Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Stanwyck tried to be brave but looked like someone whose life is crumbling around her, despite Hunter’s statement. News photographers caught her in the street in an old cardigan, watching with Hunter, touching her lips in disbelief, distraught at losing so many personal belongings.

  Press reports told of her trying to dash into the burning house to save Robert Taylor’s letters to her. The tabloids played it to the hilt. “Even after their divorce and after Taylor’s death, Barbara still loved him, was still obsessed by his memory—and his memory was tied up in those letters, certain mementos from him and personal photos of him,” reported the tabloid. “She started to rush back into the house to save these precious mementos but a fireman held her back. Barbara said, ‘Please … ‘ but then her voice broke and tears welled up.”

  Damages were estimated between $1.5 and $1.8 million. After spending a week with Nancy Sinatra, she moved into a rented house. Her home was rebuilt.

  JOAN COLLINS WAS SO NOTICEABLY ABSENT FOR THE JULY TAPING of the first “Dynasty” and “Dynasty II” scenes that Spelling had to admit to the press he hadn’t spoken to her and, in any case, would never speak to her fiancé-manager, Peter Holm. Stanwyck and Heston were so perfect they shot their first scene—a three-pager—in one take, but the two of them didn’t get along. Barbara nicknamed him “Moses” for his Ten Commandments role. “He has a bad memory,” she said. “He still thinks he’s parting the Red Sea.”

  They nevertheless thought of themselves as examples for the younger cast members. The sentiment was far from mutual. “Both Barbara and Heston are not exactly unsusceptible to their egos,” said newcomer Michael Praed. Tracy Scoggins, who played Barbara’s niece, said, “She’s rough on the younger players.” Heston admitted she was “no little Mary Sunshine on the set.”

  When Barbara had to wait while Scoggins and Stephanie Beacham had their hair fixed, she called Spelling and had him issue an order: When Stanwyck is ready, everybody else in her scene must be ready!

  Stanwyck looked frail and jittery, clutching the arm of Nolan Miller as she entered the Beverly Wilshire Hotel ballroom for the publicity bash that ABC and Spelling threw for the season debut of “Dynasty and Dynasty II: The Colbys.” Stanwyck and Linda Evans, now the costar in “Dynasty,” wore stunning Nolan creations, Barbara a black chiffon dress that set off her trademark white hair. The average costume budget per episode of the new show was $25,000, and at $10,000 a week, Nolan was the highest-paid costume designer in the business. When a magazine reporter approached, Nolan said to her, “Barbara dear, say hello. This gentleman would like to do a story.”

  “With or without my help I’m sure,” she snapped.

  As the taping progressed, character developments promised in the series’ step outline were not in the scripts. Constance Colby Patterson never moved into the Colbys’ boardroom, and her love interest, played by Joseph Campanella, was eliminated. Barbara saw her part dwindle to the point where she was little more than a well-dressed mouthpiece for the good guys in the family. Although Spelling and Shapiro respected her two-days-a-week shooting schedule, constant rewrites made it a six-day job to learn her lines and attend story meetings and rehearsals. When she complained that she was playing the same scene she had done the week before, she was told, “Don’t worry. It’ll work.”

  “I say the same line every week,” she told Shapiro, “the only thing different is my dress.” Rock Hudson, who created a sensation flying to Paris seeking experimental treatment for AIDS and died of the disease in October 1985, was cheap fodder for her anger: “Even if Rock Hudson had been healthy when he did ‘Dynasty,’ the scripts would have done him in,” she spat.

  One day in March 1986, when Shapiro came on the set, Barbara faced her down and said, “This is the biggest pile of garbage I ever did—it’s lucky I signed only for thirteen episodes. I’ll be surprised if it lasts half that long.”

  By April, Stanwyck’s revolt was out in the open. Tabloids had a field day. The Star quoted her as telling Shapiro, “It’s one thing to know you’re making a lot of money off vulgarity, but when you don’t know it’s vulgar—it’s plain stupid.” She called the show “a turkey.”

  She went to Spelling and told him she had never walked out on a contract before, but, reluctantly, she was going to leave the show. “I’ve played the same damn scene twenty-four times,” she told him. He asked her to reconsider.

  To write her out of the series, a last episode had her on the phone arranging an around-the-world cruise for herself and her absent boyfriend. “The Colbys” didn’t outlive her prophecy by much. It wrapped its second, and final, season on ABC with a cliffhanger improbable even for television standards—Fallon’s kidnapping by a UFO—although she surfaced on “Dynasty” the following season.

  ~ ~ ~

  THE SCREEN ACTORS GUILD HAD RESORTED TO SUBTERFUGE TO give Stanwyck its award. The American Film Institute tried to be up front with her in 1986 when it wanted to make her the fifteenth recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award at a televised tribute dinner. “I can’t go through with that evening,” she told AFI’s president George Stevens, Jr. “I’m not that kind of person.” Stevens, whose father had directed her in Annie Oakley, turned to AFI board member Heston to persuade her. “My TV brother Moses called me and said, ‘I’ll take care of everything,’” she told Variety. “’I’ll not hear any more from you. You will be there!’ And he hung up.”

  She almost didn’t make the April 9 black-tie ceremony. A week earlier she had sprained her back, and she checked out of St. John’s Hospital only hours before the Beverly Hills Hotel award dinner. During the long evening Stanwyck stayed in a wheelchair in the wings for all but ten minutes. The organizers showed clips from many of her movies and her kiss with Ronald Reagan frame frozen on the screen. The long evening of tributes was emceed by Jane Fonda. In keeping with the actress being honored, the evening was short on sentimentality and long on clear-eyed fun.

  “I only made one movie with Barbara Streisand,” Fonda announced, shook her head, and walked offstage. She came back, did her intro again, and said her condition for appearing was that no clip from Walk on the Wild Side be run. “My father was in love with her all his life,” she told the glittering audience. “He openly admitted it to all his wives.”

  The testimonials were delivered from the audience as assorted well-wishers simply stood at their tables and spoke. Walter Matthau called himself an admirer of Stanwyck because she knew how to wrap both a good girl and a bad girl into one performance. Fred MacMurray called Stanwyck “the most wonderful girl to work with.” He summed up their four films together. “Once I sent her to jail, once I shot her, once I left her for another woman and once I sent her over a waterfall.” Richard Chamberlain called Stanwyck’s raw voice “a million dollar case of laryngitis.”

  With a supreme effort, she got out of the wheelchair and, to the accompaniment of a standing ovation, walked onstage. Unable to mask her pain, she leaned on the glass podium and responded to the applause with “Honest to God, I can’t walk on water.” Matter-of-factly, she said she was there because of what others had taught her. She singled out Frank Capra, who let her in on all the secrets of filmmaking, and Billy Wilder, “who taught me to kill—and thank God for him!” She thanked the crews—”I refer to them as my boys”—the writers—”Oh, God, how important they are”—and other actors.

  With that, she picked up her award, made it to the wheelchair and an oxygen tank, and returned to the hospital.

  SHE HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR HER EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY, BUT on July 16, 1987, friends and Variety columnist Army Archerd showered her with attention. Her illnesses kept her confined to her home, thin and weak, but clinging to hopes of doing one more movie or a TV series. Ironically, the back problems that almost made her miss the AFI tribute were aggravated by treadmill exercises to strengthen her lungs against the combination of chronic emphysema and pulmonary obstruction that weakened her. Her eye condition remained painful, but she was able to read a
nd watch television.

  The limitations and humiliations of invalidism were especially grating to the fiercely independent Stanwyck. It was certainly not how she had imagined her later years would be. She had accepted The Thorn Birds and “The Colbys” not only to work but also hoping to recapture her fame. She had wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.

  Stanwyck let her mind drift to the past. Her sickroom became a dimly lit shrine to Bob Taylor and herself. Photos of them together were everywhere. On the night table stood her honorary Oscar. It was almost twenty years since Bob had died, but she talked of her late husband as if he were there yesterday, and she came to believe she could communicate with him through the Oscar. If anyone asked why she was clutching the statue in bed, she said, “It brings Bob to me.”

  “When I hold this Oscar and I’m very quiet, I feel young and beautiful again. I discovered some time ago that Bob is still with me and that our love for each other will continue on the other side. Bob comes to me in the early hours of each morning. I wasn’t frightened when he first appeared—just pleased and grateful. That was a year ago and I was tossing and turning in my sleep. I turned on the light and saw the Oscar gleaming on the table. Something told me to pick it up. As I touched it there was a little electric shock and then my beloved Bob was standing by me. A look of incredible tenderness was on his face. We were together again and I knew he was there to help me to the other side.”

  What she feared most happened in June 1988. Pneumonia put her in St. John’s Hospital with few chances of survival. Dr. Robert J. Kositchek could do little to ease her gasping pains because of her allergy to many painkillers and because doctors found ten broken ver-tebrae in her brittle back. Isolated in an oxygen tent in a room where the lights were dimmed to protect her eyes, she could barely wave to Larry Kleno, Nancy Sinatra, Sr., and her old friends Loretta Young and Jane Wyman. From the White House, President Reagan phoned, but she was too weak to take the call.

  Once more she rallied. Three weeks later she was back home, cared for by round-the-clock nurses. When she wasn’t on oxygen, she was able to sit up in bed and make household decisions. She liked to have her hair combed out and groomed herself for the day in case an unexpected visitor dropped by. The variety and dosages of painkillers made it difficult to say when she’d be awake, however, and visitors inevitably became scarcer. With the exception of Nancy Sinatra, she was surrounded by paid staff, Kleno, and medical technicians.

  She felt utterly forgotten and even on good days sank into despair. Nolan Miller came by to show her a videotape of his newest couture collection. A more concerted effort to cheer her up was devised by Kleno with the consent of Morgan Maree, her longtime business manager. Kleno talked to the tabloids. Stories appeared on “The Forgotten Barbara Stanwyck,” with Maree’s address at the bottom for readers who might want to send a cheerful postcard. “She doesn’t know what day it is or if she’s eaten breakfast yet or why she needs a nurse,” wrote The Globe. “She can’t leave her bedroom at all. That’s where she’ll probably die. She knows there’s not much time left and what would give her the most peace would be to know she’s not forgotten.” Dion was variously reported as never calling or reconciled with his mother.

  Staff members read the postcards that did come in. They gave her a scrapbook to leaf through, but found her sitting staring out the window. There were days when she seemed to give up hope. A bladder infection added to her distress.

  She was readmitted to St. John’s Hospital in May. Hospital workers reported that she had instructed nurses not to admit Dion to her bedside, no matter how close to death she might be. Again, she was sent home.

  Months went by in a monotonous haze. She told Kleno she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes strewn over Lone Pine, the stretch of California desert on the eastern slope of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, where she had made several westerns.

  She was too ill to react to Bette Davis’s death from cancer and to the ultimate indignity that befell Bob’s memory. MGM was only a shred of its former self, and the huge, mostly idle film factory in Culver City was now named Lorimar Studios. Reacting to the neoconservatism of President George Bush and to Senator Jesse Helms’s art bashing, fifty Lorimar screenwriters petitioned to have the building they were working in stripped of the name the Robert Taylor Building.

  A taint of anti-Semitism had trailed the actor for years, but, said director Judy Chaikin, it was the days of the blacklisting that gave Taylor a special place of infamy. “Taylor is the only one on film actually naming names,” she said. “When people see it, it takes their breath away; the star who named names.” Ursula, who had remarried, came to the defense of her second husband. Bob, she said, had been betrayed by the studio he promoted. But the speed with which Lorimar stripped Taylor’s name from the Writers Building and renamed it the George Cukor Building astonished even the petitioners.

  BARBARA WAS BACK AT ST. JOHN’S HOSPITAL JANUARY 9, 1990, FOR treatment of her chronic lung condition. Medication made her refuse food.

  Eleven days after admittance she went into a coma. Nancy Sinatra and Kleno were at her side with her nephew Gene Vaslett, his wife, and two daughters. In the late afternoon of January 20, 1990, her heart gave out, and she died in her sleep.

  There was no funeral. According to her wishes, her body was cremated. Kleno rented a helicopter and scattered her ashes over Lone Pine.

  37

  IT WORKED DIDN’T IT?”

  BARBARA STANWYCK KNEW THAT WHAT COUNTS IS TO BE IN THE last act. “Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture,” she said. “I don’t care what happens before. I don’t even care if I was in the rest of the damned thing—I’ll take it in those last fifteen minutes.” Between the memorable and the forgettable, between The Lady Eve and Always Goodbye, Double Indemnity, and Escape to Burma, she is part of Hollywood’s preferred vision of itself.

  Stanwyck felt restless and empty without a movie role to slip into, and her insistence on the importance of being in a film’s final quarter hour reminds us that life, like the movies, unspools in the present tense. She never found out what it was that gifted directors saw in her, what millions responded to up there on the screen.

  If we flash back to 1917, little is expected, less is calculated or planned for ten-year-old Ruby Stevens. All she can think of a few years later is getting enough money to buy a nice coat. At the dawn of the talkies, she is someone who learns to defy the special gravity of the screen. Still later, she realizes style and reticence make for the larger-than-life images that allow audiences to lose themselves in screen fantasy. Classical Hollywood never cast actresses for their acting abilities, and moviegoers accepted the bigger-than-life fantasy, the tension, and the glamour. Like her threadbare Depression audiences, she learned to let the flair, distinction, and strength of the people she played rub off on her. She became the Barbara Stanwyck who was said to be not fully dressed until she screwed a sneer on her lips. She knew that drama and laughter originate in character as much as in circumstance.

  She knew the world didn’t owe her a living, and her compulsive dedication to work was lifelong. Since her childhood taught her she wasn’t important to anyone, she decided early on to take herself seriously. She learned to control situations and people in her life and was unable to surrender, even if it meant unsatisfying intimate relationships in her personal life. She felt guilty and responsible for her husbands and never quite trusted anyone—other than herself.

  Psychiatrists tell us the orphan’s greatest quandary is whom to trust, that people without a consistent identity are prone to role playing, to making up identities. They also tell us that the result is often a lifelong conflict between a need to be in charge and a wish to be taken care of. She never resolved this inner tension. Had she done so, had she been all in control or all clinging vine, she would have been a much less intriguing performer. Acting may be indefinable, but what moviegoers react to is the appeal of the oversized presence on the screen. The trick is not to defeat
expectations but to surpass them.

  Unlike many who climb from nothing, she managed to hang on to a basic emotional honesty. She was straightforward and as far as she could recall never said anything she didn’t mean. She hated the trappings of celebrity and found the public’s assumed familiarity somewhat presumptuous. As a matter of principle rather than vanity, no one ever saw her in cold cream or curlers. Prematurely gray, she was not afraid to say how old she was. Yet the humiliations of old age frightened her. More than a decade after turning down All About Eve, she refused the ravings of Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

  Screen acting is not progressive. Movie actors do not go from strength to strength toward ever more demanding parts, but slide sideways at best, typecast and shackled by past successes. To be asked to repeat oneself is in itself a drift toward mediocrity. Stanwyck realized early on that the mechanics of moviemaking never really favored performers. The industry might be star-oriented—graven images of mystery and allure sell tickets—but the prime initiative does not belong to actors. People who are not performers decide what gets made and with whom. With the movies’ built-in glare, massive inadvertencies, and trendy obsessions, hanging on to a career is in itself an art. The climb is unpredictable, the room at the top tenuous. Stanwyck played her hand superbly.

  She looked as if she could handle herself in any situation. Whether she was called upon to endure happiness or doom, she tempered her projected competence with irony, which is why she aged better than more mannered performers.

  She created a body of characters as complex as any of her peers’ performances, but was careless in the myth-creating business. The orphan, chorus girl, and Gower Gulch beginnings were the stuff of stardust, but she didn’t throw tantrums like Crawford, didn’t walk off pictures like Davis. Except for a pair of Clifford Odets adaptations that were overlooked, she missed the cinematized versions of the classic and classy Broadway theater. She incarnated ladies named Sugarpuss O’Shea, Dixie Daisy, and Sierra Nevada Jones while others embodied Mrs. Miniver, Tracy Lord, Regina Giddens, and Margo Channing. It is hard to imagine Hepburn playing second fiddle and taking second billing to Elvis Presley, Colbert in her sixties getting back in the saddle, Davis or Crawford suffering Aaron Spelling and Linda Evans for more than one script read-through. To Stanwyck, however, the point of working was to keep busy, not to pole-vault herself onto some pedestal. Invariably, when Hollywood handed out its annual awards, she was passed over. She had little faith in acting theories. She had mocked Marilyn Monroe, who came to the set of Clash by Night trailing Actors Studio’s Paula Strasberg, and Jane Fonda, who couldn’t do a scene in Walk on the Wild Side without Strasberg. “I marvel at people who have theories about acting,” Barbara said disdainfully in 1987. “I never had an acting lesson.”