A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

  The director called Barbara and asked her to come to his office on the mezzanine of the Plymouth at 236 West Forty-Fifth Street, a theater the Shuberts had built ten years before in collaboration with Hopkins, who wanted to use it to showcase his more serious productions. Hopkins had since leased the theater from the Shuberts.

  Ruby had been warned that Hopkins was a man of few words. She entered his austere cubicle, sat down, and waited. Hopkins was sitting behind a rolltop desk. He leaned back in his swivel chair and told Ruby the name of the play and gave her a copy of the script, but didn’t offer her the part.

  “He looked me over and asked me what my salary was,” she said. Ruby had not made more than $100 a week but summoned the courage to reply, “Three hundred dollars.” She waited for Hopkins’s outraged response. Instead, he agreed to pay the, to her, enormous amount of money.

  “Hopkins told me his terms and his production schedule. It was up to me to find out when the rehearsals started and to show up on the first day.”

  Hopkins thought Hal Skelly and Barbara Stanwyck were “the perfect team” for his new show.

  Mae, Walda, and Ruby moved to the Empire Hotel on West Sixty-Third Street between Broadway and Columbus Avenues.

  Mae Clarke was in rehearsals during the long summer months for Manhattan Mary. “It was hot and heavy and sweaty,” she said.

  • • •

  Burlesque went into rehearsals in the dead of summer in July 1927.

  Ruby had lunch regularly with Nancy “Billy” Bernard, her friend from Keep Kool days. Nancy had married a traveling salesman and moved to Long Island. When she came into New York, it was to see Ruby and to stay with her at the Empire. “It was no Waldorf Astoria or anything like that.”

  Nancy and Ruby ate lunch at the Broadway Schrafft’s near the hotel and spent afternoons shopping. “We would spend the evenings together and laugh,” said Nancy.

  Ruby needed clothes, and Billy took her to a shop on Broadway called Merl’s, owned by a designer for whom Billy occasionally modeled. “It was like Cartier’s, very expensive,” said Nancy. “Ruby saw a dress with a jacket that she wanted. She asked me if I would get it for her and said she would pay me back. I had Merl wrap it up for her.”

  Soon after, Ruby telephoned Billy on Long Island to tell her that she had arranged for her friend to have “a spot” in Burlesque. Nancy’s husband didn’t want his wife working in the theater. He was often away for two or three months at a time selling men’s clothes, and Nancy was trying to wean herself away from the stage, but she wanted the part in Burlesque. She reasoned that if she went into the show when her husband was away, he would be “all right with my working in it when he returned,” and she accepted the part. Four days into rehearsals with the cast, Nancy’s husband unexpectedly returned and insisted that she drop out of Burlesque.

  “Ruby never paid for the suit,” said Nancy. “I asked her, and she said she would, but she never did. I had to pay for it myself from modeling, $5 a week.”

  • • •

  Hopkins’s rehearsals were known for their intense quiet and calm, the mood almost monastic. The cast sat in a semicircle reading their lines as if they were chanting a prayer. A portable stage light was center stage. Next to it at a table sat Hopkins’s general stage manager, Paul Porter, with the book of the play for line cues.

  Hopkins stayed in the shadows at the upper stage and paced back and forth, never interrupting a scene to give instructions or suggestions, nor speaking to the actors before or after, his silences communicating the force of his ideas. Hopkins believed in letting it just happen, in letting the actor come to his or her own interpretation, even the beginning actor, not yet cluttered with old clichés, who Hopkins felt could work well this way. Hopkins sought naturalness onstage, no unnecessary movement and simplicity, and the following morning would whisper the most minimal comments.

  Oddly, it was during Hopkins’s days working as a press agent for Keith’s Columbus Vaudeville Theatre in Cleveland, watching vaudeville actors establish their characters immediately, that he came to understand what would be most useful for the actor on the legitimate stage.

  He saw vaudeville as a severe test; vaudeville audiences could quickly become restless; any letdown—the curse of the legitimate theater—was not possible. Hopkins saw that even if an act had been played for years, the vaudevillian could not afford to be bored; the act had to remain fresh to him. The vaudeville actor could get the effect of being new not by trying but by being. His only safety was in submerging himself completely in the character.

  Hopkins watched Ruby work and began to have great plans for her. She “displayed more sensitive, easily expressed emotion” than he had encountered since Pauline Lord.

  Hopkins’s distinguished productions and his knowing direction had helped to bring the careers of many to the fore. He’d first seen Pauline Lord in a small part in The Talker; Katharine Cornell, as a young girl in A Bill of Divorcement; Ruth Chatterton in The Rainbow; Lynn Fontanne in a small role in a play with Laurette Taylor. Through their work with him, they became the most admired and celebrated actresses of their time. Hopkins worked as well with actors whose legend preceded them by many decades—Mrs. Fiske and John Drew among them—and still other actors who were at the peak of their careers: he cast John Barrymore in Tolstoy’s Living Corpse and directed him again in Richard III and Hamlet; he cast Alla Nazimova, acclaimed as the first “modern” actress in the American theater, at the age of thirty-nine, in the part of the fourteen-year-old girl in the first English-speaking production of Ibsen’s Wild Duck. Nazimova, long a theatrical star in her native Russia as well as in Europe and New York, was then under contract to Metro, having made two pictures at its New York studio at Sixty-First Street near Broadway: Revelation and Toys of Fate.

  • • •

  During the summer months, rehearsals for Burlesque began at ten in the morning and went until ten at night, heat or no heat.

  Barbara and Skelly began to sense that the ties between Bonny and Skid would evoke strong sympathy with the audience.

  Skelly saw Skid Johnson as “a big drunken lout with good intentions, blundering into misfortune, raising hell, but no Romeo, just faithful to one love.” Like Skid, Skelly was a blunderer and a hell-raiser: he’d spent a week in jail; he’d been a prizefighter and manager and first baseman for the Boston Braves. Skelly knew life in burlesque and understood what it was to be a comedian/clown; he’d played one for two years. Like Skid, Skelly got his first break from the theater owner John Cort and began his career on the New York stage in a series of musical comedies.

  Barbara described Bonny as the one “elected for the job of loving this poor clown. They say pity is akin to love and I suppose that has a great deal to do with Bonny’s feeling for her husband . . . How can you explain love anyway? You can’t . . . You know it exists but seek the reason, and you are up a tree.”

  • • •

  Hopkins’s rewrite of Burlesque included the character of a songwriter. During the second act, Skid’s songwriter and piano player, Jerry Evans, plays a piano onstage, punctuating the scene. Hopkins wanted a musician who, like Skelly and Stanwyck, could be himself and hired the young pianist and composer Oscar Levant, whose song “Keep Sweeping the Cobwebs off the Moon” was having success in New York.

  Levant had just returned from England, where he was the piano accompaniment for Rudy Wiedoeft, the classical saxophonist, and Frank Fay, who was then appearing at the Palladium.

  Levant was a classically trained pianist who’d come to New York from Pittsburgh at fifteen to study music with the dream of becoming a concert pianist. In between, to earn a living, he’d found work as a flash pianist, “full of technical ornamentation, appoggiatura and cascading frills,” as he described it, “but in the jazz lexicon signifying absolutely nothing.”

  Levant was a talker who was funny, and Barbara loved to laugh. Levant could go on a talking jag and not know what he was saying; he was unpredictable and easily u
nhinged.

  His life was split between the discipline of musical study and the excess of boozy parties and dangerous nights; he attended the concerts of pianists appearing in New York and went to hear symphony orchestras. He studied the work of New York’s permanent and guest conductors Arturo Toscanini, Siegfried Wagner, Maurice Ravel, Walter Damrosch, and Leopold Stokowski; he spent time with songwriters and jazz musicians. By night Levant fell into the company of bookies and showgirls, prizefighters and gangsters. When he played the piano, his music was tough, animated, honest.

  During rehearsals for Burlesque he and Ruby became good friends.

  Hopkins worked with Levant to score the music for the second act to create a party atmosphere. Levant was to set the mood throughout the scene: at first, it was to be jazzy and playful, soft and sentimental. He was to play popular songs like “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Here in My Arms,” and “In the Gloaming,” which Bonny sings for her Wyoming cattleman but directs to Skid (“Best to leave you—best for you, and best for me”). Levant was to follow with Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me” and then a few bars from Rhapsody in Blue.

  As the scene moves toward its final desperate moments, and Skid realizes that Bonny is through with him forever, that she is about to marry her Wyoming cattle rancher, he calls for Jerry/Levant to play the wedding march with “pep and ginger.” “Come on, Jerry, play it fast. It’s a dancin’ weddin’. Here comes the Minister, here comes the bride.” Skid is laughing, drunk. He offers to give the bride away. He begins to dance, all arms and legs like a puppet being pulled by a madman to the rhythm of Levant’s frenzied playing. Skid dances faster and faster. “Here comes the bride. Here comes the groom. Do you take this gal? Do you take this gal? Do you take this man? Do you take this man? Till death do you part. Till death do you part . . . Man and wife—Man and wife. Come on, sing, everybody. Here comes the bride.”

  Bonny can’t take any more and pounds on the piano top, screaming, “Stop him! Stop him! Stop, all of you!” Skid dances out of the room. “I’m goin’,” he yells as he leaves. The curtain comes down as the door slams shut and the music stops with a crash.

  The second act curtain scene from Burlesque. Left to right: Oscar Levant, Eileen Wilson, Charles D. Brown, Ruby (now Barbara Stanwyck), and Hal Skelly, New York, 1927. (CULVER PICTURES)

  • • •

  Mae Clarke was out front in the audience almost every night watching Ruby and never “got through marveling at her performance.” During the scene where they “jazzed up” the wedding march, Mae said of Ruby’s cry that she’d “never heard one person get as many vibrations into her voice as Barbara got into hers. As she beat her hands on the piano, screaming, ‘Stop it! Stop it’ . . . it was like [listening to] a symphony chorus . . . instead of just one person speaking.”

  • • •

  Burlesque went into the Plymouth in August. It was the first production with music ever to play the theater.

  President Coolidge announced in Rapid City, South Dakota, that he would “not choose to run for President in 1928.” Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce (and “Under-Secretary of Everything Else”), accepted the nomination for president at the Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri. In his acceptance speech, Hoover, called “the Wonder Boy” by Coolidge, reassured the delegates on the convention floor, “We have not yet reached the goal, but given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon, with the help of God, be within sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation.”

  • • •

  Burlesque opened on September 1, 1927. The opening night audience was enraptured by it. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times compared the play unfavorably to Broadway, the hit of the previous year, saying that Broadway did “the trick first and with infinitely more skill in both drama and producing.” Atkinson went on to say that Skelly “gives a glowing performance of fleeting character portrayal amid a whirl of eccentric make-ups and bits of hoofing and clowning.” And “Miss Stanwyck plays with genuine emotion.”

  Walter Winchell compared Burlesque favorably to Broadway, saying Burlesque was the “more touching piece . . . even if it isn’t as thrilling. [It] is a finer dramatic effort and a lovelier story . . . a simple love tale but so moving, effective and so tenderly told that even the men’s kerchiefs were conspicuously employed at the Plymouth where it promises to remain for ever so long a spell.

  “Hal Skelly, a veteran of tent shows, small and big time vaudeville and comical attractions crashed the star division . . . Miss Stanwyck’s performance . . . is adroit and sympathetic; she toys with your heartstrings . . . [and] made you fear that you were effeminate . . . [S]ome of us wept . . . There is no competition in town right now and even when there is, Burlesque will survive it all, for it is poignant stuff, rich in plot and life.”

  Alexander Woollcott called it a “no account and palpably synthetic play in which the skill and unfailing taste of our foremost producer had been lavished.” But Woollcott praised the two central roles as “beautifully played,” describing “Miss Stanwyck” as “touching and true” who “brought much to those little aching silences in a performance of which Mr. Hopkins knows so well the secret and sorcery.”

  A critic from Variety said, “Young Barbara Stanwyck, who used to be Ruby Stevens of the cabarets . . . is a fine ingénue and in her dramatic moments, gleams. Her chief virtue is poise, and her salvation is restraint. That girl has a big future.”

  After the play’s opening, Bill Mack presented Barbara with a diamond bracelet. She thought he’d waited to see if she was “any good” before giving it to her. The diamonds were small, but Barbara thought they were “the greatest.” Every time she moved her hand she thought she was “blinding the public.”

  Barbara as Bonnie with Hal Skelly as Skid, in Burlesque, New York, 1927. She is twenty years old. (© CONDÉ-NAST ARCHIVE/CORBIS)

  Burlesque was a success. It was the first production at the Plymouth to charge the top weekday ticket price of $4.40—$5.50 on Saturdays—the highest ticket price for a Broadway nonmusical.

  The play opened on Thursday. The following day, ticket sales broke all house records, netting more than $3,000. Saturday’s matinee took in more than $2,000 after expenses. The first four performances brought in $12,000 in gross receipts. The 650-seat theater had an eight-week advance sale of 570 orchestra seats. The show was grossing $29,000 per week.

  Audiences considered Burlesque racy. In one scene Ruby appeared in a teddy that covered her from neck to thigh. “Chorus girls stripped,” said she, but never stars, and “the audience gasped.”

  Ruby’s nephew Gene was taken to see the show for his eleventh birthday. Barbara sang a song to him, the hit song of the show, in his first-row center seat. “She just looked at me,” he said. “I’ll never forget it.”

  • • •

  Barbara Stanwyck was being talked about and photographed. She posed for a sitting with Hal Skelly for Vanity Fair’s photographer Edward Steichen. She was being asked to parties, but she rarely accepted. When she did attend, Walda Mansfield said, “she sat there and wasn’t terribly friendly with anybody.” When she entered a room, Barbara found where she was to sit and sat there. Her head was up, her shoulders squared. She looked neither to the right nor to the left, but even so, in a crowded room, Barbara was the first woman to be noticed.

  After each evening’s performance Oscar Levant made the rounds of nightclubs, parties, and all-night delicatessens. Ruby was invited along, but she “couldn’t abide going,” said Levant. “She was the rage of Broadway but Barbara was wary of sophisticates and phonies.”

  Among the invitations was a request for her to attend a big party given by Mr. Condé Nast, owner of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The American Golfer, and his pattern publishing.

  Walda said, “Oh, that’ll be fun. What are you wearing?”

  Ruby said, “I’m not going.”

  The party was at Mr. Nast’s thirty-room apartment at 1040 Park A
venue.

  “You’re not going? That’ll be good for you to go to a party and meet all these people.”

  “I’m not going. I’m not ready for it.” Ruby didn’t attend. “I didn’t know what the hell to say to them—they all talked verry, verry English. Can you imagine me . . . acting up the part of a lady with those dames? I knew it was going to be one of those ritzy affairs. I wanted to go, but, honestly I was scared stiff. I just couldn’t get up my nerve.”

  Ruby sent a note to Mr. Nast declining and told him in so many words that she “couldn’t make the grade.”

  With the success of Burlesque, Ruby was able to buy a mink coat on credit. “It was beautiful. Dark mink.” She felt as if she were “the only girl who’d ever had a mink coat and wore it all the time. It was a uniform.”

  Ed Kennedy went to see Ruby in her new play. He thought she was heartbreaking in the role of Bonny. Ed and Ruby hadn’t seen much of each other, but he was proud of her success and went backstage to congratulate her and say hello. Ruby was thrilled to see him, and they made a date for dinner. Ed picked up Ruby at the Empire Hotel in his new Hupmobile touring car to drive out to the country for a Sunday evening. Ruby rushed through the hotel lobby as several young men whistled at her. The catcalls so agitated Ed that when he opened the car door for her, he pulled the door off its hinges. They went to a garage, had the door fixed, and then drove off to have dinner in the country. Their romance did not start up again.

  • • •

  Mae was touring with Manhattan Mary. The play wasn’t doing well in Pittsburgh; the heat and the popularity of moving pictures were eroding theatrical profits.

  Manhattan Mary was about to come into New York as George White was still changing the cast. Ona Munson was brought in to replace Elizabeth Hines. The cast was rehearsing until two and three in the morning and then proceeding to the author’s hotel room to learn the new songs that had just been written.