declined to help others write her story. Without her collaboration, Al DiOrio, the biographer of Judy Garland and Bobby Darin, published a slim Stanwyck biography.

  By early spring 1985, her eyesight and bronchitis were on the mend. Aaron Spelling had a TV movie for her he hoped to spin off into a series. To play her husband in Dark Mansions, Spelling was trying for Sterling Hayden, her lover in Crime of Passion. Going on seventy-six, Stanwyck made Spelling agree that if Dark Mansions should go to a series, her scenes would be filmed so
she would only work two days a week.

  By April, Dark Mansions was out and “The Colbys” was in.

  “Dynasty” was at the height of its popularity. In the United States alone, over 50 million people watched each episode, and Spelling decided to match the success of “Dallas” with a new series that in its early weeks was formally titled “Dynasty II: The Colbys.” Set in Los Angeles, its central characters were the members of the family of one of “Dynasty’s” main characters, Jeff Colby, played by John James. Charlton Heston was the corporate magnate Jason Colby, Jeff’s father, and Emma Samms was Fallon Carrington, Jeff’s wife. Stanwyck would be Constance Colby Patterson, Jason’s elder sister. The character was a spunky woman with a brain for business, a mixture of Barbara’s Executive Suite heiress and her “Big Valley” matriarch.

  Besides her two-days-a-week work rule, Barbara made Spelling and producer-writer Esther Shapiro agree she would never have to work past 6:00 P.M., never the week before Christmas, and never do interviews.

  The step outline had Constance Colby Patterson controlling half the family fortune and determined that neither Jason nor anyone else in the family would trample on her. Charlton Heston claimed the reason he agreed to be in the series was Stanwyck’s presence.

  Spelling and his team of writers planned interaction between the casts of “Dynasty” and “The Colbys.” However, Joan Collins (one of “Dynasty’s” major stars) hated the rival series, and, according to TV Guide, she urged her fellow actors on “Dynasty” to have nothing to do with the spin-off.

  A MONTH BEFORE FILMING STARTED, BARBARA’S HOME WAS GUTTED in a blaze. She was inside Saturday morning, June 22, 1985, when the fire started in the attic of her Loma Vista Drive home. She heard the smoke alarms go off and went outside to see the roof on fire. Seven fire engines responded as did neighbors, including Ross Hunter, her producer on All I Desire. “Anyone else would have been hysterical but Barbara was magnificent, seeing her beautiful paintings covered with ashes,” Hunter said. Nancy Sinatra managed to get through police barricades and chase away news crews pestering Barbara for interviews.