by Axel Madsen
ALSO BY AXEL MADSEN
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Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
STANWYCK
AXEL MADSΕΝ
iUniverse.com, Inc.
San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai
Stanwyck
All Rights Reserved © 1994, 2001 by Axel Madsen
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ISBN: 0-595-19398-6
ISBN: 978-1-4759-2377-3 (eBook)
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
“I HOPE SHE LIVES”
BROOKLYN
“STARK NAKED, I SWEAR”
REX
FAYSIE
HOLLYWOOD
CAPRA
LOW-BUDGET LIFE
WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?
DEPRESSION BLUES
SINGLE
ARLY
PRIVATE LIVES
STELLA
OFFSCREEN
SCREWBALLS, MR. C.B., AND GOLDEN BOY
MARRIAGE
HE FAR PASSIONS
THE LADY EVE
THE SWEATER GIRL
PATRIOT GAMES
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
RAND AND WARNER
UNEASY PEACE
BEARING WITNESS
PREJUDICE
PRIMAL WOMEN
FALSE FRONTS
HERSELF
B PIX
SHARP REMINDERS
“THE BARBARA STANWYCK SHOW”
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
MATRIARCH
GOLDEN GIRL
CLOSING NUMBER
IT WORKED DIDN’T IT?”
NOTES ON SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
ENDNOTES
She has played five gun molls, two burlesque queens, half a dozen adulteresses and twice as many murderers. When she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was terrific.
WALTER MATTHAU
Acknowledgement
MY INTEREST IN BARBARA STANWYCK GOES BACK TO THE TEN YEARS I WAS a Hollywood writer and journalist. I interviewed Stanwyck on the set of “The Big Valley” and later in connection with her work on “The Colbys” television series. After her death in 1990, I realized that the Stanwyck story had never really been told. I wrote this book to help fill the gap and to satisfy my curiosity about a golden age.
I am indebted to many people who helped me with this project. Some contributors are no longer living; others asked for confidentiality. My respect and thanks extend to everyone, including, in Los Angeles, Iris Adrian, William Aldrich, Maggy Maskel Ferguson, Nina Foch, Michael Hargraves, Dr. Robert J. Kositchek, Frank McCarthy, Nolan Miller, Terry Sadler, Viege Traub, Gertrude Walker, and Billy Wilder.
In New York, Joan Benny, Tracy Devine, and Tom Miller; in Detroit, Shirley Eder; in Paris, Alain LéGrignou, and in Carversville, Pennsylvania, David Greenwald.
I also want to extend special thanks to Dana Harrington and to my agent, Jane Jordan Browne.
1
“I HOPE SHE LIVES”
TO GET UP IN THE MORNING AND, ON A SOUNDSTAGE, TO BECOME more intense and riveting than the reflection in the bathroom mirror fulfilled her deepest existential need. To crawl into fictional skins, to step into the pool of fused, dedicated light and hear a director’s call for action suspended the banality of living. To assume made-up characters more raffish, witty, and lovely than her own self made hurts and failings go away.
She was an orphan when she was three. In her daydreams her parents had been rich, but somebody had got it all mixed up. It was all a big mistake. She was the princess on the pea. Not that it led to any folie de grandeur: “I just wanted to survive and eat, and have a nice coat,” she’d say late in life. The norm of her childhood was struggle, confusion, and pain, but she learned not to blame anybody. Pop psychology wants us to understand Bette Davis in terms of her stage mother, Katharine Hepburn by explaining her doctor father. There is nobody to explain Barbara Stanwyck. She found it a bit embarrassing herself and in self-defense made her childhood a taboo subject for much of her life. In her eighties, she relented. “All right, let’s just say I had a terrible childhood. Let’s say that ‘poor’ is something I understand.” She thought there was something second-rate about not having a mother, that she wasn’t good enough—not altogether the woman she should be, not quite the actress people kept telling her she was.
A movie role was a nice coat to slip into, to disguise, not reveal, who she was. The lines were written in advance, and saying them masked the lack of education she knew was the reason she had a hard time expressing herself. From fifteen to eighty she was the perpetual overachiever and an exception to the rule that artistic temperament rarely goes hand in hand with financial smarts. She kept as firm a grip on herself as she did on her money.
A streak of bitterness ran deep in her. It made her earthy, instinctive, sarcastic, weary of sophisticates, and not very good at the games of love. Her orphan childhood made her deny her soft, caring, and vulnerable sides. She was too straightforward, too headstrong for romance, and couldn’t believe a partner would want the relationship any other way. Men and women were equal, she believed, because character has nothing to do with gender.
She was a woman of allure, dogged calculation, and repressed emotions. She possessed a keen native intelligence, had a tongue as sharp as a rapier, yet her orphan’s powerlessness left a hollow core in her that she hated. She was easily bored with herself and, to flesh out her existence, took any role. She taught her adopted son to take the knocks on the chin and to forget to cry. Her scrapper’s mettle, her emotional reserve and cheeky pluck gave her a gravity that directors realized they could capture with a camera. Frank Capra embarrassed her when he told her that her austere beauty, wide th
in mouth, straight brows, and classical nose projected purity, a kind of lonely gallantry and self-assurance that gave the scripted wisecracks contrast. In her fifties, “The Barbara Stanwyck Show” failed because as a TV host she had to open the show by standing there, stripped of a part, and be herself.
THE CONFLICT THAT SHAPED HER LIFE—AND MADE HER SO INTER-esting to watch on the screen—was the struggle between her wish to give of herself and her need to be in control. Too special and too identifiable to play Everywoman, she was wrong for many of her parts. Prestigious films eluded her as she aged, yet she survived the cameras for an astonishing fifty-five years.
She did not burst onto the scene. She eased on and eased off even more leisurely. Frank Capra’s Ladies of Leisure was her breakthrough, but it was already her fourth movie. The Night Walker was her eighty-eighth and last, but it was followed by twenty years of television, much of it unworthy of her talent. She played a rich mix of characters, many of them gutsy, self-reliant women, faith leaders and chiselers, gold diggers and saps, burlesque queens and cardsharps. When movies got fewer and shabbier in the 1950s and ‘60s, she let go playing high-ridin’ women engaged in brutal mating games. Her sexuality in The Furies and Forty Guns is so arrogant that to win her the gunfighters in love with her practically have to kill her. There were also portrayals of victims, of course. Barbara did her share of movies in which a woman sacrifices herself for her man, her child, for other women, and she excelled at that other movie staple—the tough reporter who goes mushy in the fadeout. She was attracted to roles that required her to annihilate herself in another, invented woman and knew how to endow both her victims and hard-as-nails dames with faux-naïf cunning and dramatic sense. She was fearless when it came to fleshing out swindlers, gun molls, dupes, and sentimental masochists. “Some of my most interesting roles have been completely unsympathetic,” she said. “Actresses welcome such parts, knowing that vitriol makes a stronger impression than syrup.” She talked a good game, but lost her nerve when Joseph Mankiewicz offered her All About Eve. Playing an actress on the skids terrified her.
To be a star is to live in a glass house, yet Stanwyck eluded just about everyone. She knew how to choke off subjects she didn’t want to talk about, how to close doors behind her, even to friends. Many insiders were surprised when Malcolm Byron Stevens died in 1964. They didn’t know she had a brother.
A lot was never known about her.
SHE GREW UP AFRAID OF TRUSTING ANYONE, AFRAID OF PEOPLE finding out she didn’t belong to anybody. Her insecurity gave her tough veneer. It also gave her the kind of discipline that helps a person hang on to dazzling success. She longed for acceptance and stability, but the first man who paid attention died when she was twenty-one. She rushed into the arms of a riveting charm-pot and had to learn all over again that the only person she could count on was herself.
People who met her for the first time were surprised by how small she was. She stood all of 5’ 3” and most of her life weighed under 115 pounds. In her teens her voice was already deep and husky and made her sound like someone with a secret. Her alto was all-business, and it deepened over the years into a voice whose throaty undertone warned of the scam to come. In many of her films, there is a suggestion of zingy, smutty sex, of a woman enjoying her perversity and control. She saw life as a poker game. You play the hand life deals you. If men lose, it’s their problem. Instead of seeing the glint in her eyes they should watch the cards in their hands.
She was the incarnation of grace and save-your-ass resilience that defined an era. While remaining the least mannered and pretentious of the stars of her period, she was up there with Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn. Her uncanny way of looking at herself as if she were a third person appealed to both male and female audiences. Lesbians in search of role models adopted her as one of their own. They admired the qualities she projected, her inscrutability to the opposite sex in her films, the way she related to men. Fear of her own feelings and of society’s reaction made her surround her intimate life with discretion. People could never wrest from her anything she didn’t want them to know.
She maintained an easy camaraderie with her strong directors—William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder. Capra wanted to tumble into bed with her, but discovered a greater rush in the way she goaded his talent. There is a measure of irony in the fact that her all-round good sport, “director’s actress” reputation robbed her of choice roles. Self-respecting legends are supposed to throw tantrums, to knife fellow actors in the back, to intimidate employers. The scheming of her friend Joan Crawford to get the Mildred Pierce title role so awed its producer that the casting of Stanwyck was rescinded. Barbara could never convince David O. Selznick she was perfect for the good-time girl dying of a brain tumor in Dark Victory or Jack Warner that The Fountainhead’s woman between two men was her.
She was famously married to actors for periods of her life. Frank Fay was a one-man vaudeville act who sank in direct proportion to her rise. She felt guilty and responsible for his failure and veered from wanting to lose herself in the marriage to being fiercely independent, deepening her fears of intimacy. Their seesaw relationship became so much a model for A Star Is Born that Selznick hired lawyers to make sure the screenplay wasn’t liable to court action. Growing up shifting for herself may have tempered maternal instincts, but to save the marriage she conned Fay into adopting a baby. She was never close to the boy. When he was six she banished him to a succession of boarding schools.
She married Robert Taylor on her terms. She treated the matinee idol as an adolescent and humiliated him in front of the macho friends he so desperately needed to reinforce his masculinity. Their sex life, such as it was, lasted only months, but the marriage turned out to be a clever career move. They were a fulsomely correct couple during World War II and the Hollywood witch-hunt years when, politically, they swung sharply to the right. He loathed his own screen-lover image and hated the pretty-boy roles that made women swoon. Upholding the image, however, was all-important. When challenged by Ava Gardner, he climbed into bed with her. In old age Stanwyck’s passion for him turned morbid. Twenty years after he died, she became convinced his ghost was visiting her, that he had returned to guide her into the afterlife.
STANWYCK WALKED TOO FAST, TALKED TOO FAST, AND MADE TOO many pictures. She made no excuses for her clunkers with Ronald Reagan, Barry Sullivan, and Joel McCrea. She told interviewers that if she didn’t have fun working, she wouldn’t be doing it. When people suggested such sentiments were typically associated with actors like James Cagney and Spencer Tracy, she answered, “Maybe we’re just more used to these traits in men, so that we associate them with masculinity instead of character.”
Barbara worked tirelessly to improve herself. Because she realized she lacked education and social graces, she read, studied, and, to deal with people smarter than she, built an armor plate of one-of-the-boys wisecracks. She detested people who felt pity for themselves. She hated hats, flattery, feathers, and conversationalists who began their sentences with “Listen …” She never veered out of control, never suffered tortured brooding or chemical dependencies. Acting was a job. She put on lipstick without a mirror and when people asked, “What if it smears?” she said, “Then the makeup man fixes it. That’s his job. We all have jobs.” She refused to watch the dailies or to be technical. “Don’t teach me, take care of me,” she told her cinematographers, who over the years ranged from studio journeymen to “name” cameramen like George Barnes, Rudolph Maté, and James Wong Howe. Not to have a role lined up in some movie made her restless. When married to Taylor she agreed with him that she should have some other interests, but went right ahead signing up for film after film. Fellow actors both admired and resented her self-punishing exactness. She was never late on a shoot, never forgot her lines. They paid her a lot to do what she liked best, she thought. The least she could do was get there on time.
STANWYCK WAS A HOMEBODY WHO TRAVELED ONLY UNDER DURESS.
She visited Europe only three times and, feeling out of her depth, lapsed into a caricature of the American yahoo abroad. For half her long life she lived alone and called herself a bachelor woman. In her later years she spent long, solitary nights drinking herself into a stupor.
Like many movie stars of her generation, she smoked herself to death.
Bad health plagued her old age, but she refused to let the public see her fall apart. She had the memory of an elephant. It took her from thirty to sixty, she said, to sort out and jettison the clutter in her mind. “I think living in the past, clinging to memories and souvenirs of days long gone, treating the present as a sort of hazy, second-rate competitor of the ‘good old days,’ is an anesthetic for those who have too little to do, and too much time in which to do it,” she proclaimed.
Being a loner gave her otherworldly insights that astonished even her. “I see things, I have instincts,” she said on her eightieth birthday. “Many times before somebody says something, I know what they’ll say. A couple of times people said, ‘You’re weird.’” Nancy Sinatra, Sr., her best friend during her later years, thought she was reincarnated, that she had been on this earth before. To which Barbara cracked, “Other people say senility is setting in.”
SHE WAS OF A PERIOD THAT WASN’T ALL-KNOWING ABOUT SHOW business. Her stardom didn’t rely on finding an angle or a spin. She never “did” Barbara Walters, or “The Tonight Show,” or a book tour (or a book). Her best friend was her publicist, who saw to it that the Stanwyck-Taylor marriage fell apart according to sanitized Hollywood standards. Nobody quoted Barbara on her conservative politics during the Red Scare or interviewed her brother or her sisters back in Brooklyn.
In today’s ever-recycled entertainment world of short and shallow screen careers and video-rental accessibility, she is an intriguing personality of a fabled age, the orphan as ready vessel into which roles are poured. Hollywood’s pinnacle decades were her busiest, and happiest, years. The all-powerful studios and the most gifted directors wanted her. She was married to the top studio’s handsomest leading man, was a pro’s pro, and earned scads of money.
