Barbara Stanwyck (23 page)

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.

A duplicitous Stanwyck cools her heels behind bars in Robert Siodmak's noir
The File on Thelma Jordan
(1949).

The end of an era: Stanwyck says goodbye to all that in Sam Fuller's masterful western
Forty Guns
(1957).

As an older woman, Stanwyck let her hair go white, but her face could still be as open and vulnerable as a girl's.

The young Barbara Stanwyck in all her glory, as Megan Davis in her best Frank Capra film,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1933).

The Gay Sisters, Flesh and Fantasy, My Reputation, The Other
Love, B. F.'s Daughter, East Side, West Side, To Please a Lady,
Titanic, Executive Suite, These Wilder Years

T
here were times when Stanwyck cast an envious eye over the kind of material Bette Davis was making her own at Warner Bros. She very much wanted to play in
Dark Victory
(1939), which went to Davis, and she also lusted for
Mildred Pierce
(1945), but her pal Joan Crawford snagged that one. Stanwyck wasn't especially suited to the woman's picture of this era, but, as was the case with many another genre, she got several chances to make this type of movie her own. As she had done in other genres, she tackled—and ultimately conquered—the soap opera on her own terms.

Davis and a few others had turned down
The Gay Sisters
(1942), a Lenore Coffee adaptation of a lengthy Stephen Longstreet novel, before Stanwyck took it on. The first ten minutes of this movie could make for a knockout drinking game; if you downed a shot every time somebody said the name “Gaylord,” you'd be dead drunk before the first reel was finished. Papa Gaylord (Donald Woods), who is off to World War I, insists on “a Gaylord house, run by Gaylord servants, in the Gaylord manner,” and he's just getting warmed up. He calls one of his three daughters a “good Gaylord” and then mentions that another is “a Gaylord, through and through.” Of oldest daughter Fiona, a servant intones, “A Gaylord if ever there was one, and a redheaded Gaylord at that!” Just in case we don't get the picture yet, Father G cries, “You're not just a Smith or a Jones or a Brown, you're a Gaylord!” Counseling Fiona, he mentions, “You must always be a Gaylord,” and emphasizes that, “The land is the Gaylord's religion.” It's as if some Monty Python sketch had been
sandwiched into the opening scenes; counting the readable names of the girls' dead mother and then the monogrammed hat that falls off of their dead father at the front, there are twenty-one instances of this “Gaylord” repetition mania in the prologue alone.

Jumping forward in time, it seems that the Gaylord girls, or “the Gay dames,” as they're sometimes called, have been involved in litigation over their father's will for twenty-three years and counting. Stanwyck's “fighting Fiona” has some grudge against Charles Barclay (George Brent), a rich man in league with a charity trying to collect 10 percent of the estate, and Barclay has some grudge against her. Fiona has a small boy named Austin (Larry Simms), and we later learn that he is the result of Fiona's failed marriage to Barclay.

The intriguing thing here is Stanwyck's relation to her on-screen son. In his first scene, Stanwyck avidly watches this kid get picked on by a group of boys and then relishes the sight of him defending himself: “Fight back, punch him in the nose!” she snarls. Surely this attitude mimics the distant, tough-love way that Stanwyck tried to relate to Dion, who was too sensitive and awkward to be the little firebrand she wanted (Simms even looks a lot like a young Dion Fay). Later on, Fiona worries about where Austin will spend his vacations and briefly gives up custody of him over this issue, a sad on-screen contrast to Stanwyck's active avoidance of her own son off-screen whenever he had a vacation from military school.

The “Gaylord” madness lets up a bit in the first hour, but it comes creeping back in when you least expect it. “We Gaylords are a queer lot,” says good sister Susanna (Nancy Coleman). Fiona herself gets in on the act: “Susie, Susie, what a Gaylord!” she sighs, and later makes reference to “an old Gaylord custom.” To top off the Gaylord fever, when Fiona has finally given in to Barclay and sold the old homestead, she says, “Let's go down and drink to the end of the Gaylords,” and Stanwyck is forced into another of her weirdly unconvincing drunk scenes. She's on much more solid ground when she sarcastically narrates a flashback to when she hoodwinked Barclay; it plays as a rip-off of
The Lady Eve
, but agreeably so. Stanwyck is fully aware here of the thespian implications of her contemptuous man trapping, referring to “my big acting scene” when Fiona pretends to get the vapors on her wedding night, then swooning ultra-falsely on a staircase. “Katharine Cornell couldn't have done it better,” Stanwyck cracks, knowing full well that her modern style of performing is sweeping away the “back of the hand to the forehead” custard of Cornell and all her forebears.