Barbara Stanwyck

Early life

Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens on July 16, 1907, in New York City. She was the fifth and youngest child of Kathryn Ann "Kitty" (née McPhee) and Byron E. Stevens. Both parents' families had been in North America since the 1740s. Byron, of English descent, was a native of Lanesville, Massachusetts, where his father was a significant landowner. He had aimed to become a lawyer, but had dropped out of college in favor of work after his father's death, eventually becoming a bricklayer and stonesetter. Stanwyck's mother Kitty was a Canadian immigrant of Scottish-Irish descent from Sydney, Nova Scotia. They had met when Kitty was visiting family in Boston.

Stanwyck had three older sisters and one older brother. The family had relocated from New England to Flatbush, Brooklyn the year before Stanwyck was born in search of better work opportunities for Byron. In July 1911, four-year-old Stanwyck and her six-year-old brother were riding a streetcar with their mother when a drunk passenger fell and pushed their mother off the vehicle. Kitty Stevens was heavily pregnant at the time, and the accident induced early labor, which caused fatal sepsis. Byron Stevens' alcoholism worsened after his wife's death, and he left the family soon after. He joined a work crew digging the Panama Canal in 1912, dying there some years later in an epidemic.

Stanwyck's sisters were already adults when their mother died, but while they stayed closely involved in their younger siblings' lives, they could not take care of them full-time. In the years following the disintegration of their family, Stanwyck and her brother lived in a series of unofficial foster homes (mostly friends of the family) in Flatbush. As the foster homes could only accommodate one child at a time, the siblings were separated, which caused them additional distress. Around 1919, Stanwyck and her brother moved in with their older sister and her family.

Stanwyck attended Public School 152 in Brooklyn. She hated school with the exception of literature, and received generally poor grades. She was bullied and routinely picked fights with the other students. Stanwyck started to dream about entering show business in childhood. One of her sisters had become a successful vaudeville dancer and took Stanwyck with her on summer tours. She also idolized film star Pearl White, whose serial The Perils of Pauline (1914) was popular at the time. As a teenager, Stanwyck began performing in amateur theater and in shows at film theaters in Flatbush.

Career

Ziegfeld girl and Broadway success

In 1923, a few months before her 16th birthday, Stanwyck auditioned for a place in the chorus at the Strand Roof, a nightclub over the Strand Theatre in Times Square. A few months later, she obtained a job as a dancer in the 1922 and 1923 seasons of the Ziegfeld Follies, dancing at the New Amsterdam Theater. For the next several years, she worked as a chorus girl, performing from midnight to seven in the morning at nightclubs owned by Texas Guinan. She also occasionally served as a dance instructor at a speakeasy for gays and lesbians owned by Guinan. One of her good friends during those years was pianist Oscar Levant, who described her as being "wary of sophisticates and phonies".

Billy LaHiff, who owned a popular pub frequented by show people, introduced Stanwyck in 1926 to impresario Willard Mack, who was casting his play The Noose. Stanwyck successfully auditioned for the part of the chorus girl. As initially staged, the play was not a success. In an effort to improve it, Mack decided to expand Stanwyck's part to include more pathos. The Noose reopened in October 1926, and became one of the most successful plays of the season, running on Broadway for nine months and 198 performances. At the suggestion of David Belasco, Stanwyck changed her name to Barbara Stanwyck by combining the first name of the title character in the play Barbara Frietchie with the last name of the actress in the play, Jane Stanwyck; both were found on a 1906 theater program.

Stanwyck had her first leading role in Burlesque (1927), which was a critical and commercial success. Its producer Arthur Hopkins later described casting her because she had "a sort of rough poignancy. She at once displayed more sensitive, easily expressed emotion than I had encountered since Pauline Lord." The same year, Stanwyck made her first film appearance as a fan dancer in Broadway Nights (1927). While playing in Burlesque, Stanwyck had begun a relationship with actor Frank Fay. Soon after marrying on August 26, 1928, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where Stanwyck hoped to pursue a career in films.

Film career

Stanwyck's first sound film was The Locked Door (1929), followed by Mexicali Rose, released in the same year. Neither film was successful; nonetheless, Frank Capra chose Stanwyck for his film Ladies of Leisure (1930). Her work in that production established an enduring friendship with the director and led to future parts in his films. Other prominent roles followed, among them as a nurse who saves two little girls from the villainous chauffeur (Clark Gable) in Night Nurse (1931). In Edna Ferber's novel brought to screen by William Wellman, she portrays small-town teacher and valiant Midwest farm woman Selena in So Big! (1932). She followed with a performance as an ambitious woman sleeping her way to the top from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Baby Face (1933), a controversial pre-code thriller. In The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), another controversial pre-code film by director Capra, Stanwyck portrays an idealistic Christian caught behind the lines of the Chinese Civil War kidnapped by warlord Nils Asther. A flop at the time, though it received some critical success, the lavish film is "dark stuff, and it's difficult to imagine another actress handling this ... philosophical conversion as fearlessly as Ms. Stanwyck does. She doesn't make heavy weather of it."

Regarding her pre-code work, Mick LaSalle, movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said, "If you've never seen Stanwyck in a pre-code film, you've never seen Stanwyck. [The code began to be enforced seriously beginning in July 1934.] Never in her career, including Double Indemnity, was she ever as hard-boiled as she was in the early 1930s. She had a wonderful quality of being both incredibly cool and yet blazingly passionate. Her cynicism was profound, and then, without warning, she would explode into shrieking, sobbing."

In Stella Dallas (1937), she plays the self-sacrificing title character who eventually allows her teenaged daughter to live a better life somewhere else. She landed her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress when she was able to portray her character as vulgar, yet sympathetic, as required by the movie. Next, she played Molly Monahan in Union Pacific (1939) with Joel McCrea. Stanwyck was reportedly one of the many actresses considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), although she did not receive a screen test. In Meet John Doe, she plays an ambitious newspaperwoman with Gary Cooper (1941).

In Preston Sturges's romantic comedy The Lady Eve (1941), she plays a slinky, sophisticated confidence woman who "gives off an erotic charge that would straighten a boa constrictor", while falling in love with her intended mark, a guileless, wealthy herpetologist, played by Henry Fonda. Film critic David Thomson described Stanwyck as "giving one of the best American comedy performances", and she was reviewed as brilliantly versatile in "her bravura double performance" by The Guardian. The Lady Eve is among the top 100 movies of all time on Time and Entertainment Weekly's lists, and is considered to be both a great comedy and a great romantic film with its placement at #55 on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list and #26 on its 100 Years...100 Passions list.

Television career

As Stanwyck's film career declined during the 1950s, she moved to television. In 1958, she guest-starred in "Trail to Nowhere", an episode of the Western anthology series Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, playing a wife who kills a man to avenge her husband. In 1961, she hosted an anthology drama series titled The Barbara Stanwyck Show that was not a ratings success, but earned her an Emmy Award. The show ran for a total of 36 episodes. During this period, she also guest-starred on other television series, such as The Untouchables and four episodes of Wagon Train.

She stepped back into film for the 1964 Elvis Presley film Roustabout, in which she plays a carnival owner.

The Western television series The Big Valley, which was broadcast on ABC from 1965 to 1969, made Stanwyck one of the most popular actresses on television, winning her another Emmy. She was billed in the series' opening credits as Miss Barbara Stanwyck for her role as Victoria, the widowed matriarch of the wealthy Barkley family.

In 1983, Stanwyck won an Emmy for The Thorn Birds, her third such award. In 1985, she made three guest appearances in the primetime soap opera Dynasty prior to the launch of its short-lived spin-off series The Colbys, in which she starred alongside Charlton Heston, Stephanie Beacham, and Katharine Ross. Unhappy with the experience, Stanwyck remained with the series for only the first season, and her role as Constance Colby Patterson was her last. Earl Hamner Jr., former producer of The Waltons, was rumored to have initially wanted Stanwyck for the role of Angela Channing in the 1980s soap opera Falcon Crest, and she turned it down, with the role going to her friend Jane Wyman, but Hamner assured Wyman that it was only a rumor.

Personal life

Marriages and relationships

While playing in The Noose, Stanwyck reportedly fell in love with her married co-star Rex Cherryman. When Cherryman took ill in early 1928, his doctor advised him to take a sea voyage, so Cherryman set sail for Le Havre intending to continue on to Paris, where Stanwyck and he had arranged to meet. While at sea, he contracted septic poisoning and died shortly after arriving in France at the age of 31.

On August 26, 1928, Stanwyck married her Burlesque co-star Frank Fay. Fay and she later claimed that they had disliked each other at first, but became close after Cherryman's death. Fay was Catholic, so Stanwyck converted for their marriage. She was reportedly unable to have children, and one biographer alleges the cause of her infertility was a botched abortion at the age of 15 that resulted in complications. After moving to Hollywood, the couple adopted a boy. The marriage was troubled; Fay's successful Broadway career did not translate to the big screen, whereas Stanwyck achieved Hollywood stardom. Fay was reportedly physically abusive to Stanwyck, especially when he was inebriated. Some claim that the marriage was the basis for dialogue written by William Wellman, a friend of the couple's, for A Star Is Born (1937) starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. The couple divorced on December 30, 1935. Stanwyck won custody of their son, whom she raised with a strict, authoritarian hand and demanding expectations. Stanwyck and her son became estranged after his childhood, meeting only a few times after he became an adult. Wrote Richard Corliss, the child "resembled her in just one respect: both were, effectively, orphans."

In 1936, while making the film His Brother's Wife (1936), Stanwyck became involved with her co-star, Robert Taylor. Rather than a torrid romance, their relationship was more one of mentor and pupil. Stanwyck served as support and adviser to the younger Taylor, who had come from a small Nebraska town; she guided his career and acclimated him to the sophisticated Hollywood culture. The couple began living together, sparking newspaper reports. Stanwyck was hesitant to remarry after the failure of her first marriage, but their 1939 marriage was arranged with the help of Taylor's studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a common practice in Hollywood's golden age. Louis B. Mayer had insisted that Stanwyck and Taylor marry and went as far as presiding over arrangements at the wedding. Stanwyck and Taylor enjoyed time together outdoors during the early years of their marriage and owned acres of prime West Los Angeles property. Their large ranch and home in the Mandeville Canyon section of Brentwood, Los Angeles, is still referred to by the locals as "the old Robert Taylor ranch".

Political views

A conservative Republican, Stanwyck opposed the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She felt that if someone from her disadvantaged background had risen to success, others should be able to prosper without government intervention or assistance. For Stanwyck, "hard work with the prospect of rich reward was the American way." She became an early member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) after its founding in 1944. The mission of this group was to "combat ... subversive methods [used in the industry] to undermine and change the American way of life." It opposed communist influences in Hollywood. She publicly supported the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and her husband Robert Taylor testified as a friendly witness. Stanwyck supported Thomas E. Dewey in the 1944 and 1948 United States presidential elections.

A fan of Objectivist author Ayn Rand, Stanwyck persuaded Warner Bros. head Jack L. Warner to purchase the rights to The Fountainhead before it became a bestseller, and she wrote to Rand of her admiration of Atlas Shrugged.

Religion

Stanwyck was originally a Protestant, and was baptized in June 1916 by the Reverend J. Frederic Berg of the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church. She converted to Roman Catholicism when she married first husband Frank Fay, but does not appear to have remained an adherent after the marriage ended.

Brother

Stanwyck's older brother, Malcolm Byron Stevens became an actor, using the name Bert Stevens. He appeared mostly in supporting roles, often uncredited. He appeared in two films that starred Stanwyck: The File on Thelma Jordon and No Man of Her Own, both released in 1950.

Later years and death

Stanwyck's retirement years were active, with charity work outside the limelight.

In 1981, in her home in the exclusive Trousdale section of Beverly Hills, she was awakened during the night by an intruder who struck her on the head with his flashlight, forced her into a closet, and absconded with $40,000 in jewelry.

In 1982, while filming The Thorn Birds, Stanwyck inhaled special-effects smoke on the set that may have caused her to contract bronchitis, which was compounded by her cigarette-smoking habit. She began smoking at the age of nine and stopped just four years before her death.

Stanwyck died on January 20, 1990, at the age of 82, from congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. She had indicated that she wanted no funeral service. In accordance with her wishes, her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered from a helicopter over Lone Pine, California, where she had made some of her Western films.