Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  When John takes Lee home to his picture-perfect family, Sturges can’t quite make these family members as believable as he made Lee’s mother or those terrible Hoosiers at the courthouse. He tries to add realistic, knotty detail to John’s spinster Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson), but he has trouble with John’s widowed mother, Mrs. Sargent (Beulah Bondi), who is small-minded but not narrow-minded—a type that exists in life, I suppose, but not a type that is all that fruitful or interesting to observe in action. When Mrs. Sargent mentions that John once borrowed some money and then was given the chance to pay it back, there is too neat a correlation between his past and Lee’s. But Stanwyck keeps us focused; when she leans over a bed holding a warm nightgown from John’s mother, her face gleams the way it did in the stateroom scene in Ladies of Leisure, and this time there is a modicum of hope in her expression. But Sturges can’t make this hope feel earned because he has so vividly shown us in the earlier scenes that such feeling is a mirage that might kill you

  Mrs. Sargent, who knows the truth about her, gently warns Lee that she might spoil John’s career if they were to get married. Lee is standing in front of a mirror, and when Mrs. Sargent puts her hands on Lee’s shoulders, Stanwyck freezes, with her mouth wide open, one arm up holding a comb, a vision of complete Mouchette-style awkwardness. Mirrors always bring out Stanwyck’s deepest feelings. They seem to tell her that she can’t hide and that she needs to show us everything she has in her, even if it isn’t flattering or pretty to look at. Since this is a post-Code movie, Lee must pay for her crimes, whereas before 1934 Ernst Lubitsch would have certainly left her free to make up her own mind about what she wants to do next. Leisen films the hushed parting between John and Lee with real tenderness, but the complexities of the early scenes get politely swept under the rug.

  “The special tone of The Lady Eve is a kind of energetic cruelty, a malicious exuberance” writes James Harvey in Romantic Comedy. There’s a unique kind of high spirits in Stanwyck’s performance in many of her best scenes in Eve, so close to the bubbliness of an Irene Dunne or the lyricism of a Katharine Hepburn, but shaded with something more uneasy, more lethal. Harvey writes that her high spirits come out of a kind of “transmuted anger,” and that’s probably true. This anger never intrudes on Stanwyck’s dual characterization of Jean, a delectable card sharp working on a boat with her father (Charles Coburn) and The Lady Eve Sidwich, a rapacious English noblewoman. But it informs every bit of the pleasure Stanwyck takes while rooking Henry Fonda’s slightly rancid innocent, Charles Pike, a snake enthusiast and heir to the Pike’s Ale fortune (it’s “The Ale That Won For Yale”).

  Though Sturges isn’t as fluid and visual a director as Leisen, a lot of the pleasures of this beloved movie come not just from its stream of words uttered by juicy character actors like Coburn, William Demarest, Eric Blore, and Eugene Pallette, but also from the sheer glamour of its settings. Edith Head outdoes herself on Stanwyck’s wardrobe here, so that it’s a sensual thing just to watch her being so beautifully presented in impeccably designed white and gold dresses and knit caps, and ornate little diamond brooches set against black and white suits (this is Stanwyck’s anti-Stella Dallas, clothes-wise, a sort of reward). In many ways, it was a kind of holiday movie for Stanwyck. She said that the atmosphere on a Capra set was “like a cathedral,” while on a Sturges set it was “a carnival.”

  “I wonder if I can clunk him on the head with this?” Jean asks, as she stares down at Charles from the bow of a ship. The question is barely out of her mouth before she yields to her low impulse and drops an apple onto his pith helmet. He’s been up the Amazon for a year with his snakes (a frisky cartoon snake happily slithers down through the opening credits), and Jean seems to know, well before she should, that she has landed herself the prize chump of all time—or, as her father says, the ultimate “sucker sapien.” Staring into her compact (which fills the frame), Jean hammers out sugar-high, wise-ass narration as Charles is assailed from all sides by hopeful females in the ship’s dining room. Her dialogue could feel merely mean if Stanwyck didn’t deliver it in such a rapid-fire, complexly layered way. Jean’s hyper-articulation would have made Kay Arnold’s head swim, and it could have intimidated Stanwyck only a few years earlier, but here for Sturges she has attained a total verbal mastery to match all of her other gifts. So many other directors asked Stanwyck to stare into mirrors and reveal damaging things about herself; Sturges gives her the mirror and the control over his film.

  On the set of The Mad Miss Manton, where he was unhappy with the script, Fonda had been openly rude to Stanwyck, but he knew just how good a script The Lady Eve was and this time they got along splendidly. In his autobiography, Fonda writes that he fell in love with Stanwyck while working with her and always loved her afterwards, but she wasn’t having his gush. “Yes, Lady Eve was a good picture,” she said, sensibly, “but about the rest of Fonda’s talk, he was single when I was single, and where was he?” Here’s the straight-shooter, telling even this most plain-spoken and dignified of actors that if he had really been serious, he should have put his money where his mouth was and asked her out. Their mutual, unconsummated attraction to each other definitely helps the lingering scenes where Jean, wearing a black crepe dress with a tantalizing bare midriff, goes about seducing Charles, whom she calls “Hopsie,” his childhood nickname.

  “See anything you like?” asks Jean, leaning against her wardrobe. She senses that she can be as brazen as she wants with Charles, and he’ll never catch on. It’s his total obliviousness, his innocence, that starts to seduce her in turn, so that she’s eventually a sucker in her own game. Charles is the ultimate con artist’s dream, and she longs to give up her own worldliness for his innocence, or at least gain some relief in his uncomplicated presence. “Why, Hopsie,” she purrs, when he confusedly leans in for a kiss, “you ought to be kept in a cage!” This is the flip side of the contemptuous, scarred Lily Powers; Jean is a woman who helplessly starts to love a man precisely because he falls for her manipulation so easily.

  Jean seems genuinely scared of the pet snake in Charles’s room (its name is Emma), but she smartly turns this scare to her advantage by screaming and running to her own room (Sturges speeds up the footage slightly so that Stanwyck and Fonda briefly look like they’re in a Mack Sennett two-reeler). In the famous long-take seduction scene in her stateroom, which runs over three minutes, Jean idly plays with Charles’s ear and musses his hair. “Snakes are my life … in a way,” says Charles. Jean takes this in and says, “What a life,” one of Stanwyck’s mysterious conclusions about something or other, just like, “That’s it. We’re smart,” in Remember the Night.

  Jean leads Charles down a winding path of conversation about their respective romantic ideals. His is vague, and so she says, “It would be too bad if you never bumped into each other.” It’s a funny line, as Stanwyck says it, but also a sad one. Most people, she seems to suggest, never do meet the lover they imagine in their heads. Jean claims that she wants “a little short guy with lots of money,” so that he can look up to her. Soon she has Charles cross-eyed with lust, and she even lets out a frankly sexual groan (Sturges smuggled a lot past the censors) before bidding her Hopsie goodnight.

  Later, with her father, whom she calls Harry (he’s known in the trade as Handsome Harry, so he seems to have been a ladies’ man in his youth), Jean wakes up from a nightmare involving Charles’s snake, Emma. The nightmare hints that she’s subconsciously afraid of really giving herself over to him sexually because it might dig up some vanished, “ideal” romantic feelings from her youth. Harry deals some fifths on her bed in a way that surprises her: “You won’t need it,” he says, off-handedly, “it’s just virtuosity.” For Sturges, the secret aesthete, there’s no such thing, of course, as “just” virtuosity. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be filming Stanwyck’s virtuoso cat-with-a-mouse comedic play with such love and delight (Fonda said that Sturges would uninhibitedly laugh at his own jokes, and that he was “a total egomaniac,” b
ut that this had “almost an endearing quality because he was so naïve about it”).

  When Jean tells her father that she’s fallen for Charles and asks that he be spared at the card table, the old man demurs. She toughens up and boasts that she can protect him: “I’m not your daughter for free, you know!” Jean snaps. This constitutes another moment of deep recognition, coming fast on the heels of “What a life,” in the stateroom. For Sturges, Stanwyck keeps hitting these gongs of verbal recognition so that they resonate so deeply they can hardly be explained, finally, with specific thoughts or words. The Lady Eve itself is slippery and resists the sort of “deep dish” analysis that Sturges always mocked in his work, while still offering as complex a sensory experience as any in the cinema. This movie was a hit, a honey, and a riot, and it’s been loved ever since it was released, right when America needed to take its mind off the upcoming war, a war that barely impinged on Stanwyck’s life on film (at one point, Demarest does a vaudeville-like imitation of Hitler, a reminder of the hell happening off screen).

  “They say a moonlit deck is a woman’s business office,” says Jean, when Charles goes all mushy on her describing his love. Claudette Colbert would have said a line like that using all her earthy, racy common sense. Jean Arthur would have said it anxiously, as if she wasn’t sure if she didn’t sound silly. Irene Dunne might have said it with a tiny twinkle in her eyes, pressing the tip of her tongue to her palette, while Katharine Hepburn would have said it resentfully (or hopefully, if she was in her “femme” mode). Joan Crawford would have made it sound pushy and needy. Bette Davis would have said it ironically. Only Stanwyck could have said this line like she does in The Lady Eve, casting an eye over all of these possibilities, while never quite settling on one of them. It’s clear that the idea amuses her, slightly. Jean doesn’t take it too seriously. Or does she? Stanwyck makes it clear that Jean loves falling for her own act for once; all through this movie, Jean is at her most sincere when she’s being most blatantly insincere with Charles. Surely this is a paradox of human behavior that a world-class actress like Stanwyck would intimately understand.

  “A man that couldn’t forgive wouldn’t be much of a man,” says Jean, with all the common sense maturity that Stanwyck can muster (and that’s a formidable amount in 1941), after Harry warns her that she might be heading for a fall when she tells Charles the truth about herself. Sturges uses Fonda very cleverly in this movie, even more cleverly than he uses Stanwyck. When Charles learns that Jean and her father are gamblers and cons, he coldly rejects her, even pretending that he knew about her all along. Sturges brings out Fonda’s rigid, priggish side, so that we don’t feel quite so bad about laughing at him all through the shipboard scenes. Charles is such an uptight jerk when he spurns Jean that we glide into the final third of the movie completely on her side in any scheme for vengeance she cares to cook up for him.

  Meeting fellow con Sir Alfred (Blore), Jean hatches a plan to impersonate an English lady and give Charles his comeuppance. “I want to see that guy,” she snarls, in the hard, Brooklyn-nasal tone of Mae West. “I’ve got some unfinished business with him,” she continues, her voice softening slightly. “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” Jean concludes. It’s a rather vicious line, but Stanwyck says it with her troubling brand of sadistic tenderness, an abstracted state all her own in which she considers all her many unspeakable options and makes them blend and collide in her unreachable psychic depths.

  Jean holds herself regally when she enters the Pike home as The Lady Eve Sidwich, charming Papa Pike (Pallette) with her tales of taking the subway (in these scenes, Stanwyck suggests an English accent by slapping together a bunch of inane, high-pitched vocal mannerisms and sketch comic impressions of Englishness). After Charles sees her, he’s so befuddled that he takes a speeded-up pratfall over a sofa. When he gets back up, Eve rushes over to him and gently cleans him, Jean’s love for her Hopsie breaking through. He goes upstairs to change, and Eve slips right through the narrow passage between a chair and a table without even looking down, a nifty visual detail that emphasizes how different they are and how they need each other. Charles takes another fall, pulling down some curtains this time, and Eve can’t help laughing, like an audience member. Sturges then frames Fonda in a close-up, where he looks extremely attractive in his lost boy way.

  Why doesn’t he see through her right away? Well, Charles is pretty dim, but Jean has her own explanation. She says it’s because they don’t love each other anymore, though that’s true only on the surface; that knife has cut deep into both of them. When she has Charles under her control again and he proposes marriage to her, Stanwyck glances downwards and looks as if she’s about to crack up as a horse keeps nudging Fonda in the head. (It took thirty takes to get the three-minute stateroom scene because Stanwyck kept laughing, an unusual indulgence for such a famed professional, but one perhaps necessary so as to unleash the barely contained joy of this character, something that didn’t come naturally to Stanwyck).

  For all its fun, The Lady Eve also quite seriously describes the process of disillusionment in youthful nonsense romance, as well as the sort of constantly renewing attraction that is essential to any long-term sexual relationship after the first flush fades and is replaced by deeper knowledge. There’s no such thing as too much information for real, devoted lovers (even if there are certain things that are definitely better left unsaid, a point that Charles makes in the last scene).

  Jean/Eve makes a strikingly skeptical-looking bride behind her flowing Edith Head veil, and she thoroughly enjoys disillusioning poor Hopsie again on their wedding night, when the English lady she’s impersonating merrily admits to a string of husbands and lovers. “I was always taught to be frank and honest!” cries her Eve, and Jean is honest too, of course, about what really matters. When Eve gazes at him like a little girl as he tries to forgive her, it’s hard not to notice that this is the exact look Jean gave her father when he was dealing his fifths; it seems like Jean is partly working out her father issues here. Harry loves her and has his own code of behavior, but he’s also totally amoral. It’s great to have a parent who doesn’t judge you, but Jean’s father makes no judgments and thus has no boundaries. She has to make up her own in order to really become a full-fledged adult out from under his influence.

  Charles keeps taking his pratfalls until she finally takes pity on him and everything is wrapped up for a fragile happy ending that brings them back to their original love boat, older and wiser, with promises of lots of role-playing and sex games to come (the cartoon snake looks “morning after” sated as he hugs two apples that read “The” and “End”). The Lady Eve is, in its way (and what a way), a perfect film, and it features Stanwyck’s funniest, most confident, and most unabashedly romantic performance.

  Before she was Barbara Stanwyck, Ruby Stevens was a teenaged chorus girl who came up the hard way.

  An early publicity photograph of a strikingly young-looking Stanwyck when she was under contract to Columbia Studios.

  Adolphe Menjou and Stanwyck take their masks off for a moment in the Frank Capra tearjerker Forbidden (1932).

  Stanwyck’s young missionary falls under the nihilistic sexual influence of a Chinese warlord in Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).

  Pawed daily by nasty men, Stanwyck’s Lily Powers drowns in self-pity in one of the opening scenes of the scandalous Baby Face (1933).

  A war-loving Robert Young tries to save Stanwyck from the corrupting influence of communism in the alarming right-wing comedy Red Salute (1935).

  In the mid-1930s, Stanwyck was liberated from money and man troubles in a series of screwball comedies, including The Bride Walks Out (1936).

  As her stardom grew, Stanwyck became more comfortable—and more beautiful—in glamorous clothes, often created by designer Edith Head.

  In The Mad Miss Manton (1938), Stanwyck attempts to play a flighty Park Avenue debutante.

  A rare photo of Stanwyck and her adopted son Dion (c.
1940). Courtesy of Photofest.

  Stanwyck in her favorite role, the clothing-challenged Stella Dallas (note the fuzzy shoes).

  William Holden is a violinist turned boxer in love with Stanwyck’s Lorna Moon in Golden Boy (1939).

  Stanwyck clings tightly to matinee idol second husband Robert Taylor.

  Stanwyck in one of her greatest roles, Jean Harrington, a card-sharp brought low by love in the classic Preston Sturges comedy The Lady Eve (1941).

  As singer Sugarpuss O’Shea, Stanwyck proves plenty yum-yum in Ball of Fire (1941).

  Defiantly returning to her chorus girl roots, Stanwyck is a striptease artiste in William Wellman’s Lady of Burlesque (1943).

  Stanwyck plays it cool in perhaps her best-known role, blond-wigged sociopath Phyllis Dietrichson, in Billy Wilder’s classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944).

  Fate catches up with Stanwyck’s spoiled heiress in her most flagrant Oscar bid, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).

  Appearing as a neglected wife in East Side, West Side (1949), Stanwyck gets some bad news over the phone.