by Dan Callahan
And some of them learn to like it. I won’t dramatize her personal life at this point, since she obviously didn’t herself. Self-pity, Stanwyck felt, will kill you. But a lack of self-pity can sometimes edge into overall bitterness about life, so that sometimes, in her interviews, only a small bit of bleak humor stands between Stanwyck’s straight-shooting view of herself and the abyss that swallowed up Lily Powers. “Romance can’t be forced, dreamed up, arranged,” she said, when asked about her romantic life in the late 1960s. She spoke from experience, for the Hollywood publicity machine had actually tricked her into caring about her own arranged marriage, and she knew too well how “make believe” in life can murder your pride.
In 1965, Stanwyck finally got herself the western series she had long hoped for, The Big Valley, which ran for four seasons and lived on, so to speak, in syndication. For some Baby Boomers, The Big Valley is the credit that Stanwyck is remembered for, and the show still has its fans. The Big Valley has a kind of tranquilizing effect. Where Stanwyck’s movies urge you to sit up and take notice of them, The Big Valley invites you to put up your feet and relax. Everything about this show is small, and it even manages to miniaturize Stanwyck. Her high-falutin’ billing reads, “And Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck,” and though I suppose she’s earned such a designation, it does her no favors.
As Victoria Barkley, the matriarch of the big valley of the title, Stanwyck is asked to play mom to three actors so square-jawed, manly, and personality-free that it’s hard to tell them apart (Lee Majors, who plays the illegitimate Barkley heir, has blond hair, and the other two have dark hair, but that’s about all that distinguishes them). Linda Evans, who plays Victoria’s daughter, is usually dressed in such tight pants that she’s basically there to walk up and down the family staircase so we can enjoy the view.
In most of the episodes, the Barkleys are menaced by a bad seed, or a group of bad seeds, or a malcontent of some sort, and by the end of the hour the bad guys have been vanquished—but not before these bad guys have admitted What Makes Me So Bad, while the Barkley’s nod and smile at them understandingly. There’s a “learning lessons” smugness here that’s deeply dispiriting. Like many American TV shows, The Big Valley fetishizes the family as a source of strength, and Stanwyck goes along with this complacency in a way that feels detached and almost medicated sometimes, or at least terribly tired. She rarely seems like a mother to her children, but it’s tough to do anything with these particular children.
So often on The Big Valley, Stanwyck is asked to just listen … to nothing. To react … to nothing. Or nothing much. Eventually, even her moments of inspiration, usually having to do with the handling of props, or self-contained monologues about Victoria’s hard past, get lost in the shuffle in the overall torpor of this interminable television serial, which has so very little on its mind beyond cranking out another hour of TV fodder. When a director like Joseph H. Lewis is at the helm, suddenly there are actual camera movements and careful compositions, but nothing can pierce the formula scripts.
Stanwyck looks stylishly thin on the show (almost too thin, sometimes), and the costumers keep putting her into absurdly incongruous pastel purple or blue dresses, suffocating, girly clothes that don’t suit her grit. Every once in a while, there will be an episode that allows Victoria to get her hands dirty, and Stanwyck relishes the few chances the show gives her to be tough. She’s especially fine in “Earthquake,” where she’s trapped underground with a whining Charles Bronson, playing a lazy drunk that Victoria has to whip into shape. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you’re alive!” she says to Bronson at one point. That attitude is what got her through this unrewarding work.
“Make the best of things,” had always been Stanwyck’s basic survival tactic, and there are treasurable little moments on The Big Valley when she revives her Sugarpuss O’Shea sexuality, just to prove that it’s still operational, the knowing look followed by a slow turn. But in an awful episode like “Teacher of Outlaws,” where Victoria has to teach a thug how to read, the sentimentality is of such a low nature that it’s hard to watch Stanwyck having to endure it. She won a second Emmy for the show, and it kept her busy, but that’s all it did. (Once, as I passed a sex shop in Greenwich Village, I saw a life-size cardboard cut out of Stanwyck’s Victoria Barkley in the window with a balloon caption that read, “Come in and explore my big valley!” I hope it might have made Stanwyck laugh.)
After The Big Valley was cancelled, the remainder of Stanwyck’s acting career, with the exception of The Thorn Birds, was dependent, regrettably enough, on offers from schlock TV producer Aaron Spelling, who promised her a Nolan Miller wardrobe and a chance to work, in that order. She made three ABC movies of the week for Spelling, and the most that can be said for the first, a haunted house effort called The House That Would Not Die (1971), is that it’s not one of the better TV films of its sort from this period and not one of the worst. Stanwyck looks stylish in her black and white Miller wardrobe. She still knows how to run down a staircase and enter a room like a star, and she thoroughly enjoys the scenes that call for her to roughhouse and get thrown around the set by her possessed co-stars. The second, A Taste of Evil (1971), was another chiller of the “thunderstorm and billowing curtain” school, directed, like House, by John Llewellyn Moxey. In the first half, Stanwyck plays a rather distracted, concerned mother of a daughter (Barbara Parkins) who had been raped as a girl. Parkins, who was on TV’s Peyton Place, is such a non-actress that she kills any interest in her scenes with Stanwyck, and the film is directed incompetently (in one scene near a pool, a boom mic is visible in the frame for quite a while).
Once Parkins is led away to recuperate, Stanwyck picks up the slack, revealing that her character is trying to drive her daughter mad for money. This evil mother is only slightly more interesting than the good mother of the first scenes, but Stanwyck gets a lot of mileage out of a speech where she spews out her unnatural hatred of her daughter and even admits that she was glad when the handyman (Arthur O’Connell) raped the girl. In the last third, Stanwyck runs around in the rain with a gun at some length, and at a certain point her hair gets all wet so that the sculptured white helmet hair she’s been hiding under collapses; in several shots, Stanwyck looks very much like her younger self, the child/ woman of Forbidden. The extreme white hairdo she favored in this period probably limited her opportunities, locking her too firmly into advanced age visually, when she could have pulled off middle age easily with a dark wig.
She was set to play in a TV film called Fitzgerald and Pride, but three days into shooting she became ill and had to be hospitalized for removal of a kidney. She was replaced by another Brooklyn native, Susan Hayward. After her hospital stay, Stanwyck claimed that she had crossed over from life into death: “For two days I was on the other side,” she said. “It’s very cold there and it’s very dark.” Out of the hospital, in her third Spelling TV movie, a soapy effort called The Letters (1973, she played a rich woman who dominates her sister (Dina Merrill) and then marries the sister’s lover (Leslie Nielsen). Three key scenes were cut from her performance due to time considerations (it was a story done in three parts).
At this point, several years passed without any work at all. I’m afraid that in 1980 Spelling tempted Stanwyck to do an episode of Charlie’s Angels called “Toni’s Boys,” which was supposed to lead to a series of her own where she would operate with three hunky male Angels. As a kid, I saw this episode re-run and couldn’t understand why the actress I knew from Double Indemnity and The Lady Eve was appearing on such a low-class show. The plot is a blur, but I vividly remember her saying at one point, “It seemed like a good idea at the time!” as if she were semi-apologizing to us. No need.
On October 27, 1981, at one in the morning, Stanwyck was awakened by a flashlight shining into her face. She heard a man’s voice asking her where he could find her purse and her jewelry. She turned on her bedside lamp and saw that the man was wearing a ski mask. The thief ordered her to turn out the
light and not to look at him. “I want your jewelry or I’ll kill you,” he said. Stanwyck told him that her jewelry was in a top drawer in her dressing room, but the robber couldn’t find it, and when she turned on her light again, he pistol-whipped her. “I told you not to look,” he yelled. He finally found some jewels, then grabbed Stanwyck and threw her in her bedroom closet; he didn’t lock the door, but he warned her that if she came out, he would kill her. She stayed in the closet for a long while with blood running down her face, until she thought that the coast was clear. Then she crawled out and called the police. She was treated for her injuries at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. They never caught the thief.
If Stanwyck had been isolated before, now she became almost totally secluded. Her few friends noticed a change in her, and a decline. “The shock was tremendous to her,” said her costumer friend Nolan Miller. “I don’t think she ever got over it.” Stanwyck had always prided herself on being tough, but there’s not much you can do to combat an experience like this, especially when you’re old and ill and frail, as she was at this point. She had left Brooklyn so many years ago and had found what she felt was a paradise in California. Now, it was as if that was spoiled, too, as if crime and bad luck had followed her.
In 1982, Stanwyck was presented with a special Academy Award, and she accepted it gratefully, remembering William Holden—who had recently died—in her speech. At the 1978 Oscars, Holden had departed from the prepared script and paid tribute to this woman that he loved. “Oh, Bill,” she said to him, quickly averting her face from the camera, not wanting us to see how moved she was. It was the protective instinct of someone who has been so deeply hurt that she tries not to lay herself open in any way; she reserved that openness only for her work.
The year after she won her Oscar, Stanwyck had her last real chance as an actress, a television miniseries adaptation of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 Australian romance novel, The Thorn Birds. The book is wordy, page-turning trash that makes Gone with the Wind look like The Idiot. A popular novel of the twenties like Stella Dallas has at least pretensions to literary quality and sometimes seems better than it actually is, but McCullough’s book is grindingly obvious and not at all well written. When the mega-rich Irish bitch Mary Carson stares at her beloved Father Ralph de Bricassart in the nude, McCullough writes: “She eyed his flaccid penis, snorting with laughter.” That’s a fair enough example of this material.
McCullough’s Mary is sixty-five, has “a shock of red hair” and just a few wrinkles on her somewhat blotchy skin. She gets fat as she ages, and she exits this life cursing Father Ralph’s impotence in labored, unpleasant language. Stanwyck was excited when she won the part (Bette Davis had wanted it), and she knew that the miniseries was going to be an event, so she went to bat for her character when she felt the script she was sent had softened her (Mary’s rougher edges were reinstated). Sensing that this would probably be her last major appearance, Stanwyck seems to have entirely worked out her performance beforehand. In his memoir, her Father Ralph, Richard Chamberlain, wrote that at the first read-through she told the cameraman not to miss the various facial nuances she had planned, “don’t miss that look,” and so on. This is not the way the young or middle-aged Stanwyck worked when she was making her feature films, but she may have felt that she’d be pretty much on her own in TV-land, as she had been all those years on The Big Valley, and so she decided to safeguard what would be her final statement as an actress. There would be nothing left to chance.
The Thorn Birds certainly looks better than the rest of her TV work. It has handsome, textured visuals, both in the interiors of Mary Carson’s home (where a lot of smoky light is used) and in the landscape spectacle photography of the Australian outback (actually filmed in Simi Valley in California), with herds of sheep and stray shots of kangaroos used as tourist filler. We first see Stanwyck’s Mary when she’s looking at Chamberlain’s Ralph as he says Mass. Her first close-up features a highly ambiguous expression, very open, questioning and vulnerable. She seems to be wondering just why she’s in love with Ralph, but when he slips her the communion wafer, she lowers her chin and eyes and then looks up and shoots him a sizzling sort of “take it or leave it” look (the kind of look that Stanwyck didn’t want the cameraman to miss). Stanwyck does her best work in these early scenes with her face, which has barely aged. There isn’t much she can do with some of her dialogue but speed through it and coast on her own natural charisma, signaling to us, “Alright, some of this might be silly, but I’m not, so pay attention.”
At her best in this miniseries, Stanwyck makes Mary Carson predatory in a way that we can enjoy; she plays the manipulativeness of this woman with all the heady, distracted style that she patented fifty years before. But there’s a delicacy about her, too, and it has to do partly with age. There are times when she has trouble with some of her s sounds because of her dentures, and that chorus girl stride has been decimated. Only her hands are as they were before, and so she uses these expressive hands more than ever, as Mary keeps everyone around her under her control. Stanwyck lightens this self-important epic soap with her vitality, so that sometimes she seems to be “performing” instead of acting. It’s so hard to make Mary Carson human.
When Ralph comes in from the rain and strips to dry himself off, Mary approaches him stealthily, telling him about his beauty, then putting her hands on his back, then moving them down his chest slowly, sensuously, like Jean playing with Hopsie’s hair in The Lady Eve, like Phyllis pawing Walter at the end of Double Indemnity. It’s difficult to think of another elderly actress who could have played this scene of sexual hunger without giving rise to embarrassment or laughter. Somehow, even after all the time that has passed, Stanwyck can still turn it on, that sexuality of hers that seemed to have a life of its own, and it hasn’t been reduced by age. The resurgence of this Stanwyck sexuality, so important in her performing arsenal, threw her for a loop momentarily on the set; when she first started to stroke Chamberlain’s chest, she screwed up her lines, then admitted, “What the hell, it’s the first time in twenty years I’ve had a naked man in my arms.” A laugh for the crew, and a measure of her own personal loneliness in these last decades.
Chamberlain’s Father Ralph keeps telling Mary about their relationship during their scenes together. This is the basic problem with the writing, which goes back to the book. It’s almost all telling and no showing, so that Stanwyck really has little to play except for the “malice” that’s been called for in dialogue. But Mary’s last scene with Ralph and its accompanying monologue give Stanwyck an opportunity and an opening that she seizes with the desperation of an actress making one last stand, and she doesn’t play it safe. It’s an aria, something Stanwyck had been excelling at since at least 1930 (though it sounds like she was also doing it on stage in The Noose), and it can proudly take its place beside her earlier large outbursts of feeling. Since this outburst is her last—and since that is the subject of the speech itself—Stanwyck’s aria tears at us precisely because it’s bigger than life, bigger than the TV miniseries that houses it. Once more, Stanwyck presses that emotional button inside of herself, and what explodes out of her is the bitterness of a neglected old woman, the confusion of a young woman being extinguished—and all sorts of other messy things.
Mary is climbing the stairs with Ralph after her seventy-fifth birthday party. She says she’s tired of living, and Stanwyck emphasizes Mary’s feeble, drooping body that can barely hold her head up straight. Duke frames Chamberlain and Stanwyck in a two shot as Mary asks for a kiss goodnight, and Ralph starts to give her a kiss on her hand. “No!” she shouts, abruptly, throwing his hand down. “On my mouth! Kiss me on my mouth as if we were lovers!” We cut to Ralph putting her off, and then we see Mary in the first of her raging close-ups. He says that he can’t kiss her because he’s a priest, and she shouts that he’s “some impotent, useless thing that doesn’t know how to be either!” (This line is post-dubbed so badly that it threatens the scene that Stanwyck is b
uilding, but not for long.)
Ralph says that she doesn’t really love him; he’s just a reminder of what she can no longer be. At this, we cut back to a close-up of Stanwyck, nodding her head toughly. Then she begins her aria. “Let me tell you something, Cardinal de Bricassart,” she says, leaning back and winding up for the punches, “about old age and about that God of yours,” she continues, her husky voice drizzling gravelly contempt all over her words. “That vengeful God who ruins our bodies and leaves us with only enough wit … for regret!” She raises her voice on this line and gives it a ringing, upward inflection, socking “for regret,” so that her voice breaks.
Her small blue eyes have widened, and they’re such young eyes; the hurt in them is young hurt. “Inside this stupid body I am still young!” she declares, shaking her head, as if she can’t believe she’s been stranded like this, let down and humiliated by age. “I still feel,” she says, “I still want,” and then, “I still dream!” so that “dream” is filled with all the tears in the world. “And I still love you, oh God how much!” she cries, throwing her head back with total abandon.
And then she just stands there in close-up, completely naked and exposed, her eyes scanning the distance and seeing only emptiness and death. She slowly raises herself up and chokes back the tears that have started, leaning sideways and twisting her mouth to make a harrowingly specific sound that squashes all her feelings back down. She’s stopped this eruption, somehow, but a tear glitters near her left eye anyway, like some diamond that will not dare to slide down her cheek. Exhausted, she looks at this man she loves and can never have, and the bitterness comes back into her face, a look of “you’ll get yours,” accompanied by a barely perceptible nod. Then she closes the doors to her bedroom.
