A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Read online

  The Stevenses were a proud family. Byron was a man whose bearing bespoke austerity, strength, and formality, but things weren’t right in the house. Byron’s drinking was unsettling, and one day he left and didn’t return. Kitty had three daughters to care for and no money. Her eighteen-year marriage was all she had known.

  Kitty soon learned that Byron was living in Brooklyn and sent sixteen-year-old Maud, the second of the three daughters, whose authority and fierceness made her seem as if she were the oldest, to bring him back. Maud made her way to Brooklyn, found Byron living in a boardinghouse, and persuaded him to return with her to Chelsea.

  Shortly after, Kitty gave birth to a son, Malcolm Byron, on February 26, 1905, the name Malcolm from Kitty’s twin brother who had died as a boy in Nova Scotia. Millie, Maud, and Mabel were eighteen, sixteen, and fifteen.

  The Stevens girls had grown into proper young women, each as accomplished a seamstress as her mother. Millie, the oldest, had a tender fey quality, a softness that surrounded the even features of her face. Her blue eyes were large and sharply defined. Millie was a dreamer like Kitty and, with her mother’s prompting, intended to be an actress and a dancer.

  Maud was practical and grounded, proud and haughty. She made sure things got done in a way that Millie never quite could. Maud was proud of her family heritage, of her handsome papa and stalwart mother, and proud as well of her own position as a clerk in a dress shop. Maud cared about the way she looked and loved to wear the finest dresses and suits with fur stoles, fur muffs, and grand hats that were adorned with veils, feathers, and flowers.

  Mabel, the quietest of the three, was soft-spoken and shy but a hard worker.

  The family was back together, but work was hard to find in Chelsea. Byron realized that employment was available in Brooklyn, New York, where buildings were being constructed in brick. Within the year he and Kitty left Chelsea with Millie and her husband, Maud, Mabel, and Malcolm to make a new life across the river from Manhattan.

  Flatbush, circa 1900.

  • • •

  Flatbush in 1906 was a small town, similar to Lanesville and Chelsea, with row and clapboard houses and narrow tree-lined streets. Thirty years before, large farms ran along the avenues to Coney Island.

  With the opening of the Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Coney Island Railroad in 1878, the area began to be developed. Sixty-five acres of land that had been a potato farm of the Vanderveers was transformed into a grid of streets. By 1906, when the Stevenses moved to Brooklyn, Flatbush was becoming a fashionable section that included Vanderveer Park, Ditmas Park, Fiske Terrace, Manhattan Terrace, and Slocum Park. Landowners had resisted dividing their fields into city lots, and the lush green lanes and country roads of Flatbush turned into wide avenues and boulevards, but once it became part of the City of Brooklyn, new tax rates made it impossible for farmers to hold on to the land.

  Within thirty years Flatbush was transformed from a small village into a busy, thriving town.

  The Stevenses moved to 312 Classon Avenue between DeKalb and Lafayette Avenues. Millie, Maud, and Mabel, twenty, eighteen, and sixteen, and Millie’s husband were living with their mother and father and year-old brother. Classon Avenue was a narrow, quiet, dark cobblestoned street of three-story brownstones two blocks south of Myrtle, with its grocery shops and vegetable stores crowded together.

  The Stevens girls, now young women, Brooklyn, New York, 1907. Millie Stevens, age twenty-one (left), Maud Stevens Merkent, age nineteen (center), Mabel Stevens, age seventeen (right). (ALL COURTESY GENE VASLETT)

  Malcolm was two years old when Byron and Kitty had another child—a girl, who was born on July 16, 1907, the same birth date as her father, who had been born in 1864.

  Maud and Mabel were employed as sales clerks at the Abraham & Straus dry goods store on Fulton, Hoyt, and Livingston Streets. Maud had befriended one of the other clerks there, a woman her age called Ruby Merkent Joppeck, and Maud wanted her mother to name the baby girl after her friend Ruby. Kitty and Byron liked the name and called their fifth child Ruby Catherine Stevens.

  Millie, Maud, and Mabel, now young women, were embarking on their own lives.

  In December 1907, Maud Stevens and Albert Merkent were married and moved to a house at 1330 Rogers Avenue. The Merkent family owned a well-established butcher shop, Merkent’s Meat Market, but Albert took a job as a chauffeur and was considered an excellent driver.

  Millie had been married for three years and was struggling as an actress. She had always been thought of as the beauty of the family, with a softness and light that drew people to her. Her mouth was full, and the set of it with its slight smile was both an invitation and a warning of a determined spirit. The fullness of her face and violet eyes were similar to those of her mother, her proud stance that of her father.

  In October 1907, Millie found work in a show and was on the road in the Midwest, appearing in a political comedy called A Contented Woman by the successful Broadway playwright Charles Hoyt. Millie Stevens was being singled out in reviews and was soon on tour in a production of The Road to Sympathy and traveling with the show as far as Columbus, Ohio.

  In April 1910, Maud, age twenty-two, gave birth to a boy, Albert Mortimer Merkent. While Maud was being a new mother, Kitty, forty-one, and Byron, forty-six, were rearing two young children. Malcolm Byron was five years old and had just started kindergarten at P.S. 45; Ruby was three. Work was steady, but times were not easy: Byron drank, and money was scarce. And in 1911, Kitty became pregnant with her sixth child.

  • • •

  Toward the end of July, the intense summer heat had settled in the city. Kitty was late into her pregnancy. She and Ruby and Byron were on a trolley when a drunk fell and kicked Kitty in the stomach. She lost her footing and was thrown from the car. Byron and Ruby watched as their mother fell to the street and people rushed to her side. A mounted policeman moved through the crowd and helped Kitty to her feet, and she and the children were brought home.

  Kitty had started to hemorrhage. Five-year-old Malcolm saw blood everywhere as he waited for what seemed a long time before Mabel came to help. The doctor was called. Kitty had gone into labor. During the day and throughout the night she continued to lose blood and was overtaken by fever and chills. Byron, Millie, Maud, and Mabel were with her. Blood poisoning set in from an incomplete miscarriage. She fought to stay alive, but by the following evening septicemia had overtaken her body. Kitty was dead at age forty and was buried two days later in Green-Wood Cemetery.

  Ruby Stevens, age four, with her brother, Malcolm Byron, age five or six, circa 1911. (MARC WANAMAKER/BISON ARCHIVES)

  Byron and Kitty had been married for twenty-five years, had raised a family together first in the village of his childhood and then made a new life in a small city. They had raised three girls and made a fresh start in a strange new place with a new family. Without his wife, Byron was lost, undone.

  He couldn’t take care of his young son or daughter. Six-year-old Malcolm didn’t return to school in September. Byron Stevens moved out of the apartment. What happened next to Byron, Malcolm, and Ruby is unclear; there are variations to the story.

  In one version, Malcolm, then six, and Ruby, four, were placed in orphanages and were moved to a series of institutions. In another, Millie took Ruby, tightly holding her hand and carrying a box that contained what bare essentials Ruby owned, to a tenement flat and, unable to care for her sister, left her with a family. Malcolm and Ruby were taken in by friends of the Stevenses. In another version, the children were taken in by a series of strangers, families who were paid to care for the children as they were moved from house to house. And in yet another version, Malcolm went to live with one sister, Mabel, and her husband of two years, Giles Vaslett, an accountant from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Ruby went to live with Maud and her husband, Bert Merkent, and their year-old son, Al.

  Byron Stevens took a room in a run-down hotel, similar to the one he was living in when he had left Kitty years before. He contin
ued to work through the early fall and into the winter until he was laid off. He wept for the loss of his wife, continued to drink, and found himself in one brawl after another.

  During Christmas 1911, six-year-old Malcolm Stevens was brought to his father’s room. The boy sat on the edge of the steel bed, with father and son having little to say to each other. Malcolm was frightened and became even more so when his father left the room to go down the hall. The room was dark. One corner housed a pole for clothes with nothing on it but a few hangers. A chest of drawers had cigarette burns on it.

  The boy sensed his father was going to go away, but he didn’t know what to do or say to stop him.

  • • •

  Byron Stevens left Brooklyn after the New Year. There were extra dollars to be made on a massive U.S. government project south of Costa Rica with food, living expenses, and medical services being paid for and written off to national defense. U.S. military engineers had taken over from the French government the massive construction of a waterway that was to be a new route joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by way of the Isthmus of Panama.

  Stevens found work on a freighter going south. He was headed for Panama, a long way from Lanesville, Massachusetts, and a longer way from the wife who had died and the children he was leaving behind.

  TWO

  The Perils

  1911–1915

  My father loved my mother madly and when she died, he went gypsy, I was raised by strangers, farmed out. There were no rules or regulations. Whoever would take me for five dollars a week, that’s where I was. So I really didn’t have any family.

  —Ruby Stevens

  Ruby, at four years old, and her brother, Malcolm Byron, were on their own. They had a family of grown-up sisters who loved them but couldn’t care for them, who lived in houses that were warm with their own families. For Ruby and Byron it was a world of loneliness. They were placed with different families. Ruby often slept at the houses of friends of Maud’s and Millie’s and would be given a cot in the dining room or parlor. During the day, she ate meals with her sister Maud and Bert Merkent. Millie paid to keep Ruby with families in the neighborhood, thinking it would be good for her.

  Ten or twelve families took Malcolm and Ruby in, perhaps more. “There was never a family that had room for the two of us, Byron and me,” said Ruby. “That was the tragedy of it.” The names of the families became a blur, but the feelings remained sharp and clear: Ruby didn’t belong to anyone.

  She came first only to Byron. There was no mother or father to love or comfort her; no one bothered about her clothes. Byron was everything to Ruby, and she, everything to him. He was a little boy, but to Ruby, Byron was a “little man” and she idolized him.

  Ruby (top row, second from left) and Malcolm Byron Stevens (middle row, far left), Brooklyn, New York, circa 1912. (COURTESY NANCY BERNARD)

  • • •

  Ruby learned to live on the streets and to make the best of it. “We never played games,” she said. “I never cared for games anyway. The only game I can remember playing,” she said, “is the game of fighting.” She learned at a young age that her survival was based “on self-preservation . . . When you live like that you always take care of yourself first, because there’s no one else to do it.”

  Malcolm Byron was a quiet boy, never loud or outspoken in the way Ruby was. “He was always a loner,” she said. Malcolm never teased his little sister and was protective of her.

  Ruby was the “leader of any gang” she and Malcolm played with. “Despite her quietness,” said Malcolm, “the other children would turn to Ruby when they were hurt, or bullied. She never failed them.”

  The Dutch Reformed Church was a short walk from Rogers Avenue. Ruby found a world at the church deep within herself, “a world of . . . beauty and music and laughter and dancing,” without scorn or mistrust.

  Ruby thought the church was beautiful and on Sundays went there by herself. Its clock and steeple stood over the old maple and oak trees on the avenue. On either side of the church along Flatbush Avenue were large white gabled houses that had been built during the previous century.

  Ruby was enrolled in P.S. 152 and “hated school, hated arithmetic.” The teachers called her a “dunce” and wondered what was wrong with her. Literature was the first thing she could do well and the only thing she paid attention to. One teacher was gentle and understanding and warned her student who “hated so many things so earnestly” and lived in a fantasy world, “Life will deal you an awful blow, Ruby, unless you come out of the clouds.” Ruby acted as if she weren’t listening, but she heard her teacher’s words.

  Ruby watched boys playing catch on the street. They tolerated her and allowed her to play football with them. Their games seemed more exciting than the girls’. It was the girls who resented Ruby’s easy companionship with the boys. A ring of girls one day closed in around her. “She’s an orphan,” one girl said, making it sound as if it were the worst thing anyone could be. “They were branding me an outcast,” said Ruby. She kept her eyes level with theirs and stared them down. With the exception of the football team, Ruby “hated everything about school. I hated the teachers, the other kids and the enforced obedience.” She signed her own report cards and envied the other children who had parents to sign theirs.

  • • •

  Ruby’s three sisters did the best they could to care for her, but they could never be mother or father to her or Malcolm. Millie, Maud, and Mabel had known an upbringing that was formal, where tradition and propriety were important. The girls had known the love, protection, and care of a mother whose magnetic, determined spirit and raucous laugh were their sources of hope and strength; they had grown up with a sometimes remote father who would drink and get angry but whose sense of fun and love saw them through their years together. Though they struggled, the Stevenses had had each other. Millie, Maud, and Mabel carried that inside them, and they tried the best they could to pass that on to Ruby and Malcolm.

  He did his best to look out for Ruby, to take care of her and make sure she was safe. When Malcolm was to be moved to another family, Ruby tried to lock him up so they couldn’t take him away. She screamed and cried and promised she would be easy to look after if they would only take her too. “I promised everything,” she said, “if they would only keep us together. I couldn’t believe they were taking him, and I was being left behind. Afterwards all sorrow died away.” Ruby felt only “a terrible fighting anger.” If she needed to get in touch with her brother during the times they lived apart, a boy their age would act as the go-between and somehow get a message to Malcolm.

  Ruby associated the women around her, she later said, with working at washtubs, at kitchen sinks, hanging clothes outside streaked, dirt-covered tenement windows. She remembered women whose backs were bent from exhaustion, whose stomachs were swollen from giving birth too many times, who were in an endless battle against poverty.

  “I used to dream,” said Ruby, “that somebody got me all mixed up, that I belonged to nobility. That my parents had been rich, and one day they would come and take me out of all this muck and mire.”

  It hurt Maud when, years later, Ruby described herself as a child who was “shifted from pillar to post.” Maud and Ruby, separated in age by nineteen years and worlds of experience, argued about what those early years had been like for Ruby. Maud described how she had raised her baby sister; Ruby understood that Maud didn’t want to hear the truth.

  Millie didn’t have a home, much less a place where Ruby could live with her, but she took her to work with her as much as possible when Millie wasn’t on the road and had work as a showgirl.

  Millie was the most beautiful woman Ruby had ever seen, with all the talent and emotion an actress should have. She was finding work in shows that played in New York and traveled the northeastern and midwestern circuits, opening for a few days in one city and moving on to the next, from Syracuse and Columbus to Toledo and Pittsburgh and back again. Her work continued to be noticed
and get strong mention in local reviews in town after town.

  When Millie spoke to Ruby of their mother, her “eyes were soft and dreamy.” She described Kitty as “beautiful, with long, raven-black hair and violet eyes,” and a voice Shakespeare would have called “soft, gentle and low.” And, said Millie, “she had a wonderful lilting laugh.” She could still hear her mother’s laugh.

  • • •

  In 1913, when Ruby was six years old, the movie serial was sweeping the country. It started as a circulation battle among newspapers—the Chicago Tribune and six other Chicago papers—originally a promotional gimmick thought up by McClure’s Magazine to coincide with its publication in The Ladies World of a group of stories called What Happened to Mary. The idea was to publish a story and release a screen version of it as a two-reeler for the nickelodeons. Each story was self-contained but was connected by the same set of characters.

  These serials were so successful that in 1914 Pathé Frères made a serial of its own—The Perils of Pauline—at Pathé’s newly built studios in Jersey City at One Congress Street. The story was printed simultaneously in the Hearst papers.

  Pearl White, star of Pathé’s serial, The Perils of Pauline, renowned for her hair-raising adventures and for doing her daring stunts herself. (PHOTOFEST)

  The Perils of Pauline featured a young actress called Pearl White, a Missouri farm girl—part Italian (her father), part Irish (her mother)—who had joined the circus, tumbling and riding bareback, getting her nerve and her training. Pearl joined a touring stock company at five years old, appearing as Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Three years later she was in New York acting with the Powers Film Company. By 1914 she had starred in more than 120 one-reelers.