by Axel Madsen
Vidor’s memories of the filming were bitter. Halfway through, Goldwyn stormed onto the set and berated Vidor and everybody else, calling the performances bad. He wanted to fire Vidor and Stanwyck and close down the picture. Late that night, he called Vidor at home, apologizing. He had seen the rushes again. They looked wonderful.
“It was painful,” Vidor recalled. At the end of principal photography, he posted a note to himself above his desk: NO MORE GOLDWYN PICTURES! Barbara, however, remembered Goldwyn’s directive that the flowers in the film be real. No actress of his would have to stick her face in a piece of wax.
Released in August 1937, Stella Dallas grossed more than $2 million. Calling the Prouty drama terribly dated for 1937 audiences, the New York Times’s Frank Nugent nevertheless found “Miss Stanwyck’s portrayal is as courageous as it is fine. Ignoring the flattery of makeup and camera, she plays Stella as Mrs. Prouty drew her; coarse, cheap, common, given to sleazy dresses, to undulations in her walk, to fatty degeneration of the profile. And yet magnificent as a mother.”
The film was nominated for an Oscar. The other Best Actress nominees for Best Performance in 1937 were Luise Rainer (The Good Earth), Irene Dunne (The Awful Truth), Greta Garbo (Camille), and Janet Gaynor (A Star is Born). Perhaps a good omen for Stella, Anne Shirley was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category.
With Bob as her escort, she attended the March 10, 1938, Academy Awards presentation. The klieg lights popped when Stanwyck and the costar of Camille entered the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. Early in the evening, Shirley lost to Alice Brady for In Old Chicago. When it came to the Best Actress award, the winner was Luise Rainer. Barbara was crushed. “My life’s blood was in that picture,” she said. “I should have won.”
Her mistake was perhaps her own. She was someone who never pretended to be what she wasn’t. She was too much a regular person, too much what studio and producers hoped regular people were like. Everybody accepted her work. No one questioned whether she was good. Incandescence is made by oversized presence, built-in glare, excess, inscrutability, and low cunning, not by being a hardworking pro and a good sport.
Ironically, she was the most natural American actress. Movies with irresistible foreign femmes fatales were becoming passé. Katharine Hepburn was slightly eccentric, Joan Crawford often outrageous. In Bette Davis, Warner Brothers created a homegrown Evil Woman who topped the fervid, hypnotic, and remote Garbo-Dietrich allure. With her startling eyes, disdainful mouth, clipped, almost British, speech, Davis was becoming the screen’s ultimate bitch. In a series of reckless, unsympathetic but high-powered roles that no other star dared try, she interpreted connivance, neurosis, psychosis, and the vain Southern-belle heartbreaker in a series of box-office hits.
Stanwyck was the independent woman. Even if the roles she played weren’t natural, she made them look that way. With her distinctive style and pulsating voice, she projected both toughness and warmth, cynicism and sensitivity. She had competition from Davis, Hepburn, and Crawford when it came to assertive women’s parts, but as a freelance she didn’t have to ask for permission from Warner, Berman, or Mayer. Several prestige films eluded her, but her lack of pretensions and workmanlike professionalism made her a “director’s actress” even when her relationship with Cohn, Warner, and Goldwyn remained prickly.
To 1970s feminists, Barbara’s portrayal would be seen as Every-woman as victim. “Stanwyck brings us to admire something that exceeds in stupidity and beauty and daring the temperate limitation of her literary model and all the generalizations about the second sex,” Molly Haskell would write. In a larger overview twenty years later, Elizabeth Kendall would see Stanwyck’s ability to reveal grief and loneliness ever so movingly beneath a tough and efficient front as a side of her that made canny directors want to create parts explicitly for her: “Capra had been the first, but John Cromwell in Banjo on My Knee also dramatized Stanwyck’s wild loneliness, and so, in another way, did King Vidor in Stella Dallas.”
Although nominated three more times, she regretted most losing the Stella Dallas Oscar.
Young Ruby Stevens and big brother Malcolm Byron, Brooklyn.
David Porter Collection
Barbara Stanwyck,
1927.
Courtesy of the
Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Noose (left to right):
Stanwyck, Cherryman, and
Helen Flint.
David Porter Collection
Rex Cherryman.
Billy Rose Theatre Collection
The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Hal Skelly and Stanwyck in Burlesque, Barbara’s first big stage hit, 1927. New York Public Library
The Locked Door, with Harry Stubbs (left) and Rod La Rocque, United Artists, 1929.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Fays, 1930. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Frank and Barbara in Malibu, 1930. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
With Frank Capra, for Ladies of Leisure, Columbia, 1930. Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives
Ladies of Leisure, with Ralph Graves (left) and Lowell Sherman.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Rising young star, 1931.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Frank Fay in God’s Gift to Women, with director Michael Curtiz and Joan Blondell, Warner Brothers, 1931.
© 1935 Turner Entertainment Co. All rights reserved.
Dion Fay at nine. Joan Benny Archives
With Joel McCrea (left) and director Alfred Santell for Internes Can’t Take Money, Paramount, 1937.
Copyright © by Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA Inc.
Barbara Stanwyk: The Paramount treatment.
National Archives
Robert Taylor. First publicity shot, 1934.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
MGM photo session for newcomers Betty Furness and Robert Taylor.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Barbara and Bob in This Is My Affair, Fox, 1937. © 1937 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
Stella Dallas, with Anne Shirley, United Artists, 1937.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
With Cecil B., who directed parts of Onion Pacific from a stretcher, Paramount, 1939.
National Archives
Golden Boy candid: William Holden and Barbara, Columbia, 1939.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Marrying Bob Taylor, 1939.
Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Remember the Night, with director Mitchell Leisen and Elizabeth Patterson, Paramount, 1940.
Copyright © by Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA Inc.
Mitchell Leisen and crew filming Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Remember the Night.
Copyright © by Universal City Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, Λ Division of MCA Inc.
15
OFFSCREEN
BARBARA’S QUEST FOR SELF-TRANSFORMATION WORKED SPLENDIDLY on movie sets. Offscreen, she had never resolved her need to be in control and her wish to be taken care of. The conflict disappeared for a while in her relationship with Bob because she was so overwhelmingly in charge. Bob tried to please, tried to avoid arguments. He had a hard time expressing anger, felt guilty easily, was quick to assume blame, to continue to defer to his mother. However, both wished to continue their glasshouse professions unscathed. Bob would admit years later that they were not in love.
Barbara was all work and, for play, found sufficient distraction watching
her horses run at the Santa Anita racetrack. Whereas her thoroughbreds were for racetrack winning and she had no real favorites, Bob raised quarter horses and gave them names. The respect of coworkers was enough for her, and most nights she was either reading scripts or learning lines. But her devotion to her work never inspired Bob to demand more of himself. She was protective of him. She called him “Junior”—behind her back he called her “The Queen.” If anyone wondered about marriage, she said Bob was immature, that she didn’t think he should be tied down.
People sometimes found them oddly stiff and, in the company of other stars, less than brilliant. Joan Crawford’s know-it-all manner intimidated Barbara. Joan might put plastic covers on her furniture, but in her closets she had an index card with photograph and swatches attached to each dress to remind her when and where she had worn it.
Before she went anywhere, she consulted her index cards so as to be able to tell her hostess, “So nice to see you. I haven’t seen you since that premiere in New York.” Barbara was too straightforward to be that brazen, but she enjoyed watching the effect of her friend’s gall on people. When at Joan’s, she hung back and observed.
In Carnival Nights in Hollywood, Elizabeth Wilson caught Stanwyck and Taylor at the beginning of a Crawford soiree:
The guests are all assembled before Joan appears, pausing first at the top of the stairs. She has the best tan, Barbara Stanwyck the worst (busy working days on Stella Dallas). While long and lean Gary Cooper plays with the marble machine in the game room, challenging Una Merkel and Charles Boyer to a game, Cooper’s lovely wife talks to Betty Furness and Pat Boyer. Luise Rainer and her husband, Clifford Odets, arrive, and Franchot Tone instantly goes into a huddle with Odets. The two know each other from New York. As Ginger Rogers eyes the food, Robert Taylor and his girlfriend, Barbara Stanwyck, who suffers the torture of the timid, play ping-pong while Joan Crawford looks on holding a little glass of sherry, which she never touches.
Barbara said she disparaged herself because she believed others were going to, and she wanted to beat them to it. She worried, mostly about things that didn’t happen. She was intense about everything, “bitter about a lot of things and clinging to them (sometimes the chip on my shoulder wasn’t exactly invisible either).”
One place she and Bob were relaxed was at Mary and Jack Benny’s dinner parties. The Bennys loved to entertain in their grand Roxbury Drive home in Beverly Hills. Benny was the number-one radio comedian, the suave, vain, know-it-all braggart who seemed so on top of things even if his cast made a fool of him every week. His radio show paid him $25,000 a week, and he was also busy in movies. As a young man in vaudeville, he told Barbara, he had been influenced by Frank Fay.
Jack and Mary Livingstone (née Sadie Marks) had been married since 1927. Their adopted daughter, Joan, was Dion’s age. Mary did everything for Jack. She made sure she was seen in the right restaurants, driving the right car, shopping in the right stores, and that everybody knew she was Mrs. Benny.
The Bennys’ parties were celebrity events and ranged from intimate dinners for twelve to dining under a garden tent for sixty to a hundred.
Mary always had the best food and the prettiest china, and she had her annual September barbecues catered by Chasen’s. The guests were usually married couples, George and Gracie Burns, producer William Goetz and his wife, Edith, the Mervyn LeRoys, the Charles Vidors. Beatrice Kaufman, George S.’s formidable and much-cheated-on wife, would remember meeting Barbara and Bob with Sam and Frances Goldwyn at the Bennys’.
Besides being mothers of adopted children, Mary and Barbara had compatible temperaments. They were not late-night people. They tended to be reclusive, but knew how to make fun of their insecurities. The couples were comfortable together; Barbara, Bob, Jack, and Mary often went out as a foursome and were capable of sitting at a nightclub for almost an hour without saying a word to each other.
BOB NEVER USED HIS GOOD LOOKS TO HIS ADVANTAGE, SAID HIS friend Lloyd Nolan. If anything Bob considered his handsomeness something of an embarrassment that prevented him from being a regular guy. It was his impression that MGM wanted to maintain his bachelor image. When the reporters asked Barbara if she would marry him, she said no. When the press asked him, he said they were just good friends. Metro spent lavishly, and Howard Strickling worked assiduously, to make Robert Taylor a “man’s man,” giving him a series of rugged roles and honing his outdoorsy image. Bob’s only insurrection was against his mother. As a movie star going on twenty-six, he felt it was time to create distance between himself and Ruth. She renewed her attacks on Stanwyck and blackmailed her son with teary forewarnings that he was killing her. What would happen if she had a heart attack? Bob got her twenty-four-hour nursing care. Promising he would look in on her every day, he bought a spread next to Stanwyck’s ranch in Northridge.
Buying land in “the Valley” was the latest fashion among both irregular and married couples. Gary and Veronica “Rocky” Cooper lived on a ten-acre ranch in Van Nuys, Spencer and Louise Tracy had bought a nearby hacienda-style house, and Hal and Louise Fazenda Wallis, a silent-film comedienne, had a sixty-acre spread on Woodman Avenue in Sherman Oaks. Carole Lombard and Clark Gable—he still married to Rhea Langham Gable—purchased a twenty-acre property in Encino. Surrounded by acres of citrus, fig, peach, and plum groves, fields of oats and alfalfa, a nine-stall stable, a barn, and a pigless sty, Bob’s two-story white brick-and-frame house had nine rooms and spacious red-brick terraces. The second floor featured two adjoining master suites—a “his” decorated in brown and beige, a “hers” in blue and white.
It is impossible to say what their sexual relations were. Bob was known to be attracted to people of his own sex; Barbara lived the very private life of a successful independent woman. They could drive to the ocean on a date and sit silently watching the ocean. He was timid, she skittish, witty, full of fun, but had difficulties with intimacy. She had little tolerance for duplicity, but there was nothing she could do about his homosexual reputation.
Hollywood was not noted for its fondness for actresses over thirty. Paramount refused to renew Marlene Dietrich’s contract in 1937, and for the next year the thirty-six-year-old Marlene, touted as the most glamorous, most alluring woman in the world, was out of work. The thirty-year-old Stanwyck nevertheless worked nonstop under the direction of the cream of filmmakers, made scads of money, and created for herself a well-controlled and increasingly private life. Whether Louis B. Mayer or some go-between warned her that Metro wanted Robert Taylor to stay single, she was smart enough to hang back. By telling Bob he shouldn’t be tied down, she made him look to her with lofty consideration.
He knew he couldn’t match her life experience. He told people he was in awe of the way she had practically brought herself up, that she was someone he could depend on. She had never emulated actresses who dressed too cute and too young and only managed to fool themselves, and with Bob she didn’t pretend anything. She considered it a weakness to give in to moods. Yet as they saw more of each other, she began to like giving in to Bob’s whims.
She liked who she was and how her life was going. The booming film industry was a floating stock company. She had worked with some of the best and brightest in all sorts of combinations. Studios and directors paid attention to her. “If you say, Ί don’t like this script, I don’t like so-and-so,’ most of them will listen to you,” she would say in a career interview. “And if they think your ideas are valid, they will call in the writer and you discuss it as adults and professional people should.”
Uncle Buck was a reassuring presence at the ranch, always there, always ready to help. He was her link to Mildred, who had brought her up. Byron was nearby, but Mabel’s fate had been as tragic as their mother’s. She had married, given birth to a son, and died before little Eugene Vaslett was two. Barbara felt her nephew was her responsibility, and over the next twenty years saw Eugene through college.
Barbara’s friendship with Jack and Mary Benny deepened as their da
ughter and Dion became buddies. The Bennys loved the desert air and the golf and rented houses in Palm Spring before they bought a home next to Tyrone and Annabella Power. Barbara had finally learned to drive and on Sundays piled Dion into her Chevrolet and drove to Palm Springs. “My mother was not the easiest person to get along with but Stanwyck was constantly over at the house,” Joan would recall. “I thought she was nice.”
“SKIP STANWYCK WAS MY FIRST BOYFRIEND. WE WERE FIVE OR SIX, and we were first on two-wheel bicycles. Skip used the surname Stanwyck. He was adorable with freckles and sandy blond hair. He sent me my first love letter—in almost indecipherable capital letters scrawled all over the place it said with classical simplicity, Ί love you.’ Together we picked wild flowers in an enormous field behind the El Mirador, rode our bikes and explored the neighborhood. And possibly each other as well. To me he was Skip; later he became Tony. I remember us at my parents’ home in Palm Springs, and pictures being taken of Skip and me with our bikes.”
Joan Benny might find Dion adorable with his freckles and sandy hair. To Barbara, he was neither winsome nor stimulating. He was overweight and seemed to have little personality. Did it occur to her that her feelings confused him? There are no indications that she questioned herself. Indifference and rejection are common reasons for overeating, but Barbara never associated Dion’s overeating and unresponsiveness with her lack of interest in him. Barbara tried to teach Dion to be tough. As a child she had hated discipline. Responsibility was something that had been thrust on her, not something she had gone looking for. It had been the same for most of the other kids in Brooklyn. She recited a poem she had learned by heart. There was no down in eagles’ nests. Eagles nests were built of scratchy sticks and little rocks.
