Stanwyck

by Axel Madsen

  Crawford was also a bisexual who not only had a torrid affair with Gable under her husband’s nose but seduced young women when they were available. More than one young reporter would tell of interviews at the Crawford residence at which the star, under the pretext of needing to change, invited the journalist to continue the conversation while she dressed for dinner. Once in the bedroom, Crawford made remarks about the color coordination of the reporter’s clothes and, picking designer dresses from her own closet, suggested the visitor slip out of her dress and try on several outfits. At nineteen, she had appeared in a pornographic movie that, in 1935, led blackmailers to extort a reputed $100,000 from MGM in return for the negative. Photos of a reclining naked Crawford, eyes heavenward in real or fake ecstasy, a woman between her spread-eagled legs, circulated in the pornographic underground. Christina Crawford, Joan’s adopted daughter, would say that her mother tried to sleep with a hired nurse. “I knew about my mother’s lesbian proclivities,” Christina would write in Mommie Dearest, “and this only added to what I had already figured out for myself.”

  EVIDENCE OF LESBIANISM AMONG HOLLYWOOD’S STARS WOULD always remain elusive. While homosexuality, real or supposed, was a topic of gossip, the film colony’s gays lived double lives, hiding part of themselves from blackmailers, tabloid columns, and guardians of conformity and decency. The rules were not the same for lesbians and homosexual men. As long as a woman could show she was married or occasionally available to men, lesbian affairs were more acceptable in some circles than avant-garde art. At the same time, lesbians were more protective of each other than gay men. Women who dared perceive themselves as gay rarely risked admitting their lesbianism, even among women they were all but certain were also lesbian. Since childhood, Stanwyck had known how to hide her innermost feelings. Stardom had taught her pretense and how to resort to one-of-the-boys chumminess, elaborate surfaces, and campy disguises. Throughout her life, she would erase and deny all areas of intimacy. She would never define herself by her feelings for Helen Ferguson.

  Sex is often a minor part of lesbian attraction, rated below respect, loyalty, and trust, and Stanwyck’s lifelong friendship with Ferguson was framed within the public bounds of a working relationship that no one would question. Helen was Barbara’s publicist.

  An actress turned press agent and career counselor, Ferguson for nearly thirty years remained Barbara’s friend. She had married and divorced an actor, and, on a second try, married a banker. Helen was as hard-driving and hard-swearing as Barbara, and her racy cussing was much admired by Barbara and by Helen’s other clients—Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Henry Fonda, Nelson Eddy, Jeanette MacDonald, and Robert Taylor. Helen charged Barbara $400 a month and for twenty-seven years never varied her price. She claimed she was a publicist who never told the press a lie. When pressed on the point, she conceded, “We certainly present the facts as dramatically as the facts allow.”

  Born in Decatur, Illinois, Helen had started playing bit parts at thirteen in Essanay two-reelers in Chicago and made her stage debut the same year as Barbara. Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood. Her first husband was the actor William “Big Bill” Russell, her second spouse Russell’s best friend, Robert L. Hargreaves. Helen quit acting for public relations in 1930 and, with Jewel Smith as her associate, managed the Helen Ferguson Publicity Agency at 321 South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. Barbara and Helen had a lot in common. Neither of Helen’s two marriages had produced a child. Both women struggled with feelings of uneasiness and inadequacy in their marriages. Helen was good company, if at times a bit overwhelming. By the mid-1930s their friendship was something of a joke to Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone. “Why do you always bring that maid of yours?” Mary would ask. To which Barbara would pretend offense and reiterate that her friend was no maid. When they traveled together and Helen insisted too much on the star treatment for Stanwyck, Barbara was brutal. To Helen’s “You are entitled” in front of hotel front desks or limousine drivers, Barbara would sneer, “Oh, shut up, Helen.”

  Helen Ferguson came into Stanwyck’s life at a time when Barbara’s faith in her marriage was floundering, when she felt she no longer knew how to set things right, when she no longer believed she could keep a lid on what her husband was doing to himself and to them. Helen was dependable where Frank was unreliable. She was a good person, fun and assertive, where Frank was a strain. Barbara reached out to Helen, but resented Helen for meeting a lot of her needs. We do not know whether the two women physically consummated their relationship—and psychiatrists of a later period would argue that the question was immaterial—but their affection for each other was lasting. Helen would live on and off at the successive Stanwyck estates, always present at critical moments in her life.

  Intricate checks and balances marked their relationship. Stanwyck never mixed or confused her on-screen persona with her offscreen self. As much as she willingly bared herself for a camera, she hated revealing her private life. It was Helen’s job to tell the world about Stanwyck, to tout the luminous performer. Golden-age Hollywood demanded glitter, and Helen knew earthiness didn’t lend itself to star worship. Barbara didn’t mix with the smart set. She wasn’t quotable. Helen limited access to Barbara, imposed a distance as if she were afraid members of the press would discover there was less to Stanwyck than they expected. Although Barbara occasionally resented Helen for mothering her, she trusted her not only to pick the journalists she should see, but to sit in on the few interviews they both found unavoidable, steering questions away from what would have made the Barbara Stanwyck story more than the prosaic little-girl-lost, up-from-the-bot-tom saga. Copy from the Helen Ferguson Agency described Stanwyck’s sincerity, loyalty, and intrinsic honesty and turned her head-over-heels falling for Fay into reticence. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” said a 1938 Helen Ferguson Agency ten-page biography. “Barbara was on top, she didn’t need any help, didn’t want to marry.” The “bio” postponed the St. Louis wedding by a year. In a digression that perhaps reflected Barbara’s adult marital trouble more than a memory of parental discord since she was three when her mother died and her father disappeared, she was quoted as saying the reason she had hesitated to marry Fay was that she “remembered what marriage meant from her childhood days.”

  Stanwyck was never inside, or “in the life,” as the lesbian bar phrase of the period had it, but the screen image of gutsy, self-reliant, and self-assured woman she developed combined with her reticence to tell the world about herself made her a lifelong icon of gay women. Unearthing the truth about her sexuality would remain impossible, not only because Helen never quite trusted us with the real Barbara, but because Tinseltown’s anything-goes myth encouraged prurient conjecture. People would swear that she was, with Greta Garbo, Hollywood’s most famous closeted lesbian, that “everybody” knew. Some would say they were friends of so-and-so who had been her lover. Such informants, however, would shy away from giving the name of the woman or retreat into generalities. The Fays were never thought of as “twilight tandems,” nor was their marriage a “lavender” cover-up. Barbara enjoyed people—men—as long as they didn’t come too close.

  CATHOLICISM AND JUDAISM—THE PREDOMINANT FAITHS OF SHOW-biz people—are explicitly antagonistic to same-sex love. Although Hollywood was more tolerant of drinking, drugs, cohabitation, and avant-garde politics than the rest of the country, homosexuality was a deadly proclivity that, if found out, usually meant instant ruin. Since it was hardly in any studio’s interest if word got out that its leading man was faking it when he kissed the leading lady, homosexuals lived behind the wall of silence. Arm-twisted by the studios that had them under contract, suspected lesbian actresses routinely married, many of them husbands who were homosexuals.

  To heterosexual males Stanwyck was provocative, to women in love with women she was affirming. To lesbians growing up in loneliness, lacking contacts with other lesbians, fearing parental shock and despairing of finding examples to emulate, the Barbara Stanw
yck screen image defined her as “one of us.” The reason was not any coded message in gestures or delivery, but the way the screen characters to which she gave life defined themselves in their own terms and were comparatively independent of men and of household expectations. What made lesbians sit up and notice was that when Stanwyck confronted men there was no subliminal I’m-Jane-you’re-Tarzan glint of the kind Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell used. Stanwyck was mocking and emotionally honest, and the way she related to the opposite sex was different from that of the screen’s other tough ladies.

  To a majority of lesbians of her day who saw marriage as the safest front and therefore the only viable choice, she was someone who arranged her life in such a way as to avoid public censure yet, on the screen, luminously defied respectability. In the dark anonymity of a movie theater, lesbians didn’t care that the plot demanded Stanwyck be attracted to a man. They told each other the characters she played in Ladies of Leisure, Ten Cents a Dance, Ladies They Talk About—much lesbian slang came from women’s prisons—and Baby Face “worked” for them. They watched every new Stanwyck movie and projected their sexual instincts onto the screen and read their yearnings into Barbara’s straight gaze and pulsating voice.

  Her sexual ambivalence was buried deep in her private nature. She grew up without focused attention, knowing she didn’t really matter to anybody. Accepting herself became a lifelong undertaking. She didn’t believe private behavior could reveal public character, but turning made-up parts into full-blooded women was the essential rush of her life. The camera was never a threat, the curiosity of strangers was.

  The “gay lib” of the 1970s and ‘80s made Stanwyck uncomfortable. When a gay activist asked about her sexual preference, he was nearly thrown out of her house. Her marginal childhood made her want to conform. Anything borderline was risky. Her politics were right of center, not so much because of Frank’s conservatism but because of her deep-seated need to be in control. Others might liberate themselves, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, from “unreal loyalties,” including loyalties to accepted sexual norms. But Barbara never considered her relationships with Helen Ferguson, Crawford, and others as having anything to do with the attachments between “real lesbians.”

  Despite his risqué stage repertoire and rogue swagger, Fay was a prude. He had worked with Eva Le Gallienne, an actress who was candid about her lesbianism, but he was convinced Katharine Cornell was more applauded because she concealed her sexual inclination in her long-term marriage to bisexual producer Guthrie McClintic. When Frank said he wanted his wife to stay home, he expressed prevailing women’s magazine convictions that a woman holding down a professional position was in danger of losing her womanly qualities. With Barbara, he avoided discussing matters that might prove embarrassing to either of them.

  Stanwyck’s only public brush with convoluted morals charges came in 1934 when a private nurse sued her. Stanwyck had hired Elizabeth Curtis in New Jersey and brought her to Los Angeles. Claiming she was owed $3,500 in wages, the nurse alleged that Stanwyck had wanted her to live with Frank’s father and in a deposition hinted that sexual favors had been expected of her. In the absence of specifics, everyone assumed it was Francis Donner’s libido, not his daughter-in-law’s, that Nurse Curtis had been expected to stroke. Charles Cradick handled the damage control as he had done in Barbara’s contractual dispute with Harry Cohn two years earlier. Hinting that the young woman’s character was more suspect than her pay claim suggested, the lawyer told the press that Stanwyck would not dignify the allegation with an answer. “If persons engaged in the motion-picture business made public statements each time unwarranted demands were made on them for money and such statements were published in the press, there would be little, if any, space for other news.”

  Curtis’s Superior Court suit was filed March 9, 1934, naming Stanwyck, Frank Fay, and his father as defendants. Frank and Barbara spirited Francis Donner to Arizona so he couldn’t be subpoenaed to testify and, through Cradick, let it be known they were visiting Donner in Arizona themselves. When District Attorney Burton Fitts began checking the nurse’s allegation, she dropped charges of sexual impropriety. In an amended complaint filed three weeks later, she withdrew her statement that Stanwyck had induced her to stay with Donner Sr., and reduced her complaint to compensation for services as “private nurse, companion, maid and cook.” Her $3,500 suit was settled out of court.

  ALTHOUGH STANWYCK AND CRAWFORD WERE SOMETIME RIVALS FOR juicy roles over the years, they remained lifelong friends, on occasion comforting each other. Joan would recall how Barbara climbed over the wall one night, saying she was leaving Frank and asking if she could spend the night. “Their fights were dreadful,” Joan would remember. “He hit her often. Franchot hit me, too. When it goes that far, the time has come to call it quits. Barbara and Frank might have made a success of their marriage if they’d gone back to New York.” Crawford believed her friend stayed married—and in Hollywood—because the sacrifices on the way up had been too hard. “Like Barbara, I was challenged by Hollywood. We fought and starved and begged. How could we give it up even for a good marriage?”

  The deepest contradiction in Joan and Barbara was a need both to be in control and to be taken care of. Marriage, even a cracked marriage, gave both a sense of belonging and stability. It was par for the course. Besides Crawford and Tone, Barbara’s old roommate Mae Clarke had suffered the same indignities trying to keep her husband in gambling money. Mae had played the heroine in Universal’s Waterloo Bridge, portrayed Lionel Barrymore’s daughter in This Side of Heaven, and come close to stardom when James Cagney pushed half a grapefruit into her face in Public Enemy. Her husband, Lew Brice, never got anywhere in pictures, and after years of being known as Fanny Brice’s brother, he instead become known as Mae Clarke’s husband. When she came home after a day’s work at the studio, Lew would demand, “Who the hell have you been flirting with today?” and rough her up. After he roughed her up one day she spent the night at her sister-in-law’s. They had divorced by the time of the Cagney grapefruit scene, and Lew made it doubly famous in New York by entering the Strand Theatre just before Cagney shoved the grapefruit in Mae’s face. Lew sat and gloated, left, and returned for the next screening. Mae starred with Cagney again in Lady Killer, and critics had fun with Cagney picking on her again, this time dragging her around by the hair. In 1936, Cagney and Clarke were teamed a third time in Great Guy, but the routine mercifully had become repetitious.

  Frank couldn’t cope with a life beneath his abilities. He had what Barbara called a “wounded animal” attitude toward bad luck. In his own mind, there was nothing irrational in believing that for him the movies were jinxed. So firmly did he accept this that there was nothing to explain. Hollywood was out to get him.

  While he began negotiating with Broadway impresarios about another return, Barbara tried a new tack—involving him in her career. She told him Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck agreed she could have some say in the choice of films. For each of her remaining three commitments, Zanuck would submit six possible stories for her consideration. If she wasn’t sure, Zanuck, she, and Frank would make the final choice.

  Both Columbia and Warner Brothers publicists tried to deflect newspaper inquiries into the state of the Fay marriage, but Frank foiled their best efforts by acting up in nightclubs. Friends excluded them, and when Frank realized invitations had dried up he blamed her. Barbara ignored the blows Frank administered, refused to see anything terribly wrong. She went along with whatever he wanted, covered for him. She let him tell people he was the star and his wife merely fulfilling a contract. On nights out, she drank with him. She had never found life to be fair, and she took Frank’s abuse. He was no longer the man she had looked up to, but she, couldn’t give him up. If she did, she would be back to the worst aspects of her unconnected, empty childhood.

  FRANK GOT A MOVIE. STARS OVER BROADWAY WAS HIS FIRST IN four years, a tongue-in-cheek opera movie starring Pat O’Brien. Fay played
the master of ceremonies at a comic amateur hour against O’Brien’s manager of the Metropolitan Opera and tenor James Melton’s classical singer.

  Their fights continued. Few personal mementos would survive a fire at her house in 1938, but one undated letter, written to Frank after one of their brawls, told of her desperation to hang on to him, to somehow make it all come out right, even if it meant the end of her career.

  I love you just as much as it is possible for a woman to love a man. If I were born with anything fine in me, and I choose to think I was from what I know of my father and mother, you have brought that fineness to the surface.

  I cannot imagine life without you and I am not being melodramatic.

  I probably do not give you the impression at any time—that of not being able to imagine life without you, I mean. However, that is due to my lack of education and not being able to express myself clearly in speech.