Barbara Stanwyck (14 page)

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 barely 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.

An elegantly creepy score by Vic Mizzy keeps things moving, and Stanwyck has fun with her juicy role, especially when she gets to scream in horror. Her first set of screams sound succulent, even orchestral, a Phil Spector wall of sound (she ends the last one on a smoker's hacking
cough). Later on she does another set of basso yowls, this time putting her whole body into it and throwing her head back to punctuate one of her screams. Best of all, when her tormented dreamer realizes what a jam she's in, Stanwyck decides to amuse herself and us by going all-out hambone. “I can't wake up,” she says, breathlessly, letting it sink in. “I can't wake up!” she cries, making the realization louder and more uncontrolled. And then, “I CAN'T WAKE U-h-h-h-h-h-a-HUP!” she howls, putting both arms over her face like some bygone great lady of the stage.

The last half hour gets a little too drowsy, so that the audience might fall asleep with Stany. It's nothing to win a prize on, but
The Night Walker
is not at all embarrassing, unlike the horror features of the time that annihilated Davis, Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Tallulah Bank-head, Miriam Hopkins, and a score of others. Stanwyck came out of her 1960s horror experience unscathed partly because she didn't have the kind of strong, one-note star persona that could be easily trashed. Even in this genre, she's fresh, alert, and inventive, whereas the peevish Taylor has entered into Bela Lugosi territory—at the end, he takes off a ghoulish mask, but his overly made-up, lined face underneath is far more disturbing. When asked about working with his ex-wife, Taylor said, “It's as if we were never married,” and it certainly seems that way on screen.

“I'm supposed to be a hermit,” Stanwyck laughed, in the 1960s, “a loner nursing a broken heart because I lost Robert Taylor …. I don't think anybody's hilariously happy living alone, but you learn to adjust.” Again, this is tricky to read. She's able to step outside of the supposed narrative of her life and comment on it, as if it's a script she's thinking about accepting, but where does real feeling come in? Stanwyck probably couldn't separate that out herself, so there's no way that we can, either. When she attended Taylor's memorial, she wore a yellow dress, because he had once told her that he didn't want her in black at his funeral. She cried openly and loudly during the service, which wasn't her usual stoic style. Stanwyck was crying for a real man who had died, of course, a man that she had known and maybe even loved, in her way. But I think it's fair to say that she always loved the idea of them together more than the reality—which was perfectly pleasant after the nightmare of Frank Fay, but never more than a movie-type deal, at least on his side.

It's clear, however, that Stanwyck really loved her brother Byron, and she made sure that as an older man he had work. Leslie Caron remembers:

Stanwyck's brother Byron was an extra on my film
The Glass Slipper
(1954). We worked on a scene where I'm introduced to the princely court in the great ballroom—I had to step down this long staircase wearing a huge ball dress and the court was massed at the foot of the stairs. Byron stood a little forward from the rest, in a prominent position. He immediately struck me as a hopeless alcoholic, his face very red and his features deformed by alcohol. Strangely, it was evident to me that the assistants were favoring him so it would be impossible to complete the scene without calling him the next day. I asked why this man was getting this treatment of favor. I was told in a discrete way that he was Barbara Stanwyck's brother and that he needed any help he could get. My shock and pain at hearing this were immense. In Hollywood the sense of hierarchy was very strong, it was measured by your success and the salary you earned, the car you drove, the neighborhood you lived in. An extra was way down on the lower rung of the ladder, lower than the craftsmen and the crew while the stars stood at the very top. Democracy didn't exist on a movie set. The huge gulf that separated brother and sister was all the more shocking.

It's a measure of how much Stanwyck was loved by her crew that they made special allowances for the one person from her childhood who had made her feel secure, even though he seemed to be in bad shape by the early 1950s.

Robert Wagner's recent memoir,
Pieces of My Heart
, has opened a new door on Stanwyck's personal life during the period immediately following her divorce from Taylor. After the making of
Titanic
(1953), Wagner says that he took Stanwyck home from a party, and at the door he was met with “a magical look of interest … and appreciation … and desire.” They danced, they drank champagne; he left at dawn. Eventually, she gave Wagner his own keys to her home, and they spent weekends together when they were both in town. Their four-year relationship had to be kept secret owing to the difference in their ages (he was in his early twenties and she was in her mid-forties).

“She cooked for me,” Wagner remembers. “She was good in the kitchen, but then she was good everywhere.” He says that she was highly sexed and had a lot on her mind. She made regular visits to a psychiatrist who prescribed her sodium pentothal to calm her down (she was a coffee addict and rarely able to get the sleep she needed). “Like so many people in show business, she was a prisoner of her career,” he writes.
That assessment sounds about right, though I would probably change his characterization of Stanwyck to “willing prisoner.” Now, there is a small chance that Wagner is gilding the lily about what they had together. In his own recent memoir, Farley Granger related a self-serving story about a one-night stand with Stanwyck in the early fifties. The story doesn't sound particularly believable as Granger tells it, but there are a lot of helpful, pertinent details in Wagner's Stanwyck chapter. He thinks that because of his youth and good looks, he brought her a confidence that she had lost being married to Taylor. I can only hope that this was the case.

Wagner says that she owned some of her own movies, and so they would sometimes watch these films together. She screened
Union Pacific
(1939) for him, and
Ball of Fire
, and even
Baby Face
, during which she let him know what it had been like to work for that movie's producer, Darryl Zanuck. “Barbara told me that Darryl had chased her around his office … and I got the distinct impression that she hadn't appreciated the exercise.” Zanuck just wanted a piece of her, of course, yet his unwanted passes put her in exactly the right state of mind to play Lily Powers; maybe Zanuck sensed as much on some level. Stanwyck told Wagner about how mean Al Jolson was to her when she was starting out, and Wagner thinks that it might have been Jolson who gave her those cigarette burns on her chest.

The relationship with Wagner, whatever it was, couldn't really go anywhere because of their age difference, so finally Stanwyck called it off. Of her later years, Wagner says, “I don't know who the men in her life were, although I'm sure they existed. I know she had escorts, although I assumed most of them were gay.” Stanwyck said in her later years, “Oh, yes, sometimes I have to go to something or other. When I do, I just call good ol' Butch [Cesar] Romero and he says rather reluctantly, ‘Well, if you HAVE to go, I'll take you.' He does that for all of us old broads.”

Wagner wanted to see Stanwyck in the hospital when she was dying, but she advised him to remember her in her prime. As she died, he says, Stanwyck was wearing a four-leaf clover necklace he had given her. On-screen, Wagner looks to me nearly as shifty and unpleasant as Robert Taylor, but off-screen, he seems to have shored up a lot of Stanwyck's broken pride.

Stella Dallas

O
live Higgins Prouty wrote her bestseller,
Stella Dallas
, after her three-year-old daughter died of encephalitis. Known today mainly through this novel and a story about another misfit that would become the Bette Davis vehicle,
Now, Voyager
(1942), Prouty was also the model for “Philomena Guinea,” the famed author of syrupy tales skewered by Sylvia Plath in
The Bell Jar
. By 1961, Prouty had fallen so far out of favor that she couldn't find a publisher for her memoirs and had to have them printed herself. The novel
Stella Dallas
doesn't circulate much; I had to read the one non-lending copy at the New York Public Library during one long afternoon.

The novel has a claim as the prototypical soap opera. For eighteen years, over Prouty's objections, Stella Dallas was a character on a radio soap. Since then she's suffered many indignities, not least the mistaken 1990 movie
Stella
, starring Bette Midler. Nothing I can remember of that movie can top this description in the essential book,
Bad Movies We Love
, which says that Midler is the only one “to interpret this Olive Higgins Prouty chestnut as an occasion to do a bump ‘n' grind atop a bar, imitate Carmen Miranda, stage a food fight, and refer constantly to her breasts while insisting that other characters rave over her sex appeal.” The book also highlights Midler's “terrifying propensity for transforming herself into Betty Hutton, Ruth Gordon and Jerry Lewis all rolled into one.”