Barbara Stanwyck (2 page)

“At least nobody beat me,” Stanwyck later said, trying to make the best of things. Then: “Where I grew up, kids lived on the brink of domestic and financial disaster.” Ruby had no real friends, and later she claimed that she was “the stupidest little brat in school.” An orphan, alone, in the Brooklyn of 1920. Whatever she saw and heard seems to have made her as guarded as possible; in her most touching moments on screen, she's always struggling to keep her poker face on so that the bottomless emotion she's hiding can't burst out like lava flowing over the sets, the camera, even the audience in the theater. “My clearest memory is of the crowds,” she remembered, “of spent old women bent over hot tubs and babies crying and men reeling drunk to their homes. Half the time I slept on a mattress on the kitchen floor.”

Maud and Mabel were both married and had little contact with Ruby or, later, with Barbara Stanwyck. It was a fractured family, barely a family at all. Yet, loner that she was, all her life Stanwyck was loyal to two people from this blasted childhood: Byron, whom she helped gain work as an extra in films, and sister Millie's boyfriend, “Uncle Buck” Mack, who became a surrogate father figure for Ruby and ran Stanwyck's household throughout her Hollywood years right up to his death in 1959. A vaudevillian of the old school, Uncle Buck taught Ruby the dance steps she would need to go into the chorus line like her sister. Ruby liked the theater, but the movies were more important to her, and they remained important her whole life. “I'd do anything to get money to go to movies,” she said, “I tended children, washed dishes, ran errands.” Ruby thrilled to Pearl White's serials and acted out some of them in Prospect Park. “I tried to escape by retreating to a dream world of my own,” Stanwyck later said.

At thirteen or fourteen, Ruby got a job at the Abraham and Strauss department store, doing “the plain wrapping, not the fancy,” of course. There was a stab at clerical work, and then she was fired from
Vogue
when she said she could cut dresses to a pattern but couldn't manage it. “I knew there was no place but show business that I wouldn't hate,” she said, and soon found herself hoofing on the roof of the Strand hotel. The
dance director, Earl Lindsay, cast her in a couple of his Broadway revues, and he taught the sullen and resentful Ruby to be professional and to always give her all, even in the back row of the chorus. She took this advice too much to heart, so that he soon had to tell her off for kicking too high and not being “a team player,” but she was a star in the making, and a star is never really a team player.

Mobsters controlled most of the clubs in this era, and Ruby probably saw and experienced a lot. “Have you had any experience?” asks a naughty-eyed boy in
Baby Face
(1933). Stanwyck gives him a priceless look of sly impatience and cracks, “Plenty”—Ruby's experience barely visible behind her eyes. Surely there were bad and scary moments for her beyond the ones that are known. In later life, people noticed that there were cigarette scars on her chest; these scars she got from her encounters with men were physical and permanent, and the knowledge of such vicious male violence and the meanness it stemmed from was permanent, too.

In Texas Guinan's nightclubs, fifteen-year-old Ruby would shake for the sugar daddies and get bank notes stuffed in her scanties. She got an education in how to inflame a man's interest and then give him the brush-off; her experience ensorcelling and then coldly denying men would later develop into one of her specialties in movies. Maybe Ruby wasn't able to cool down some of the more powerful men, especially the mobsters, but if she had to put out, she learned how to keep her heart and soul out of it. In early 1930s Hollywood, she said, “Say, you gotta live with yourself. How can a girl live with herself if she hasn't any self-respect? And how can she have any self-respect if she pretends to love a man just to get a job?” The mores of the time might have dictated this statement, but it's interesting that Stanwyck chose to stress that it was the pretense of “love” that was odious to her. Sex without love, of course, was another matter.

Stanwyck remembered her chorus years with fondness: “How my memories of those three years sparkle! My chorine days may not have seemed perfect to anyone else, but they did to me.” In her interviews, she always tried to brush off the past. It wasn't so bad, she insisted, or, it wasn't so bad for
me
. She would ricochet between being boastful about the hard knocks and being resentful of the people who hadn't suffered them—but she was never resentful about the hard knocks themselves, whatever they were. That attitude would have been too dangerous. If Stanwyck had really reflected on or tried to come to terms with what she had been through, the whole “Barbara Stanwyck” apparatus and image
might have collapsed into clinical depression, or drink, or some other kind of escapism. To her immense and lasting credit, she never entirely let that collapse happen, and her attitude allowed her to become perhaps the finest or at least most consistently fine actress of her time in American movies.

In 1922, she was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, dancing at the New Amsterdam Theater. Ruby lived with two other chorus girls, one of whom was Mae Clarke, a similar “hard on the outside, soft on the inside” type who achieved some fame, or notoriety, as the girl who gets a grapefruit in the face from James Cagney in
The Public Enemy
(1931). During a stifling summer, the girls lived over a laundry on 46th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and it's easy to picture the three of them soaking their tired feet and wisecracking about stage door johnnies as the Sixth Avenue El rattled by all through the night. “I just wanted to survive and eat and have a nice coat,” Stanwyck claimed.

At this time, Jeanne Eagels was making a huge impact on stage in
Rain
as the prostitute Sadie Thompson, the prototype for many of Stanwyck's later heroines. Sadie was a good-time girl led astray into virtue by a hypocritical minister who then rapes her and kills himself, leaving her bitterness about the world reinforced. Ruby saw Eagels in
Rain
four times, and this great actress had an effect on the later Stanwyck style. In her one surviving talkie, another W. Somerset Maugham adaptation,
The Letter
(1929), Eagels is a kind of missing link in acting culture, a bizarre, not easily classifiable bridge from the old to the new: from, say, the sheer presence of a Tallulah Bankhead to the Method neurosis of a Kim Stanley. Addicted to drugs, Eagels pours out emotion all over the place; she's an uncommonly messy actress, like a sparkler giving off blinding light before burning out. Stanwyck accessed the same type of seemingly uncontrollable personal emotion, yet somehow managed—through strength, stamina and practice—to build a kind of controlling technique around her displays of feeling, so that she gave us fresh rage and sorrow on command for decades, something the doomed Eagels was only able to do for a few years.

Oddly, Ruby became good friends with that famous neurotic of the piano, Oscar Levant, who wrote that she was “wary of sophisticates and phonies,” as if she wanted to both protect what was genuine in her heart and also protect herself from social disqualification, a perilous balance that would define her work in
Stella Dallas
(1937) and many other films. As a chorus girl, she was a “Keep Kool Cutie” (I love the
K
in “Kool”); did a number called “A Room Adjoining a Boudoir” with Johnny Dooley;
and performed a striptease behind a white screen in one of Ziegfeld's “Shadowgraph” tableaux, a discreetly sexy stage convention that survived into some of the Warner Bros. musicals of the early thirties. There are photos of her dating from this period that show her tiny eyes still shiny with the openness of youth; a more hooded look would come later in photographs of her taken during the forties and fifties. But even in the early photos, she holds her body away from the camera, protecting it with her arms or a stiff stance. If she hadn't done this, the men and the mobsters would have grabbed at her until there was nothing left.

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.