Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  This is an interesting story, but it’s hard to tell just what scene in Clash by Night could have reminded Stanwyck of her divorce from Taylor and how she was cuckolded, in the public eye at least, by his flagrant dalliances with Quo Vadis? starlets. It’s Mae who cuckolds Jerry after she marries him by giving in to Earl and his protestations of loneliness. It sounds like Lang boxed Stanwyck into a corner here; she prided herself on her image as a straight shooter, so she couldn’t very well decline when he asked her if he could level with her. I can only imagine her embarrassment when Lang said what he did. She had to take “a second,” before building herself back up and calling him out as a bastard, as if she admired him for it—and maybe she did, but maybe she was offended, too. Her performance is all over the place, indifferent sometimes, and at other times engaged in a remarkably fiery way.

  It seems to be Ryan, finally, who wakes her up decisively. “If I ever loved a man again, I’d bear anything,” says Mae, outside a dive with Earl. “He could have my teeth for watch fobs,” she claims. Unmoved by such Odetsian dialogue, Stanwyck satisfies herself with physical business, such as unceremoniously throwing a cigarette away when Ryan’s Earl offers her another one. “Don’t kid me, baby, I know a bottle by the label,” sneers Earl, moving in for a kiss, and getting met with a vicious slap from Mae that looks very real (it’s the beginning of Baby Face all over again, but this time with a much older, much tireder woman). “Peace on earth,” Earl cracks, ironically, getting his hate on, which was Ryan’s specialty.

  Stanwyck seems unwilling, in this scene, to really meet Ryan’s hate, but she gradually lets herself go with him, as if she’s saying, “Alright, you son-of-a-bitch, you want hate, I’ll give you hate.” And she’s capable of intermittent inspiration in her scenes with Douglas’s Jerry after their baby is born. During a heat wave, Jerry reports that the papers say they’re due for some cool weather, and Mae replies, “Well, the papers oughtta know,” in a light, enigmatic voice that signals Stanwyck working at her reverberating best.

  A drunken Earl stops by, then stays overnight. The next morning, after a restless sleep, Mae bends over some coffee in the kitchen and is attacked by tears. This attack is the kind of crying-having-its-way-with-you that rarely shows up in movies, where an actor is so often trying to cry instead of trying to fight off tears, as many people do in life. Earl stumbles into the kitchen to wash his neck. Both actors vividly get across both the literal and figurative heat of the environment in this scene. Ryan, wearing an undershirt, with his wide back to the camera, goes into some Irish “I should never have been born” keening, the kind of morbidness that the Irish Stanwyck is also susceptible to.

  When Ryan grabs Stanwyck from behind and begs her for love, suddenly both actors seem to leap out of the frame, as if you were watching them in a stage performance right in front of you instead of on a screen. This is the closest we’ll come to seeing what Stanwyck might have been like in live theater, and she was never more stimulated by an acting partner. So many actresses crumpled up and slunk away when confronted by Ryan at full throttle on screen. Only Stanwyck has the talent and the sheer nerve to stand up to him and meet him more than halfway. He almost eats her over the sink with a DeNiro-like kiss. She struggles a bit, but then she looks right at him and unleashes her own passion, shoving a hand into the back of his undershirt and rifling around hungrily, as raw a slice of sexual desperation as has ever been shown in movies.

  That hand in Ryan’s undershirt is an indelible image, one of the things you think about when you think about Stanwyck—that daring, that need for flesh. It is a kind of exposure, even if a lot of her other scenes here look dedicated to keeping her safe from our prying eyes. The ending, where Mae goes back to Jerry and her child, is not convincing, but Stanwyck sums up her performance when she talks to Ryan about their sordid affair and levels with herself about their “love,” which she sees as “love because we’re lonely, love because we’re frightened,” and then, quieter, “love because we’re bored.” This is as full an accounting of her own hit-or-miss work here as any I could offer. Seeing Stanwyck live in a role that suited her surely would have been an event, but most theater actors have only word-of-mouth and faded press clippings to suggest their specialness now, whereas Stanwyck will be reaching into Robert Ryan’s undershirt in perpetuity—on screen and in our mind’s eye.

  Sturges/Stanwyck

  Remember the Night, The Lady Eve

  As we get farther and farther away from the classic Hollywood period of the old studio system, where so many disparate talents flourished, the case of Preston Sturges as writer and director only seems more exotic and unexplained. According to Sturges, he didn’t do much up to the age of thirty, though he helped run the cosmetics business belonging to his mother, Mary Desti. The estimable, bohemian Desti (whose real last name was Dempsey) was best friend and confidante to the flamboyant modern dancer, Isadora Duncan. The prototypical culture vulture, Desti merrily led young Preston around to every museum in Europe and was certain he would one day be an important artist. She seems to have realized that she herself had the artist’s vocation and temperament, but not the talent. He rebelled against her influence, at first, longing for the business mind and stability of his favorite stepfather, Soloman Sturges, and the unresolved tension he felt between Desti’s arty exhortations and Sturges’s financial example resulted in the rich, unsettling voice he displayed as a writer of Broadway plays and then screenplays in Hollywood.

  The Sturges voice is so distinctive that it comes through in nearly all of his scripts directed by others in the 1930s, and it comes through strongest in two movies directed by the under-valued Mitchell Leisen, Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (1940), which starred Stanwyck (it was originally set for Carole Lombard). On the set of that movie, Sturges told Stanwyck that he would write her “a great comedy”; probably there was a “yeah, sure” twinkle in her little eyes after he said this. “I told him I never get great comedies, and he said, ‘Well, you’re going to get one,’” she later remembered. She couldn’t have known that this cheerful egoist and closet pessimist would give her The Lady Eve, which stands, with Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937) and Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938), as the very best and most representative of this era’s romantic comedies.

  Stanwyck was mistrustful of Sturges. He wasn’t her type of man, and though she reveled in the two scripts he wrote for her, there was something about him that she found phony. Robert Wagner and others have said that she thought he talked too much. William Wyler’s wife, Tami, called Sturges “a terrible listener, he would talk and other people would listen.” But Sturges had a read on Stanwyck; he told the press that she had such inner beauty that she would be “radiant in old age,” and he was right about that. He was right about a lot of things, Stanwyck-wise, and in the two scripts he gave her, he brought her to new maturity as an actress and a sensibility, adding touches of worldliness and optimism until she was able to play the highest of high comedy for him.

  Leisen tended to soften some of Sturges’s hard edges with his preference for visual luxury in his settings. He also clipped some of Sturges’s dialogue when it got too long-winded, which was not entirely a bad thing (“Preston had thirty ideas a minute and no way of evaluating them,” said Mel Epstein, the assistant director on The Lady Eve, and so Sturges depended on his collaborators to help him make decisions and trim the fat). Leisen begins Remember the Night in one of those decadent Paramount jewelry stores that he loves so much. We see a lulu of a bracelet being clasped on a woman’s wrist. “Glorious,” says the manager, and it is. But we hear the woman’s voice say, “Um, yes,” as if she isn’t sure, or as if she has a certain contempt for such expensive glory. The manager moves away for just a moment, and in a flash the woman is gone, his bracelet still on her wrist. It’s the kind of smooth scene making that Leisen does so well (when Sturges directed his own scripts, simple things like this scene tended to get over-packed and jittery).

  We see Sta
nwyck’s jewel thief, Lee Leander, walking down the street in her fur coat, her head covered in a 1940s-style black turban affair (this was Stanwyck’s first movie with Edith Head doing her clothes). The Christmas music on the soundtrack alternates with what sounds like the opening bars of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as Lee is apprehended in another jewelry store. In court, Lee is defended by “an old windbag” named Francis X. O’Leary (Willard Robertson), a ham lawyer who used to be on the stage, and as O’Leary makes his blustering case to the jury, the whole action stops for quite a time so that we can take in his shamelessness. This highlighting of what would in most movies be a minor character was Sturges’s specialty at his best, but it often led him into self-indulgence when he was less sure of himself.

  What saves this scene is that Sturges has written in smart-aleck asides for John, the prosecutor (Fred MacMurray). He also gives Stanwyck a few priceless reaction shots. At first, her face registers a kind of bewilderment to her lawyer’s exhibitionism, but then she chooses to be amused by him, in an aloof, amiably flustered way, as if she’s thinking, “What did he just say? Oh, well, OK, I’m just along for the ride!” It’s the lightness of her effects here that lets us know Stanwyck is responding to Sturges’s inventions. She might not have trusted him personally, but creatively she gets what he’s doing, and so she’s willing to try something new for him.

  “Fear turned her legs to lead!” thunders O’Leary, telling the jury that the bracelet had hypnotized Lee. Stanwyck looks down at her own artfully displayed gams and looks slightly apologetic, as if to say, “Don’t blame me for this, huh?” John knows that he’ll never get Lee behind bars until after Christmas, so he works to get a continuance and then feels guilty about sending her to jail over the holidays. He gets his pal Fat Mike (Tom Kennedy) to post bail for her, and Fat Mike brings her to his apartment, where Lee thinks she knows what he’s after. “One of these days, one of you boys is going to start one of these scenes differently,” Lee says, “and one of us girls is going to drop dead from surprise.”

  The wonderful thing here is that Stanwyck is taking a situation that she has always played for heavy drama before and turning it on its head. She does have a sense of humor, but it’s a very dry one—bone dry, in fact—so that when she gets a big laugh, which is well within her power at this point, it is always based in sorrowful experience. One thing Stanwyck could never be is silly; when Sturges has Lee act a little cute as she realizes that John doesn’t want her sexually, Stanwyck plays it as a wholly unnatural ploy. Her manipulation of John is all on the surface and sweetly tired-out, because Lee, like so many other Stanwyck women, is sick of playing games.

  They go out to eat and talk about their situation. “Sounds like a play, doesn’t it?” asks Lee, which is Sturges acknowledging the whole “movie pitch idea” of his basic screenplay, then mocking it when John replies, “Sounds like a flop.” This meta strain in Sturges’s work is only in its infancy here; later on, he sometimes went too far with his “you’re watching a movie!” stunts. In Remember the Night, this exchange leads us directly into the most important scene in the film, where Lee tries to explain her concept of right and wrong to John.

  Lee asks John if he would steal a loaf of bread if he was starving, and he says yes. She smiles knowingly and then says that she wouldn’t do that; instead, she would go out and have an expensive dinner and then tell the maître d’ that she’d lost her purse. He would only steal out of desperation, but she’s a career chiseler. For a moment John gets lost in this distinction, then he tells her that her way is smarter. “That’s it,” Lee says, some deep recognition lighting up her face. “We’re smart.”

  This is one of the most multi-leveled and disturbing of Stanwyck’s “realization” moments, probably because for Sturges everything has to be verbal. Stanwyck can’t just act here with her face, as she does in The Bitter Tea of General Yen or Stella Dallas. Stanwyck often claimed that she was not an articulate woman, and people who knew her tended to agree with that assessment, even though she seemed articulate enough in her few filmed interviews. Though she called herself inarticulate, or uneducated, maybe what Stanwyck really meant was that she was afraid of words and what they might reveal about her, and about people in general. And if she was afraid of words, then her collaboration with Sturges becomes even more suggestive. He led her out of her established comfort zones and into the kind of brilliant, yearning talk that could bring her to both new levels of understanding and new levels of desolation, all mingled together in her voice and her eyes when she says, “That’s it. We’re smart.” Lee leads John into an ethical trap, but then his response traps her in the kind of recognition that Sturges can put into words and Stanwyck can convey like a vibrating tuning fork.

  While John and Lee dance, he asks if her mother is still alive. “I hope so,” Lee says, still a little confused about her feelings for him, and by the band playing “My Old Indiana Home.” They’re both Hoosiers, it turns out, and John offers to drive her home for Christmas. “Oh, gee,” she says, a very un-Stanwyck exclamation, and it’s as if Lee wants to try out being the kind of girl who can say, “Oh, gee” and mean it. Lee and Jean in The Lady Eve are two crooks who are seduced by innocence, and in Sturges’s world, the crooked people who start to long for vanished purity or respectability—or, in Lee’s case, a conscience—are usually destroyed for their trouble. They would have been much better off just staying corrupt, a conclusion born of Sturges’s deep cynicism. It’s this cynicism that feels true, not the squirming toward a happy ending that he tried to pass off as the unlikely reward for American striving.

  That cynicism rears its head when an increasingly affectionate John and Lee, on the way to meet her mother, are confronted by a mean Indiana farmer, a gun-toting militia type who has built a detour onto his property just so he can capture and punish anyone unlucky enough to drive through. When this man takes them to a local judge, Sturges mercilessly dissects the narrow-minded prejudice of these two men. “Weren’t even married!” says the farmer; tellingly, John picks up on the tone of his words and wanders into a bewildered little digression about how the farmer has just made the word “married” sound, well, dirty. Sturges celebrates the discerning sophistication of John’s open sensibility, just as he rightly condemns the crummy ignorance of the small-minded small town men. He also makes us feel that we would need to act like the corrupt Lee when confronted with men like these. John’s sensitive deliberations only makes things worse, but she’s street smart enough to light a fire in a wastebasket and get them the hell out of there.

  In his car, Lee jeers a bit at John’s naïveté, and Leisen takes one of Stanwyck’s few faults as a performer, her inability to play direct sarcasm, and makes it seem like Lee’s confusion about her own feelings. This is the emotional muddle that leads her right into the lion’s den, the place where she came from. Lee tries to fool herself along the way that her mother will be glad to see her (“Yeah, I guess she will alright,” she chirps), but when she’s in front of her mother’s house, a bit of instinctual panic sets in: “I’m getting scared,” she says finally, her eyes blank and staring.

  Lee’s emotions trip her up, and she’s isn’t as smart as John is, but her instincts are 100 percent trustworthy. When she walks up to the door of her former home with John, Lee deteriorates into a frightened little girl talking all in a rush about being a tomboy and climbing trees and how she would have run away to sea if she had been born a man. She knocks on the door and hears a loud dog. Could it be the same dog that …. Oh, no, it can’t be, she says; he would be too old (at this point, the once glossy Remember the Night has become as foreboding as a horror film). A man answers her knock, and Lee asks for her mother by name. “I guess you mean my wife,” he says, in a manner that couldn’t be less friendly.

  Then, suddenly, a forbidding female face rushes out of the dark, and it’s obviously Lee’s mother (Georgia Caine). This is the sort of moment that’s entirely dependent on casting (Caine is chillingly perfect)
and lighting, and the scene that follows is Leisen’s moment to shine. “Merry Christmas, Mama,” Lee says, in a pure, girlish voice. But once Lee and John are inside, Lee’s mother bluntly asks, “What you come here for? What do you want?” Lee tries to tell her that she just wanted to see her, but her mother cuts her off: “Good riddance to bad rubbish I said the day she left.” Her mother says that Lee is just like her father, who laughed at serious things. Though he doesn’t specify exactly what she means, Sturges suggests that the things a woman like this thinks are serious are anything but. Lee laughing at these “serious” things is analogous to John wondering over the mean tone the farmer uses when he says the word “married,” a more open intelligence rejecting the junk that closed-minded people accept without thinking.

  Years ago, Lee borrowed some money, but her mother said Lee stole it and then told the whole town that her daughter was a thief. We weren’t good enough for her, Lee’s mother says. At this point, Sturges’s command of psychological nuance is at its most piercing; in just a few moments, we see exactly what kind of woman this is. She’s not a villain. She has problems of her own, and a tiny part of her wants to forgive her daughter (we can see that in Caine’s face), but she can’t. Mother and daughter are at cross-purposes, and it is these cross-purposes that lead to all the trouble between people, especially family members, and most especially parents and children.

  Lee and John leave, and Lee’s mother returns to the dark from whence she came. But Leisen frames her silhouette peering out the window at her daughter, who is standing on the porch and crying. Lee tells John that she had forgotten how much her mother hated her, and how much she hated her mother, and then she stops herself. Lee doesn’t want to say such an awful thing. She can feel this hatred for her mother, but she doesn’t want to say it out loud—because once she’s said it out loud, it’s official (a very Sturges concept). Now that it’s official, there’s no room for dreaming of a better life or future. Lee wishes that she had fallen out of that tree in front of her mother’s house and died, proof that when you can’t evade, put-off, or ignore something as bad as hating your mother, among other unmentionables, you might find yourself in a suicidal state of mind, a progression that Stanwyck always understood. It is Sturges, though, who gets her to actually verbalize this concept, out loud, in all its danger.