Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  Katharine Hepburn turned down The Mad Miss Manton (1938), a low-grade mystery about a loopy debutante who keeps finding dead bodies and must solve the murders herself with the aid of her society girlfriends. It’s easy to see why RKO offered it to Hepburn and easy to see why she nixed it. Why Stanwyck took it is another matter. She had rejected a lot of scripts from RKO and Fox, and I suppose at a certain point you just have to give in and do something or other. Henry Fonda got stuck playing the male lead, Peter, a newspaperman, and he was so miserable that he rudely ignored Stanwyck on the set. But he and Stanwyck already have sexual chemistry together in this first film they made together; maybe his initial rejection of her peaked Stanwyck’s masochistic interest.

  There are so many m’s in the title that it doesn’t have room for the heroine’s first name (Melsa). And Stanwyck can’t play the farcical obliviousness of this dizzy dame, though she tries and even scores a laugh or two, mainly with physical business. Her Park Avenue friends seem like a Stage Door (1937) hangover, and writer Philip G. Epstein keeps slipping in joking references to communism that might have rankled right-wing Stany if she hadn’t been so busy running around solving crimes and eying Fonda with interest (it was close to one hundred degrees the summer this movie was shot, and the girls were in fur coats, so getting the project done quickly was a priority). It’s a film where people keep throwing water at each other, and the biggest laugh comes when Stanwyck jabs a fork in Fonda’s rear. The only grace note is the ending, where Peter insists that he’ll happily live on Melsa’s money, a refreshing reversal from Michael’s pig-headedness on this subject in The Bride Walks Out.

  The perils of being a working woman come into play again in You Belong to Me, Stanwyck’s third pairing with Fonda after their triumph in The Lady Eve, and this issue is resolved most satisfactorily, for once. The action starts out with some Hal Roach slapstick on skis, as Fonda’s Peter tries to impress Stanwyck’s Helen by yodeling and making hairpin turns until he lands headfirst in the snow. Helen pulls Peter out, and they ride together back to their hotel (Fonda looks very happy to be snuggling up to Stanwyck, while she looks a bit embarrassed—or forbearing).

  When Peter finds out Helen is a physician, he asks, “Are there many women doctors?” and Stanwyck answers, “A few,” in her huskiest, most melancholy voice (she’s bleached all the Brooklyn out of it here, whereas Melsa Manton sounds more like Prospect than Central Park). Stanwyck is a knockout in her tight white sweater and long hair, and she has great fun using nonsense medical terms while she cares for Fonda, nattering on about the posterior and the tibia and the fibia. The whole movie has that creamy Columbia look of the forties, with lots of satin bedcovers and silky robes. Wesley Ruggles, the film’s underrated director, realizes that his picture is basically Stanwyck and Fonda and their chemistry with each other, so he keeps them in lingering two shots so that they can create the kind of give-and-take you might see at a good live theater performance. Fonda’s “little boy” act can get a bit grating, but he eventually offers a fine portrayal of a rich brat who has nothing but time on his hands to be suspicious of his wife and her male patients.

  Stanwyck seems like a doctor, and when she talks about how much her work means to her, it’s easy to believe her. She does some inventive physical bits. After a fight leaves some of her hair over her eyes, she takes a moment to see the hair, actually crosses her eyes slightly, then blows the hair back with one big puff (proof that if Stanwyck wasn’t a naturally funny person, she could certainly find “humor” if she looked hard enough for it). The plot seems to be turning in an unwelcome direction as Helen decides to give up her practice to be a “good wife,” but it quickly gets back on track for a final scene that lets us see that Peter understands how important his wife’s work is to her.

  Christmas in Connecticut (1945) is the sort of holiday movie that seems to have been made as bland as possible so that audiences can watch it after stuffing themselves with turkey and cranberry sauce. The movie revolves around a single, entirely predictable situation: Stanwyck’s city girl writes a popular newspaper column where she poses as a country wife and mother, and when her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet) insists on spending Christmas with her, she has to acquire a husband, a baby, and an antique-stuffed farm in short order. It’s the kind of script that might come alive with any halfway-competent comedy director, but Peter Godfrey directs in a plodding, totally uninterested manner.

  “Nice firm rump,” says soldier Dennis Morgan, staring at a cow, and Stanwyck straightens up for a second, as if she’s afraid he’s talking about her, but the timing is way off. Stanwyck isn’t even at her second best here. In one of her last scenes, she rattles off a list of things she’s tired of and finishes with, “In short, I’m tired!” giving this last “tired” a too-cutesy upwards inflection. She begins the film as another craven journalist, but soon the script asks her to be unaccountably ditzy when she falls for Morgan. Surely it would have been more intriguing to see Stanwyck go head-to-head with Greenstreet in a melodrama, à la Flamingo Road (1949).

  Only Stanwyck’s love of horses can possibly explain why she chose to do The Bride Wore Boots (1946), a woeful comedy in which she plays the horse-loving wife of horse-hating Robert Cummings (maybe her worst leading man). This is a fifth-rate script, and Stanwyck speeds us through most of it. But what’s odd here is that she seems to be giving a performance made up of spare parts borrowed from other comediennes. She tries out some Jean Arthur dithering when she has to be dizzy in a divorce court, scatters practically every other moment with Irene Dunne “ums” and “ahs,” and often falls into a Katharine Hepburn “a-ha-ha” laugh. Indeed, this movie asks her to laugh through her scenes so often that the strain really shows. Stanwyck isn’t a laugher, and she looks put out by her two obnoxiously bratty on-screen children, one of whom is a blond little Natalie Wood.

  In one particularly distasteful plot twist, the mother of the Stanwyck character has the kiddies eat too much, so that they’ll throw up and reunite their warring parents over their sickbed. This lapse in taste was reflected off-set when director Irving Pichel ordered Cummings to do a perilous stunt ride over and over again, only to be stopped by a coolly disgusted Stanwyck, who told Pichel in no uncertain terms that if he ordered a further take, he wouldn’t direct her in another scene. I wish Pichel hadn’t directed her in any scenes, and I sorely wish that Stanwyck could have done something less actively unfunny for what turned out to be her last film comedy.

  Private Lives

  Fay’s End, Robert Taylor (His Brother’s Wife, This Is My Affair,

  The Night Walker), Robert Wagner

  Oscar Levant described Frank Fay’s influence over Stanwyck during their marriage as “suffocating and total.” In a drunken rage, he once threw their adopted baby, Dion, into their pool. When he knocked Stanwyck down in front of a screaming Dion (after she had admitted going to a burlesque show), she finally felt that enough was enough and asked for a divorce in 1935. There was a custody battle for Dion, and when Stanwyck won it, Fay seems to have lost interest in the boy. Fay would sometimes drunkenly call and plead with Stanwyck to come back to him; she finally stopped accepting his calls. As an old woman, Stanwyck admitted to a reporter that if she had one thing to do over again in her life, she wouldn’t have married Frank Fay. Early in their marriage, she had said, “Gee, it’s swell to have somebody to talk to, somebody who can stand between you and the world,” but the protectiveness she liked in him all too soon became smothering and abusive.

  In the forties, Fay pulled himself together and made a comeback on stage in Mary Chase’s Harvey, as a man who has an imaginary rabbit as a friend. Tallulah Bankhead said that it was “one of the greatest performances I’ve seen,” and raved about the way Fay did “a long speech in the last act which just made me cry.” So let’s give this devil his due. He probably did accomplish one really fine thing in the theater, though James Stewart got to do the movie version of the play. Well into Fay’s successful run of Harvey, colum
nist Earl Wilson asked Stanwyck if she had seen it. She said no. He asked if she was going to see it, and her reply was withering—and funny: “A long time ago I saw all the rabbits Frank Fay had to offer.”

  Her agent, Zeppo Marx, and his wife Marion played matchmaker after her divorce from Fay and set her up with a young up-and-coming actor from MGM, Robert Taylor. Four years younger than Stanwyck, Taylor was totally dominated by his mother, a Silver Cord type of manipulator who complained of her health in order to keep him under her control. Stanwyck called Taylor “Junior,” and he called her “Queen,” and they went out on social dates for a while. Jean Harlow was meant to star opposite Taylor in His Brother’s Wife (1936), a convoluted melodrama, but MGM paired him instead with Stanwyck to capitalize on their courtship publicity.

  Taylor enters the film in a tuxedo, and he’s supposed to be drunk. He isn’t as bad as he is during his extended drunk scene in John Stahl’s Magnificent Obsession (1935), which made him a star—but he isn’t much better. This is the brief period when Taylor is at least technically good-looking, but there’s already something wolfish and downright nasty about his manner—in close-up, there’s a creepy and even Dracula-esque quality about his face, as if his hooded eyes were wearing eye shadow. Stanwyck plays a mannequin who’s good at gambling, and she looks at Taylor with interest at times—wonderingly, speculatively—while he barely seems to notice her. That’s part of what makes him such an obnoxiously poor actor; he always delivers his lines in a hearty, bluff fashion that often deteriorates into discordant displays of ill-temper, which never seem merited by the situations in his movies.

  Taylor spent more than twenty years at MGM, and he suited that studio’s inattention to nuance and its glossy, respectable surfaces, whereas Stanwyck was too honest and exploratory to fit into the house style. When she gets upset in the early sections of His Brother’s Wife, her truthful acting disrupts the whole apparatus of the film. “Too bad she had no dignity,” she says when she realizes Taylor is casting her aside. She pulls back and sees herself in the third person, distancing herself from the scene and the movie itself to give us a demonstration of how people deal with extreme trauma. In a moment like this, Stanwyck’s inventiveness can be awe-inspiring, but there isn’t much she can do to save the rest of the fast-paced film.

  This is MGM, so a key plot turn whereby her heroine gets revenge takes place mostly off-screen (to preserve audience sympathy for her character, presumably), and when she suffers in the tropics and then becomes a human guinea pig to test a serum to cure spotted fever … well, as Taylor’s father (Jean Hersholt) says, “Love! It puzzles me more than science.” More revealing is an earlier scene where gambling house owner Fish Eye (Joseph Calleia) looks at Stanwyck and says, “What surprises me is why a swell-looking girl like you always falls for a piker.” She has no answer for that one, and it would take an expert psychoanalyst to get to the bottom of Stanwyck’s own consistently bad taste in men.

  At one point in their second team effort, Taylor actually says the title, This Is My Affair (1937), and he gets top billing and most of the plot of the movie, a tale of espionage supposedly based on a true story and set during the McKinley administration. More assured and less objectionable here, Taylor even pulls off an intimate love scene with Stanwyck, lying on his back and opening his mouth when she kisses him. As a fancy dance hall singer, Stanwyck has little to do but look pretty, albeit in a softer way than usual. The whole film presents her face carefully, “beautifully,” in just the way Capra righteously rejected when he went for the truth of her being in Ladies of Leisure.

  She sings a song, “I Hear a Waltz,” in her own husky voice, and it sounds a little strange—she wanders off pitch sometimes, which might be part of the reason she barred Taylor from watching her do this scene. His vaunted male beauty made her self-conscious in the worst possible way, which is probably why she seems concerned with her physical appearance in this picture to the exclusion of all else. Director William Seiter was more at home with romantic comedy, and he lets Sidney Blackmer make Teddy Roosevelt into a thin caricature while observing the uneasy romance between his stars.

  Sheilah Graham wrote an exposé in January 1939 for Photoplay called “Hollywood’s Unmarried Husbands and Wives,” which included Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, as well as Stanwyck and Taylor. If Graham hadn’t written this article, Stanwyck and Taylor most likely wouldn’t have gotten married, but her piece enraged MGM head Louis B. Mayer, and he insisted that Taylor marry Stanwyck at once. They tied the knot, and Taylor spent his wedding night with his hysterical mother and her heart palpitations. On their brief honeymoon, they stayed with Moss and Kitty Carlisle Hart in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Once back in Hollywood, they had separate bedrooms.

  In 1941, when he was making Johnny Eager, Taylor told his nubile young co-star, Lana Turner, that he respected Stanwyck but didn’t love her, and Taylor and Turner had some kind of romance. Taylor told Stanwyck about it. She fled their home for a few days and stayed with her maid Harriet Corey, then came back. On October 7, 1941, Stanwyck was rushed to the hospital with wounds on her wrists. The story was that she had accidentally shoved her hands through a window, but it sounds like a suicide attempt.

  Nineteen forty-one was the year of The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, Stanwyck’s two best comedies. Both films revolved around her sexual attractiveness and mastery over men. Yet at home, she was caught up in a marriage that was at least partly a sham. She was hurt when her younger husband chased a more obvious young sexpot to prove himself as a man, for he saw Stanwyck as another mother figure to rebel against. But if this marriage was more an arrangement than a love match, why was Stanwyck disturbed enough to attempt suicide? Could it be that she had fallen a bit in love with Taylor—or in love, at least, with the idea of them as a couple? Or was his infidelity with Turner just a convenient breaking point that allowed her to act on something that had always been inside of her?

  To our knowledge, she never attempted suicide again, and indeed, her whole image goes against such an action, so the fact that she once went so far to try to escape from living is bewildering. This marriage to Taylor is tricky to read, but it does seem to have been humiliating in a different fashion from her tormented union with the dominating Fay. She could assert herself over Taylor as she couldn’t with Fay; Taylor was weak-willed. And maybe that suicide attempt wasn’t truly serious; maybe she did it to make Taylor feel guilty so that he would stay with her. That’s an ugly interpretation, but her actions had some effect. He did stay.

  Taylor and Stanwyck’s main problem was that he liked to go off on hunting trips with his male friends, and she didn’t like to go along—he loved flying his plane, too, and she was scared of flying. World War II gave him an out. He was away for years fighting and enjoying macho camaraderie, while she stayed at home. There have always been rumors that Taylor was gay. My guess is that he was so repressed on this score it never impinged on his consciousness. When he was presented with the sexiest women in the world, women like Turner and later Ava Gardner, he had affairs with them, but it sounds like on some level he was forcing himself.

  When Taylor got back from the service, the couple went on a trip to Europe in 1947 that worked out very badly. It was only a matter of time before they split, and they did so for good in 1951. My grandmother, who was divorced from her husband, would always ruefully repeat to me, “Barbara Stanwyck was too bossy. That’s why she lost Robert Taylor. I read that somewhere, once.” The Taylor-Stanwyck divorce in 1951 and the reasons for it had penetrated my grandmother’s consciousness as a kind of object lesson.

  Taylor had taken up with starlets on the set of Quo Vadis? (1951), but most of them were just seeking publicity, and publicity, finally, is what his marriage to Stanwyck was all about. Whatever their arrangement, it seemed to work for Stanwyck, and she never really got over losing it. She liked that she had a movie star husband so many women found attractive. Her marriage reflected well on her, even if their personal relationship was bar
ely functional. When you work as much as she did, you just need someone who can squire you to social events and do interviews with reporters. Stanwyck wanted to hold onto their united front, and Taylor wanted to escape. He was tired of being used and manipulated, and on this score, at least, he deserves some sympathy.

  Later on, thirty or so years after the fact, Stanwyck explained their divorce this way: “He wanted it and I’m not the kind of person who wants somebody if he doesn’t want me. I just say, ‘There’s the door, you can open it. You’ve got a good right hand, just turn the knob, that’s all you have to do. If you can’t open it, I’ll do it for you.’” Bitterness creeps into that statement, but it’s in the hardboiled Stanwyck manner; she could have played that scene in one of her movies. Yet at the time Taylor pressed her for a divorce, she was broken up about it, and she stayed broken up, on some level, for the rest of her life. To stick it to him, she vengefully demanded alimony and kept collecting it until he died in 1969.

  Strangely, years after the divorce, Taylor was again top billed but entirely subjugated to Stanwyck in her last feature film, the William Castle “shocker,” The Night Walker (1964). The amiably naïve Castle no doubt saw the exploitation value in having the divorced Taylor and Stanwyck star together in one of his movies. As ever, they don’t have any particular chemistry as an on-screen pair (even when she slaps him, the act has practically no impact), but the film is involving in its modest way. It starts with some bargain basement Salvador Dali images and a silly/scary voiceover about dreams (they bring out our secret desires for sex and murder, apparently). At first, Stanwyck looks tired, spreading her arms for Taylor in their first scene and saying, “Isn’t this romantic?” when it’s anything but. Yet in the following scenes, it becomes clear that Stanwyck has made tiredness a choice for her character, a passive, delirious type who’s easy to manipulate. This choice is one final proof of Stanwyck’s range.