by Axel Madsen
Preston Sturges felt her instinct was so sure that she needed almost no direction. In her own opinion, she worked best with directors who allowed her to compose her own portraits. “To me the essence of a good director is not to say, ‘Walk to the table, then turn around and face left.’ The good director will walk you through gently and give you some air.” Capra gave her the feeling she was directing herself. “He allowed you to express yourself. Then, and only then, if you were wrong, he would tactfully suggest something else. He was never didactic. Billy Wilder works the same way, and I think I’ve done some of my best work for them.”
She didn’t like directors who brought their writers on the set and changed dialogue on the run. Capra had Robert Riskin around and every morning brought scene changes on color-coded pages. “It used to drive me crazy,” Barbara acknowledged. “Sometimes he would change two or three pages of nothing but talk, talk, talk. Some of them were bastards to learn on the spot. But I never said anything about it; he was the boss.” She considered the writer paramount—perhaps that was what made her turn with such vehemence during the McCarthy era on writers she felt had betrayed her country’s ideals.
BARBARA’S PROFESSIONAL MEMORIES WERE POSITIVE. HER FONDEST recollection was Sturges, who after Remember the Night told her he was going to write her a marvelous comedy. She was funny, he said, adding, “I’m going to the front office and insist they let me direct it.” That was in 1941. Forty years later, she smiled and said, “A lot of people said that sort of thing, and fifteen minutes later it was forgotten. But two months later, Sturges handed me The Lady Eve. He was marvelous. He loved actors. Some directors get along with actors, but they don’t really like them.”
Stanwyck didn’t pretend she knew more about camera angles than the cameraman, more about makeup than the head of makeup. If a setup called for her to wear a hat, she let wardrobe put the hat on her head and walked onto the set without looking at herself in the mirror. Her no-nonsense professionalism made her the Queen to her crews over the years. Although working crews rarely take up collections to “gift the star,” at the end of a Stanwyck shoot someone always stepped forward to present her with a token of respect—a silver locket, a coffee maker, record player, or upholstered director’s chair. The inscriptions read “To the Queen” or “To the Queen from her Drones.”
“She was just the most wonderful actress in the whole business, and I’ve worked with a lot of them,” said Fred MacMurray. “She was one of a kind.” Her peers nominated her for Best Actress Academy Awards four times, for the tough-talking guileless mother in Stella Dallas, the slang-slinging chorus girl in Ball of Fire, the murderous blonde in Double Indemnity, and the bedridden neurotic in Sorry, Wrong Number. But the only Academy Award she won was an honorary Oscar. Television was more generous, giving her Emmys for “The Barbara Stanwyck Show,” “The Big Valley,” and “The Thorn Birds.”
She became an “actor’s actor,” often more enthusiastic about other performers’ work than her own. When the Hollywood Reporter asked her to write a guest column for its vacationing Rambling Reporter Mike Connelly in 1954, she wrote effusively about seeing Jeanne Eagels in Rain and in Her Cardboard Lover on the stage, of Henry Fonda on the stage in Mr. Roberts and on the screen in The Ox-bow Incident. She remembered Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
“I wrote a fan letter to Olivia de Havilland for The Snake Pit, to Bette Davis for Jezebel and Dark Victory. I’ll never forget Victor
Mature’s scene at the foot of the cross in The Robe, nor the breathtaking, heartbreaking farewell scenes of Jack Gilbert and Renée Adorée in The Big Parade. I don’t want to forget Orson Welles in The Third Man, which, so far, I’ve only seen six times. I saw Victor McLaglen in The Informer ten times—what an actor and wonderful guy. I cherish the memory of Jackie Cooper as Skippy—just writing it brings a lump to my throat and a sting in my eyes. I’ll buy Claire Trevor, period. And what about that Ida Lupino … I lack the words to express the last but not the least of my memories—no words are worthy of the unforgettable, the incomparable—Hell, I need only one word anyway. Here it is—GARBO.”
STANWYCK HAD DEVELOPED AN AVERSION TO THE SCREEN TESTS early on, for herself and others. Instead of having an actor walk on a cold stage, she was convinced that producers should give a new talent a small role in a real film, and if he or she showed talent, successively more important parts. “A role of any sort provides a challenge,” she said in 1953. “Newcomers instinctively feel this and prepare themselves to meet it. The result is a more accurate indication of their ability than a screen test could provide.”
Maureen O’Sullivan was a rare dissenting voice in fellow performers’ praise of Stanwyck. O’Sullivan ranked fifth below Stanwyck on the All I Desire credits and felt it. “I found her a cold person,” O’Sullivan would recall. “She was the only actress in my working experience who ever went home leaving me to do my closeups with the scriptgirl, which I thought was most unprofessional.”
UNLIKE ROBERT TAYLOR, WHOSE MIDDLE YEARS WERE TOUGH AND humbling, Barbara never surrendered the direction of her life to anybody. She knew how to bring an edge of reality to roles that were often absurd—sentimental, spunky bad girls who both mirrored and modeled four decades of the movies. To breathe life into screenwriters’ paper women, to make them work, was an intoxicating surrogate for love.
Her fatal attraction to Frank Fay might have played out differently today when “two-track” careers are both cliché and truism and marriages are more egalitarian. Barbara and Frank were of an age when a woman’s drive and ambitions were accomplished through the man she chose. But she and Frank fought for the same turf, each in turn using success to hurt the other. He slipped all too easily into delusion and bitterness. As their marriage careened into jealousy and alcoholic brawls, her willingness to deny herself to stay with him must also count against her. She never made the mistake again, of course.
Was sexuality just another role, as arbitrary as any part she played? Once past Fay, the little intimacy she craved she got from faithful women friends. The inventions of the soundstages fulfilled her deepest wants. Life offscreen was something of a bore, to be filled with reading books and scripts, adopting a child, watching one’s horse at the racetrack, getting ready for tomorrow’s shoot. With Robert Taylor she had it all figured out except that, like a plot twist in a Stanwyck movie, he would leave her. Returning to the big empty house on North Faring Road after the divorce, she said, was the lowest point of her life.
She was a social drinker by day and evening and a solitary boozer during sleepless nights. Stepping out of a wet raincoat and into a dry martini was more than a line of dialogue in 1940s Hollywood. Movie stars of her generation drank and smoked themselves to death, and so did Bob and Barbara. The cause of her death was congestive heart failure complicated by emphysema.
Ava Gardner, the woman Stanwyck never forgave for inciting her husband’s passions as she never had, died in London five days after Barbara. After Ava and Bob’s love affair during the summer of ‘48, the two actresses played the roles life had assigned them—seductress and cuckolded wife—in the glossy East Side, West Side. Ava went on to marry Frank Sinatra, and after Bob and Barbara divorced, long-suffering Nancy Sinatra became Barbara’s best friend. Stanwyck was eighty-two when she died, Gardner sixty-eight.
For a film star living sixty years in the Hollywood klieg lights, Barbara’s existence was surprisingly private. She disapproved of scrutiny, and even after her death, friends felt that talking about her violated her will. There are phases of her existence we will never know. Then again, what do we know of the celebrities that our unoriginal times worship? Indeed, how many of us will acknowledge witnesses to our innermost thoughts and acts? The question of whether she loved women and tolerated men is less a matter of evidence than of attitude and affinity. She balked at introspection, loathed analytical meanderings and meditations on happiness. Gay women like her for her scrappy, brainy, and w
inning self-reliance, for the way she could imply moral outrage at the lousy hand society can deal a woman. Los Angeles lesbian get-togethers appreciate the two or three women who dress up and madly vamp the crowd as Barbara Stanwyck in “The Big Valley.” Dangerous females are also part of male sexual fantasies. Lily “Baby Face” Powers, Lorna Moon, Phyllis Dietrichson, and Thelma Jordan belong to a long line of femme fatales that stretch from Manon to La Femme Nikita and Menace.
When she was seventy, she said she wouldn’t like to be young again. “I would hate to do it all over again. Life is a pretty difficult thing.” She could never forget the let-down secondhand dresses Ruby Stevens was forced to wear. As a star she asked Nolan Miller to give her sumptuous gowns with four-inch hems because a tiny hem said “poor.”
After the seven years with Fay, she started out on her own with a son she didn’t like. People tend to treat their offspring as they were treated. The parallels between Stanwyck and Crawford are striking. Both married ineffectual men, both were distracted, overworked actresses who, among other roles, wanted to play motherhood. They blamed their children when the kids didn’t fit the images their celebrity moms cultivated, when they weren’t enough of an extension of their mother’s movie-star identities. Dion felt guilty because he was not the child Barbara wanted. Perhaps he was luckier than Christina Crawford; he was merely discarded. On the other hand, Crawford’s four adopted children had each other.
We do not know why Barbara could never bring herself to fully embrace Dion. His offense may have been just to exist, to being there and getting in the way of an insecure adoptive mother’s wish to concentrate on a younger, sexually indifferent husband. Later, Dion may have been a reminder of her shortcomings, her twin failed marriages, proof of the danger of emotional surrender. Her friends say Taylor never liked Dion. Bob’s relationship with the two children Ursula Thiess brought into their marriage was equally tenuous. Whether or not Bob had a part in the discarding of the young Dion, Barbara’s rejection of the boy gives us a glimpse of a flinty inner self that probably masked deep psychic scars.
There were things she’d like to forget and nothing she would change, she often said. She was not good at giving of herself, whether it was names to her horses, affection to a son, or intimacy to a lover. She had a hard time sharing emotions. As a young woman, she gave advice too freely, and, in old age, she remembered with alarm her intolerable certainty in counseling others. Giving professional advice was different. She was generous with her talent, and the young actors she helped stretch from Robert Taylor on his first brush with egos bigger than his on Camille, through William Holden, Robert Wagner, and Linda Evans in their early years. She also championed the “little people,” for whom she stood up to bullying directors and front offices. But she could only give of her heart if no one knew. In her heyday she sent Uncle Buck with cashier’s checks and the strictest orders not to reveal the donor to Los Angeles victims of bad luck, fire, and other calamities reported in the morning’s newspaper. Her need to rely on herself was buried as deep in her earliest years as her self-awareness.
“Many people will hurt you, and you can’t change that,” she told Dion when he was six. “And you can’t run away from it because at the end of every day you wind up with yourself, after all.”
The admonition sounds like bitter experience seared into her own consciousness. She reached out twice, devoted herself to Fay and Taylor, only to learn that wishing they would change didn’t make them change. She walked out on Fay and felt humiliated when Bob did it to her. She declared she had no talent for the games of love.
In the end, she gave the best of herself to make-believe, to an image of a self she never really understood. But, as she said, “What the hell, it worked—didn’t it?”
NOTES ON SOURCES
INTERVIEWS WITH THOSE WHO KNEW BARBARA STANWYCK, INCLUDING IRIS Adrian, Joan Benny, Frank Capra, Shirley Eder, Maggy Maskel Ferguson, Larry Kleno, Frank McCarthy, Nolan Miller, Viege Traub, Gertrude Walker, Billy Wilder, and many other professional colleagues of hers are the sources of this book, as are the credits and documentation of her films and earlier books on Stanwyck. The author has read most of the celebrity journalism, gossip columnists, and fan magazines about Barbara Stanwyck (BS) and has used such sources as Zeitgeist and examples of her image. Several individuals, archives, and libraries helped in the research. Details of BS’s films and period news clippings of BS’s films were gleaned from production files at the Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, and her theatrical beginnings at the New York City Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Source citations are given in the bibliography. Documentation supporting certain portions of the narrative are cited below:
1. “I hope she lives/’ BS, “I just wanted to survive”: to author, 1985. BS, “All right, let’s just say”: Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1987. BS, “Some of my most interesting roles have been completely unsympathetic”: Saturday Evening Post, October 5, 1946. BS, “Maybe we’re just more used”: BS to author, 1985. BS, “Then the makeup man fixes it,” and “Don’t teach me”: Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1987. BS, “I think living in the past”: Pageant, May 1967. BS, “I see things”: Pageant, May 1967. BS, “It’s gone and done”: Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1987.
2. Brooklyn. Details of BS’s birth and early childhood are based on the author’s research in New York and, selectively, on BS’s remarks to several interviewers and studio biographies. Ernest Hemingway wrote on BS’s “Mick intelligence” in November 15, 1941, letter to Max Perkins. BS, “I’ll always be an orphan,” “Nobody knows Stanwyck as I Do,” Ruby Stevens as told to Margaret Lee Runbeck Good Housekeeping, July 1954. BS, “Cats and dogs”:
TV Picture Life, November 1967. BS, “At least nobody beat me”: TV Picture Life, November 1967. BS on her father, “squaring” his shoulders against circumstances: Photoplay, December 1937. BS, “Growing up in one foster home”: undated 1938 RKO studio biography. BS scrawling name on sidewalks “to show everybody”: Photoplay, December 1937. BS, “I didn’t relish the disciplines”: Pageant, May 1967. BS called herself the “stupidest” student in several interviews. Film-Comment March-April, 1981 reproduced Rev. Carter’s book inscription as part of 13-page Stanwyck “Midsection” assessment. BS attending Erasmus Hall High School noted in Burlesque playbill, 1927. BS, “The plain wrapping, not the fancy”: Collier’s, July 12, 1952. BS, “I knew that after fourteen”: Good Housekeeping, July 1954. BS, “Once in a while my sister Millie”: Hollywood Reporter, April 23, 1954. BS, “I’ll always love Earl Lindsay”: Helen Ferguson publicity release, January 1951. BS, “Then pretty soon”: Photoplay, December 1937. BS, “I gave up trying to follow the ‘sensible’ advice”: Pageant, May 1967. BS’s employment at Jerome H. Remick Music Company detailed in Jerry Vermilye, Barbara Stanwyck, p. 14.
3. “Stark naked, I swear.” BS, “I might, just might, be tempted” and “I was in the 16th row”: Pageant, May 1967. Details of Ziegfeld, the Follies, and mid-1920s Broadway life are described in Gerald Bordman, The American Musical Theatre. The description of the Follies as representing “the businessman’s ideal” is from Brooks Atkinson, Broadway, p. 114. BS, “We lived over a laundry”: BS to author, 1985. BS, “stark naked” and “Ask Mae Clarke” quoted in “The Lady Stanwyck,” interview with New York Times, March 21, 1943. Jim Kepner to author on Sheldon Dewey’s memories of BS in Jimmy Guinan’s gay speakeasy, 1993. BS, “Even in the early 1920s”: New York Times, March 21, 1943. Louise Brook’s quote “Eligible bachelors” is from unpublished book, allegedly destroyed by Brooks in 1954, after she gave copies of most of the manuscript to James Card, quoted in Barry Paris, Louise Brooks, p. 68. Levant on BS from Oscar Levant, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, p. 82. BS told the LaHiff story in numerous interviews, including Collier’s, July 12, 1952. BS remembering introduction to Mack in “Nobody Knows Stanwyck as I Do,” by Ruby Stevens as told to Margaret Lee Runbeck; Good Housekeeping, July 1954.
4. Rex. BS,
“I was a dancer”: Helen Ferguson publicity release, January 1951. BS on Loew’s WHN radio detailed in Dana Andrews, Hollywood East, p. 140. BS, “I was temperamental”: Jane Ellen Wayne, Stanwyck, p. 15. Pittsburgh rehearsals of The Noose detailed in Al DiOrio, Barbara Stanwyck, p. 30. The Noose tryout was review in the Pittsburgh Gazette, October 10, 1926, and Pittsburgh Press October 12, 1926. BS, “It’s got to be the chorus girl”: Helen Ferguson publicity release. BS, “Bill Mack was going”: Good Housekeeping, July 1954. Belasco, “Yes, I’ve been watching you”: New York Times, February 23, 1941. A Hunt Stromberg Production BS biography dated October 15, 1942, relates the story of the newly named Stanwyck inviting her sister to The Noose. Elisha Cook, Jr., “She had a scene”: quoted in Jordan R. Young, Reel Characters, p. 15. BS, “It was my first chance at dramatic acting” and “Bill Mack was going”: BS to author, 1985. BS, “Rex was handsome”: Jane Ellen Wayne, Stanwyck, p. 17. BS biography from details of Broadway Nights and most of BS’s films are culled from individual production files at the Center for Motion Picture Study. BS, “I sat down and waited”: BS to author, 1985. Levant, “If we were invited”: Oscar Levant, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, p. 82. Cherryman’s obituary: New York Times, August 11, 1928.