Barbara Stanwyck Read Free Page A

draw them into the remorseful aftermath of such outbursts.
    Elisha Cook, Jr., the future movie character actor, was in
The Noose
at the time, and he claimed that Stanwyck’s emotional involvement in her scene hit him on such a gut level that he had to go and vomit after he saw it. Clearly, this was a diamond in the rough who would always somehow stay rough, a Jeanne Eagels who had the discipline to learn how to judge and control uncontrollable emotion to such an extent that the push and pull between her feelings and her technique would lead to astonishing work in her movies in the thirties. Much like her contemporary, James Cagney, she had a freshness mixed with stylization. Some name performers of the twenties and thirties would look utterly lost and foreign to an audience in 1960—let alone our post-Method present—but Cagney and Stanwyck could easily play in the best films of today with only the slightest modification of scale.
    In 1927, Stanwyck made her film debut in
Broadway Nights
, a silent movie, now lost. She played the friend of the heroine, having lost out on the heroine role itself when she couldn’t cry for her screen test. The press agent Wilbur Morse, Jr. later said that the cameraman for the test “wanted to make her,” but she wasn’t having that. (How many times would she cry, “Get yer hands offah me!” in movies?) Worse, Ruth Chatterton, an established star, came on the set and started to laugh and carry on with her maid when the test director brought out an onion and had some schmaltzy music played so Stanwyck might access her tears. Trying to cry, Stanwyck finally told Chatterton to shut up, but this was one of the few professional battles that she lost.
    A crush on her
Noose
leading man, Cherryman, seems to have led to a tentative relationship which was dashed when he died of septic poisoning. “Everything about him was so vivid,” she remembered, “or perhapsit was because he was an actor and knew how to project.” She would always gravitate toward actors or performers. She said that she “nearly died” getting over Cherryman. And so the Irish in Stanwyck must have wondered if she was cursed, if she would ever love anyone or anything without seeing it snatched away from her. Cagily, she shifted away from “life”—whatever that is—which seemed to have it in for her, and concentrated on her work as an actress: her other life, her real, imaginative life.
    In her second and last Broadway play,
Burlesque
, Stanwyck played a dancer whose comedian husband (Hal Skelly) throws her over for another woman and gets hooked on booze, so that she has to rescue him for a final curtain. She was asked to test for the screen version of
Burlesque
, but she was still busy with the play itself. Also, on the rebound from Cherryman, she had taken up with Frank Fay, the self-proclaimed “King of Vaudeville,” a master of ceremonies, an insult comic par excellence, and someone who was sure of himself and fun to be with—up to a point. Fay was ten years older than Stanwyck and had two marriages behind him. He was a carousing Irish Catholic and a virulent right-winger, a “born in a trunk” type with an enormous ego that needed to be fed or else. Stanwyck had known Fay for a while and had disliked him at first, but she was vulnerable after Cherryman died, and so she fell for Fay and his promised protection of her. It was a whirlwind romance, as they used to say. Fay proposed to Stanwyck by telegram from a theater in St. Louis and she accepted. Only four weeks had passed since Cherryman’s death. Stanwyck and Fay were married on August 26, 1928, and soon went out to Hollywood, where Fay had been signed to a contract with Warner Bros.
    Aside from a few trips here and there, including a disastrous vacation in post-war Europe, Hollywood is where Stanwyck stayed for the rest of her long life. There’s a lovely picture of her