Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  “I’d drop dead if I had to recite a single line of Shakespeare,” Stanwyck joked to a reporter in the 1940s. Classical drama was out for her, but she had three notable tries at parts written originally for the theater. The first of these was the difficult role of Nora Clitheroe in John Ford’s abbreviated RKO adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1936), a disenchanted account of the Irish Easter rebellion of 1916. When the play premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, there was a riot during the fourth performance, led mainly by some of the women associated with the fallen men of 1916. These women objected to the play’s satire on the kind of nationalism that destroys Nora Clitheroe’s middle-class family and dreams (Barry Fitzgerald had to punch a male protestor on stage to defend the actors). In O’Casey’s play, Nora is pregnant, and she eventually loses her mind. She is the heroine of the piece, which employs a large company to play people on the margins of a dramatic event. Though she is often sympathetic, Nora is also a nag and a hysteric, so that the actress playing her has to commit fully to all of her flaws and take the risk of not being liked, at times, in order to be true to the life of this three-dimensional, righteous, sometimes exasperating woman.

  For his film of the play, Ford uses the dark, expressionist look he favored in this period, and his introduction of his star is striking. We see a woman’s head turn toward the camera, wearing a Virgin Mary–like head-cloak: Stanwyck’s face is creased in doubt, almost folded in half, in fact. The Plough and the Stars can be most fruitfully seen as one artist, Ford, looking at another, Stanwyck, in purely visual terms, observing her in different moods and at different angles. In many ways, he films Stanwyck here in a similar fashion to the self-denying, rapt, intense way that he shot Katharine Hepburn’s shadowed close-ups in Mary of Scotland, made that same year, but with a key difference. Whereas with Hepburn, Ford’s photographic attention is discreetly romantic, with Stanwyck he elevates her as a kind of maternal figure.

  Away from the city, in a contrasting luminescent sequence at a park where Nora wanders with her husband, Jack (Preston Foster), Ford has Stanwyck wear a stiff white lace hat that he lights like it’s a halo. Though Ford takes care with the illuminated and then darkened frames he puts around Stanwyck’s face, there is no attempt to glamorize or idealize her face itself. Throughout this film, she looks like a real, extremely worried person. Her features are doughy here, as if they were made of lumpy clay, and her swollen Nora looks like a person who sweats and who breathes heavily.

  Stanwyck uses only a hint of an Irish accent, allowing her to focus on Nora’s feelings without worrying about overly correct phrasings. When she tells her husband Jack that she burned his notification from the Irish Citizen Army, Stanwyck puts her full orchestral force behind the word “burned,” so that it seems to explode outward like a shower of sparks. But this is only a preview of her big moment, when she shouts for her husband outside and is told to hush up by the women of the army. “They’re all cowards!” her Nora cries. “Fools, do you think they want to die!” she howls, in a decidedly ferocious, deeply disgusted manner.

  It’s a risk. When she tried this deeper, more full-blooded hysteria in The Woman in Red, Stanwyck just looked silly, because the flimsy film couldn’t handle it. Here, she has the material and the director to make such forceful expression land and resonate. Aside from Ever in My Heart, she never made another movie that dealt directly with war, for Stanwyck is an urban American creature; she made her own battlegrounds. In this scene in The Plough and the Stars, Stanwyck is able to address one of the greatest of outrages, just as she addressed the outrage of suffering, defenseless children in Night Nurse, and she has the epic size for the role, so that you wonder if she couldn’t have played Hecuba, or Clytemnestra, or a modern Medea slaughtering her children on Flatbush Avenue to avenge herself on a faithless husband. The full arc of her role, however, is sidestepped; Stanwyck’s Nora doesn’t lose her mind, as she does in the play (she never portrayed outright mental illness on screen, preferring less clinical disturbances of the mind and heart).

  The Abbey Theatre players in Ford’s Plough “project” their roles to the camera. Arthur Shields, brother of Barry Fitzgerald, has a credit as an assistant to the director and seems to have been in charge of these actors. Ford generally preferred more natural performers, but he indulges Fitzgerald and the impish Una O’Connor without really harming the texture of his movie. Ford is the ideal interpreter of O’Casey’s ambiguous material, and this little-seen film is admirable on several levels. He does not shy away from the looting that goes on during the Easter uprising, or from arguments about the merits of socialism, which get batted around by some of the characters. In one especially vivid scene, an Irish boy is trapped on a slatted roof, trying to get into a window for shelter. British soldiers shoot him, and his body sticks to the roof for a moment and then slides down—a sickening image, held for just the right amount of time.

  RKO tampered with the film when Ford left for Honolulu on vacation. Pandro Berman, who had taken over as production head from Samuel J. Briskin, thought that the movie would be more commercial if Nora and Jack were lovers instead of spouses, and he insisted that Stanwyck and Foster come back and re-shoot some scenes, to Stanwyck’s dismay. “I’ve always felt that John should not have left the sinking ship,” she told Film Comment in 1981. “God knows I had no power at that time, nor did Preston. Only John could have saved it, and he should have.” This re-cut and re-shot version was supposed to be released in America, while Ford’s version was shown in England and Ireland (the non-Ford version has all but disappeared at this point, and most of the reviewers in America saw the Ford version). Tag Gallagher, one of the pre-eminent scholars of Ford’s work, told me that there is also a second US version of this film that is much longer, with “substantial newsreels in between some sequences—not by Ford.” Presumably such a cut was put together in order to pad the film out to reach the length of a prestige picture.

  Introducing his heroine, Lorna Moon, in his play Golden Boy, Clifford Odets writes: “There is a certain quiet glitter about this girl, and if she’s sometimes hard, it is more from necessity than choice.” He also writes that her eyes “often hold a soft, sad glance.” When Golden Boy was first produced for the stage in 1937, Lorna was played by Frances Farmer, a promising young actress who was romantically involved with Odets at that time. Afterwards, he dropped her, and she fell into mental instability. It was the part of a lifetime for Farmer, a serious role in a serious play where she was surrounded by Group Theatre stalwarts like Morris Carnofsky, Luther Adler, Robert Lewis, a young John Garfield, and, as the obsessed gay gangster Fuseli, Elia Kazan. Golden Boy was one of the Group Theatre’s major productions, but it isn’t revived much. In Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976), two young actors complain about Odets’s stilted language, but their teacher tells them that the playwright was writing poetically, that he “heightened the thing,” and that it takes a special kind of belief—and the right delivery—to make Golden Boy work.

  Lorna Moon is one of the best and most apposite roles Stanwyck was ever given, and the film of Golden Boy (1939) should have been one of her biggies, but it doesn’t really work on any level. There are several probable reasons for this failure. Lorna is a self-described “tramp from Newark,” but for this post-Code movie, she’s a “dame from Newark,” and the four credited screenwriters have subtly removed a lot of the guts from the part. In this film, Lorna doesn’t talk about how her father beat her mother, or how her mother killed herself, and she doesn’t get to say, “If I let myself go, I’d be a drunkard in a year.”

  As Odets wrote her, this is a self-destructive woman, and all of her interactions with Joe Bonaparte, a self-loathing young violinist turned boxer, should reflect their tense longing for each other, as well as their need for oblivion. Odets sets up his dichotomy of boxing (selling out to Hollywood) versus music (the theater) as a personal indictment of himself, but also of the commercialism of the modern world, and hi
s play still shoots the sort of bullets he intended—even if some are blanks owing to some overly gaudy writing in the last scenes.

  Lorna is involved with Tom Moody, a broken-down, married fight promoter who once pulled her out of the gutter. She feels loyalty to him for having saving her and sticks by him because he’s a little boy at heart and needs her help. In the film, Adolphe Menjou is cast as Moody, and he’s hopeless from the first moments of the first scene, too suave and too hollow to make Lorna’s feeling for him make sense. When he mentions the money he made back in 1928, Lorna says that her mother died that year, and it’s clear from the outset that Stanwyck just isn’t feeling this role. She’s disconnected from the fussy Menjou and totally divorced from the emotions of an embittered girl who should be right up her alley.

  Rouben Mamoulian directs uncertainly; his camera is always jerkily moving to the right or left to catch up with the characters, and this makes everything feel like a rehearsal rather than a take. He had a habit of telling his actors that the camera was running when it wasn’t, for some reason, and when he tried this on Stanwyck, she told him off in no uncertain terms. It’s hard to imagine a directorial technique that could have alienated her more, and her inspiration dried up for the actual scenes. Probably some of the best of her Lorna Moon was performed when Mamoulian’s camera wasn’t running.

  Aside from this, Stanwyck was also concerned about her inexperienced young leading man, William Holden, who had been cast as Bonaparte over a large field of likely contenders. He too had trouble with Mamoulian’s methods, and Columbia head Harry Cohn was going to have Holden fired until Stanwyck interceded on his behalf, promising to work with him off the set. “I told him much of what Willard Mack had taught me,” she said. Holden comes off just fine in the film, but it’s likely that Stanwyck’s own performance suffered because she was busy making sure his work was as good as it needed to be.

  To top all this off, she married Robert Taylor midway through shooting, on May 13th, 1939, and this was another distraction that must have caused her mind to be anywhere but on the job at hand. When he heard the news, Holden sent her a sweet telegram that read, “GOSH, What a Blow!—The Golden Boy.” It’s been intimated that Stanwyck and Holden might have been more than friends during this trial by fire, but it’s more likely that he had a lifetime crush on her owing to the help she gave him. For the rest of his life, every April 1st, the date they started shooting, Holden would send Stanwyck two dozen roses and a white gardenia. Surely Holden was one of the few people that Stanwyck really loved, perhaps a bit romantically, perhaps not. She always enjoyed helping younger, pretty boy actors like Taylor, Holden, and later Robert Wagner. “See you in 1960, maybe you’ll be somebody by then!” Lorna tells Joe. It’s a line that isn’t in the play, and of course Holden would be one of the biggest movie stars in the world in 1960. By then, Stanwyck’s film career was largely over.

  In her scenes with Joe, when Lorna is attempting to seduce him into boxing full-time, Stanwyck plays at half-energy, except for a rather too disgusted, enraged reaction after he kisses her. When she’s supposed to be charmed by Joe’s family, Stanwyck “smiles” a bit, but she isn’t a smiler; simple happiness and pleasure are well outside her ken. Lorna is supposed to be torn between Moody and Joe, but Stanwyck is just going through the motions in these later scenes. In the Meet John Doe–like happy ending, when she has to sell us another false bill of goods, she can hardly be bothered. Unfortunately, Stanwyck’s whole performance is a wash, except for one spine-tinglingly definitive moment that suggests how good she might have been as Lorna Moon. Joseph Calleia’s Fuseli looks at her legs (as does the camera) and asks Moody, “This your girl?” Stanwyck is sitting on Moody’s desk, impassive, a cigarette smoldering in her right hand. She shoots back, “I’m my mother’s girl,” in a no-fuss way that suggests that this isn’t a woman who’s afraid of gangsters, or of anything much—except for the slow-burning anger that’s eventually going to eat away her insides.

  Stanwyck had another go at an Odets heroine in Clash by Night, directed by Fritz Lang for RKO. With this theater role, she still sometimes seems like she’s just going through the motions, especially in some of her early scenes (Manny Farber in his review said that she was given to “impersonating a mentholated icicle”). But she does some of her finest work here, too, in some scenes opposite Robert Ryan—this has to count as one of her most uneven performances. The play was first produced in 1941, with Tallulah Bankhead, Lee J. Cobb, and Joseph Schildkraut in the roles that would be played in the film by Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan. Odets set his play on Staten Island, and he resolved the eternal triangle between his characters with murder.

  In the Lang movie, the setting has been moved to a California fishing village, and this change allows the director to start things off with waves crashing under the credits, followed by some evocative shots of seagulls and seals. We see Peggy (Marilyn Monroe) waking up to go to work in the fish cannery nearby. This scene is staged very realistically; it’s a bit of a shock to see the legendary Monroe as a plain girl in jeans. We watch the factory routine (which suggests Lang’s futuristic factory in his Metropolis [1926]) and all the little silver fish moving along on an assembly line. Lang doesn’t make this scene particularly symbolic; you’re allowed to draw your own conclusions.

  Mae Doyle (Stanwyck) gets off a train with a suitcase and goes into a bar to order a coffee with a brandy to go with it. Douglas’s Jerry comes in to get his drunken father (Silvio Minciotti) out of the bar. He tells his dad to go home, and the father whines, “Is nothing, home.” We see Mae react, as if to say, “You said it.” She’s been away for ten years. “Home is where you come when you run out of places,” Mae croaks, wearily, tossing her cigarette into a coffee cup. Later on, she tells us about a married man she loved, a politician who died and left her money his relatives wouldn’t let her have. Stanwyck delivers all this back-story professionally, competently, but in a way that lets us see that she’s not all that interested in this woman or where she’s been.

  Stanwyck shares a warm look of sympathy with Monroe, who blew take after take and was always late to the set. “She couldn’t get out of her own way,” Stanwyck later said of Monroe. “She wasn’t disciplined … but she didn’t do it viciously, and there was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once.” This is generous of Stanwyck, paying tribute to a different kind of movie performer after that performer’s untimely death. On the set, though, Stanwyck was heard to say, “With a figure like that, you don’t have to know how to act,” and she was right. Monroe is stilted in the film, awkward, but in certain moments she does have that movie “magic” that Stanwyck recognized and respected.

  Still and all, this is Robert Ryan’s movie, and he takes it by force from the moment he first appears as Earl, a savagely disappointed, woman hating romantic (and movie projectionist). Earl excites Monroe’s innocent Peggy and Stanwyck’s wary Mae, who discreetly looks him up and down while out on a polite date with Douglas’s bellowy widower. “Didn’t you ever want to cut up a beautiful dame?” asks Earl, talking about film cutting, but meaning something else, a fact that Mae takes in. She can see that he’s sexy, but in the worst possible way.

  Mae is seduced by Jerry’s innocence, which ties her to earlier Stanwyck characters, but Jerry is a tubby, none-too-bright innocent, not Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper, but a last resort for a forty-five-year-old woman who just wants to rest. Mae is burnt-out, and Stanwyck’s performance in the early scenes is also regrettably burnt-out, though she sometimes manages to come alive, in isolated moments. When Jerry says that everyone is afraid of getting old and lonely, Stanwyck looks up at him from a ladder she’s climbing down, stopping herself, physically and emotionally. She takes in what he’s just said as fully as possible and then replies, “I suppose,” in that shivery way of hers, as if this statement is coming from disparate sources of knowledge meeting and clashing together.

  After this moment, however, Stanwyck plays the role
with a generic sort of “charged intensity,” which feels a bit forced and all on one level. Lang switches to some cheesecake—Marilyn’s Peggy jiggling in a swimsuit on the beach—which gets Earl’s attention and then goads his sadism, which is much in evidence. He’s cruel to an elderly waiter, calling him “a good boy.” When Jerry asks Earl for his “Chinese imitation,” Mae considers Earl’s racist nonsense coolly (Stanwyck does her mouth shrug and even lifts an eyebrow, but this gesture seems like a choice borne out of either uncertainty or boredom). When Earl gets her a whiskey shot, Mae tosses it back and then stares at him challengingly. This doesn’t feel like the “Stanwyck is a stoic” routine from some of her lesser films of this time, but a jolt of real anger. There’s nothing ambiguous about this emotion, for it all but broadcasts, “I hate men.”

  Stanwyck had been the rejected party in her divorce from Taylor, and this status gnawed at her pride. At one point during shooting, she complained to Lang that she couldn’t play a scene because it was badly written. “I knew the scene,” Lang remembered, “which I thought was very well-written, and said, ‘Barbara, may I speak frankly and openly with you?’ She said, ‘Naturally,’ and I continued: ‘I think the scene reminds you of a rather recent event in your private life, and that is why you think it is badly written and you cannot play it.’ Barbara looked at me for a second and then said slowly, ‘You son-of-a-bitch,’—went out and played the two-and-a-half-page scene so wonderfully that we had to shoot it only once.”