The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Walk on the Wild Side, Roustabout, The Big Valley, The House That Would Not Die, A Taste of Evil, The Letters, The Thorn Birds, The Colbys
When film roles started to grow sparse in the late 1950s, Stanwyck was eager to get into television with a western series. She appeared on several Zane Grey Theater presentations, but the networks wanted her to parrot Loretta Young’s successful anthology show, where Young swirled on camera in a designer gown, introduced each episode, and then proceeded to act in most of them. For the 1960–61 TV season, Stanwyck succumbed and attempted a similar format with The Barbara Stanwyck Show. The worst part of the format was that she had to introduce each story as Young did; deprived of mobility. Stanwyck turns to the camera in a stiff model’s “pose” before the title comes on, and the effect is less Young-hostessy than taunting-forbidding, as if Stanwyck is saying, “I dare you to watch!” She had to read her intros off a teleprompter and was expected to make little jokes and plug the sponsors; she was very unhappy doing this. There were thirty-six episodes in all, of which she appeared in thirty-two. She won her first Emmy for the show, but it was cancelled after only one season.
Almost all of the episodes are so poorly written that Stanwyck can’t sustain much interest in them. She’s hit with more than a fair amount of sexism on this show, playing a lot of “career women” who have to learn their place. And she deals with lots of juvenile delinquents played by Method actors like Vic Morrow; she looks at them as if she’d like to understand what they’re trying to do, yet she’s the one who seems natural and real, while their Actors Studio style has dated. There are several episodes where Stanwyck has to interact with actors who are so inept that they would never have been employed for a motion picture; it’s distressing to see her try to perform with these amateurs.
When she does get a good subject, as in “Confession,” a murder story that pairs her excitingly with Lee Marvin, the half-hour format leads to jerky writing and abrupt editing that mitigates both the sexual chemistry she has worked up with Marvin and the convincing degeneration of her character as she’s holed up in an apartment overlooking a noisy merry-go-round. “She lives only for two things, and both of them are work,” said Jacques Tourneur of Stanwyck (he directed a few of these shows for her, including “Confession”). In several episodes, she plays Josephine Little, an import/export dealer in Hong Kong who does battle with Red China. “You keep your cotton-pickin’ Red hands off my country!” she cries in “Dragon by the Tail,” which was praised in Congress by Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. When she was cancelled, Stanwyck made some cracks at her sponsors’ expense: “I never even got a free shampoo,” she complained.
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).
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.
The work she was offered in the wake of this fire was unfortunate. I think we can all agree to forget that her last official credit is for the abortive Dynasty spin-off, The Colbys, decadent 1980s late-night soap trash in which she was given little to do. She didn’t fit in with the campy fighting and overblown clothes, and she made her displeasure with the series public and quit the show early. “I always say Aaron Spelling burned down my house to shanghai me back into television,” she said, mordantly. It’s not a happy last glimpse of her; she’s pretty crotchety by this point and has to hang onto tables and chairs during confrontation scenes, an aged Mexicali Rose still trying to unlock that door to get away from the sub-Joan Collins thesping of Stephanie Beachum.
Still, in the midst of the most depleted circumstances, with everyone around her doing the most remorseless, straight-ahead soap TV acting, a colorfully dressed Stanwyck, in spite of her diminished physicality and scorched-earth voice, is sometimes able to create detailed, beat-by-beat character work even with rock-bottom material. At this late stage, fighting against every type of limitation, she’s trying new things, gussying up her “ageless,” too-nice character Constance Colby Patterson by opening her small eyes wider than she usually does so that we can see the least little flicker of emotion in them (she had had cataracts removed right before the series was shot). Constance has a cowboy lover (Joseph Campanella) she gets to smooch. Campanella said that Stanwyck continued their love scenes after “cut” had been called. “Oh, God, hold me,” she told him. “Nobody has said that to me in years.” One last grasp at the world of romantic make-believe on screen.
Constance has her mental competency challenged, and she gets hit by a car. She dies off-screen, and most of her part consists of rote, “the old gal’s still got it!” condescension. “Acting is as important to me as eating and sleeping,” Stanwyck once said. Then, gleefully predicting her own end, she continued: “I’ll retire when they take me off the set in a wheel-chair—and then I hope I’ll give a good show, creaking joints, garbled speech, falling wig and all.” If Stanwyck had to participate in a venture like this, it would have been far more edifying to see her play a wicked old woman in a wheelchair bent on some kind of revenge, à la Friedrich Dürrenmaat’s The Visit.
In 1987, Stanwyck became the fifteenth recipient of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award; she was the third woman so honored (the first two were Bette Davis and Lillian Gish). The AFI had waited a bit too long to honor Stanwyck. Many of her best co-stars had died, and of her major collaborators, only Fred MacMurray and Billy Wilder were on hand to pay tribute to her. Linda Evans told a touching story about being on the set of The Big Valley after her own mother had died; Stanwyck looked at Evans for a long moment and said, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to be your Mom from now on,” her maternal side reserved for a professional context, but no less real for that. Jane Fonda hosted, sensitively, as she had for Bette Davis’s tribute in 1977, yet the evening seemed rather half-hearted, or as if something were missing.
That missing element, of course, was Frank Capra, who had been awarded his own AFI a few years before and was still alive; he was not in attendance here. Stanwyck had thrown out her bad back before the ceremony (and of course Capra gave her that bad back on Forbidden), so she spent most of it watching from backstage on a couch. Used to tributes like this and weary of their phoniness, Stanwyck began her acceptance speech by saying, “And honest to God, I can’t walk on water,” deflecting all the adulation with a firm “cut the bullshit” vibe that would have stunned Davis or Gish or Katharine Hepburn, who lapped up tributes like this as their due.
She dwelled on Capra: “He taught me what film could do for me, and what I could do for film,” she said, forthrightly. “That’s why I’m here tonight, Mr. Frank Capra.” Chevy Chase and Sylvester Stallone stared up at her vacantly as she finished her speech with the words from an old Irish prayer: “May the good Lord keep his arms around all of you, always.” In one telling reaction shot, Catherine Deneuve looked up at Stanwyck with proper reverence as one film goddess to another, but it was all rather less than heartwarming, mainly because an event like this is a part of show business that Stanwyck wasn’t built for, and God bless her for that.
Emphysema and other serious health issues kept Stanwyck bedridden up to her death in 1990. In these last few inactive years, she experienced periods of depression. She was afraid that she had been forgotten, and so her faithful press agent, Larry Kleno, and her business manager, Morgan Maree, made a concerted effort to get her some more fan mail. They talked discreetly to the press about her condition and put Maree’s address out there so that people could send Stanwyck postcards and letters. These letters were read to her, but they didn’t seem to make much of a dent in her mood. “How could this happen to me?” she asked her friend Nolan Miller, from her sickbed. “I never expected to become an invalid. I always expected to be trampled by a wild stallion or run down by a stagecoach. But never this.”
Given a scrapbook on her career, she soon lost interest and stared out her window, waiting patiently for death, as most of us do at a certain point in old age. During her last stay in the hospital in early 1990, she refused food, and after eleven days of this she went into a coma and then finally died. There was no funeral. Kleno said that she had seen too many Hollywood burials and didn’t want show biz to intrude on her own passing. Following her instructions, Kleno rented a helicopter and scattered her ashes over Lone Pine desert in California, a location where she had made some of her westerns.
Of her peers, Bette Davis had died the previous year, and Katharine Hepburn would go on and on some more, but her sharp mind went long before her body did in 2003. These two women were much starrier than Stanwyck, who actually wrote both of them fan letters on occasion but never got a response from them. They had always generated the most colorful publicity; they both wrote mythmaking autobiographies, whereas Stanwyck shied away from writing her own book. Davis and Hepburn made their lives into a narrative for us, whereas Stanwyck was unwilling or unable to do so. Because of this difference, Davis and Hepburn have lasted longer in the popular imagination than Stanwyck has, but their late indulgences on TV, in putative movies but mainly in declamatory interviews, left behind a trail of “look at me” elderly embarrassments that Stanwyck’s admirers don’t have to deal with.
Stanwyck didn’t do talk shows, and she didn’t make a series of horror movies, as Davis did, or appear in ramshackle TV vehicles that exploited her perceived off-screen life, as Hepburn did. Mighty as they were and continue to be, Davis and Hepburn were actors who sometimes indicated emotions, or ran roughshod over them. Stanwyck only did that once, in Sorry, Wrong Number, her last Oscar bid. If the silent-era Lillian Gish is the true progenitor of American screen actresses, Stanwyck, Davis and Hepburn are the holy trinity for the classic studio era; no one else had careers of such size. Of the three, Stanwyck worked with the best directors and is the one whose style is the least dated and the most natural. She blazed a new trail, and she still shows the way for all actors.
Today, Meryl Streep has staked her claim as the fifth American actress who simply cannot be ignored, and of course she has never been acclaimed for being natural. Like Davis, she often puts the idea of acting up front, using different voices and gaits and movements for each of her characters. In Streep’s 1980s prime, if you were to look at Silkwood (1983) and then A Cry in the Dark (1988), you’d see two women who are different not only physically, but also emotionally and even mentally. These two Streep performances display the kind of tough-minded, detailed character work that Davis always championed. And Davis was a Streep fan; she even wrote Streep a fan letter. In recent years, Streep has garnered the kind of love and publicity that Hepburn started to reap in the late 1960s, becoming a kind of exception that proves the rule that women are discarded or marginalized on screen when they age.
There are many links between Streep and her forebears, Davis and Hepburn, but there are few if any links to Stanwyck, who begins to seem like an anomalous and rather lonely example of quieter and deeper emotional expressivity and filmic questing. Put it this way: Davis and Hepburn and Streep all returned to the stage every now and then as they got older, and their acting style didn’t need much amplification of scale for the theater. But Stanwyck’s style is almost entirely based on the smallest movements of her eyes and shifts of her facial expression to convey her feelings; her best line readings aren’t directed out at us, but rather draw us in and seduce us into her multi-leveled, maze-like consciousness.
Jennifer Jason Leigh possesses probably the closest modern equivalent to Stanwyck’s rugged integrity. She hasn’t been able to make a career as large and coherent as Stanwyck’s, but her self-immolating work in Georgia (1995) is certainly the equal of Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas, and in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), Jason Leigh offered a performance that took the most idiosyncratic behavioral choices of a Davis or a Streep and melded them with Stanwyck’s sense of stubborn verisimilitude. Stanwyck herself might have been impressed by Jessica Lange’s hungry sexuality in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) or her call-the-cops arias of anger in Frances (1982). Like Jason Leigh, Lange hasn’t been able to sustain her career in the ostentatious, publicity-driven way of Davis or Hepburn or Streep, but she has carried on Stanwyck’s tradition. These two actresses and a few others have worked in the Stanwyck style in fits and starts, but none of them has had Stanwyck’s force or her stamina.
Conversely, I would think that Stanwyck would have been repelled by the neuroticism of Actors Studio women like Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, and Sandy Dennis. That kind of pushy fifties thesping has largely died out; it was a necessary spasm in American acting, maybe, an explosion of often unfocused emotional jags later taken up by Ellen Burstyn and Gena Rowlands, who as they aged became grande dames of the private moment twitch. Looking outside America, the closest correlative to Stanwyck is probably Anna Magnani, with her large but controlled emotional outbursts and her way of clarifying so many thoughts and feelings all at once. The self-loving exhibitionism of Jeanne Moreau feels as far from Stanwyck’s achievement as the goddessy radiance of Vanessa Redgrave. Both Moreau and Redgrave are actresses of equal size and stature and both are far too tricky and attention-seeking to have much in common with the chorus girl who was asked to take off her make up by Frank Capra.
After the premiere of Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanwyck was so moved that she actually knelt and kissed the hem of Gloria Swanson’s dress. Though Swanson’s performance as forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond is a landmark, its fussy hugeness couldn’t be farther from Stanwyck’s direct naturalism. Yet Stanwyck recognized the personal honesty of Swanson’s work, and she also recognized how hard it is to give everything you have and everything you are to a camera. Stanwyck loved the movies, even at their most extreme and artificial, yet she was the actress who most often reminded the movies of reality. Crying alone in your room. Making love with someone you’re scared of. Lashing out and hurting other people. Reminding other people of their responsibilities, as she did in movies with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Stanwyck had the kind of wary Depression fatalism best expressed by the moment in Stage Door (1937) when Ginger Rogers tells Katharine Hepburn, “We started off on the wrong foot, let’s stay that way.”
What a life, as Jean Harrington sighed to Hopsie. Real real life is not something Stanwyck wanted to go through again, but her real movie life might have tempted her, as it continues to tempt us. Praising her idol Pearl White, Stanwyck said, “Her memory still inspires me. In my humble opinion, this explains the why of motion pictures.” She might have been talking about her own career, which seems increasingly pure and dedicated as we move farther away from it. Stanwyck’s very lack of “star” eccentricity has kept her more obscure than Davis or Hepburn or Streep, but it has also had the effect of making her work seem less cluttered, more truly exposed, more questioning—and more deeply revealing of both her own actorly nature and human nature itself.