Barbara Stanwyck (15 page)

Prouty's original novel begins by describing thirteen-year-old Laurel, a girl with perfect taste who looks like an Isadora Duncan pupil. At thirty-nine, her mother Stella Dallas is “a fat, shapeless little ball of a woman” who has atrocious taste in clothes. Prouty tells us that Stella was ashamed of her own poverty-stricken mother, who aged fast and dressed drably,
and she has always over-compensated by piling on furs and ruffles and jewelry. Separated from her husband, the patrician Stephen Dallas, Stella runs into her old riding instructor, Ed Munn: “She didn't like Ed Munn. Stephen had been right. He
was
cheap.” But Ed's eyes flatter her, and Stella has a weakness for male flattery. Some upright women in town see Ed Munn entering Stella's vacation quarters, and gossip ensues, even though Stella doesn't sleep with Ed. She only wants his attention.

Prouty's Stella, in her youth, had been a beauty: “Her lips were cherry-red, her cheeks peach-blossom pink, and without paint and powder in those days.” Stephen, who has buried himself in a mill town after his embezzler father's suicide, gets taken in by her for a time and marries her. He soon discovers that she's a hopeless vulgarian who rearranges his beloved books by color and can't help but flirt archly with every man she meets. We identify with Stephen and Laurel and their antipathy towards Stella in the first third of the novel; no heroine of a book who outright rejects books is ever going to have much of our sympathy. Prouty's style can be saccharine, but the crux of her novel is far from soapy. The main tension here is between necessary and enriching good taste that can turn stuffy and intolerant, versus Stella's low-class energy, “pep” and need for fun, which can turn barbarous and destructive. Beneath this push-pull is a much more upsetting issue, the explosion of primal emotions when a son or daughter is embarrassed in some way by a parent.

In all of the
Stella Dallas
iterations, the most disturbing character by far is Ed Munn, a glad-hander who falls fast into hopeless alcoholism and dereliction. He's the ugly side of Stella herself, the stubborn coarseness she can't shake off that ruins her life. Occasionally, Stephen has found Munn “fondling” the baby Laurel, and when she reaches adolescence, Laurel is violently opposed to Munn as a kind of sexual threat. It's hard not to wonder, from a modern perspective, just what Munn has done to earn Laurel's anger and fear. Each version of
Stella Dallas
carries a queasy feeling that Munn has molested Laurel or is going to give in to his Neanderthal drunken urges and molest her, and that threat lies heavily over the narrative.

Prouty's Stella obviously doesn't care a thing about the sex act itself. She just likes male attention: “Life wouldn't be worth living, Stella felt, if she had no admirers.” The famous party scene, where no one comes to Laurel's birthday because of her mother's reputation, is handled in two terse, very effective pages in the Prouty source material. It ends with a desperate piece of emotional blackmail on Stella's part, begging Laurel never to leave her.

At her best here, Prouty has no illusions about her heroine's basic character; she even writes that Stella's famed maternal instinct had to work its way up “through her vanities and self-interests.” When Stella hears people making fun of her appearance on a train and realizes that she's holding Laurel back from social acceptance, Prouty's internal monologue for her is admirably pragmatic. This is a woman who has had her entire sense of herself destroyed brutally and quickly, yet she bounces right back and becomes “hard and practical” for the sake of her daughter's future.

Bracing as Stella's practicality is, this is the point where Prouty's novel deteriorates into far too much self-sacrifice; Stella is even forced to disillusion Laurel by marrying the odious Munn. Then comes the famous last scene, where the understanding new Mrs. Dallas (a character so all-knowing and compassionate that she gives me the creeps) leaves her sitting room shades open so that down-and-out Stella can watch Laurel experience her first tea and reconnect with the society boy she loves.

In 1924, there was a stage version of
Stella Dallas
with Mrs. Leslie Carter. A silent film followed in 1925, directed by Henry King, adapted by Frances Marion, and starring Belle Bennett as Stella and the elegant, stiff Ronald Colman as Stephen. The film begins with a ludicrous prologue where Stephen's father kills himself (a newspaper reads, in huge letters, “Stephen Dallas, Embezzler!” and a smoking gun falls directly onto the headline). In her youthful scenes, Bennett is already a blowzy, Helen Morgan-esque figure with large, forlorn eyes. Since we can't hear Bennett, the onus is on her to be visually embarrassing, and she manages to be, most of the time—especially when she's waddling around a fancy resort while Laurel (Lois Moran) recoils in horror.

This Stella is both sloppy and pretentious, a lethal combination. Amidst the detritus of her messy home, Stella extends her hand to be kissed by Laurel's teacher, Miss Philloburn (Miss Phillobrown in the book, and in the Stanwyck version). The town gossips see Bennett's Stella cavorting with Ed Munn (Jean Hersholt) and mistakenly think the two are sleeping together, just as in the book, but Bennett gives you no sense of Stella's need for male attention. She plays a few of her scenes too comedically, and when the big moments come, she throws her head back and bugs her eyes to indicate grief, even if she does let herself go straight to flabby, straw-haired hell physically.

King doesn't shape the major scenes, so everything feels sketchy—especially the birthday party sequence, where Moran ineptly looks like she's going to laugh rather than cry, and Bennett does a sort of puffy
self-pity. And King stages the scene where Munn ruins Stella's chance to get back with Stephen so poorly that it seems to have no weight at all. There's an amusing moment when Stella throws aside the text of Shaw's
Man and Superman
that Laurel gave her and pines instead for the new Elinor Glyn trash bestseller. But Bennett plays the train scene all wrong; she looks mildly annoyed, then mistily self-pitying again. For the climax in the rain, where this Stella is watching Laurel's marriage to her young man, Bennett is seen as a small figure behind a large prison-like fence, her arms stretched up to hang onto the bars. When she moves away, she looks deliriously happy—another odd, misguided choice.

This King version was so financially successful for its producer, Samuel Goldwyn, that he decided to do a remake in 1937, and he chased after Stanwyck's old screen test nemesis, Ruth Chatterton, who turned him down, thankfully. While they were making
Banjo on My Knee
, Stanwyck told Joel McCrea, a Goldwyn contract player, that she desperately wanted to play Stella Dallas. McCrea went to bat for her (“Joel McCrea practically clubbed Sam Goldwyn into getting me into
Stella Dallas
,” Stanwyck later said), and he got her a chance to make a screen test for director King Vidor, who wanted Stanwyck for the role.

Established stars like Stanwyck didn't make tests, generally, and McCrea had to talk her into doing so. She must have remembered the humiliations of all the useless tests she did when she first came to Hollywood, but Stanwyck wanted the part of Stella so badly that she was willing, finally, to do anything for it. Later, she said that “everybody was testing for it,” and even compared the situation to the search for Scarlett O'Hara, an absurd comparison, of course. No other actress of her stature really wanted this difficult and frankly unflattering role, but landing the part meant so much to Stanwyck that she built the casting process up afterwards in her own mind. She was one of the few major female stars never seriously considered for Scarlett. She never made one of the popular “moonlight and magnolia” pictures of the time, like
Jezebel
(1938). Versatile she was, but a Southern belle she was not.

Goldwyn told Stanwyck that she was too young for the role, didn't think she could act it, didn't have the necessary sex appeal, and didn't have enough experience with children, which was really a low blow. Stanwyck and her son Dion never worked as mother and son on any level. She was too solitary, too much the lone wolf, and likely too hung up on her own vanished mother to ever know what it would take to be one herself. This is not to minimize Dion's suffering, or the unhappy, close to destitute life he led (he died on May 16th, 2006). She should never
have adopted him. It just didn't work out, and by 1937 she may have already known that she had few feelings for this boy who was becoming something of a problem child. Robert Taylor said that Dion “wasn't a bad kid,” but he got bad grades; he definitely got in the way of her insecure marriage to Taylor.

When he was arrested for selling dirty books to teenagers in 1960, Dion was straightforward about his lack of a relationship with Stanwyck:

I never saw her—except for a lunch date in 1952 that was arranged by an uncle—since she sent me away to military school in Indiana. My first year of high school. I was a bad student. I guess that bothered her. She didn't expect me to be a genius or anything, but she wanted me to take advantage of the education she was buying for me. I didn't. I didn't do anything real wrong. I just wasn't interested. I was told that she would have sent me to any college I wanted to go to. I'm sorry now that I didn't take advantage of the offer. I guess it was more my fault than it was hers. How we each went our separate ways.

I find it admirable that Dion takes some responsibility for their rift, even if he would become more candid and embittered as the years went on and she still refused to see him. She didn't go to his wedding. “I invited her but she didn't make it,” he said. “She bought us a bathroom set, though. And when the baby was born, she bought furniture for him and sent us $100. It still bothers me that she's never come to see her only grandson, my son.”
Confidential
magazine ran a story with Dion in 1959 with the plaintive title, “Does My Mother, Barbara Stanwyck, Hate Me?”

If she had hated him, of course, she might have come around to loving him. The truth, sadly, was that she seemed to feel almost nothing where he was concerned. Stanwyck sent him a little furniture, a little money, but her heart was closed. She kept a photo of him in her closet in later years. When he was mentioned in her presence, she would simply say, “Oh, he's long gone,” and change the subject. Dion remembered the last time they met: “As politely as a stranger I asked about her career. As politely and distantly as the movie queen she was she answered and inquired how I had been.”

This is “star's adopted offspring as fan,” à la Christina Crawford—a much more serious and scary case, of course, but characterized by the same sort of disconnection. As someone who loves Stanwyck as much as anyone can love an artist, I can't really wrap my head around the
fact that she could say, “You can shoot outlaw horses but not kids. The only thing you can do when you have tried everything, and nothing has worked, is to save yourself.” This, from the woman who played Stella Dallas!

Judging by most accounts, the “everything” she tried doesn't seem to have been all that extensive. “Uncle Buck” Mack is the only one who cared at all about Dion in the Stanwyck household. At twelve, Dion was hospitalized when a fishing spear went through his leg at summer camp. “The doctors phoned my mother,” he said. “I waited and waited for her to come. She never so much as called.” At fifteen, he was something of a delinquent (anything to get some attention), and Stanwyck sat him down, with Taylor, to lecture him about his future.

Then, according to Dion, Mack drove him to Hollywood for a specific purpose: “Uncle Buck explained that Mother had paid for the high-priced call girl to teach me the facts of life.” If this actually happened, it opens an extremely dark window into Stanwyck's psyche. I have a good friend, the writer Bruce Benderson, an outrageous, unflappable, force-of-nature fellow, and when I told him about Dion's call girl story, even he was flummoxed. But after a pause, he burst out with, “Well, then that proves she loved him!” It was a funny line, but it contains some twisted sort of truth, I think.

Whatever led Stanwyck to do this, if she did indeed do this, it perhaps had some meaning to her that was based in her own concept of “tough love.” If we are to understand her and even some of her work, we have to come to terms with this concept, this impulse to both disillusion and enlighten. Underneath, there was probably some contempt for men and for the sex act itself, but the overarching sentiment seems to have been something like, “He needs to learn the ropes”—just as she had needed to as a girl. Nonetheless, her contempt ultimately rose to the top afterwards and stayed there. “Soon after this incident,” Dion recalled, “I got a call from Uncle Buck, and asked him if I could come home. He told me to forget it, to forget that Barbara Stanwyck was my mother. He said, ‘She wants nothing to do with you.'”

What appears to be at work here is a kind of Darwinian “fend for yourself” non-mothering mothering, mixed with a kind of desire for vengeance on the male sex and its urges, the urges that cost her those cigarette scars on her chest. And so Dion was cast out of her domain, never to return, even though he remained ever hopeful that she might reconcile with him, even on her deathbed. On that deathbed, she left instructions that he was not under any circumstances to be admitted to her
room. Some of this directive might have stemmed from financial anxiety. She had forced Robert Taylor to pay her alimony until his own death as compensation for how he had embarrassed her before their divorce. Now, she didn't want this “they shoot horses, don't they?” old child to get a penny of her money.

So how does Dion relate to
Stella Dallas
, one of her key movies and the role that meant the most to her? Stella goes to great lengths to cut herself off from her daughter so that the daughter will have a chance. In life, Stanwyck went to great and on some deep level inexplicable lengths to sever all ties with her adopted son. And Ruby Stevens's pregnant mother was hit on a streetcar by a drunk, who knocked into her so hard that she fell and hit her head and eventually died. There Ruby is, still on the steps, waiting for her dead mother to come home. So, on screen at least, Stanwyck would incarnate a mother who does everything for her child and then goes into self-imposed exile, thereby working a catharsis for Ruby and for the star's audience. At the end, Stella is on the outside looking in at her daughter's life, just as Dion was left looking in on Stanwyck's real life, her career, and hoping in vain to be noticed.