Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  Ruby and Mae Clarke moved to the Knickerbocker Hotel on 45th Street with their other roommate, Walda, and in April 1925, Ruby and Mae danced until dawn at Anatole Friedlander’s club on 54th Street. Ruby tentatively dated a boy named Edward Kennedy; he wanted to marry her, and she wanted to wait. As a kid, she had written her name in chalk on the sidewalk “to show everybody how it’s going to look in electric lights.” Her ambition was always spurring her to reach for the top, not settle near the bottom or the middle; it was a drive that never left her. “Of course, I’ve always had a burning desire to be the best of all, and, though I know most things you dream of pass you by,” Stanwyck said, “I’ll go on working with that same desire til the last role I play.” That ambition is what set her apart from somebody like her roommate Mae Clarke, a pretty girl, a talented girl, but somebody who didn’t have the urge to make herself major, to be “the best of all.”

  Ruby hung around The Tavern, a restaurant on 48th Street run by Billy La Hiff, a man who loved and helped out show biz types of all kinds. It was La Hiff who introduced her to Willard Mack, a man who would play Svengali to the young chorus girl and set her on the road to becoming something more, maybe even “the best of all.” Ruby knew this was her big chance, and she grabbed it. “When I’m frightened, even now, I try to act bold,” she said, assuming a gambler’s attitude that again sets her apart from the cautious, the “maybe” people, the Mae Clarkes. She got herself a job in Mack’s new show, The Noose, and also got jobs for her roommates (they later dropped out of it on the road).

  Ruby still thought of herself more as a dancer than as an actress, but the seeds of something else were always there, even when she was a little girl waiting on those steps at 246 Classon Avenue. In The Noose, Rex Cherryman played a condemned man who is loved by a society girl and a chorus girl, played by Ruby. She had just a few lines in the play until Mack started to tinker with it out of town, realizing that the third act needed a lift. He then wrote a scene for Ruby where she pleads with the governor for Cherryman’s ashes: a showcase moment.

  In the Belasco Theatre, Mack saw an old program, “Jane Stanwyck in Barbara Frietchie,” and so he christened his protégée with her new name, Barbara Stanwyck. A hard name, an impressive name, a name to keep visitors out—and a far cry from “Ruby Stevens,” who sounds like a forlorn girl swatting away male advances and teaching herself not to weep in her room later. Levant called Mack “a Belasco hack,” but Mack was successful and he knew his business. He was a man who had been married to the earthy Marjorie Rambeau and the grand Pauline Frederick, obscure names now, but performers who, in their surviving work, might be seen as earlier versions of the Stanwyck image. He was also sensitive enough to draw Stanwyck out of her shell and teach her some reliable techniques. Mack taught her how to make an entrance and, more importantly, he taught her how to assault an audience with emotion and then draw them into the remorseful aftermath of such outbursts.

  Elisha Cook, Jr., the future movie character actor, was in The Noose at the time, and he claimed that Stanwyck’s emotional involvement in her scene hit him on such a gut level that he had to go and vomit after he saw it. Clearly, this was a diamond in the rough who would always somehow stay rough, a Jeanne Eagels who had the discipline to learn how to judge and control uncontrollable emotion to such an extent that the push and pull between her feelings and her technique would lead to astonishing work in her movies in the thirties. Much like her contemporary, James Cagney, she had a freshness mixed with stylization. Some name performers of the twenties and thirties would look utterly lost and foreign to an audience in 1960—let alone our post-Method present—but Cagney and Stanwyck could easily play in the best films of today with only the slightest modification of scale.

  In 1927, Stanwyck made her film debut in Broadway Nights, a silent movie, now lost. She played the friend of the heroine, having lost out on the heroine role itself when she couldn’t cry for her screen test. The press agent Wilbur Morse, Jr. later said that the cameraman for the test “wanted to make her,” but she wasn’t having that. (How many times would she cry, “Get yer hands offah me!” in movies?) Worse, Ruth Chatterton, an established star, came on the set and started to laugh and carry on with her maid when the test director brought out an onion and had some schmaltzy music played so Stanwyck might access her tears. Trying to cry, Stanwyck finally told Chatterton to shut up, but this was one of the few professional battles that she lost.

  A crush on her Noose leading man, Cherryman, seems to have led to a tentative relationship which was dashed when he died of septic poisoning. “Everything about him was so vivid,” she remembered, “or perhaps it was because he was an actor and knew how to project.” She would always gravitate toward actors or performers. She said that she “nearly died” getting over Cherryman. And so the Irish in Stanwyck must have wondered if she was cursed, if she would ever love anyone or anything without seeing it snatched away from her. Cagily, she shifted away from “life”—whatever that is—which seemed to have it in for her, and concentrated on her work as an actress: her other life, her real, imaginative life.

  In her second and last Broadway play, Burlesque, Stanwyck played a dancer whose comedian husband (Hal Skelly) throws her over for another woman and gets hooked on booze, so that she has to rescue him for a final curtain. She was asked to test for the screen version of Burlesque, but she was still busy with the play itself. Also, on the rebound from Cherryman, she had taken up with Frank Fay, the self-proclaimed “King of Vaudeville,” a master of ceremonies, an insult comic par excellence, and someone who was sure of himself and fun to be with—up to a point. Fay was ten years older than Stanwyck and had two marriages behind him. He was a carousing Irish Catholic and a virulent right-winger, a “born in a trunk” type with an enormous ego that needed to be fed or else. Stanwyck had known Fay for a while and had disliked him at first, but she was vulnerable after Cherryman died, and so she fell for Fay and his promised protection of her. It was a whirlwind romance, as they used to say. Fay proposed to Stanwyck by telegram from a theater in St. Louis and she accepted. Only four weeks had passed since Cherryman’s death. Stanwyck and Fay were married on August 26, 1928, and soon went out to Hollywood, where Fay had been signed to a contract with Warner Bros.

  Aside from a few trips here and there, including a disastrous vacation in post-war Europe, Hollywood is where Stanwyck stayed for the rest of her long life. There’s a lovely picture of her perched on Fay’s shoulders on the beach at Malibu, where they had a house, a picture in which her face is ecstatically open to the warmth and air and freedom of California after the cramped heat and cold of Brooklyn and Broadway. It would take some time to get going in movies, and she would have to let go of some of her resentment and feeling of social inadequacy, but the story of Barbara Stanwyck in Hollywood is a triumphant story, not personally triumphant most of the time, but professionally so in every way.

  Her film career didn’t begin smoothly. Joe Schenck had signed her to United Artists to do one picture, The Locked Door (1929), an adaptation of a play by Channing Pollack called The Sign on the Door (Schenck’s wife Norma Talmadge had filmed it as a silent). George Fitzmaurice, the director of The Locked Door, reportedly screamed on the set that he couldn’t make Stanwyck beautiful. “I staggered through it,” she said. “It was all one big mystery to me.” And later, showing her skill with the telling wisecrack, she added: “They never should have unlocked the damned thing.” She just missed being cast in the film of Burlesque, which was renamed The Dance of Life (1929) and directed by John Cromwell for Paramount. Skelly reprised his role, while the female lead went to Nancy Carroll, another talented Irish girl from New York (and the niece of Billy La Hiff), whose career foundered because of the kind of temperament Stanwyck never allowed herself.

  The Locked Door has a bad reputation, mainly deserved, but it’s fairly well filmed for such an early talkie, especially the opening scenes on a “drinking boat” filled with whoopee-making extras. Stanwyck is second-b
illed under Rod La Rocque, under the title, and Fitzmaurice has a pretentious “signed” title card to himself in the credits; he tries to earn that signature with some fancy camera moves, courtesy of cinematographer Ray June, including an impressive crane shot over the party and a tracking shot across a bar, as the revelers shout for gin and more gin.

  We first see Stanwyck in a two shot with mustachioed La Rocque; he asks her how she likes the party. Cut to her close-up: “It’s like being on a pirate ship!” she says, a forced smile plastered on her face, as if Fitzmaurice has just told her that she isn’t pretty enough for him. In this first scene, and some of her others in The Locked Door, Stanwyck has the air of someone trying hard to have the correct reaction to things. This early effort allows us some insight into her real life at the time, when her “make the best of it” attitude wasn’t invigorating, as it would later become, but instead slightly sad.

  The camera catches her in an amateurish, “we’re talking, we’re talking, and now I’ll laugh!” pantomime blunder, as the lecherous La Rocque ushers her into a private room for dinner. When he offers her caviar, she repeats this word with a British or standard American style a, which must have been drilled into her by Willard Mack. Stanwyck’s British-sounding a lasted the rest of her career, defiantly emerging from her Brooklyn purr to prove that she’s as much a lady as anybody—even more so, because she’s had to earn it.

  La Rocque reads his lines in such a sour, affectless way that he’d be right at home in an Ed Wood movie. Stanwyck is forced to draw into herself, but she’s not able to do this as deeply as she will in later films. We see her character starting to wonder if she’s made a mistake by entering the room with La Rocque. When he starts to attack her, she gets her Irish up, rather sketchily, and he cracks, “I like you in a temper!” (The whole world, of course, would eventually love Stanwyck in a temper.) The boat is raided, and there’s a cut back to the private room: Stanwyck’s hair is mussed and her dress is disarranged. It’s unclear just how far La Rocque’s cad has gone with her, but as they exit the boat, dodging a newspaper cameraman and the police, Stanwyck projects a powerful sense of shame. It is the shame of Ruby Stevens after one of her first nights at a mob-run nightclub, when she has gauged just what will be expected of her and what parts of her body and her soul she can manage to keep for herself.

  Eighteen months pass: Stanwyck has married her new boss (William “Stage” Boyd) and tells him “I love you” with all sincerity, the reliable mark of a great movie actress (even if this mark means that she might never be able to say those three words quite so sincerely away from the camera). Her line readings can be a bit wooden here; strangely, Stanwyck always kept a vestige of this stilted delivery, which she used as a kind of control or safety valve for her explosions of emotion. For some reason, the word “to” was always her wooden word. When she tries to divert La Rocque from her sister-in-law (Betty Bronson), she says, “And you promised not to see Helen again?” Did Mack scare her when he heard her saying a Flatbush “tah” for “to”? It’s as if Stanwyck had some kind of verbal or mental block about the word, but she learned to use this block to her advantage, just as she learned to bring up and then tamp down her Brooklyn accent like she was raising and then lowering a light—or the hem of her dress.

  In early talkies like The Locked Door, the actors are trying out many different styles. Almost none of these styles are valid now, but they’re so alien that they exert a kind of fascination. No one knew yet just how different a talking picture was from a silent picture or a stage play, so actors from the stage, like Stanwyck and Boyd, jostle up against former silent stars, like La Rocque and Bronson, and everybody tries out a little of the others’ techniques until you can barely keep track of the weird pauses, ringing declarations, and inward emoting in close-ups. Bronson, who was an incomparable Peter Pan on screen in 1925, is a hopeless case here, a wilted gamine waiting for title cards that never come, and La Rocque sometimes seems like he’s trying to be deliberately funny despite his villainous role.

  Stanwyck is too young and vulnerable yet wised-up for her noble, oblivious part; the later Stanwyck would have known not to enter that stateroom with La Rocque, but this later Stanwyck also had a knack for attracting grueling filmic ordeals. She survives her first one here when her husband shoots La Rocque in his hotel room, and she finds herself trapped with his body behind the titular locked door. Stanwyck makes a fuss in the dark and pretends that she shot La Rocque, which brings some welcome comedy relief in the form of Mack Swain, the hotel proprietor, and ZaSu Pitts, the lobby receptionist. When Stanwyck tries to pull up the strap of her torn dress, a horny cop yells, “Stop that! The way your dress is now is … evidence!” The DA (Harry Mestayer) sneaks a shameless look at her left breast before grilling her in a way that feels more than a little vengeful and sexual. In the middle of this exploitative stuff, Stanwyck tries to convince her husband to be quiet, jumping off a couch and grasping at the air, a graceful, original gesture that signals her still-embryonic talent.

  Whatever its failings, The Locked Door at least offered Stanwyck a clearly defined role in a clearly defined story. Her second film, Mexicali Rose (1929), at Columbia, is a bottom-of-the-barrel programmer of the worst sort, the kind of movie where no one has given much thought to anything. It runs all of sixty minutes and features a scenario by head Columbia writer Dorothy Howell (working under the pseudonym Gladys Lehman) that makes little sense. In a capsule review, Pauline Kael wrote, “Barbara Stanwyck called the film ‘an abortion,’ and she wasn’t being too rough on it”—one wisecracking dame quoting another’s wisecrack and then amplifying it, a neat trick. Seen today, Mexicali Rose is the kind of picture so primitive and so muddled that it defeats any effort to mock it.

  It opens with another barroom scene, this time set south of the border. In a tired running gag, a drunk is always running to the bar whenever a free drink is offered. Stanwyck’s first close-up shows her beautifully lit and made-up, decked out in a flowing gold robe that opens strategically at the legs. It swiftly becomes clear that the film is only interested in her as a sex object, and in a limited way, at that. After she sits down on husband Sam Hardy’s lap (“Gee, I could go to the devil in your arms!” she cries), the camera comes to a full stop when she gets up so that it can stare at her behind.

  Later on, when she’s exiting a boat, the camera is placed low and again lingers on her rear end as she walks down a gangplank; it’s a “forget your acting, let’s see your ass” part that forces Stanwyck to place her hands on her hips a lot and sashay around. Hardy buys her an anklet, a harbinger of double indemnities to come, and she has him tie it on her. You can practically hear the director barking, “We’ve done her ass, now let’s do her legs,” behind the camera. But whenever the camera gives her a close-up, Stanwyck is clearly a star already, so that we want to watch any emotion that she cares to show us on her hard little face, with its tiny, mistrustful eyes.

  Hardy discovers bruises on her leg and another man’s tie in her room, so he sends her packing. Rose has a few lines about how a married lover turned her into a tramp, but Stanwyck can’t do either the manipulation or the anger of such a moment yet. Yet green as she is, she’s Eleonora Duse compared to Hardy, who has a lot of laugh lines that fall flat, and to the inept William Janney, who plays Hardy’s young charge. Stanwyck marries Janney, and it’s not made particularly clear, either in the script or in her playing, if Rose does it for revenge or out of genuine love. When we hear Rose has killed herself off-screen, this development feels as bewildering as the rest of the film; it seems that everybody just wanted to get this turkey finished.

  These two bad experiences with movies—the second far worse than the first, which was no prize—thoroughly demoralized Stanwyck and undermined her confidence. Fay was getting a big build-up from Warners, where he did his emcee act for their revue, The Show of Shows (1929). At this point, he was still the star in the family, and he could still afford to be solicitous of his wife because she was having
a hard time getting started.

  There were no more offers after the sleazy Mexicali Rose, and Stanwyck was stuck at home for a few months. Finally, she made a color test of her scene from The Noose with Alexander Korda, who gave her some encouragement, even though she knew she was being given the brush-off and might even be washed up. “At twenty-two, they had me on my way to the Old Ladies’ Home,” she later said. Harry Cohn at Columbia still had an option on her services, and he asked Frank Capra, the studio’s wunderkind director, to meet with Stanwyck and see if she might do for the lead in his film Ladies of Leisure (1930). She muffed the interview, and Capra called her “a porcupine,” but then Fay got him on the phone and urged him to look at her Korda test. We owe Fay a lot for that phone call.

  The Capra Miracle

  Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden,