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

by Victoria Wilson

  Studios were frantic to have those actors and actresses traveling in Europe return to America as soon as possible. Norma Shearer, Tyrone Power and his wife, Annabella, and Edward G. Robinson were in France. Douglas Fairbanks and Robert Montgomery were in London. Maureen O’Sullivan had been one of only ninety-six passengers out of a possible two thousand on a crossing of the Queen Mary to London.

  The Tele-View newsreel theater in Hollywood increased its business, one of the few theaters to do so. Barbara and Bob were among the many who went to the newsreels to find out what was going on with the war in Europe.

  Their plans for a European trip, including bicycling for part of it, were canceled because of the war. Bob suggested South America as an alternative. Barbara wanted to see Europe first; if she couldn’t go to Europe, she preferred not to go anywhere—and didn’t.

  • • •

  A week after completing Remember the Night, Barbara appeared on Lux Radio Theatre in Wuthering Heights, from the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur adaptation of Samuel Goldwyn’s picture. Brian Aherne was her Heathcliff; Ida Lupino, Isabella. William Wyler’s picture had been released five months before and was a big hit. Radio Theatre listeners had sent in letters requesting that Lux present Wuthering Heights on the air. J. Walter Thompson paid Barbara her usual $4,000 for the broadcast.

  The Englishness of the novel, its underscoring of gentry and class, seemed to be an intimidating element for Barbara and kept her from capturing the more nuanced, challenging aspect of Cathy’s character: the “perverted passion and passionate perversity” of her attachment to Heathcliff, lower-class, illegitimate, a black gypsy who falls in love above himself.

  Barbara seemed more concerned about her English accent than portraying Cathy’s passionate love (“I am Heathcliff”) for her demonic stepbrother. For someone who read as much as Barbara did, there was an awe of English society and an England that existed in the hearts and minds of novelists and in the movies.

  Barbara’s Catherine Earnshaw, a nineteenth-century English girl of the moors, was too modern, too contemporary—a rare off note in Barbara’s many Lux appearances. Her voice was too strident, too shrill. There wasn’t a nineteenth-century bone in Barbara’s body.

  Cathy’s marriage to Linton as an escape from her incestuous love for Heathcliff is a rush to convention, a turning away from her uproarious emotions toward order, comfort, kindness, civility, all the gentler virtues that society has to offer. It was impossible for Barbara to play a weak-willed woman, a woman who turns her back on emotion for convention.

  Cathy and Heathcliff’s love for each other is a contract of childhood so intense, so binding, that they cannot outgrow it (“He’s more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”), as the Brontës could not get out of their contract of childhood, they could not prolong the idyll of it. Barbara is not a conventional woman. She understood the deep feelings forged in childhood and its bond; she had that pact with her own brother.

  Always the up-from-under girl, Barbara was not someone who could act against her true feelings or run from them if they challenged family life. She could never turn away from passion because she didn’t want it. Barbara is about surviving. Love may get in the way, or be the way; she can sacrifice herself because of love but not sacrifice love because of pleasantness, courtesy, and comfort.

  After the “curtain,” DeMille called the actors back onstage to the microphone to take a bow and say a few (scripted) words to the audience. Barbara said of Wuthering Heights, “It’s a moving play, C. B. But more than that, I think it has a lesson today for every woman. It shows the necessity of holding on to one’s ideals.” As for the moors, Barbara said, “It’s no place for my Irish imagination.”

  • • •

  The move from Marwyck into town caused Barbara to lose too much weight. She was down to 106 pounds and was on a regimen to gain back some of it. Barbara was disciplined about food; she didn’t approve of people being fat. It implied negligence. She ate little—roast beef au jus; steak, rare (“Just let it bow to the broiler on the way over”); hamburger, raw. She could be ravenous until she sat down to eat, and then her appetite vanished. Other times she would eat something she shouldn’t. She drank up to twelve cups of coffee a day and ran on nervous energy.

  If she couldn’t fall asleep until five in the morning and had to be at the studio early, she was up an hour after she fell asleep and sometimes went as long as twenty-eight hours without a catnap.

  During the move from Marwyck, cartons of liquor and wine were stacked on the patio to be brought into the house the next day. Bob and Barbara’s Great Dane and golden retriever knocked over the cartons, which fell and broke on the patio floor. The dogs lapped up the wine that spilled and the following morning were hungover.

  Barbara brought most of her furniture from the ranch. It was simple, contemporary, comfortable. Two couches faced each other in their new living room. Looking down on the furniture was a six-foot painting by Paul Clemens of Barbara in a red velvet full-length gown. An imposing phonograph, given to her by RCA for doing an advertisement for the company, stood in the living room; at Christmas, a large tree took its place.

  The bedroom and sitting room on the second floor overlooked sycamore boughs and a garden at the back of the house. The bedroom had a tufted flowered-chintz bed; the sitting room was simple, without dressing table, elaborate mirrors, or perfume bar. Around a white brick fireplace were a Victorian sofa and a large wing chair, unadorned lamps, and tables piled with books.

  Bob loved to cook. When he wasn’t cooking, Barbara ordered the meals and planned the menus, something she never did before knowing Bob. She didn’t care what she ate, but Bob was particular about food.

  Barbara loved to clean; ashtrays were emptied as fast as they were used. “You were never royalty,” said Bob to Barbara on her fanatical cleaning. In another age, he told her, she would have been the scullery maid, never the princess, although his affectionate name for her was Queen. If the kitchen was a mess or a toilet had to be scrubbed, even with a cook or a maid in the house, Barbara did the cleaning and scrubbing.

  The gardeners who tended the grounds were out every Saturday mowing the huge lawns. The smell of newly cut grass was so intoxicating to Dion it made him want to get on his bike and ride forever.

  • • •

  Two weeks after moving into the house in Beverly Hills, Barbara was trying to open a window that had been painted shut. It wouldn’t give. She hit the frame with the heel of her right hand. The glass broke; her wrist was cut. She was bleeding badly and was taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and rushed into the operating room. For the next hour, the doctor, whose patients included other actors and performers—Sylvia Sidney, Alice Faye, Mickey Rooney, Al Jolson—sutured Barbara’s severed tendon with fifty-five stitches. Bob was at work shooting retakes of Remember? Barbara didn’t call him; she didn’t want to worry him or interrupt his work.

  Barbara went through trouble alone. At Marwyck, one night in the midst of the move, she awakened in the early morning hours in horrible pain from food poisoning and paced in darkness for the rest of the night instead of waking Bob, who was working the next day, or asking Uncle Buck to drive her to the hospital. In the morning, she went to work with spasms of pain rather than cause a delay in shooting.

  After putting her arm through the window, Barbara spent the night in the hospital and went home the next day with a splint on her wrist and a special glove to protect her hand.

  After the accident, there was talk of what had happened and why Barbara hadn’t told Bob about it. Barbara’s response: “I’m not the morbid type, and if I were, what in heaven’s name have I to be morbid about? I’m lucky and happy and I know it.” DeMille sent Barbara a telegram telling her how sorry he was about her hand. The success of Union Pacific resulted in the director’s signing a new four-year contract with Paramount. Barbara wrote back thanking DeMille and said that she’d wanted to call but knew he wasn’t feel
ing well—he was still having prostate difficulties—and didn’t want to bother him.

  “I can’t write very good yet so please do forgive me,” she wrote. “My hand is healing nicely. The stitches were taken out a few days ago. Could I please have an autographed picture of you C.B.? I hope you are feeling better and may I please work for you soon again. Devotedly Barbara.”

  Barbara worked with DeMille on Lux Radio Theatre when she starred in the Margaret Sullavan part in Universal’s Only Yesterday, first directed in 1933 by John Stahl. It had been Sullavan’s screen debut and was from the Stefan Zweig novella Letter from an Unknown Woman and Frederick Lewis Allen’s “informal” history of the 1920s. George Brent performed on the air opposite Barbara.

  The same night marked the premier broadcast of The Hedda Hopper Show, also on CBS; the show was fifteen minutes long and was to run three times a week.

  • • •

  Barbara’s picture Golden Boy and Bob’s Lady of the Tropics opened within a few weeks of one another: Lady of the Tropics at the Capitol in early August; Golden Boy in New York at the Music Hall on Labor Day weekend.

  Reviewers were full of praise for Mamoulian’s translation of Odets’s play and his portrait of the brutality of prizefighting. They wrote of William Holden’s “at times perfect” interpretation of Joe Bonaparte. It was Lee J. Cobb, at twenty-seven, also a newcomer to pictures from the Group Theatre, as the senior Bonaparte, and Sam Levene, as the taxi driver brother-in-law, who walked away with the picture and the reviews.

  Barbara, who captured Lorna Moon so thoughtfully and worked so hard to coach Holden to build a difficult role, was passingly acknowledged by critics (“A solid performance,” The Hollywood Reporter; “Stanwyck has supplied just the proper note of cynicism and frankness,” said The New York Times). Reviewers took their cue from Odets’s setup and regarded Lorna Moon in the piece as a character there to support the men instead of seeing how central she is to the play and how delicate a role it was to create. Variety called Barbara’s performance “a standout . . . [it] does much to provide a sincere ring to the picture.” Barbara’s deftness made it look too easy.

  Lady of the Tropics was called “hokum” by Louella Parsons, “grand opera tragedy; more droll than deadly” (“The fact that Mr. [Ben] Hecht emerges with his reputation intact,” wrote Frank Nugent in The New York Times, “is something which belongs among his own recently published ‘Book of Miracles’ ”). Bob Taylor’s work was acknowledged despite the picture (“Taylor turns in a good performance under the circumstances,” said Variety). Hedy Lamarr was dismissed (“It is necessary to report that Lamarr is essentially one of those museum pieces, like the Mona Lisa, who are more beautiful in repose”).

  Bob was slipping in popularity. Pictures like Lady of the Tropics weren’t helping his career. The Motion Picture Herald’s annual poll listed Mickey Rooney as the top motion picture personality of 1939, with Shirley Temple falling from first place after holding that spot for four years. Gable, Tyrone Power, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and Sonja Henie were among the top ten American stars. Bob was now in the category of honorable mentions, along with Bing Crosby, Deanna Durbin, Wallace Beery, Myrna Loy, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Ginger Rogers, and Cary Grant.

  • • •

  A month after Barbara’s accident, she and Bob, just back from a week in Mexico City, flew to New York for a ten-day belated honeymoon, to rest, Christmas shop, buy clothes, and see every show they could. Barbara still had a splint on her wrist.

  She didn’t have to start work at United Artists on Cheers for Miss Bishop until January. She would be working with Archie Mayo on their fourth picture together. The script, by Stephen Vincent Benét, was from the Bess Streeter Aldrich novel Miss Bishop, published in 1933, about a dedicated midwestern schoolteacher from pioneer stock who sacrifices the richness of conventional life for service.

  Bob was to start work soon on Flight Command by Commander Harvey Haislip and John Sutherland. Haislip had written a picture—Thunder Afloat—about German U-boats invading American waters in the Great War that opened in mid-September 1939, weeks after Europe was at war. Haislip’s new picture was a propaganda story about preparedness. Metro made clear it did not advocate war, though the studio was hoping to get the cooperation of the navy for the picture.

  Barbara and Bob flew into Newark Airport and went to the Pierre, where they were staying. While in New York, they went to see Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes. The curtain went up, and a woman turned around and whispered so the entire house could hear, “Look, there’s Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor!”

  Their presence caused such a commotion in the theater that during the first intermission Barbara and Bob moved to the back row. The next morning a friend called to ask if it was true that they had walked out on Tallulah’s play. Barbara wrote a letter to Miss Bankhead explaining what had happened. “I wanted her to know that we didn’t walk out,” said Barbara. “I have too much respect for actors who are trying to do their best, to be the cause of upsetting them.”

  Miss Bankhead wrote back saying that the story hadn’t reached her but that if it had, she would not have given it any credence.

  Barbara and Bob saw Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, then running in its eighth month. Joseph Cotten was C. K. Dexter Haven; Van Heflin, the journalist; Shirley Booth, the photographer. Barbara and Hepburn had been accused in the press of feuding. Barbara thought Hepburn wonderful in the play and wrote to tell her so.

  In between going to the Billy Conn–Gus Lesnevich bout at Madison Square Garden, Barbara and Bob went to a party given by Moss Hart on their behalf. Hart’s play with George Kaufman, The Man Who Came to Dinner, had opened on Broadway a month earlier.

  A guest at the party went on about how badly movie stars behave in New York. Barbara sat and listened. “Aren’t you going to defend Hollywood actresses?” “No I am not,” said Barbara. “There’s no excuse for those girls. They know better than that. They are rude and someone should tell them so. Just because we’ve been lucky enough to make money and get our names in lights doesn’t give us the right to be rude.” Edna Ferber overheard the exchange, rose to her feet, and bowed to Barbara, who smiled back and turned to Moss Hart and said, “Be sure and invite me back again sometime, if you want to break your lease.”

  After the party, Hart, Barbara, and Bob drove to Bucks County for the weekend. Hart’s eighty-odd-acre farm was an hour-and-a-half drive south of New York. He referred to his eighteenth-century fieldstone house, Fairview Farm, as “my Pennsylvania extravagance, my appalling little dream-farm, my beautiful white elephant,” and dubbed himself the “Jewish Ethan Frome.” Fairview Farm’s regular guests included Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, and Katharine Cornell.

  Hart’s neighbors, George and Beatrice Kaufman, lived a mile down the road on Barley Sheaf Farm, which Kaufman called Cherchez la Farm. The Kaufmans, who rented an apartment on East Sixty-Third Street, had bought the house in Bucks County following his much-publicized scandal involving Mary Astor.

  Moss Hart was an avid shopper of colonial antiques. “When I go into a store,” he said, “I’m convinced that every piece of merchandise on every shelf is trembling with desire to belong to me.” During the weekend Hart took the Taylors antiquing for their new house.

  • • •

  Barbara and Bob flew to South Bend to go to the Notre Dame–USC game and watch, along with fifty-six thousand other spectators, the Fighting Irish battle the Trojans and lose in the last three minutes of the game to USC’s two battering-ram running backs, Grenville Lansdell and Ambrose Schindler, 20–12.

  Barbara and Bob arrived back in Los Angeles in time for their prizewinning German boxer, Princess Ondra, to give birth to her first litter of eight puppies, which were to be given away as Christmas presents.

  Barbara made it clear to her friends that if they planned to give Dion presents, they shouldn’t spend more than $1.95 and that if the gifts cost more, Dion wouldn’
t get them. The year before Dion had received thirty or forty expensive presents from Bob and Barbara and their friends. Barbara felt that no child could cope with that much and disciplined herself not to give Dion a surfeit of things. She was trying not to be extravagant with him. Though she wanted him to have the things she didn’t have as a child, she thought she’d overdone it and that it wasn’t helping him.

  The piles of presents under the tree with Dion’s name on them were, by Christmas Eve, diminished by half. Dion had shaken and felt each wrapped present in an effort to guess what was inside. Barbara explained to him that there were many poor people in the world and that he could have five of the presents; the rest were to be sent to orphanages.

  Barbara’s generosity with others was legendary. She didn’t speak of it and didn’t want it mentioned. She never went to charity bazaars or benefits but sent anonymous gifts to those who were in need—wheelchairs, crutches, and braces to a local clinic for paralyzed children whose parents couldn’t afford to buy the equipment. She redid a hospital room for a short story writer and playwright who, months before, had been severely burned all over her body when her dress caught fire and she was forced to spend months recovering in the hospital.

  Barbara felt that too many possessions for her son would deprive him of a proper perspective on what was important. She saw it as a way of building Dion’s character; he saw it as an inexplicable punishment.