by Dan Callahan
When we next see Mary, she’s a corpse in bed, and Stanwyck makes herself look like a corpse, even if her eyes flutter slightly when Chamberlain closes them and puts pennies on her lids. After two hours running time, Mary is dead, and there are a lot more hours of The Thorn Birds to go, of course, which really just boils down to waiting for Meggie (Rachel Ward) to sleep with the priest that she has loved since childhood, and waiting through all those commercials repeating Henry Mancini’s score with teaser tidbits of sex on the beach. Watchable as the rest of it is, Stanwyck’s aria shames the project as a whole, and the image it leaves of white hair, white dress, and glistening, “Why, God?” blue eyes is not to be forgotten.
In its familiar rawness and its go-for-broke honesty, Stanwyck’s last aria lets us see that she still had it in her to give another major performance, but her age, her ill health, and the era she went out in kept her from that possibility. I’m grateful at least that she got to deliver that speech, in close-up, with the camera respectfully registering the depth of her accumulated experience and the miraculously pristine and still protesting lost innocence that first revealed itself in Ladies of Leisure. Stanwyck won her third and last Emmy for Mary Carson; she graciously spent most of her speech praising fellow nominee Ann-Margret.
On June 22, 1985, she was dealt another blow when her house caught on fire. Bizarrely, this was the third major house fire Stanwyck had suffered; there had been two in the thirties which had cost her many photos and mementoes. During this third fire, her best friend, Frank’s first wife Nancy Sinatra, tried to shield Stanwyck from reporters, but several of them saw her try to rush into the house to save a few things she loved. When the firemen stopped her, she said, “Please,” and she had to fight back her tears. It’s enough to make you wonder why some people are plagued by such bad luck, and enough to make you marvel at the stoicism that people like Stanwyck develop to get through things like this.
She must have wondered about lousy luck, too; I mean really, three house fires? But she even managed to turn this tragedy into a dark-humored story for a reporter. “I dialed 911,” she recalled, “and about the time I got out on the street, the engines and the crews had arrived, and I said, ‘OK, fellas, you’re on.’” (As if this third fire were a vaudeville routine!) “They rushed in and right away they started bringing out my paintings. Only in Beverly Hills!” she joked. I’d love to think Stanwyck actually said, “OK, fellas, you’re on,” to the firemen, but it’s enough that she chose to re-write it this way after the fact. Though she liked to present herself as a salty bulwark against cultural pretension, Stanwyck had a modest appreciation for visual art, especially the landscapes of French painter Maurice de Vlaminck.
The work she was offered in the wake of this fire was unfortunate. I think we can all agree to forget that her last official credit is for the abortive Dynasty spin-off, The Colbys, decadent 1980s late-night soap trash in which she was given little to do. She didn’t fit in with the campy fighting and overblown clothes, and she made her displeasure with the series public and quit the show early. “I always say Aaron Spelling burned down my house to shanghai me back into television,” she said, mordantly. It’s not a happy last glimpse of her; she’s pretty crotchety by this point and has to hang onto tables and chairs during confrontation scenes, an aged Mexicali Rose still trying to unlock that door to get away from the sub-Joan Collins thesping of Stephanie Beachum.
Still, in the midst of the most depleted circumstances, with everyone around her doing the most remorseless, straight-ahead soap TV acting, a colorfully dressed Stanwyck, in spite of her diminished physicality and scorched-earth voice, is sometimes able to create detailed, beat-by-beat character work even with rock-bottom material. At this late stage, fighting against every type of limitation, she’s trying new things, gussying up her “ageless,” too-nice character Constance Colby Patterson by opening her small eyes wider than she usually does so that we can see the least little flicker of emotion in them (she had had cataracts removed right before the series was shot). Constance has a cowboy lover (Joseph Campanella) she gets to smooch. Campanella said that Stanwyck continued their love scenes after “cut” had been called. “Oh, God, hold me,” she told him. “Nobody has said that to me in years.” One last grasp at the world of romantic make-believe on screen.
Constance has her mental competency challenged, and she gets hit by a car. She dies off-screen, and most of her part consists of rote, “the old gal’s still got it!” condescension. “Acting is as important to me as eating and sleeping,” Stanwyck once said. Then, gleefully predicting her own end, she continued: “I’ll retire when they take me off the set in a wheel-chair—and then I hope I’ll give a good show, creaking joints, garbled speech, falling wig and all.” If Stanwyck had to participate in a venture like this, it would have been far more edifying to see her play a wicked old woman in a wheelchair bent on some kind of revenge, à la Friedrich Dürrenmaat’s The Visit.
In 1987, Stanwyck became the fifteenth recipient of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award; she was the third woman so honored (the first two were Bette Davis and Lillian Gish). The AFI had waited a bit too long to honor Stanwyck. Many of her best co-stars had died, and of her major collaborators, only Fred MacMurray and Billy Wilder were on hand to pay tribute to her. Linda Evans told a touching story about being on the set of The Big Valley after her own mother had died; Stanwyck looked at Evans for a long moment and said, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to be your Mom from now on,” her maternal side reserved for a professional context, but no less real for that. Jane Fonda hosted, sensitively, as she had for Bette Davis’s tribute in 1977, yet the evening seemed rather half-hearted, or as if something were missing.
That missing element, of course, was Frank Capra, who had been awarded his own AFI a few years before and was still alive; he was not in attendance here. Stanwyck had thrown out her bad back before the ceremony (and of course Capra gave her that bad back on Forbidden), so she spent most of it watching from backstage on a couch. Used to tributes like this and weary of their phoniness, Stanwyck began her acceptance speech by saying, “And honest to God, I can’t walk on water,” deflecting all the adulation with a firm “cut the bullshit” vibe that would have stunned Davis or Gish or Katharine Hepburn, who lapped up tributes like this as their due.
She dwelled on Capra: “He taught me what film could do for me, and what I could do for film,” she said, forthrightly. “That’s why I’m here tonight, Mr. Frank Capra.” Chevy Chase and Sylvester Stallone stared up at her vacantly as she finished her speech with the words from an old Irish prayer: “May the good Lord keep his arms around all of you, always.” In one telling reaction shot, Catherine Deneuve looked up at Stanwyck with proper reverence as one film goddess to another, but it was all rather less than heartwarming, mainly because an event like this is a part of show business that Stanwyck wasn’t built for, and God bless her for that.
Emphysema and other serious health issues kept Stanwyck bedridden up to her death in 1990. In these last few inactive years, she experienced periods of depression. She was afraid that she had been forgotten, and so her faithful press agent, Larry Kleno, and her business manager, Morgan Maree, made a concerted effort to get her some more fan mail. They talked discreetly to the press about her condition and put Maree’s address out there so that people could send Stanwyck postcards and letters. These letters were read to her, but they didn’t seem to make much of a dent in her mood. “How could this happen to me?” she asked her friend Nolan Miller, from her sickbed. “I never expected to become an invalid. I always expected to be trampled by a wild stallion or run down by a stagecoach. But never this.”
Given a scrapbook on her career, she soon lost interest and stared out her window, waiting patiently for death, as most of us do at a certain point in old age. During her last stay in the hospital in early 1990, she refused food, and after eleven days of this she went into a coma and then finally died. There was no funeral. Kleno said that she h
ad seen too many Hollywood burials and didn’t want show biz to intrude on her own passing. Following her instructions, Kleno rented a helicopter and scattered her ashes over Lone Pine desert in California, a location where she had made some of her westerns.
Of her peers, Bette Davis had died the previous year, and Katharine Hepburn would go on and on some more, but her sharp mind went long before her body did in 2003. These two women were much starrier than Stanwyck, who actually wrote both of them fan letters on occasion but never got a response from them. They had always generated the most colorful publicity; they both wrote mythmaking autobiographies, whereas Stanwyck shied away from writing her own book. Davis and Hepburn made their lives into a narrative for us, whereas Stanwyck was unwilling or unable to do so. Because of this difference, Davis and Hepburn have lasted longer in the popular imagination than Stanwyck has, but their late indulgences on TV, in putative movies but mainly in declamatory interviews, left behind a trail of “look at me” elderly embarrassments that Stanwyck’s admirers don’t have to deal with.
Stanwyck didn’t do talk shows, and she didn’t make a series of horror movies, as Davis did, or appear in ramshackle TV vehicles that exploited her perceived off-screen life, as Hepburn did. Mighty as they were and continue to be, Davis and Hepburn were actors who sometimes indicated emotions, or ran roughshod over them. Stanwyck only did that once, in Sorry, Wrong Number, her last Oscar bid. If the silent-era Lillian Gish is the true progenitor of American screen actresses, Stanwyck, Davis and Hepburn are the holy trinity for the classic studio era; no one else had careers of such size. Of the three, Stanwyck worked with the best directors and is the one whose style is the least dated and the most natural. She blazed a new trail, and she still shows the way for all actors.
Today, Meryl Streep has staked her claim as the fifth American actress who simply cannot be ignored, and of course she has never been acclaimed for being natural. Like Davis, she often puts the idea of acting up front, using different voices and gaits and movements for each of her characters. In Streep’s 1980s prime, if you were to look at Silkwood (1983) and then A Cry in the Dark (1988), you’d see two women who are different not only physically, but also emotionally and even mentally. These two Streep performances display the kind of tough-minded, detailed character work that Davis always championed. And Davis was a Streep fan; she even wrote Streep a fan letter. In recent years, Streep has garnered the kind of love and publicity that Hepburn started to reap in the late 1960s, becoming a kind of exception that proves the rule that women are discarded or marginalized on screen when they age.
There are many links between Streep and her forebears, Davis and Hepburn, but there are few if any links to Stanwyck, who begins to seem like an anomalous and rather lonely example of quieter and deeper emotional expressivity and filmic questing. Put it this way: Davis and Hepburn and Streep all returned to the stage every now and then as they got older, and their acting style didn’t need much amplification of scale for the theater. But Stanwyck’s style is almost entirely based on the smallest movements of her eyes and shifts of her facial expression to convey her feelings; her best line readings aren’t directed out at us, but rather draw us in and seduce us into her multi-leveled, maze-like consciousness.
Jennifer Jason Leigh possesses probably the closest modern equivalent to Stanwyck’s rugged integrity. She hasn’t been able to make a career as large and coherent as Stanwyck’s, but her self-immolating work in Georgia (1995) is certainly the equal of Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas, and in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), Jason Leigh offered a performance that took the most idiosyncratic behavioral choices of a Davis or a Streep and melded them with Stanwyck’s sense of stubborn verisimilitude. Stanwyck herself might have been impressed by Jessica Lange’s hungry sexuality in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) or her call-the-cops arias of anger in Frances (1982). Like Jason Leigh, Lange hasn’t been able to sustain her career in the ostentatious, publicity-driven way of Davis or Hepburn or Streep, but she has carried on Stanwyck’s tradition. These two actresses and a few others have worked in the Stanwyck style in fits and starts, but none of them has had Stanwyck’s force or her stamina.
Conversely, I would think that Stanwyck would have been repelled by the neuroticism of Actors Studio women like Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, and Sandy Dennis. That kind of pushy fifties thesping has largely died out; it was a necessary spasm in American acting, maybe, an explosion of often unfocused emotional jags later taken up by Ellen Burstyn and Gena Rowlands, who as they aged became grande dames of the private moment twitch. Looking outside America, the closest correlative to Stanwyck is probably Anna Magnani, with her large but controlled emotional outbursts and her way of clarifying so many thoughts and feelings all at once. The self-loving exhibitionism of Jeanne Moreau feels as far from Stanwyck’s achievement as the goddessy radiance of Vanessa Redgrave. Both Moreau and Redgrave are actresses of equal size and stature and both are far too tricky and attention-seeking to have much in common with the chorus girl who was asked to take off her make up by Frank Capra.
After the premiere of Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanwyck was so moved that she actually knelt and kissed the hem of Gloria Swanson’s dress. Though Swanson’s performance as forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond is a landmark, its fussy hugeness couldn’t be farther from Stanwyck’s direct naturalism. Yet Stanwyck recognized the personal honesty of Swanson’s work, and she also recognized how hard it is to give everything you have and everything you are to a camera. Stanwyck loved the movies, even at their most extreme and artificial, yet she was the actress who most often reminded the movies of reality. Crying alone in your room. Making love with someone you’re scared of. Lashing out and hurting other people. Reminding other people of their responsibilities, as she did in movies with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Stanwyck had the kind of wary Depression fatalism best expressed by the moment in Stage Door (1937) when Ginger Rogers tells Katharine Hepburn, “We started off on the wrong foot, let’s stay that way.”
What a life, as Jean Harrington sighed to Hopsie. Real real life is not something Stanwyck wanted to go through again, but her real movie life might have tempted her, as it continues to tempt us. Praising her idol Pearl White, Stanwyck said, “Her memory still inspires me. In my humble opinion, this explains the why of motion pictures.” She might have been talking about her own career, which seems increasingly pure and dedicated as we move farther away from it. Stanwyck’s very lack of “star” eccentricity has kept her more obscure than Davis or Hepburn or Streep, but it has also had the effect of making her work seem less cluttered, more truly exposed, more questioning—and more deeply revealing of both her own actorly nature and human nature itself.
FILMOGRAPHY
1927
Broadway Nights, First National
Director: Joseph C. Boyle
Producer: Robert T. Cane
Cast: Lois Wilson, Sam Hardy, Louis John Bartels, Philip Strange, Barbara Stanwyck
1929
The Locked Door, United Artists
Director: George Fitzmaurice
Producer: George Fitzmaurice
Cast: Rod La Rocque, Barbara Stanwyck, William “Stage” Boyd, Betty Bronson, Mack Swain, ZaSu Pitts
Mexicali Rose, Columbia
Director: Erle C. Kenton
Producer: Harry Cohn
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Sam Hardy, William Janney, Louis Natheaux, Arthur Rankin
1930
Ladies of Leisure, Columbia
Director: Frank Capra
Producer: Harry Cohn
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ralph Graves, Lowell Sherman, Marie Prevost, Nance O‘Neil
1931
Illicit, Warner Bros.
Director: Archie Mayo
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, James Rennie, Ricardo Cortez, Charles Butterworth, Joan Blondell
The Miracle Woman, Columbia
Director: Frank Capra
Pro
ducer: Harry Cohn
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Sam Hardy, David Manners, Beryl Mercer, Russell Hopton
Night Nurse, Warner Bros.
Director: William Wellman
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ben Lyon, Joan Blondell, Clark Gable, Charlotte Merriam, Charles Winninger
Ten Cents a Dance, Columbia
Director: Lionel Barrymore
Producer: Harry Cohn
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ricardo Cortez, Monroe Owsley, Sally Blane, Blanche Friderici
1932
Forbidden, Columbia
Director: Frank Capra
Producer: Harry Cohn
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Peterson, Thomas Jefferson
The Purchase Price, Warner Bros.
Director: William Wellman
Producer: Jack Warner
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Lyle Talbot, Leila Bennett, Murray Kinnell
Shopworn, Columbia
Director: Nicolas Grinde
Producer: Harry Cohn
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Regis Toomey, ZaSu Pitts, Lucien Littlefield, Clara Blandick
So Big!, Warner Bros.
Director: William Wellman
Producer: Jack Warner
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Dickie Moore, Bette Davis, Guy Kibbee
1933
Baby Face, Warners Bros.
Director: Alfred E. Green
