Barbara Stanwyck (39 page)

Finally, Stanwyck got a movie offer, a featured role in
Walk on the Wild Side
(1962) as a lesbian madam. At first, she was jubilant: “Chalk up another first for Stanwyck!” she crowed. But when gossip columnist Louella Parsons called her and claimed to be shocked that she accepted such a part, Stanwyck got defensive with her. “What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?” she asked. The role was juicy, but perhaps its air of exploitation made Stanwyck uncomfortable (and it definitely added fuel to the fire of the lesbian rumors surrounding her bachelor woman private life at the time). The script, which was based on a Nelson Algren novel set in Depression-era New Orleans, was worked over by many hands, and the film suffers from two miscast and uncharismatic leads, Laurence Harvey and Capucine, the mistress of producer Charles K. Feldman. Capucine is such a weak and bored scene partner that Stanwyck has to work in a kind of void, which can be seen as appropriate, since her character, Jo Courtney, is unrequitedly in love with Capucine's prostitute Hallie. The movie featured a frustrated dynamic that Stanwyck had never been asked to play before.

Stanwyck enters
Walk on the Wild Side
with plummy confidence, even doing a literal “star turn” before going upstairs to see her beloved star hooker—she almost laughs, maybe with the sheer joy of just being in a movie again. Hallie says that Jo should stop trying, that she “can't change” for her. But Jo replies, “Sometimes I've waited years for what I've wanted,” in a ghostly, absent voice. She's a predatory hawk, a woman who swoops down on unhappy or destitute girls and installs them in
her elegant New Orleans bordello, but Stanwyck makes sure we can see Jo's genuine, tender love for Hallie. She's aged visibly since her last on-screen role in
Forty Guns
, and Edward Dmytryk photographs her harshly, as if Jo is a greyed, narrow-eyed bird of prey (“Take your claws off me,” Hallie says to Jo at one point).

Jo is saddled with a legless husband who scuttles around on a pulley. In a scene late in the movie, she reveals her disgust for men. “Love,” she sneers, quietly. “Can any man love a woman for herself without wanting her body for his own pleasure?” This is a lady who despises yet profits from male lust, and this is the one quality that makes her interesting in relation to Stanwyck's other characters. But Jo Courtney is a shallow conception, a woman who needs to be “explained” by some Penguin Freud, a lesbian who doesn't even get to be a real lesbian because that would be too threatening in 1962. Instead, we're made to understand that she's frigid.

In her big early scene where she slaps and manipulates Hallie, Stanwyck performs an expert, almost campy pyrotechnical display, startling us with some decisive movements and step-on-the-gas shouting to keep the girl in line (her exhale on an “Ah!” sounds like the hiss of steam heat from a radiator). The scene plays rather like an audition, or an advertisement for her talent: “I'm tired of sitting at home with the TV, hire me!” she seems to be signaling.
Wild Side
, turgidly directed by Dmytryk, is anything but wild and is only enlivened by a baby-faced Jane Fonda, shaking her chassis as a runaway-turned-hooker named Kitty Twist, and by a sinuous credit sequence by Saul Bass involving a kingly black cat slinking along to Elmer Bernstein's jazzy, amusing score. Stanwyck obviously put thought and skill and honest emotion into this smallish role, but it led her nowhere. She hated flying, so she was stranded in Hollywood when most movie production at that time had moved abroad to Europe.

Two years later, producer Hal Wallis, a trusted link to an older Hollywood, offered Stanwyck the opportunity to appear in an Elvis Presley movie. She was understandably skeptical at first. “But I thought this might be very interesting,” she told John Kobal, “this would give me an entirely different audience, a very young audience.” (Her reasoning is close to the thinking that Bette Davis used to talk herself into accepting
Return from Witch Mountain
[1978], a Disney feature). And so she's billed below the title in
Roustabout
(1964), one of the legion of assembly line Elvis movies that make for such a depressing day of programming when they habitually get run back to back on television. Stanwyck plays Maggie Morgan, the owner of a struggling carnival, and she's endorsed in
the film as an emblem of personal feeling amid financial failure—even if this whole enterprise is just one more moneymaking venture for Elvis's manager, Colonel Parker. “I think he's smooth, and sexy,” says a female audience member as Elvis sings the first of many interchangeable songs. But the King looks bored and stale.

After a fight, Elvis finds himself working in Maggie's carnival, where he draws in teenage customers with his lazy, open-mouthed leers. Stanwyck is still slender and attractive in her blue denim and white and grey mane of hair. She underplays and generally takes it easy, but there's one scene with Elvis where she can't help herself—she has to be an artist. Fed up with his selfishness, Stanwyck purrs, “Oh … just take care of number one, huh?” Presley rises to meet her righteous energy: “That's right, doesn't everybody?” he drawls, in the tone of his “Thank you, thankyouverymuch.” Stanwyck is overtaken by a kind of moral unrest: “No,” she says, making the word land. “No,” she repeats, making her protest sink in. “You learn that and you might start coming alive from the waist up.”

Stanwyck seems actually to reach Elvis in this scene; he looks shaken when she leaves it. The gritty representative of the Depression 1930s rebukes the irresponsible, narcissistic neo-Boomer, and the exchange has a weight that embarrasses the purgatorial movie itself. I'm not sure how she achieves this effect, but it partly has to do with the measured rhythm of her delivery and also the need to make a large statement to her audience, an audience that she's begun to lose. Though
Roustabout
is a waste of her time and ours (in the last number, she gets lost in the crowd), in that one scene Stanwyck is as galvanizing as she ever was.

Stanwyck wasn't equipped for idleness (few people are, of course, but especially those who have always put work first). Surely she felt lonely and unappreciated at times during this period. As always, though, she looked at her situation and made the best of it. “I live very simply,” she told John Kobal. “I have a nice home and a few friends. I don't go to many big parties or premieres or anything like that, mainly because I don't care for them. And I have a few good friends, and I enjoy them as I hope they enjoy me. And apart from my housekeeper, I live alone. Well, of course, I'm a bachelor woman!” she insisted, giving it a name and making it sound sensible and fancy-free. “But so many people take it out of context,” she continued, “then they dramatize it and it's like, ‘Here's Madame X walking down the street, poor old soul.' Well, that's not true at all. Hundreds of thousands of people live alone …”

And some of them learn to like it. I won't dramatize her personal life at this point, since she obviously didn't herself. Self-pity, Stanwyck
felt, will kill you. But a lack of self-pity can sometimes edge into overall bitterness about life, so that sometimes, in her interviews, only a small bit of bleak humor stands between Stanwyck's straight-shooting view of herself and the abyss that swallowed up Lily Powers. “Romance can't be forced, dreamed up, arranged,” she said, when asked about her romantic life in the late 1960s. She spoke from experience, for the Hollywood publicity machine had actually tricked her into caring about her own arranged marriage, and she knew too well how “make believe” in life can murder your pride.

In 1965, Stanwyck finally got herself the western series she had long hoped for,
The Big Valley
, which ran for four seasons and lived on, so to speak, in syndication. For some Baby Boomers,
The Big Valley
is the credit that Stanwyck is remembered for, and the show still has its fans.
The Big Valley
has a kind of tranquilizing effect. Where Stanwyck's movies urge you to sit up and take notice of them,
The Big Valley
invites you to put up your feet and relax. Everything about this show is small, and it even manages to miniaturize Stanwyck. Her high-falutin' billing reads, “And Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck,” and though I suppose she's earned such a designation, it does her no favors.

As Victoria Barkley, the matriarch of the big valley of the title, Stanwyck is asked to play mom to three actors so square-jawed, manly, and personality-free that it's hard to tell them apart (Lee Majors, who plays the illegitimate Barkley heir, has blond hair, and the other two have dark hair, but that's about all that distinguishes them). Linda Evans, who plays Victoria's daughter, is usually dressed in such tight pants that she's basically there to walk up and down the family staircase so we can enjoy the view.

In most of the episodes, the Barkleys are menaced by a bad seed, or a group of bad seeds, or a malcontent of some sort, and by the end of the hour the bad guys have been vanquished—but not before these bad guys have admitted What Makes Me So Bad, while the Barkley's nod and smile at them understandingly. There's a “learning lessons” smugness here that's deeply dispiriting. Like many American TV shows,
The Big Valley
fetishizes the family as a source of strength, and Stanwyck goes along with this complacency in a way that feels detached and almost medicated sometimes, or at least terribly tired. She rarely seems like a mother to her children, but it's tough to do anything with these particular children.

So often on
The Big Valley
, Stanwyck is asked to just listen … to nothing. To react … to nothing. Or nothing much. Eventually, even her moments of inspiration, usually having to do with the handling of props,
or self-contained monologues about Victoria's hard past, get lost in the shuffle in the overall torpor of this interminable television serial, which has so very little on its mind beyond cranking out another hour of TV fodder. When a director like Joseph H. Lewis is at the helm, suddenly there are actual camera movements and careful compositions, but nothing can pierce the formula scripts.

Stanwyck looks stylishly thin on the show (almost too thin, sometimes), and the costumers keep putting her into absurdly incongruous pastel purple or blue dresses, suffocating, girly clothes that don't suit her grit. Every once in a while, there will be an episode that allows Victoria to get her hands dirty, and Stanwyck relishes the few chances the show gives her to be tough. She's especially fine in “Earthquake,” where she's trapped underground with a whining Charles Bronson, playing a lazy drunk that Victoria has to whip into shape. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you're alive!” she says to Bronson at one point. That attitude is what got her through this unrewarding work.

“Make the best of things,” had always been Stanwyck's basic survival tactic, and there are treasurable little moments on
The Big Valley
when she revives her Sugarpuss O'Shea sexuality, just to prove that it's still operational, the knowing look followed by a slow turn. But in an awful episode like “Teacher of Outlaws,” where Victoria has to teach a thug how to read, the sentimentality is of such a low nature that it's hard to watch Stanwyck having to endure it. She won a second Emmy for the show, and it kept her busy, but that's all it did. (Once, as I passed a sex shop in Greenwich Village, I saw a life-size cardboard cut out of Stanwyck's Victoria Barkley in the window with a balloon caption that read, “Come in and explore my big valley!” I hope it might have made Stanwyck laugh.)

After
The Big Valley
was cancelled, the remainder of Stanwyck's acting career, with the exception of
The Thorn Birds
, was dependent, regrettably enough, on offers from schlock TV producer Aaron Spelling, who promised her a Nolan Miller wardrobe and a chance to work, in that order. She made three ABC movies of the week for Spelling, and the most that can be said for the first, a haunted house effort called
The House That Would Not Die
(1971), is that it's not one of the better TV films of its sort from this period and not one of the worst. Stanwyck looks stylish in her black and white Miller wardrobe. She still knows how to run down a staircase and enter a room like a star, and she thoroughly enjoys the scenes that call for her to roughhouse and get thrown around the set by her possessed co-stars. The second,
A Taste of Evil
(1971), was another chiller of the “thunderstorm and billowing curtain” school, directed,
like
House
, by John Llewellyn Moxey. In the first half, Stanwyck plays a rather distracted, concerned mother of a daughter (Barbara Parkins) who had been raped as a girl. Parkins, who was on TV's
Peyton Place
, is such a non-actress that she kills any interest in her scenes with Stanwyck, and the film is directed incompetently (in one scene near a pool, a boom mic is visible in the frame for quite a while).

Once Parkins is led away to recuperate, Stanwyck picks up the slack, revealing that her character is trying to drive her daughter mad for money. This evil mother is only slightly more interesting than the good mother of the first scenes, but Stanwyck gets a lot of mileage out of a speech where she spews out her unnatural hatred of her daughter and even admits that she was glad when the handyman (Arthur O'Connell) raped the girl. In the last third, Stanwyck runs around in the rain with a gun at some length, and at a certain point her hair gets all wet so that the sculptured white helmet hair she's been hiding under collapses; in several shots, Stanwyck looks very much like her younger self, the child/ woman of
Forbidden
. The extreme white hairdo she favored in this period probably limited her opportunities, locking her too firmly into advanced age visually, when she could have pulled off middle age easily with a dark wig.

She was set to play in a TV film called
Fitzgerald and Pride
, but three days into shooting she became ill and had to be hospitalized for removal of a kidney. She was replaced by another Brooklyn native, Susan Hayward. After her hospital stay, Stanwyck claimed that she had crossed over from life into death: “For two days I was on the other side,” she said. “It's very cold there and it's very dark.” Out of the hospital, in her third Spelling TV movie, a soapy effort called
The Letters
(1973, she played a rich woman who dominates her sister (Dina Merrill) and then marries the sister's lover (Leslie Nielsen). Three key scenes were cut from her performance due to time considerations (it was a story done in three parts).