Book Review: 'A Life of Barbara Stanwyck' by Victoria Wilson

Barbara Stanwyck rarely played refined, upscale types. One of her favorite directors, William Wellman, told her, "You can't play a lady." Street-wise party girls, brassy mothers, gambling ladies, dancers for hire, gum-chewing prison inmates, man-eating home wreckers, jewel thieves and sharpshooting westerners suited her better. Whatever the role at hand, she conveyed the flinty sass of a woman who has seen it all and can fend for herself. A reporter called her "the screen's mistress in the art of telling the world where to get off." As early as Wellman's "Night Nurse" (1931), Victoria Wilson notes, Stanwyck shattered expectations as the spitfire title character, who shows her "steeliness and street grit" when she realizes her young charges are being exploited: First she strikes their mother's leering boyfriend, then she dumps a bucket of ice water over the drunken mother's head.

"The only game I remember playing," Barbara Stanwyck said of her childhood, "is the game of fighting." Ms. Wilson's epic biography of the actress—of which the 1,000-page "Steel-True" (the title alludes to a Robert Louis Stevenson poem) is only the first volume—suggests she never stopped.ENLARGE

In 1930s Hollywood, George Hurrell defined glamour, and he shot Stanwyck many times. For 'Ball of Fire' she was come-hither; for 'Meet John Doe,' earnest and intimate. But his favorite image was this 1937 shot—just one among dozens of portraits of screen greats that make 'George Hurrell's Hollywood' (Running Press, 416 pages, $60) a cinephile's delight. GEORGE HURRELL’S HOLLYWOOD © 2013 BY MARK A. VIEIRA, RUNNING PRESS, A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP

Born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn in 1907, Stanwyck lost her mother at age 4 when a drunk on a trolley kicked the pregnant Kitty Stevens and she fell to the street. Her father deserted the family, so she lived with aunts and uncles and families who were paid to take her in. Stanwyck's older sisters provided some support, and she formed a fierce bond with her brother, Malcolm Byron, but for the most part she looked after herself. She would always identify with strong, self-sufficient women such as Pearl White, the fearless star of "The Perils of Pauline," whom she idolized as a child, and Annie Oakley, whom she would portray in George Stevens's 1935 film.

Stanwyck endured a brutal abortion at 15 that left her unable to have children. By that time she had left school and gone to work, taking whatever positions she could find: store clerk, switchboard operator, package wrapper. She developed a fierce work ethic that never left her. But ever since the age of 8, when she tagged along on the road with her older sister, Millie, who was an actress, Stanwyck had set her sights on performing. "She experienced an ecstasy just being in theaters," Ms. Wilson writes, "and made up her mind that she was going to be 'a great dancer.' "

The young hoofer began getting chorus girl jobs in Manhattan nightclubs. She did her first tour with the Ziegfeld Follies before she was 16 and in a few years moved on to speaking roles in plays. By age 20 her stage name (invented by David Belasco, who thought Ruby Stevens sounded too much like a burlesque queen) was up in lights on Broadway. Her powerful, smoky voice set her apart, and she knew, seemingly by instinct, how to reach an audience. "Barbara Stanwyck brings forth the handkerchiefs with expediency," the New York Telegram wrote of an early performance.

Two men played key roles in establishing her as a screen actress in Hollywood: the comic vaudevillian Frank Fay and the director Frank Capra. Known as the King of Vaudeville Gulch, Fay wielded considerable influence in New York show business. Performers like Jack Benny and Milton Berle copied his arch manner, and crowds thronged to see his routines. A thrice-divorced, devout Catholic, he was 16 years older than Stanwyck when she met him in 1927. Stanwyck accepted his dominance, convinced that "I was nothing until he came along," and after they married insisted, "Frank comes first with me and always will." She turned down offers from Hollywood and went west only after Fay had signed a movie contract. They both headlined their first films in 1929.

In Hollywood, however, Stanwyck soon outstripped her husband, winning accolades for her powerful, natural performances even as his erratic behavior—drinking binges, wild spending and violence—was turning him into a Hollywood has-been. They would divorce by 1935—when she was still only 28—and Ms. Wilson's account of the deterioration of the Stanwyck-Fay marriage is riveting: "Barbara went home at the end of the day. Fay was drunk and argumentative. He hit her and knocked her down the staircase. She knew she had to get out. She was lucky to be alive."

It was Capra, still quite young and unheralded himself, who assigned Stanwyck the role that made her a star: a party girl in "Ladies of Leisure" (1930). In these years before the puritanical Production Code took hold, adultery could be depicted with a wink, unmarried women could be frankly sexual and sinful characters didn't have to be punished for their transgressions. Capra—who would go on to direct Stanwyck in "The Miracle Woman" (1931), "Forbidden" (1932), "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" (1933) and "Meet John Doe" (1941)—felt she had a fierce and "childlike" innocence that gave his films a moral center. He preferred her with minimal makeup, unadorned and exhibiting her raw power, a gutsy truthfulness. Capra called her "a primitive emotional," and said, "I let her play herself, no one else." "This chorus girl," he said, "could grab your heart and tear it to pieces."

Victoria Wilson's pages on Capra owe much to her interviews with Edward Bernds, a sound mixer who worked with both Stanwyck and Capra. Bernds, who died in 2000, witnessed the attraction and closeness that developed between the actress and director. According to Bernds, Capra was the smitten one; Barbara didn't want to leave Fay for Capra or anyone else. It comes as a surprise when Ms. Wilson reports casually that Stanwyck was in love with both Fay and Capra. Stanwyck was such a private person that some aspects of her emotional life remain opaque even in a book of this length.

Bernds's disclosures are hardly the only revelations in these pages. The author's resourcefulness as a researcher and doggedness in tracking down an amazing array of firsthand observers inspire awe. She spoke to Stanwyck's adopted son, Tony Fay, and Walda Mansfield, one of her roommates in New York. She quotes from a revealing unpublished memoir by actor Joel McCrea, who first worked with Stanwyck in "Gambling Lady" (1934).

But Ms. Wilson is a completist. Every Stanwyck movie must take its place in her chronicle, every live performance and radio appearance. When she mentions a director or co-star, we're given that person's back story: previous credits, character quirks, reputation. The author also devotes many pages to American politics in the eras of Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the economics of the Depression, the effect of censorship on Hollywood, and the growing importance of the Academy Awards.

The goal is to place the actress's life and work in context. But we often lose sight of Stanwyck in the thickets of information. In her chapter devoted to "Stella Dallas" (1937), a major film in which Stanwyck delivered a harrowing performance, Ms. Wilson lavishes attention on a precursor, the silent version of "Stella Dallas," starring Belle Bennett. Elsewhere she devotes several pages to Woody Van Dyke, the colorful director of the artistically undistinguished "His Brother's Wife" (1936). The reason that movie matters, however, is that Stanwyck co-starred with Robert Taylor, the Nebraska-bred actor who would become her second husband, and MGM promoted the co-stars as "America's Grand New Love Team."

Ms. Wilson, meanwhile, has much further to go: This volume takes us only through the year 1940 and fewer than half of Stanwyck's more than 80 films. Stanwyck has performed none of her signature roles in "The Lady Eve" (1941), "Meet John Doe" (1941), "Ball of Fire" (1941), "Double Indemnity" (1944) and "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948)—the roles that established her as a doyenne of film noir and as one of the screen's most accomplished comic actresses. Her decades of work in television must also come under scrutiny. Even Stanwyck aficionados—and there are many who consider her the finest, most versatile and truthful actress that Hollywood has produced—may be discouraged by the detail of "Steel-True."

Too much of a good thing, as Mae West said, can be wonderful; it can also be just too much.