Higgins graduated from Smith and married Lewis Isaac Prouty, whose family ran a shoe and boot company. They lived in Brookline, Beacon Hill, and Buzzards Bay. Prouty’s first book, Bobbie, General Manager, was a big success.
Olive Higgins (Prouty), circa 1904. (SMITH COLLEGE ARCHIVES, SMITH COLLEGE)
Stella Dallas, Prouty’s fifth book, was a novel inspired by a conversation the author overheard at a dinner party in Boston. One of the guests was curious about her dinner partner. “Evidently,” the guest said to the hostess, “a member of an old Boston family. He referred to a daughter he was taking with him on a camping-trip this summer. Where is his wife?”
“Separated,” the hostess said. “He married someone beyond the pale socially when he was very young and was sent by his business to a branch office somewhere a long way off from Boston. They have been separated ever since the child was born—a girl twelve or thirteen now, quite lovely in spite of her mother—really terribly ordinary. The child lives with her mother in a dreary little apartment out in the suburbs somewhere but spends a month every summer with her father . . . It was really pathetic last August, all the plans that man made for the child—packing into one month, a whole year’s devotion.”
That night, after the party, as Prouty was falling asleep, she thought about the “lovely” child and the “terribly ordinary” mother, “beyond the pale socially,” left behind in her “dreary apartment” when the little girl went to visit her aristocratic father, and about why “such an apparently discriminating man” had married such an inappropriate woman. The next day Mrs. Prouty began to write a book about them. For her, the novel was never about “mother love.” It was a much more daring subject in 1923: about “the paths of the sensitive child of separated parents of different backgrounds with the resulting conflict.”
Stella Dallas was serialized in the fall of 1922 in The American Magazine and published in April 1923 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Soon after the book’s publication, Prouty had a nervous breakdown. She was forty-one years old and had lost two baby daughters within a period of three years.
In the novel, Prouty wrote about courageous themes: a woman—a mother—who refuses to be restrained by the conventions of marriage; who forsakes her child to go dancing with her husband and flaunts herself before other men; who refuses to follow her husband when he is given a promotion and assigned a big job in New York; who brings into her house a crude, overaffable “other man” who is shunned by the society she so venerates.
Mrs. Prouty wrote about divorce; about a child balancing her relationship with her mother and father and the fierce loyalty the child feels toward the mother as a result of the father’s leaving; about the mother’s struggle financially to give everything she can to the child and the vast disparity between the way the parents live.
“A novel of absolutely first rate importance,” said the New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times saw Prouty’s novel as “a book written with sophistication . . . there is no attempt at fine writing, and yet . . . the reader has the impression that all the effects of fine writing have been attained. There is no reason why Stella Dallas should not place Mrs. Prouty immediately amid such writers as Zona Gale and Willa Cather.”
Stella Dallas was produced as a play by Selwyn and Company with Mrs. Leslie Carter in the title role. It was not a pleasant experience for Mrs. Prouty, who watched helpless as Stella Dallas was turned into a play she barely recognized. The playwrights, Harry Wagstaff Gribble, a former actor who’d toured the American West with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in Pygmalion, and Gertrude Purcell, transformed Stella Martin—despite Prouty’s protestations—from a respectable woman who had attended the State Normal School—an innocent woman misjudged—into a wily, sexual, blowsy dame whose gaudiness and killing manner were played up in order to bring in laughs for the seventy-year-old Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Carter’s dressing room was locked shut so that none of the other actors could see her making up or see that her hair was a wig, then a taboo subject.
Edward G. Robinson was Mrs. Carter’s Ed Munn, Stella’s sometime lover and, later in the play, her husband. Robinson, as a teenager, had watched Mrs. Carter onstage, then a mature woman. Now, years later, Mrs. Carter would doze onstage and wake just in time to step on Robinson’s line.
Mrs. Prouty liked Harry Gribble and Gertrude Purcell “well enough,” she wrote to her husband. “But I do not think they are to the manner born when it comes to fine points of feeling and etiquette in play-writing. They’re rough-hewn. The play is a mess.”
Mrs. Leslie Carter, in her sixties, circa 1924. She was called the “American Bernhardt” and rose to stardom under the tutelage of David Belasco. (ROBINSON LOCKE COLLECTION, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS)
Mrs. Prouty realized early that Mrs. Leslie Carter “herself, is the problem. She’s pretty coarse,” she wrote, “and will ‘damn and gosh-darn’ and ‘golly’—till I’m wondering what sort of character I wrote about, anyway.”
Mrs. Carter was desperate for a solid characterization and a good director. “If [the director] had any of Mr. Belasco’s talent,” Mrs. Carter said to Mrs. Prouty one day during rehearsals, “he could make me your kind of Stella without all this agony. Mr. Belasco could make me a saint or a devil, a nun or a harlot, a lady or a slut, just as he chose. Such a director! Such an artist! And oh such a man!”
The feud between Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Prouty over the characterization of Stella continued.
“Mrs. Carter is acting pretty badly,” Mrs. Prouty wrote to her husband. “Showing unfortunate traits—ugly, teary, soft—hard—loyal—disloyal—all in one half-hour. Whenever she’s off-stage I like the play but when she’s on—I have to try and like it. Well, it isn’t my fault.”
Mrs. Prouty said later, “There are two things I want to avoid in my writing: sentimentality and melodrama.” The play, unlike her novel, was accused of both. Selwyn’s Stella Dallas was received by critics as “claptrap” and an “incongruous combination of burlesque and melodrama.”
• • •
For the silent picture of Stella Dallas, Frances Marion struggled to find the “thin line between convincing sentimentality and lachrymose melodrama.” For the remake, the Marion script, her first assignment for Goldwyn, was mostly unchanged. It was basically Gribble and Purcell’s script of the play.
During the filming of the silent Stella Dallas, Goldwyn kept Mrs. Prouty informed about the picture’s progress. He sent her stills that “puzzled” her. “There were characters I did not recognize and scenes I could not place,” she said. As a result of the play, there were gaping inconsistencies with Stella’s character and with the plot of the movie script.
In the movie, Stella Martin, as the young girl living with her parents, with her heart set on the handsome, dashing Stephen Dallas, is lovely, well-spoken, with energy and spirit; her clothes are modest with touches of color in contrast to the drabness of her mill-town family. She flirts shyly, with upward glances, with reservation. After she becomes Mrs. Stephen Dallas and has attained the stature she’s yearned for—married to a blue blood with a fine apartment on the other side of the river—she flirts outrageously with other men, dresses in outlandish clothes, and speaks in a shrill voice with a harsh mill-town accent.
In the silent version, there is the sequence when Stella and Stephen are courting. They sit on the veranda swing in front of Stella’s living room window. Behind them, from the other side of the window, are Stella’s brother and her father mugging and making fun of what to them is laughably fake—her modest demeanor when they know that their Stella is fun loving and playful, a cutup. She is holding herself back as a way to win Stephen’s heart.
In the Vidor remake, Stella, who had her heart set only on Stephen Dallas, is now, a year later, home from the hospital with their new baby, bored (inexplicably in story terms) with her husband, bored with his “iceberg-y” ways of doing things, his lectures about how she should walk and talk and comport herself.
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nbsp; She comes home with her new baby from the hospital an altogether different person. Gone are her modest clothes; instead, she is wearing a foolish hat of extreme design and an equally silly coat. Where before she wanted only to be Mrs. Stephen Dallas, now she’s fed up with having to adapt to his ways (“How would it do for you to do a little of the adapting, Stephen, a little of the giving up?” And when he asks her why she married him, she—bravely—returns the question, “Why did you ever marry me?”). When Stephen leaves for New York to take a big job, Stella (oddly in terms of the story but again as an interesting, brave choice) refuses to go with her husband and chooses instead to stay behind in Millwood (Millhampton in Prouty’s novel) with their baby.
Stella Martin is the ambitious girl who has married up and has arrived as Mrs. Stephen Dallas; why would she choose to stay behind in Millwood when her husband leaves for New York? The reason given: “I’m not going to leave here just when I’m getting in with the right people.” In the Vidor version, Stella’s decision to stay behind dislocates the story. Does she choose to stay behind as a small-town girl, frightened of leaving what is familiar and her childhood fantasy of an adult world?
On a date with Stephen while they are courting, they are at the movies. Stella watches transfixed as the screen lovers (they are watching Belle Bennett in the 1925 version of Stella Dallas) dance off to a private place where they turn toward each other and embrace; the picture ends with a they-lived-happily-ever-after kiss. Stella is so carried away by the power of the movie story it takes her a few seconds to come back to her real life. As they walk home, Stella tells Stephen, “I don’t want to be like me. I want to be like the people in the movies, everything well-bred and refined.”
Olive Higgins Prouty’s Stella makes the decision to stay behind when Stephen Dallas leaves for New York, and it makes sense. Prouty’s Stella Martin is the belle of her town, the girl who far outshines all the others; she has “stacks of style” and can “drape a straight piece of cloth about her hips and shoulders and [make] it assume fashionable lines all by itself.” She’s a girl with ambition who makes it through high school and completes a course at the State Normal School. She knows she’s different from the other girls, most of whom are content after ninth grade to work in the weaving rooms at the mills or else marry “some raw half-awake young man from the mills and have children, and children and children.”
Stella’s got confidence in her “personal charm.”
When Stephen marries her, he sees her limitations and crudities. He sees how she occasionally makes mistakes with grammar and in taste. But to Stephen, Stella is wonderfully sweet-tempered, always amiable, always gay; and he’s moved by the fact that she doesn’t pity him because of the family scandal he’s fled (the discovery that his father has embezzled and has subsequently committed suicide). Stephen is ready to “rub down [Stella’s] rough edges.”
In the novel, Prouty charts their class differences and shows how their marriage is undone by the inevitable: Stephen is tall and slight, aristocratic in bearing; Stella is plump and constantly nibbles on candy. Stephen loves the beauty of the outdoors and finds it exhilarating. Stella doesn’t enjoy the outdoors but uses it for practical purposes, as a means to reduce her weight. Stephen takes pleasure from reading and listening to music. “That dead, old-fashioned high-brow stuff” gives Stella “the fidgets” and “horribly bores her.” Stella’s only interest in books is in their decorative quality (she arranges them on the shelves according to the color of their bindings). She prefers movie magazines and finds comfort in them.
As Stella Dallas with John Boles as her husband, Stephen, and an unidentified child as their daughter, Laurel, 1937.
Stella doesn’t know Thackeray or Eliot or Trollope or Meredith (“Lord, what did he [Stephen] find in those old birds?” she asks); a violin makes her “want to scream” it’s so “squeaky”; she likes to go to a vaudeville show and a good play with “modern actors.”
Stephen, as the blue blood, is conventional; he is adaptable, approachable, accorded the advantages of his breeding and class, but to Stella he is glum and ill-humored (“What is he, an undertaker?” asks Ed Munn, to which Stella breaks into shrieks of laughter in recognition of the truth about her husband). To Stella, Stephen is someone who wants to tamp down her spirit and style. She may not have his breeding, she may be loud and conspicuous, but she’s got energy, and she wants to have “some fun in life.”
As Prouty shows how Stephen’s breeding comes to the fore, how his love of success cannot be denied, she shows as well how Stella’s lack of breeding does her in. Stephen, in horror, comes to see that he has married a woman he does not love and that the loneliness he feels is his burden to bear for his hasty choice. Prouty shows how, once Stella is received and accepted as Mrs. Stephen Dallas by certain Millwood prelates and officials, her innocence is turned into disastrous self-confidence, “how the limelight of recognition turns her into something hard and brittle that flies to pieces at his slightest touch.”
With Alan Hale, the towering hearty 220-pound actor as Ed Munn, with whom Barbara had worked in So Big and Message to Garcia. He began in one-reel, ten-minute Lubin pictures in 1912, appeared in Rex Ingram’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and John Ford’s The Lost Patrol, among others, but it was his small role in It Happened One Night that propelled him into another realm: Of Human Bondage, John Stahl’s Imitation of Life, and High, Wide, and Handsome, among them. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)
Stella’s transformation throughout Prouty’s novel is interwoven so that when Stephen leaves for New York, Stella’s choice to stay behind makes sense. Barbara’s Stella shows up basic problems with the script that Belle Bennett’s Stella was able to hide. Barbara’s Stella, so tender with her child, is not at all the same Stella who laughs at Ed Munn’s pranks.
Jean Hersholt as Ed Munn in the Henry King silent production is much less of a blowhard than Alan Hale. Hersholt’s Munn has a humanity Hale’s doesn’t have. Hale played Munn as wide and loud as he could.
Belle Bennett was able to evoke a real-life vulgarity, a woman not elegantly brought up; she evokes a woman with unsuitable responses to things. Bennett had the life to fill out her Stella Dallas. When Bennett stays behind in Millhampton, it feels right. Barbara saw playing Stella as a “double challenge.” There was Bennett’s performance “beautifully played.” Barbara saw that the way to play Stella was “on two levels, almost making Stella two separate women.”
As an actress, Barbara makes one expect subtle, delicate responses. It is the way her face moves, a sharpness, a strength that comes through, and an intelligence that make it hard to believe her Stella is unaware of the way people are responding to her.
“On the surface,” said Barbara, Stella “had to appear loud and flamboyant—with a touch of vulgarity. Yet while showing her in all commonness, she had to be portrayed in a way that audiences would realize that beneath the surface her instincts were fine, heartwarming and noble.”
Barbara accomplished what she set out to do with Stella.
“Portraying surface vulgarity” is a thin dividing line “between tragedy and comedy,” said Barbara, who made sure that “all of the facets of Stella—a great woman in spite of jangling bracelets and bobbing plumes—were never confusing to the audience.” It wasn’t confusing, just inconsistent with who Stella was. The constant in the character is the love Stella feels for Laurel, a love that, for Stella, supplants all others.
In one scene Stella and Ed Munn are on the train to Boston to pick up party favors for Laurel’s tenth birthday celebration. Ed has played a practical joke on the other passengers in the car: he’s duped them into thinking he’s a big winner on a horse race and shakes their hands, unbeknownst to them, with itch powder. Stella is quietly sipping sarsaparilla and, even as she objects to Ed’s antics, is drawn into the prank. The hapless passengers are now scratching every which way. Ed is delighted with the joke, and Stella is shrieking with laughter so much that they both
flee the car before they are found out and stumble into the next car, where Laurel’s teacher, Miss Phillibrown, is sitting. Miss Phillibrown is aghast at what she sees: Laurel’s mother with a man who is not her husband and carrying on in a rowdy, vulgar way. Stella doesn’t notice Laurel’s teacher; nor does she see the disapproval on her face or anyone else’s. (In the silent picture, Miss Tibbets spots Stella in Boston leaving a boardinghouse with Ed and assumes they’ve shared a room when they had innocently stayed in separate bedrooms.) It is hardly believable that Stella doesn’t recognize Miss Phillibrown when she’s recently come to Stella’s house; it is equally hard to believe Stella doesn’t notice how she and Ed are being looked at by the other passengers.
Ed becomes serious and tells Stella once again how he feels about her. She explains to him, with nobility and with Barbara’s full-throated softness and resonance, “It’s not personal, Ed. There’s not a man living that could get me going anymore. Lollie just uses up all the feelings I got. I don’t seem to have any left for anyone else.” That Stella is believable, and real.
Other inconsistencies occur when Dallas surprises Laurel on Christmas Day and asks Stella if Laurel can spend the day with him. Stella and Laurel have planned to open presents and then “take in a show.” Stella is glad to see Stephen, and when he asks her to join them for dinner before they are to catch the train back to New York, Barbara’s Stella sees in Stephen the man she fell in love with. Gone is the blowsy, loud common woman; she is modest and quiet and excuses herself to get ready to join them for dinner. She removes the frills and extras from the dress she’s made in order to please Stephen. She comes back into the living room wearing a simple dark long-sleeved dress.
When, later in the picture, Stella is summoned to the office of Dallas’s lawyer, she is once again strident, brusque, dressed to the tens in outlandish hat and coat speaking in a more outlandish lower-class accent and a shrill voice to tell the lawyer what for.
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 69
