by Dan Callahan
Barbara Stanwyck
HOLLYWOOD LEGENDS SERIES
CARL ROLLYSON, GENERAL EDITOR
Barbara Stanwyck
THE MIRACLE WOMAN
DAN CALLAHAN
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.
Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the author‘s collection.
Copyright © 2012 by Dan Callahan
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2012
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Callahan, Dan, 1977–
Barbara Stanwyck : the miracle woman / Dan Callahan.
p. cm. — (Hollywood legends series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-183-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-184-7
(ebook) 1. Stanwyck, Barbara, 1907–1990. 2. Motion picture actors and
actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.S67C36 2012
791.43‘028092—dc23
[B] 2011021567
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
To Keith Uhlich
CONTENTS
Introduction
Orphan of the Storm
The Locked Door, Mexicali Rose
The Capra Miracle
Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Meet John Doe
The Rough-and-Tumble Wellman Five
Night Nurse, So Big!, The Purchase Price, The Great Man‘s Lady, Lady of Burlesque
Pre-Code Sex
Illicit, Ten Cents a Dance, Shopworn, Ladies They Talk About, Baby Face
Drama Grab Bag, 1930s
Ever in My Heart, Gambling Lady, A Lost Lady, The Secret Bride, The Woman in Red, Red Salute, A Message to Garcia, Banjo on My Knee, Internes Can‘t Take Money, Always Goodbye
Screwball Stanwyck
The Bride Walks Out, Breakfast for Two, The Mad Miss Manton, You Belong to Me, Christmas in Connecticut, The Bride Wore Boots
Private Lives
Fay‘s End, Robert Taylor (His Brother‘s Wife, This Is My Affair, The Night Walker), Robert Wagner
The Scratch and the Itch
Stella Dallas
Stage Stanwyck
The Plough and the Stars, Golden Boy, Clash by Night
Sturges/Stanwyck
Remember the Night, The Lady Eve
Stanwyck Soap and 1950s Drama
The Gay Sisters, Flesh and Fantasy, My Reputation, The Other Love, B. F.‘s Daughter, East Side, West Side, To Please a Lady, Titanic, Executive Suite, These Wilder Years
Wilder/Stanwyck
Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity
Stanwyck Noir
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Cry Wolf, The Lady Gambles, The File on Thelma Jordan, No Man of Her Own, The Man with a Cloak, Jeopardy, Witness to Murder, Crime of Passion
Ordeal for Oscar
Sorry, Wrong Number
Two for Sirk
All I Desire, There‘s Always Tomorrow
Wild West Stanwyck
Annie Oakley, Union Pacific, California, The Furies, The Moonlighter, Blowing Wild, Cattle Queen of Montana, The Violent Men, Escape to Burma, The Maverick Queen, Trooper Hook, Forty Guns
Aftermath
The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Walk on the Wild Side, Roustabout, The Big Valley, The House That Would Not Die, A Taste of Evil, The Letters, The Thorn Birds, The Colbys
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
Barbara Stanwyck
INTRODUCTION
This book is a heartfelt appreciation of Barbara Stanwyck’s work in movies. While there have been many studies and biographies on female film stars of equal stature—stars like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo—comparatively few books about Stanwyck have appeared. Of these, Al DiOrio’s mid-eighties biography is small but serviceable, while Axel Madsen’s 1994 biography paints a grim, insensitive picture of Stanwyck’s personal life, relies heavily on gossip, and pays only cursory and inexact attention to her films. Back in 1974, Ella Smith brought out Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck, which is stuffed with evocative photos and features an insightful analysis of Stanwyck’s acting, along with helpful interviews with many of the people who worked with Stanwyck, most of whom sing her praises. That book was written while Stanwyck was still alive, and it was meant as a tribute that would please her; for all its fine writing and detail, it doesn’t have the long-range perspective that is possible now.
This book includes sections about Stanwyck’s personal life, and I will sometimes indulge in educated guesses about this shadowy subject. These guesses are by definition speculative and hopefully open enough to allow you to make up your own mind about her off-screen existence. The main event for me, though, is Stanwyck’s films and her work in them. You’ll find little of the usual filler about Hollywood at the time, who might have said what to whom at the Coconut Grove, or how much money Stanwyck made for each project. I see Stanwyck as a major artist, and I want to show you the nitty-gritty of what she accomplished and how she managed to accomplish it.
Stanwyck collaborated with some of the finest directors of her time: from Frank Capra, William Wellman, William Dieterle, George Stevens, John Ford, King Vidor, and Mitchell Leisen in the thirties; to Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, André de Toth, and Robert Siodmak in the forties; to Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, and Sam Fuller in the fifties; to Jacques Tourneur and Joseph H. Lewis on TV in the sixties. She was never tied to one studio, which is why she had more freedom in picking properties, and, unlike many of her contemporaries, she found herself in ever more adventurous company in the movies as she got older. There hasn’t been enough analysis of her directors and her films themselves as a whole. For instance, the earlier Stanwyck books dismiss her two seminal films with Sirk outright. I hope that my book can help to open up discussion on her best movies and offer you a close, in-depth reading of her gifts and the varied, inventive ways she put them to use.
Orphan of the Storm
The Locked Door, Mexicali Rose
Barbara Stanwyck had a hard childhood, that’s certain. She didn’t linger over it, and I’m not going to, either, but it’s worth mulling over some of the available information and considering what it might tell us about her. We’ll never be sure just how hard this childhood was and what experiences might have scarred her for life. In his memoir, Robert Wagner writes that he thought she had been “abused” in some way, and maybe she was abused in all ways imaginable. When pressed about this issue late in life, Stanwyck put on her toughest mask and said, “Alright, let’s just say I had a terrible childhood. Let’s say that ‘poor’ is something I understand.” The distinctive Stanwyck note of fast-talking, “moving right along” blitheness and bitterness is right there in that “Alright,” as if she’s just going to level with you, and the repetition of “let’s just say” as “let’s say,” which has the same effect as that wonderful little shrug she did in so many of her middle and late period films.
She was born Ruby Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, at 246 Classon Avenue. Stanwyck wouldn’t recognize the old neighborhood now. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Classon Avenue is within walking distance of my house, so I ventured out on a snowy day to see what was left of her past, only to discover that the house wasn’t there anymore. In its place is the Pratt Institute, an architectural and design college. Ruby Stevens never even made it to high school, but not many pe
ople of her class and generation did in those days, and college was out of the question.
She was the fifth child of Byron and Catherine McGee Stevens of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Byron was English and Catherine was Irish. There’s a lot of the Irish about Stanwyck; Hemingway met her on a hunting trip with her second husband, Robert Taylor, and commented on her “good tough Mick intelligence.” In 1905, Byron abandoned Catherine and his growing family to do some bricklaying in Brooklyn. Catherine chased after him, and Byron was apparently not happy when she found him. Their first four children all had names beginning with the letter M: Maud, Mabel, Mildred, Malcolm—and then little Ruby, the special child, the gem, born in Brooklyn on Classon Avenue. A photo of Ruby at two years old shows a very unhappy-looking toddler; her entire head seems to frown protectively, as if she’s saying, “Please don’t hurt me.”
In the winter of 1909–10, Catherine, pregnant again, was knocked off a streetcar by a drunk and hit her head. A month later, she died. Two weeks after the funeral, Byron went off to help dig the Panama Canal. Little Ruby was left in the care of her sister Millie, who was making her living as a chorus girl (“[S]he didn’t pay much attention to me,” said Stanwyck), and her brother Malcolm, whom they called Byron, after their absent father. When Millie went on the road, Byron and Ruby were placed in foster care. In later life, Stanwyck strived to remain objective about this eventuality, too, saying that the foster care system wasn’t “cruel,” just “impersonal.” At the beginning of Axel Madsen’s unreliable Stanwyck biography, he tells an unattributed story about Ruby repeatedly running away from foster care and always heading back to 246 Classon Avenue, where her brother Byron would find her sitting on the steps, waiting for her mother to come home.
It’s a haunting image. Trying to picture it in my head, I’m reminded less of the sort of Hollywood tearjerkers Stanwyck made in the thirties and more of the unloved little girl in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), an awkward, rough kid so totally on her own that she freezes any sentimental impulse, any inclination toward tears. If Stanwyck really was that abandoned little girl, mired in poverty, always waiting for her dead mother at 246 Classon Avenue, surely the seasoned pro she became would not want us to cry for her. She had to get tough and stay tough, and she did, but the well of permanent hurt inside her would remain as pure in The Thorn Birds in 1983 as it was in her first Frank Capra movie in 1930.
At a certain point, Ruby realized her mother couldn’t come back. That was death, and it was official. But maybe her father might come back someday? Surely she daydreamed about that possibility every now and then, and why not? Why wouldn’t he feel some responsibility for his children’s welfare? But he didn’t. Did he ever feel any guilt about leaving his children? Or was he a man who didn’t have time for guilt—or love? Maybe he was an adventurer, and basically solitary, as basically solitary as Ruby had to be and as Barbara Stanwyck chose to be. There are conflicting stories about what happened to Byron. In some of them, he died on the boat going to the Panama Canal. In another, more dramatic tale, it was said that his children lined up on the dock to wait for his return from the canal but were told that he had died on board ship and been buried at sea.
“At least nobody beat me,” Stanwyck later said, trying to make the best of things. Then: “Where I grew up, kids lived on the brink of domestic and financial disaster.” Ruby had no real friends, and later she claimed that she was “the stupidest little brat in school.” An orphan, alone, in the Brooklyn of 1920. Whatever she saw and heard seems to have made her as guarded as possible; in her most touching moments on screen, she’s always struggling to keep her poker face on so that the bottomless emotion she’s hiding can’t burst out like lava flowing over the sets, the camera, even the audience in the theater. “My clearest memory is of the crowds,” she remembered, “of spent old women bent over hot tubs and babies crying and men reeling drunk to their homes. Half the time I slept on a mattress on the kitchen floor.”
Maud and Mabel were both married and had little contact with Ruby or, later, with Barbara Stanwyck. It was a fractured family, barely a family at all. Yet, loner that she was, all her life Stanwyck was loyal to two people from this blasted childhood: Byron, whom she helped gain work as an extra in films, and sister Millie’s boyfriend, “Uncle Buck” Mack, who became a surrogate father figure for Ruby and ran Stanwyck’s household throughout her Hollywood years right up to his death in 1959. A vaudevillian of the old school, Uncle Buck taught Ruby the dance steps she would need to go into the chorus line like her sister. Ruby liked the theater, but the movies were more important to her, and they remained important her whole life. “I’d do anything to get money to go to movies,” she said, “I tended children, washed dishes, ran errands.” Ruby thrilled to Pearl White’s serials and acted out some of them in Prospect Park. “I tried to escape by retreating to a dream world of my own,” Stanwyck later said.
At thirteen or fourteen, Ruby got a job at the Abraham and Strauss department store, doing “the plain wrapping, not the fancy,” of course. There was a stab at clerical work, and then she was fired from Vogue when she said she could cut dresses to a pattern but couldn’t manage it. “I knew there was no place but show business that I wouldn’t hate,” she said, and soon found herself hoofing on the roof of the Strand hotel. The dance director, Earl Lindsay, cast her in a couple of his Broadway revues, and he taught the sullen and resentful Ruby to be professional and to always give her all, even in the back row of the chorus. She took this advice too much to heart, so that he soon had to tell her off for kicking too high and not being “a team player,” but she was a star in the making, and a star is never really a team player.
Mobsters controlled most of the clubs in this era, and Ruby probably saw and experienced a lot. “Have you had any experience?” asks a naughty-eyed boy in Baby Face (1933). Stanwyck gives him a priceless look of sly impatience and cracks, “Plenty”—Ruby’s experience barely visible behind her eyes. Surely there were bad and scary moments for her beyond the ones that are known. In later life, people noticed that there were cigarette scars on her chest; these scars she got from her encounters with men were physical and permanent, and the knowledge of such vicious male violence and the meanness it stemmed from was permanent, too.
In Texas Guinan’s nightclubs, fifteen-year-old Ruby would shake for the sugar daddies and get bank notes stuffed in her scanties. She got an education in how to inflame a man’s interest and then give him the brush-off; her experience ensorcelling and then coldly denying men would later develop into one of her specialties in movies. Maybe Ruby wasn’t able to cool down some of the more powerful men, especially the mobsters, but if she had to put out, she learned how to keep her heart and soul out of it. In early 1930s Hollywood, she said, “Say, you gotta live with yourself. How can a girl live with herself if she hasn’t any self-respect? And how can she have any self-respect if she pretends to love a man just to get a job?” The mores of the time might have dictated this statement, but it’s interesting that Stanwyck chose to stress that it was the pretense of “love” that was odious to her. Sex without love, of course, was another matter.
Stanwyck remembered her chorus years with fondness: “How my memories of those three years sparkle! My chorine days may not have seemed perfect to anyone else, but they did to me.” In her interviews, she always tried to brush off the past. It wasn’t so bad, she insisted, or, it wasn’t so bad for me. She would ricochet between being boastful about the hard knocks and being resentful of the people who hadn’t suffered them—but she was never resentful about the hard knocks themselves, whatever they were. That attitude would have been too dangerous. If Stanwyck had really reflected on or tried to come to terms with what she had been through, the whole “Barbara Stanwyck” apparatus and image might have collapsed into clinical depression, or drink, or some other kind of escapism. To her immense and lasting credit, she never entirely let that collapse happen, and her attitude allowed her to become perhaps the finest or at least most consist
ently fine actress of her time in American movies.
In 1922, she was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, dancing at the New Amsterdam Theater. Ruby lived with two other chorus girls, one of whom was Mae Clarke, a similar “hard on the outside, soft on the inside” type who achieved some fame, or notoriety, as the girl who gets a grapefruit in the face from James Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931). During a stifling summer, the girls lived over a laundry on 46th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and it’s easy to picture the three of them soaking their tired feet and wisecracking about stage door johnnies as the Sixth Avenue El rattled by all through the night. “I just wanted to survive and eat and have a nice coat,” Stanwyck claimed.
At this time, Jeanne Eagels was making a huge impact on stage in Rain as the prostitute Sadie Thompson, the prototype for many of Stanwyck’s later heroines. Sadie was a good-time girl led astray into virtue by a hypocritical minister who then rapes her and kills himself, leaving her bitterness about the world reinforced. Ruby saw Eagels in Rain four times, and this great actress had an effect on the later Stanwyck style. In her one surviving talkie, another W. Somerset Maugham adaptation, The Letter (1929), Eagels is a kind of missing link in acting culture, a bizarre, not easily classifiable bridge from the old to the new: from, say, the sheer presence of a Tallulah Bankhead to the Method neurosis of a Kim Stanley. Addicted to drugs, Eagels pours out emotion all over the place; she’s an uncommonly messy actress, like a sparkler giving off blinding light before burning out. Stanwyck accessed the same type of seemingly uncontrollable personal emotion, yet somehow managed—through strength, stamina and practice—to build a kind of controlling technique around her displays of feeling, so that she gave us fresh rage and sorrow on command for decades, something the doomed Eagels was only able to do for a few years.
Oddly, Ruby became good friends with that famous neurotic of the piano, Oscar Levant, who wrote that she was “wary of sophisticates and phonies,” as if she wanted to both protect what was genuine in her heart and also protect herself from social disqualification, a perilous balance that would define her work in Stella Dallas (1937) and many other films. As a chorus girl, she was a “Keep Kool Cutie” (I love the K in “Kool”); did a number called “A Room Adjoining a Boudoir” with Johnny Dooley; and performed a striptease behind a white screen in one of Ziegfeld’s “Shadowgraph” tableaux, a discreetly sexy stage convention that survived into some of the Warner Bros. musicals of the early thirties. There are photos of her dating from this period that show her tiny eyes still shiny with the openness of youth; a more hooded look would come later in photographs of her taken during the forties and fifties. But even in the early photos, she holds her body away from the camera, protecting it with her arms or a stiff stance. If she hadn’t done this, the men and the mobsters would have grabbed at her until there was nothing left.
