Barbara Stanwyck Read Free

number called “A Room Adjoining a Boudoir” with Johnny Dooley;and performed a striptease behind a white screen in one of Ziegfeld’s “Shadowgraph” tableaux, a discreetly sexy stage convention that survived into some of the Warner Bros. musicals of the early thirties. There are photos of her dating from this period that show her tiny eyes still shiny with the openness of youth; a more hooded look would come later in photographs of her taken during the forties and fifties. But even in the early photos, she holds her body away from the camera, protecting it with her arms or a stiff stance. If she hadn’t done this, the men and the mobsters would have grabbed at her until there was nothing left.
    Ruby and Mae Clarke moved to the Knickerbocker Hotel on 45th Street with their other roommate, Walda, and in April 1925, Ruby and Mae danced until dawn at Anatole Friedlander’s club on 54th Street. Ruby tentatively dated a boy named Edward Kennedy; he wanted to marry her, and she wanted to wait. As a kid, she had written her name in chalk on the sidewalk “to show everybody how it’s going to look in electric lights.” Her ambition was always spurring her to reach for the top, not settle near the bottom or the middle; it was a drive that never left her. “Of course, I’ve always had a burning desire to be the best of all, and, though I know most things you dream of pass you by,” Stanwyck said, “I’ll go on working with that same desire til the last role I play.” That ambition is what set her apart from somebody like her roommate Mae Clarke, a pretty girl, a talented girl, but somebody who didn’t have the urge to make herself major, to be “the best of all.”
    Ruby hung around The Tavern, a restaurant on 48th Street run by Billy La Hiff, a man who loved and helped out show biz types of all kinds. It was La Hiff who introduced her to Willard Mack, a man who would play Svengali to the young chorus girl and set her on the road to becoming something more, maybe even “the best of all.” Ruby knew this was her big chance, and she grabbed it. “When I’m frightened, even now, I try to act bold,” she said, assuming a gambler’s attitude that again sets her apart from the cautious, the “maybe” people, the Mae Clarkes. She got herself a job in Mack’s new show,
The Noose
, and also got jobs for her roommates (they later dropped out of it on the road).
    Ruby still thought of herself more as a dancer than as an actress, but the seeds of something else were always there, even when she was a little girl waiting on those steps at 246 Classon Avenue. In
The Noose
, Rex Cherryman played a condemned man who is loved by a society girl and a chorus girl, played by Ruby. She had just a few lines in the play until Mack started to tinker with it out of town, realizing that the third act needed a lift. He then wrote a scene for Ruby where she pleads with the governor for Cherryman’s ashes: a showcase moment.
    In the Belasco Theatre, Mack saw an old program, “Jane Stanwyck in
Barbara Frietchie
,” and so he christened his protégée with her new name, Barbara Stanwyck. A hard name, an impressive name, a name to keep visitors out—and a far cry from “Ruby Stevens,” who sounds like a forlorn girl swatting away male advances and teaching herself not to weep in her room later. Levant called Mack “a Belasco hack,” but Mack was successful and he knew his business. He was a man who had been married to the earthy Marjorie Rambeau and the grand Pauline Frederick, obscure names now, but performers who, in their surviving work, might be seen as earlier versions of the Stanwyck image. He was also sensitive enough to draw Stanwyck out of her shell and teach her some reliable techniques. Mack taught her how to make an entrance and, more importantly, he taught her how to assault an audience with emotion and then