Barbara Stanwyck (40 page)

At this point, several years passed without any work at all. I'm afraid that in 1980 Spelling tempted Stanwyck to do an episode of
Charlie's Angels
called “Toni's Boys,” which was supposed to lead to a series of her own where she would operate with three hunky male Angels. As a kid, I saw this episode re-run and couldn't understand why the actress I knew from
Double Indemnity
and
The Lady Eve
was appearing on such a low-class show. The plot is a blur, but I vividly remember her saying at one point, “It seemed like a good idea at the time!” as if she were semi-apologizing to us. No need.

On October 27, 1981, at one in the morning, Stanwyck was awakened by a flashlight shining into her face. She heard a man's voice asking her where he could find her purse and her jewelry. She turned on her bedside lamp and saw that the man was wearing a ski mask. The thief ordered her to turn out the light and not to look at him. “I want your jewelry or I'll kill you,” he said. Stanwyck told him that her jewelry was in a top drawer in her dressing room, but the robber couldn't find it, and when she turned on her light again, he pistol-whipped her. “I told you not to look,” he yelled. He finally found some jewels, then grabbed Stanwyck and threw her in her bedroom closet; he didn't lock the door, but he warned her that if she came out, he would kill her. She stayed in the closet for a long while with blood running down her face, until she thought that the coast was clear. Then she crawled out and called the police. She was treated for her injuries at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. They never caught the thief.

If Stanwyck had been isolated before, now she became almost totally secluded. Her few friends noticed a change in her, and a decline. “The shock was tremendous to her,” said her costumer friend Nolan Miller. “I don't think she ever got over it.” Stanwyck had always prided herself on being tough, but there's not much you can do to combat an experience like this, especially when you're old and ill and frail, as she was at this point. She had left Brooklyn so many years ago and had found what she felt was a paradise in California. Now, it was as if that was spoiled, too, as if crime and bad luck had followed her.

In 1982, Stanwyck was presented with a special Academy Award, and she accepted it gratefully, remembering William Holden—who had recently died—in her speech. At the 1978 Oscars, Holden had departed from the prepared script and paid tribute to this woman that he loved. “Oh, Bill,” she said to him, quickly averting her face from the camera, not wanting us to see how moved she was. It was the protective instinct of someone who has been so deeply hurt that she tries not to lay herself open in any way; she reserved that openness only for her work.

The year after she won her Oscar, Stanwyck had her last real chance as an actress, a television miniseries adaptation of Colleen McCullough's 1977 Australian romance novel,
The Thorn Birds
. The book is wordy, page-turning trash that makes
Gone with the Wind
look like
The Idiot
. A popular novel of the twenties like
Stella Dallas
has at least pretensions to literary quality and sometimes seems better than it actually is, but McCullough's book is grindingly obvious and not at all well written. When the mega-rich Irish bitch Mary Carson stares at her beloved Father Ralph
de Bricassart in the nude, McCullough writes: “She eyed his flaccid penis, snorting with laughter.” That's a fair enough example of this material.

McCullough's Mary is sixty-five, has “a shock of red hair” and just a few wrinkles on her somewhat blotchy skin. She gets fat as she ages, and she exits this life cursing Father Ralph's impotence in labored, unpleasant language. Stanwyck was excited when she won the part (Bette Davis had wanted it), and she knew that the miniseries was going to be an event, so she went to bat for her character when she felt the script she was sent had softened her (Mary's rougher edges were reinstated). Sensing that this would probably be her last major appearance, Stanwyck seems to have entirely worked out her performance beforehand. In his memoir, her Father Ralph, Richard Chamberlain, wrote that at the first read-through she told the cameraman not to miss the various facial nuances she had planned, “don't miss
that
look,” and so on. This is not the way the young or middle-aged Stanwyck worked when she was making her feature films, but she may have felt that she'd be pretty much on her own in TV-land, as she had been all those years on
The Big Valley
, and so she decided to safeguard what would be her final statement as an actress. There would be nothing left to chance.

The Thorn Birds
certainly looks better than the rest of her TV work. It has handsome, textured visuals, both in the interiors of Mary Carson's home (where a lot of smoky light is used) and in the landscape spectacle photography of the Australian outback (actually filmed in Simi Valley in California), with herds of sheep and stray shots of kangaroos used as tourist filler. We first see Stanwyck's Mary when she's looking at Chamberlain's Ralph as he says Mass. Her first close-up features a highly ambiguous expression, very open, questioning and vulnerable. She seems to be wondering just why she's in love with Ralph, but when he slips her the communion wafer, she lowers her chin and eyes and then looks up and shoots him a sizzling sort of “take it or leave it” look (the kind of look that Stanwyck didn't want the cameraman to miss). Stanwyck does her best work in these early scenes with her face, which has barely aged. There isn't much she can do with some of her dialogue but speed through it and coast on her own natural charisma, signaling to us, “Alright, some of this might be silly, but
I'm
not, so pay attention.”

At her best in this miniseries, Stanwyck makes Mary Carson predatory in a way that we can enjoy; she plays the manipulativeness of this woman with all the heady, distracted style that she patented fifty years before. But there's a delicacy about her, too, and it has to do partly with
age. There are times when she has trouble with some of her
s
sounds because of her dentures, and that chorus girl stride has been decimated. Only her hands are as they were before, and so she uses these expressive hands more than ever, as Mary keeps everyone around her under her control. Stanwyck lightens this self-important epic soap with her vitality, so that sometimes she seems to be “performing” instead of acting. It's so hard to make Mary Carson human.

When Ralph comes in from the rain and strips to dry himself off, Mary approaches him stealthily, telling him about his beauty, then putting her hands on his back, then moving them down his chest slowly, sensuously, like Jean playing with Hopsie's hair in
The Lady Eve
, like Phyllis pawing Walter at the end of
Double Indemnity
. It's difficult to think of another elderly actress who could have played this scene of sexual hunger without giving rise to embarrassment or laughter. Somehow, even after all the time that has passed, Stanwyck can still turn it on, that sexuality of hers that seemed to have a life of its own, and it hasn't been reduced by age. The resurgence of this Stanwyck sexuality, so important in her performing arsenal, threw her for a loop momentarily on the set; when she first started to stroke Chamberlain's chest, she screwed up her lines, then admitted, “What the hell, it's the first time in twenty years I've had a naked man in my arms.” A laugh for the crew, and a measure of her own personal loneliness in these last decades.

Chamberlain's Father Ralph keeps telling Mary about their relationship during their scenes together. This is the basic problem with the writing, which goes back to the book. It's almost all telling and no showing, so that Stanwyck really has little to play except for the “malice” that's been called for in dialogue. But Mary's last scene with Ralph and its accompanying monologue give Stanwyck an opportunity and an opening that she seizes with the desperation of an actress making one last stand, and she doesn't play it safe. It's an aria, something Stanwyck had been excelling at since at least 1930 (though it sounds like she was also doing it on stage in
The Noose
), and it can proudly take its place beside her earlier large outbursts of feeling. Since this outburst is her last—and since that is the subject of the speech itself—Stanwyck's aria tears at us precisely because it's bigger than life, bigger than the TV miniseries that houses it. Once more, Stanwyck presses that emotional button inside of herself, and what explodes out of her is the bitterness of a neglected old woman, the confusion of a young woman being extinguished—and all sorts of other messy things.

Mary is climbing the stairs with Ralph after her seventy-fifth birthday party. She says she's tired of living, and Stanwyck emphasizes Mary's feeble, drooping body that can barely hold her head up straight. Duke frames Chamberlain and Stanwyck in a two shot as Mary asks for a kiss goodnight, and Ralph starts to give her a kiss on her hand. “No!” she shouts, abruptly, throwing his hand down. “On my mouth! Kiss me on my mouth as if we were lovers!” We cut to Ralph putting her off, and then we see Mary in the first of her raging close-ups. He says that he can't kiss her because he's a priest, and she shouts that he's “some impotent, useless thing that doesn't know how to be either!” (This line is post-dubbed so badly that it threatens the scene that Stanwyck is building, but not for long.)

Ralph says that she doesn't really love him; he's just a reminder of what she can no longer be. At this, we cut back to a close-up of Stanwyck, nodding her head toughly. Then she begins her aria. “Let me tell you something, Cardinal de Bricassart,” she says, leaning back and winding up for the punches, “about
old age
and about that God of yours,” she continues, her husky voice drizzling gravelly contempt all over her words. “That vengeful God who ruins our bodies and leaves us with only enough wit … for regret!” She raises her voice on this line and gives it a ringing, upward inflection, socking “for regret,” so that her voice breaks.

Her small blue eyes have widened, and they're such young eyes; the hurt in them is young hurt. “Inside this stupid body I am still young!” she declares, shaking her head, as if she can't believe she's been stranded like this, let down and humiliated by age. “I still feel,” she says, “I still want,” and then, “I still
dream!”
so that “dream” is filled with all the tears in the world. “And I still love you, oh God how much!” she cries, throwing her head back with total abandon.

And then she just stands there in close-up, completely naked and exposed, her eyes scanning the distance and seeing only emptiness and death. She slowly raises herself up and chokes back the tears that have started, leaning sideways and twisting her mouth to make a harrowingly specific sound that squashes all her feelings back down. She's stopped this eruption, somehow, but a tear glitters near her left eye anyway, like some diamond that will not dare to slide down her cheek. Exhausted, she looks at this man she loves and can never have, and the bitterness comes back into her face, a look of “you'll get yours,” accompanied by a barely perceptible nod. Then she closes the doors to her bedroom.

When we next see Mary, she's a corpse in bed, and Stanwyck makes herself look like a corpse, even if her eyes flutter slightly when
Chamberlain closes them and puts pennies on her lids. After two hours running time, Mary is dead, and there are a lot more hours of
The Thorn Birds
to go, of course, which really just boils down to waiting for Meggie (Rachel Ward) to sleep with the priest that she has loved since childhood, and waiting through all those commercials repeating Henry Mancini's score with teaser tidbits of sex on the beach. Watchable as the rest of it is, Stanwyck's aria shames the project as a whole, and the image it leaves of white hair, white dress, and glistening, “Why, God?” blue eyes is not to be forgotten.

In its familiar rawness and its go-for-broke honesty, Stanwyck's last aria lets us see that she still had it in her to give another major performance, but her age, her ill health, and the era she went out in kept her from that possibility. I'm grateful at least that she got to deliver that speech, in close-up, with the camera respectfully registering the depth of her accumulated experience and the miraculously pristine and still protesting lost innocence that first revealed itself in
Ladies of Leisure
. Stanwyck won her third and last Emmy for Mary Carson; she graciously spent most of her speech praising fellow nominee Ann-Margret.

On June 22, 1985, she was dealt another blow when her house caught on fire. Bizarrely, this was the third major house fire Stanwyck had suffered; there had been two in the thirties which had cost her many photos and mementoes. During this third fire, her best friend, Frank's first wife Nancy Sinatra, tried to shield Stanwyck from reporters, but several of them saw her try to rush into the house to save a few things she loved. When the firemen stopped her, she said, “Please,” and she had to fight back her tears. It's enough to make you wonder why some people are plagued by such bad luck, and enough to make you marvel at the stoicism that people like Stanwyck develop to get through things like this.

She must have wondered about lousy luck, too; I mean really,
three
house fires? But she even managed to turn this tragedy into a dark-humored story for a reporter. “I dialed 911,” she recalled, “and about the time I got out on the street, the engines and the crews had arrived, and I said, ‘OK, fellas, you're on.'” (As if this third fire were a vaudeville routine!) “They rushed in and right away they started bringing out my paintings. Only in Beverly Hills!” she joked. I'd love to think Stanwyck actually said, “OK, fellas, you're on,” to the firemen, but it's enough that she chose to re-write it this way after the fact. Though she liked to present herself as a salty bulwark against cultural pretension, Stanwyck had a modest appreciation for visual art, especially the landscapes of French painter Maurice de Vlaminck.