Barbara Stanwyck: more mysterious than Garbo

“Anyone who seeks constant happiness seeks the unobtainable. The moments of happiness are not like pebbles on the beach; they are as rare as emeralds, as bright and flashing as diamonds. Happiness is the most ephemeral of emotions - but it is the brilliance that points up living. I cherish my happy memories and hopes, as though they were jewels.” —Barbara Stanwyck

The director of photography on “Ladies of Leisure” was Joseph Walker, who made five more films with Stanwyck, and who used to grind special lenses for each of his favorite actresses, the better to catch and refine their look. The lighting, too, as in “The Miracle Woman”—Stanwyck, Capra, Walker again, released the following year—is of an almost wounding beauty, far in advance of the amateur acoustics, with rim-lit details picked out like stars against the semi-dark. From there to the shadows of “The Godfather,” as rich as chocolate, is really not so far.

The other note that rings out clearly from “Ladies of Leisure,” and that would toll like a bell through the rest of Stanwyck’s career, is the sound of a smart woman surveying, with a snicker and a sigh, the dumber sex. Kay Arnold, on first meeting the painter, lifts her gaze, and there is a cool, smoky steadiness about it that is hard to read. It doesn’t say, “Hello, big boy,” or “Come down and see me sometime.” The message it sends is “Hmm. Ain’t no mountain.” If she likes the fellow, she will scale him, but make no mistake: as a female, she is already a superior soul.

Should she choose to open her heart, it will be only on the most condescending of terms. “I love him because he’s the kind of a guy that gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk,” Sugarpuss eventually says of Professor Potts. “I love him because he doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk.” Ouch.

The ouches would go off like firecrackers when Stanwyck was around, and she never let up, having learned her explosive trade before 1934, when the enforcement of the Hays Code—with its emphasis on “correct standards of life”—came along and dampened all the squibs. “Night Nurse” (1931), “Ladies They Talk About” (1933), “Baby Face” (1933): these are the kinds of Stanwyck projects that gave movies a bad, bad name.

In the first, she waltzes into a hospital, smiles her way into a job, then changes into her uniform, hiking one leg into the lap of her fellow-nurse Joan Blondell, whom she has known for minutes, and letting her peel off the stocking. At night, a leering intern puts a med-school skeleton in Stanwyck’s bed, so she hops into Blondell’s, and the two of them giggle together in undergarments and fright. Buñuel himself could not have done better. “Night Nurse,” directed by William Wellman, is a stirred-up soup of a movie. We get abused children, a drunken mother, a wounded bootlegger, and a young, unfriendly Clark Gable as a chauffeur in black jodhpurs. He looks like an Italian Fascist, and he slugs Stanwyck so hard that her chin bleeds.

There is a case for saying that Alfred E. Green’s “Baby Face” (which screens at bam on a juicy double bill with “Ladies They Talk About,” a female jailbird drama) didn’t just predate the Hays Code; it actually brought the code crashing down onto Hollywood heads. Stanwyck is Lily Powers, who escapes from the steel mills of Pennsylvania, where her father tries to pimp her to anyone he chooses. With her black friend Chico (Theresa Harris), Lily arrives in New York, where she proceeds to sleep her way up a company; as her conquests mount, the camera ascends the side of the office building. She starts in personnel (“Have you had any experience?” “Plenty”), proceeds through filing and mortgages, and winds up bedding the vice-president (“Did Fuzzy-Wuzzy enjoy his dinner?”). Lily: “I’m not like other women—all the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.”

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper in "Meet John Doe" (1941) directed by Frank Capra

Nobody knows for sure whether Capra and his leading lady were ever an item. His biographer Joseph McBride proclaims it as fact; hers, Axel Madsen, is less certain, one of the abiding mysteries of Stanwyck being that her public image—unlike Jean Harlow’s, say—could never be mapped in any detail onto the contours of her private existence. She was definitely there, funny and silvery, up on the screen, but the definition faded as you tried to peek behind. Her movies felt like cryptic clues to a backstory of will power and frustration, the truth of which would not have pleased her fans.

“Miss Stanwyck is not the sort of woman I’d have met in Nebraska,” Taylor had said. He was the more godlike performer, she the more racy. Their coming together was a gift to the fan magazines and the publicists: “They made you—made you—go out two or three nights a week,” Stanwyck said of her employers at M-G-M. Husband and wife were robust Republicans; both belonged to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was responsible for, among other things, alerting Washington to what was perceived as the Communist menace in Hollywood. Stanwyck’s conservatism never did an inch of damage to her reputation, but Taylor is now remembered primarily, if unfairly, as a snitch, the guy who named names at the huac hearings in 1947. In the end, what led to their divorce, in 1951, was not political ardor, or even romantic gossip.

Taylor was seduced by Ava Gardner, but in the movie industry that was like pulling into a gas station for an oil check. He and Stanwyck just peeled apart, seeking different things. Revered for her calm at work, she was a scold and a shouter at home, and he, after wartime service in the Navy, couldn’t take orders forever. When Stanwyck led Gary Cooper by the nose, in “Ball of Fire,” it was a riot, but in real life the laughter died at her door.

“I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” That line always gets a laugh, as it should, for it springs from “The Lady Eve” (1941), one of the most liberatingly funny films ever made. Step back for a second, though, and you can still hear the “alert, precocious, and savage” tone that Stanwyck ascribed to her ruptured childhood. “The Lady Eve” is a Preston Sturges movie, which means that it does not and probably cannot stop, hurling Stanwyck headlong into the chase. First, she is a cardsharp who sucks money from a wandering heir (Henry Fonda) on an ocean liner; then, scarred by his rejection, she becomes an English grande dame, bewitching him into a series of emasculating pratfalls; finally, she reverts to her first persona, fooling everyone except Muggsy, the hero’s cynical valet. “Positively the same dame,” he growls in the final shot, refusing to believe that life is anything but a fix.

Stanwyck could turn on the chill—her performance opposite Van Heflin and a boyish Kirk Douglas in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946) appears to run on liquid nitrogen—but she could also throw out hints of tenderness when you least expected it, and languid little one-liners when they weren’t appropriate. Stanwyck’s greatest strength, in other words—her range—was also the reason that she is impossible to tie down and tame. No genre was beyond her, and no one movie sums her up. She motors from role to role like Heflin cruising into Iverstown, or Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past,” drifting from town to town as though in and out of a fever.

You think that “The Lady Eve” marks her as the best and most devil-tongued comedienne of her time, up there with Katharine Hepburn and the Rosalind Russell of “His Girl Friday”? Correct, but consider the moment when Henry Fonda, an amateur natural historian, claims that snakes are his life. “What a life!” reads the published screenplay, but that’s not what Stanwyck delivers. “What a life,” she says, with mild wistfulness, as if noting for an instant what a loner this rich boy truly is, and how he might want to be wooed for something other than his cash.

Stanwyck spoke sparingly of her past; history, for her, had begun in Hollywood, and it would end there. She travelled a few times to Europe and loathed everything about it. (“All the charm of the Old World, and the Old World plumbing,” as Lily Powers says in “Baby Face.”) Her career was at its most hectic and fruitful in the thirty-two years between “Ladies of Leisure” and “Clash by Night,” in which she confided to Marilyn Monroe that all she required in a man was “someone to fight off the blizzards and the floods.”

Douglas Sirk found in her “an amazing tragic stillness,” while praising her discretion: “She gets every point, every nuance without hitting on anything too heavily.” The closeup of her tears, in the first of those films, as her character walks up the path to her family home, to the sound of violins, should be the merest hokum, yet it stirs us like the last dying echo from the age of Garbo. And remember: Stanwyck herself never had a family home.

Everything about Stanwyck, whatever the mood of the movie, bears a slight graze of screwball, as if, deep down, Ruby Stevens was sly enough to have rumbled mankind for the untrustable species that it was. That is why “Double Indemnity,” though it sweats blood and deals with the lowest of low morals, somehow streams along with the glee of black comedy. The damn thing flows like Mozart. I even worship the leading lady’s wig, with its radioactive spring roll at the front. (“We hire Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington,” the head of Paramount said.) Watch the early scenes in Stanwyck’s home and try not to grin like MacMurray when he first spies her at the top of the stairs, wearing a bath towel and a look of infinite mischief. She gets dressed, for decency’s sake, although, given that her outfit includes high heels with pom-poms and an ankle bracelet engraved with the name Phyllis, it might have been better for MacMurray if she hadn’t. Decency was never dirtier.

In the world according to Barbara Stanwyck, all the mice are men. She was something else, with claws, and her genius was to show us plenty of fur but never let us agree on what that something was—the moll, the missionary, the bad mother, or the Keep Kool Cutie. On the set, she was a paragon of control, yet Capra used to run three or four cameras in an effort to capture her on the first and freshest take, believing that with every repeat she lost the shine of spontaneity. Listen to her in “Clash by Night,” fending off a dolt: “What kind of animal am I? Do I have fangs, do I purr? What kind of jungle am I from? You don’t know anything about me.” No, and it drives us mad. Crazy about you, baby. Source: www.newyorker.com

Frank Capra, her great early director, would say she “could grab your heart and tear it to pieces,” though Variety would observe, “Her chief virtue is poise, and her salvation is restraint.” Here we encounter that seemingly contradictory blend of reflectiveness and emotional intensity that defined her, and is perhaps not so surprising in one whose mantra was “acting is thinking.” Of course there were roles she couldn’t play. A movie star is defined as much by her limitations as her strengths. Hence, this tomboy street-fighter and scourge of phonies and swells couldn’t do period and she couldn’t do privilege. Even the artifice of an accent — the Irish brogue she used in several films — was a hit-or-miss affair, breaking the naturalistic spell. Capra loved her, and knew how to illuminate her, playing to her strengths. “When she wasn’t in front of the camera,” he once said, “she was almost mousy... But when the camera rolled, she turned into a huge person.”

Wilson reports an incident from Stan­wyck’s life that I found eerily reminiscent of the final scene in “Stella Dallas.” The star and her then-love Robert Taylor attended a preview of the film; Stanwyck wore street clothes with her hat pulled down over her face, hoping to pass unnoticed. She was clutching at the coattails of her crowd-magnet lover when a cop yanked her aside. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said, “none of that stuff,” and the burly cop began roughing up the tiny actress until Taylor came to the rescue.

With Stanwyck as the star, these films are less simple tales of sacrifice and surrender than something both triumphant and spiritual: She doesn’t so much transcend the material as take it to another plane.

Most of all, Taylor, though a bit more social, conspired to keep Stanwyck in seclusion, away from the eyes of the world. The same veil of secrecy presents itself to her biographer.

Ultimately, she was more mysterious than Garbo. After all, Garbo’s mystery was there to see and bewitch, as obvious a part of her screen persona as her profile and her heavy-lidded look. Stanwyck’s, however, lay deep beneath the transparency of her emotions. Hers is not a mystery capable of being unraveled and Wilson wisely doesn’t try. What she gives us is a brilliant enigma, firmly grounded only in her artistry and sense of craft. Source: www.nytimes.com