by Dan Callahan
An elegantly creepy score by Vic Mizzy keeps things moving, and Stanwyck has fun with her juicy role, especially when she gets to scream in horror. Her first set of screams sound succulent, even orchestral, a Phil Spector wall of sound (she ends the last one on a smoker’s hacking cough). Later on she does another set of basso yowls, this time putting her whole body into it and throwing her head back to punctuate one of her screams. Best of all, when her tormented dreamer realizes what a jam she’s in, Stanwyck decides to amuse herself and us by going all-out hambone. “I can’t wake up,” she says, breathlessly, letting it sink in. “I can’t wake up!” she cries, making the realization louder and more uncontrolled. And then, “I CAN’T WAKE U-h-h-h-h-h-a-HUP!” she howls, putting both arms over her face like some bygone great lady of the stage.
The last half hour gets a little too drowsy, so that the audience might fall asleep with Stany. It’s nothing to win a prize on, but The Night Walker is not at all embarrassing, unlike the horror features of the time that annihilated Davis, Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Tallulah Bank-head, Miriam Hopkins, and a score of others. Stanwyck came out of her 1960s horror experience unscathed partly because she didn’t have the kind of strong, one-note star persona that could be easily trashed. Even in this genre, she’s fresh, alert, and inventive, whereas the peevish Taylor has entered into Bela Lugosi territory—at the end, he takes off a ghoulish mask, but his overly made-up, lined face underneath is far more disturbing. When asked about working with his ex-wife, Taylor said, “It’s as if we were never married,” and it certainly seems that way on screen.
“I’m supposed to be a hermit,” Stanwyck laughed, in the 1960s, “a loner nursing a broken heart because I lost Robert Taylor …. I don’t think anybody’s hilariously happy living alone, but you learn to adjust.” Again, this is tricky to read. She’s able to step outside of the supposed narrative of her life and comment on it, as if it’s a script she’s thinking about accepting, but where does real feeling come in? Stanwyck probably couldn’t separate that out herself, so there’s no way that we can, either. When she attended Taylor’s memorial, she wore a yellow dress, because he had once told her that he didn’t want her in black at his funeral. She cried openly and loudly during the service, which wasn’t her usual stoic style. Stanwyck was crying for a real man who had died, of course, a man that she had known and maybe even loved, in her way. But I think it’s fair to say that she always loved the idea of them together more than the reality—which was perfectly pleasant after the nightmare of Frank Fay, but never more than a movie-type deal, at least on his side.
It’s clear, however, that Stanwyck really loved her brother Byron, and she made sure that as an older man he had work. Leslie Caron remembers:
Stanwyck’s brother Byron was an extra on my film The Glass Slipper (1954). We worked on a scene where I’m introduced to the princely court in the great ballroom—I had to step down this long staircase wearing a huge ball dress and the court was massed at the foot of the stairs. Byron stood a little forward from the rest, in a prominent position. He immediately struck me as a hopeless alcoholic, his face very red and his features deformed by alcohol. Strangely, it was evident to me that the assistants were favoring him so it would be impossible to complete the scene without calling him the next day. I asked why this man was getting this treatment of favor. I was told in a discrete way that he was Barbara Stanwyck’s brother and that he needed any help he could get. My shock and pain at hearing this were immense. In Hollywood the sense of hierarchy was very strong, it was measured by your success and the salary you earned, the car you drove, the neighborhood you lived in. An extra was way down on the lower rung of the ladder, lower than the craftsmen and the crew while the stars stood at the very top. Democracy didn’t exist on a movie set. The huge gulf that separated brother and sister was all the more shocking.
It’s a measure of how much Stanwyck was loved by her crew that they made special allowances for the one person from her childhood who had made her feel secure, even though he seemed to be in bad shape by the early 1950s.
Robert Wagner’s recent memoir, Pieces of My Heart, has opened a new door on Stanwyck’s personal life during the period immediately following her divorce from Taylor. After the making of Titanic (1953), Wagner says that he took Stanwyck home from a party, and at the door he was met with “a magical look of interest … and appreciation … and desire.” They danced, they drank champagne; he left at dawn. Eventually, she gave Wagner his own keys to her home, and they spent weekends together when they were both in town. Their four-year relationship had to be kept secret owing to the difference in their ages (he was in his early twenties and she was in her mid-forties).
“She cooked for me,” Wagner remembers. “She was good in the kitchen, but then she was good everywhere.” He says that she was highly sexed and had a lot on her mind. She made regular visits to a psychiatrist who prescribed her sodium pentothal to calm her down (she was a coffee addict and rarely able to get the sleep she needed). “Like so many people in show business, she was a prisoner of her career,” he writes. That assessment sounds about right, though I would probably change his characterization of Stanwyck to “willing prisoner.” Now, there is a small chance that Wagner is gilding the lily about what they had together. In his own recent memoir, Farley Granger related a self-serving story about a one-night stand with Stanwyck in the early fifties. The story doesn’t sound particularly believable as Granger tells it, but there are a lot of helpful, pertinent details in Wagner’s Stanwyck chapter. He thinks that because of his youth and good looks, he brought her a confidence that she had lost being married to Taylor. I can only hope that this was the case.
Wagner says that she owned some of her own movies, and so they would sometimes watch these films together. She screened Union Pacific (1939) for him, and Ball of Fire, and even Baby Face, during which she let him know what it had been like to work for that movie’s producer, Darryl Zanuck. “Barbara told me that Darryl had chased her around his office … and I got the distinct impression that she hadn’t appreciated the exercise.” Zanuck just wanted a piece of her, of course, yet his unwanted passes put her in exactly the right state of mind to play Lily Powers; maybe Zanuck sensed as much on some level. Stanwyck told Wagner about how mean Al Jolson was to her when she was starting out, and Wagner thinks that it might have been Jolson who gave her those cigarette burns on her chest.
The relationship with Wagner, whatever it was, couldn’t really go anywhere because of their age difference, so finally Stanwyck called it off. Of her later years, Wagner says, “I don’t know who the men in her life were, although I’m sure they existed. I know she had escorts, although I assumed most of them were gay.” Stanwyck said in her later years, “Oh, yes, sometimes I have to go to something or other. When I do, I just call good ol’ Butch [Cesar] Romero and he says rather reluctantly, ‘Well, if you HAVE to go, I’ll take you.’ He does that for all of us old broads.”
Wagner wanted to see Stanwyck in the hospital when she was dying, but she advised him to remember her in her prime. As she died, he says, Stanwyck was wearing a four-leaf clover necklace he had given her. On-screen, Wagner looks to me nearly as shifty and unpleasant as Robert Taylor, but off-screen, he seems to have shored up a lot of Stanwyck’s broken pride.
The Scratch and the Itch
Stella Dallas
Olive Higgins Prouty wrote her bestseller, Stella Dallas, after her three-year-old daughter died of encephalitis. Known today mainly through this novel and a story about another misfit that would become the Bette Davis vehicle, Now, Voyager (1942), Prouty was also the model for “Philomena Guinea,” the famed author of syrupy tales skewered by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. By 1961, Prouty had fallen so far out of favor that she couldn’t find a publisher for her memoirs and had to have them printed herself. The novel Stella Dallas doesn’t circulate much; I had to read the one non-lending copy at the New York Public Library during one long afternoon.
The novel has a cl
aim as the prototypical soap opera. For eighteen years, over Prouty’s objections, Stella Dallas was a character on a radio soap. Since then she’s suffered many indignities, not least the mistaken 1990 movie Stella, starring Bette Midler. Nothing I can remember of that movie can top this description in the essential book, Bad Movies We Love, which says that Midler is the only one “to interpret this Olive Higgins Prouty chestnut as an occasion to do a bump ‘n’ grind atop a bar, imitate Carmen Miranda, stage a food fight, and refer constantly to her breasts while insisting that other characters rave over her sex appeal.” The book also highlights Midler’s “terrifying propensity for transforming herself into Betty Hutton, Ruth Gordon and Jerry Lewis all rolled into one.”
Prouty’s original novel begins by describing thirteen-year-old Laurel, a girl with perfect taste who looks like an Isadora Duncan pupil. At thirty-nine, her mother Stella Dallas is “a fat, shapeless little ball of a woman” who has atrocious taste in clothes. Prouty tells us that Stella was ashamed of her own poverty-stricken mother, who aged fast and dressed drably, and she has always over-compensated by piling on furs and ruffles and jewelry. Separated from her husband, the patrician Stephen Dallas, Stella runs into her old riding instructor, Ed Munn: “She didn’t like Ed Munn. Stephen had been right. He was cheap.” But Ed’s eyes flatter her, and Stella has a weakness for male flattery. Some upright women in town see Ed Munn entering Stella’s vacation quarters, and gossip ensues, even though Stella doesn’t sleep with Ed. She only wants his attention.
Prouty’s Stella, in her youth, had been a beauty: “Her lips were cherry-red, her cheeks peach-blossom pink, and without paint and powder in those days.” Stephen, who has buried himself in a mill town after his embezzler father’s suicide, gets taken in by her for a time and marries her. He soon discovers that she’s a hopeless vulgarian who rearranges his beloved books by color and can’t help but flirt archly with every man she meets. We identify with Stephen and Laurel and their antipathy towards Stella in the first third of the novel; no heroine of a book who outright rejects books is ever going to have much of our sympathy. Prouty’s style can be saccharine, but the crux of her novel is far from soapy. The main tension here is between necessary and enriching good taste that can turn stuffy and intolerant, versus Stella’s low-class energy, “pep” and need for fun, which can turn barbarous and destructive. Beneath this push-pull is a much more upsetting issue, the explosion of primal emotions when a son or daughter is embarrassed in some way by a parent.
In all of the Stella Dallas iterations, the most disturbing character by far is Ed Munn, a glad-hander who falls fast into hopeless alcoholism and dereliction. He’s the ugly side of Stella herself, the stubborn coarseness she can’t shake off that ruins her life. Occasionally, Stephen has found Munn “fondling” the baby Laurel, and when she reaches adolescence, Laurel is violently opposed to Munn as a kind of sexual threat. It’s hard not to wonder, from a modern perspective, just what Munn has done to earn Laurel’s anger and fear. Each version of Stella Dallas carries a queasy feeling that Munn has molested Laurel or is going to give in to his Neanderthal drunken urges and molest her, and that threat lies heavily over the narrative.
Prouty’s Stella obviously doesn’t care a thing about the sex act itself. She just likes male attention: “Life wouldn’t be worth living, Stella felt, if she had no admirers.” The famous party scene, where no one comes to Laurel’s birthday because of her mother’s reputation, is handled in two terse, very effective pages in the Prouty source material. It ends with a desperate piece of emotional blackmail on Stella’s part, begging Laurel never to leave her.
At her best here, Prouty has no illusions about her heroine’s basic character; she even writes that Stella’s famed maternal instinct had to work its way up “through her vanities and self-interests.” When Stella hears people making fun of her appearance on a train and realizes that she’s holding Laurel back from social acceptance, Prouty’s internal monologue for her is admirably pragmatic. This is a woman who has had her entire sense of herself destroyed brutally and quickly, yet she bounces right back and becomes “hard and practical” for the sake of her daughter’s future.
Bracing as Stella’s practicality is, this is the point where Prouty’s novel deteriorates into far too much self-sacrifice; Stella is even forced to disillusion Laurel by marrying the odious Munn. Then comes the famous last scene, where the understanding new Mrs. Dallas (a character so all-knowing and compassionate that she gives me the creeps) leaves her sitting room shades open so that down-and-out Stella can watch Laurel experience her first tea and reconnect with the society boy she loves.
In 1924, there was a stage version of Stella Dallas with Mrs. Leslie Carter. A silent film followed in 1925, directed by Henry King, adapted by Frances Marion, and starring Belle Bennett as Stella and the elegant, stiff Ronald Colman as Stephen. The film begins with a ludicrous prologue where Stephen’s father kills himself (a newspaper reads, in huge letters, “Stephen Dallas, Embezzler!” and a smoking gun falls directly onto the headline). In her youthful scenes, Bennett is already a blowzy, Helen Morgan-esque figure with large, forlorn eyes. Since we can’t hear Bennett, the onus is on her to be visually embarrassing, and she manages to be, most of the time—especially when she’s waddling around a fancy resort while Laurel (Lois Moran) recoils in horror.
This Stella is both sloppy and pretentious, a lethal combination. Amidst the detritus of her messy home, Stella extends her hand to be kissed by Laurel’s teacher, Miss Philloburn (Miss Phillobrown in the book, and in the Stanwyck version). The town gossips see Bennett’s Stella cavorting with Ed Munn (Jean Hersholt) and mistakenly think the two are sleeping together, just as in the book, but Bennett gives you no sense of Stella’s need for male attention. She plays a few of her scenes too comedically, and when the big moments come, she throws her head back and bugs her eyes to indicate grief, even if she does let herself go straight to flabby, straw-haired hell physically.
King doesn’t shape the major scenes, so everything feels sketchy—especially the birthday party sequence, where Moran ineptly looks like she’s going to laugh rather than cry, and Bennett does a sort of puffy self-pity. And King stages the scene where Munn ruins Stella’s chance to get back with Stephen so poorly that it seems to have no weight at all. There’s an amusing moment when Stella throws aside the text of Shaw’s Man and Superman that Laurel gave her and pines instead for the new Elinor Glyn trash bestseller. But Bennett plays the train scene all wrong; she looks mildly annoyed, then mistily self-pitying again. For the climax in the rain, where this Stella is watching Laurel’s marriage to her young man, Bennett is seen as a small figure behind a large prison-like fence, her arms stretched up to hang onto the bars. When she moves away, she looks deliriously happy—another odd, misguided choice.
This King version was so financially successful for its producer, Samuel Goldwyn, that he decided to do a remake in 1937, and he chased after Stanwyck’s old screen test nemesis, Ruth Chatterton, who turned him down, thankfully. While they were making Banjo on My Knee, Stanwyck told Joel McCrea, a Goldwyn contract player, that she desperately wanted to play Stella Dallas. McCrea went to bat for her (“Joel McCrea practically clubbed Sam Goldwyn into getting me into Stella Dallas,” Stanwyck later said), and he got her a chance to make a screen test for director King Vidor, who wanted Stanwyck for the role.
Established stars like Stanwyck didn’t make tests, generally, and McCrea had to talk her into doing so. She must have remembered the humiliations of all the useless tests she did when she first came to Hollywood, but Stanwyck wanted the part of Stella so badly that she was willing, finally, to do anything for it. Later, she said that “everybody was testing for it,” and even compared the situation to the search for Scarlett O’Hara, an absurd comparison, of course. No other actress of her stature really wanted this difficult and frankly unflattering role, but landing the part meant so much to Stanwyck that she built the casting process up afterwards in her own mind. She was one of
the few major female stars never seriously considered for Scarlett. She never made one of the popular “moonlight and magnolia” pictures of the time, like Jezebel (1938). Versatile she was, but a Southern belle she was not.
Goldwyn told Stanwyck that she was too young for the role, didn’t think she could act it, didn’t have the necessary sex appeal, and didn’t have enough experience with children, which was really a low blow. Stanwyck and her son Dion never worked as mother and son on any level. She was too solitary, too much the lone wolf, and likely too hung up on her own vanished mother to ever know what it would take to be one herself. This is not to minimize Dion’s suffering, or the unhappy, close to destitute life he led (he died on May 16th, 2006). She should never have adopted him. It just didn’t work out, and by 1937 she may have already known that she had few feelings for this boy who was becoming something of a problem child. Robert Taylor said that Dion “wasn’t a bad kid,” but he got bad grades; he definitely got in the way of her insecure marriage to Taylor.
When he was arrested for selling dirty books to teenagers in 1960, Dion was straightforward about his lack of a relationship with Stanwyck:
