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

  Occasionally, Millie Stevens would take Ruby to see Pearl White “in her perils.” “There wasn’t much money for anything,” Ruby recalled. There were times when, in order to get a hot meal, Ruby would go into a diner, order hot water, and add ketchup to it. Ruby “tended children, washed dishes, ran errands,” she said, anything to earn enough money to go to the serials.

  The heroine of the Perils was a young modern woman of 1914. Pauline’s parents, like Ruby’s, were dead. Pauline is alone in the world and lives in a grand mansion with servants who attend to her needs and drive her about in her town cars and roadsters. Pauline is not stuffy, nor does she put on airs. She is simple, trusting, free-spirited, bursting with the possibilities of life, and hell-bent on experiencing its adventures. A devoted suitor asks for her hand in marriage, but Pauline laughs off the proposal. Marriage and its obligations are of no interest to her. Pauline intends to “realize life’s greatest thrills” and then describe them in a book that she will write herself, a romance of adventures.

  Pauline’s new trustee is determined to get her money and plots to lure her to certain death, from which she manages to free herself. She is drawn into outrageous exploits, blissfully, innocently. In each episode, a surefire inescapable trap is set for her. And while Pauline’s reliable fiancé seems to be her rescuer, it is Pauline who withstands all forms of torture, somehow figuring out an escape from the most treacherous circumstances, defying the odds like an agile escape artist, avoiding death from gunshot, drowning, or falling from great heights. Whether she is kidnapped on horseback, pursued by Indians, tossed down the side of a mountain, ducking boulders, or bound and gagged and left in a cave, Pauline—quick, undaunted—always prevails. Or does she?

  Tune in to the next episode . . .

  The Perils of Pauline became a huge sensation. Even Madame Sarah Bernhardt requested an audience with the young Pearl White, telling her how she had longed to meet her, how the screen adventuress was worshipped by the soldiers back in France fighting in the war against Germany.

  Pearl White supported women’s suffrage. By 1916 eleven states, mostly in the West, had ratified the right of women to vote. A referendum for suffrage had been defeated in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. White was performing a publicity stunt to show how “fearless, peerless” she really was. The eighteen-year-old “lady daredevil of the fillums” stood on a scaffolding twenty-two stories in the air, painting her initials in four-foot letters on the brick wall of the Gregory Building on Seventh Avenue. Her manager was sure she would fall and be killed. But Pearl painted on. Draped over her shoulders was a scarf that said in large red letters, “VOTES FOR WOMEN.”

  It was often mentioned in newspaper accounts that Pearl White, along with Paul Panzer (Pauline’s nefarious guardian), refused the help of a double to perform the hair-raising escapes that mesmerized audiences: jumping off cliffs, bridges, railroad trains, yachts; being chased by wild animals; being bound and gagged and left in dangerous positions; going over embankments locked in a car. Pearl had a fondness for reckless living; the more danger involved, the more pleasure it gave her.

  She was called a modern Joan of Arc, the empress of the Pathé serials, an actress without temperament who believed that “working ten hours a day took the edge off of artistic emotion.” The press described her as being “frank” and “having common sense to an unusual degree,” someone who “disliked flattery” and thought of her acting “more as work than as art.” She understood that “pantomime alone” was the way to the camera and the audience, that even if you had an effective voice, you couldn’t use it, and that in front of the camera the emotion was located in the play of the eyes, especially in close-ups.

  Pearl White was a girl from the West who loved to do wild, daring things. She was a goddess whose sense of freedom appealed to Ruby Stevens. After watching Pearl in one picture be thrown down a deep well with a cobra lying at the bottom, Ruby walked through Prospect Park hoping to find a similar well with a cobra coiled at the bottom lying in wait.

  • • •

  During the summer of 1915, when Ruby was eight years old, Millie left to go on the road with a vaudeville show described as “high class vaudeville at low prices” and took her youngest sister with her. They traveled by train and lived in dressing rooms and railroad hotels in town after town, the show continuing in the fall and winter months in cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and beyond.

  Ruby stood in the wings watching each performance. She had a place to be, and people let her be there. She “loved the music and the lights. Everyone looked so happy out there dancing and singing for the audience,” she said. She became the heroine of her own plays.

  When the show played the Lyric Theatre, The Indianapolis News called Millie Stevens “the hit of the bill.” The Pittsburgh Leader described her as “an expressive comedienne” whose portrayal was “so vital in spirit that her characterization compels admiration by the very human qualities through which she clothes it . . . the equal of Miss Stevens has not appeared in popular priced vaudeville in a great while.”

  Ruby watched as the performers came offstage, removed their spangles and makeup, and turned into young women who worked hard and had problems and concerns like anybody else.

  “I couldn’t have cared less about the birds and the bees in the park,” she said. “All I wanted to do was watch the actors and talk to the stagehands.”

  The applause thrilled her. Ruby experienced an ecstasy just being in the theaters and made up her mind that she was going to be “a great dancer.”

  THREE

  Starting Life Anew

  1916–1923

  The Reverend William Chamberlain “was the only person outside of my family whom I loved,” said Ruby, who had fallen under the spell of the pastor at the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church.

  The following year, the Reverend J. Frederic Berg became the pastor and spoke to the congregation about public spirit and ways to cultivate it. Ruby came to admire Reverend Berg as much as she had Reverend Chamberlain. “During one Sunday sermon, Reverend Berg asked us if we knew what love was,” said Ruby. “I thought he was going to expose my feelings for him to everyone.” The pastor talked about different kinds of love, about forgiveness, about the power of love and how it could save you and make you strong. “The hate was drained out of me,” said Ruby. “It was vague and strange but something happened in my heart.”

  Ruby was inspired by the work of the church and wanted to become a missionary, to walk the world finding lost souls and save them from their unhappiness. On a spring day early in June 1916, Ruby was baptized in the sanctuary of the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church. Without any family members present, Ruby and Reverend Berg stood below the pulpit with the baptismal font between them. Ruby promised to be brought up a Christian, to avail herself of the church, and to renounce evil. Afterward, he gave her the testament, in which he had written on the flyleaf, “In all thy ways acknowledge him.” Many years later, Ruby still had the little testament.

  • • •

  Mabel and Harold Cohen, good friends of the Merkents’ who lived two blocks north of their home at 2586 Bedford and agreed to let Ruby live with them. The Cohens were poor, but their house was clean, and they knew how to prettify poverty.

  They had meals together as a family, eating food that was plain but good. Mrs. Cohen thought children should have something hot in their stomachs before school and served oatmeal for breakfast. For dinner, she stewed chicken with cooked carrots and gave them soft little balls that tasted like dumplings. Ruby noticed that Mr. Cohen kissed his four children and wife when he came home each night.

  He taught Ruby how to use a knife and fork. At first she was ashamed, but no one laughed, and Mr. Cohen, whose voice was soft and melodious, was patient with her. “They tried to teach me manners. They tried to stop me from swearing.”

  The Cohens were the first people ever to brush Ruby’s hair or care how she looked. She learned t
o play jacks and marbles and to jump rope. “They were the first to give me affection,” she said later.

  • • •

  Ruby marked off the days of the calendar until Millie came to see her.

  Whatever unhappiness Ruby may have suffered, it was compensated for when Millie and her fiancé, Gene Salzer, called for her and took her to the city for weekends.

  Gene Salzer conducted the orchestra in the theater in which Millie was acting, and Millie and Gene looked forward to being married and making a home that would include Ruby. After performance Gene took Ruby to get something to eat; “if they didn’t have cream puffs,” said Ruby, “we would get up and walk out.” Millie would take Ruby to a vaudeville show, and Ruby would return to the Cohens and act out what she’d seen on the stage, dancing and singing and imitating the comics.

  • • •

  There was talk of war. The Germans had sunk three American ships, resulting in the death of fifteen men.

  President Wilson pronounced, “The world must be made safe for democracy,” and demanded a declaration of war with Germany. A draft was created, the largest since the Civil War, that called for ten million unmarried men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one to sign up.

  Ray Merkent, Bert’s brother and the youngest of the six Merkents, volunteered for service, enlisting in the navy with its fleet of modern battleships second in the world only to England. War bond rallies were organized. Factories were on call twenty-four hours a day to produce artillery, tanks, and ammunition. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, the largest government shipbuilder in the country, had two years before produced the battleships Arizona and New Mexico and was now building the battleship Tennessee.

  The country was calling on its citizens to go a day without wheat, meat, fat, and sugar and to use Sundays as a day to ration gas. Even the president went to church on Sunday in a horse-drawn carriage rather than in a car. Broadway theaters were closed in an effort to save coal. In Malcolm’s and Ruby’s schools—in all public schools—teachers had to take an oath of allegiance, solemnly swearing to support the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the State of New York, an oath that had to be certified by the schools’ principals.

  By November 1918, General Pershing’s troops had triumphed in France; Germany and Austria-Hungary surrendered. More than a hundred thousand American men lost their lives, as had ten million European soldiers. The armistice was signed; the war was over. Celebrations were organized for returning war heroes, among them a parade down Fifth Avenue for General John Joseph Pershing and his army.

  • • •

  Mrs. Cohen was going to have a baby, and Ruby knew there would no longer be room in the house for her. She understood that these were her circumstances, and she was determined to change them rather than be their victim.

  She went to live with Maud and Bert and their son, Al. Malcolm was living with Mabel, her husband, Giles Vaslett, an accountant, and their new baby, Eugene, on Eastern Parkway with Giles’s parents, Esther and Fayette Vaslett. Giles Vaslett was a difficult man and a heavy drinker, and Malcolm spent hours walking the Brooklyn docks, watching the tramp steamers and cargo ships from Latin America and elsewhere enter the harbor and leave, heading for the upper New York Bay and out to sea. He dreamed of the day when he himself would set out to sea, heading south. He would somehow work his way to Panama, where he would find his father and bring him back to Brooklyn, and he and Ruby would be together again as a family. At fourteen, Malcolm, big and blond and resembling his father, looked more like a man than a boy.

  • • •

  Millie Stevens found work in the chorus of a John Cort production called Glorianna and in October 1918 opened at the Liberty Theatre on Forty-Second Street, west of Broadway.

  At thirty-two years old she was one of eighteen dancers of “Dolores’ Dancing Class of Debutantes and Maids,” a chorus described in the opening paragraphs of the New York Times review as “well accounted for” and “indispensable to the proceedings.” She was living at the Palace Hotel, and Ruby occasionally stayed there with her and accompanied her big sister to “haunt the wings” of the Liberty Theatre.

  Also in Glorianna was Buck Mack, part of the dance team Miller and Mack. Mack was newly returned from the war and was living at the Princeton Hotel, five doors down the street from the Palace. On his days off, he would “mosey up” to see Millie and Ruby.

  “Millie was a swell girl,” said Mack. “A pretty blonde doll herself and crazy about her kid sister.” Mack encouraged Ruby to dance and often took her out to a delicatessen on Broadway. Ruby began to call him Uncle Buck. “We had a regular routine,” she said. “Uncle Buck would ask me what I wanted and I’d always answer, ‘A turkey leg.’ ‘Turkey leg, huh?’ as if it were a surprise. Then, he’d say, ‘Well, Joe, give the little lady the finest you got.’ ”

  • • •

  In 1919, Malcolm and Ruby were living with Maud, Bert, and Al on Bedford Avenue. Malcolm at fourteen graduated from eighth grade at P.S. 152 and began working at Merkent’s Meat Market delivering meat, still haunting the docks and dreaming of hiring out on a boat. In his nine years of education, he had attended nine different schools and lived in fourteen different homes, some belonging to family members, others to strangers.

  Ruby was twelve and in the sixth grade. She lived near the old Vitagraph studios and often went there to wait for her favorite movie idols to emerge. One day she saw two beautiful little blond girls at the entrance of the studio, looking like angels, each wearing a coat and hat made of white rabbit fur. They were Dolores and Helene Costello waiting for their father, Maurice. Ruby would have given anything for the girls’ clothes.

  Soon after Malcolm’s graduation, he told Ruby he was leaving Brooklyn on a ship going to South America. Ruby had always counted on her brother being there for her. They had talked many times about running away together, and this was their chance. When Malcolm told her that everything would be all right, she believed him. She pleaded with Malcolm to take her with him; they could take care of each other. Malcolm knew it wouldn’t work and said no. Ruby didn’t belong to anyone except Malcolm. As a little girl, she felt safe with her brother and wanted to hide behind him. Ruby believed that had she been a boy, he would have taken her with him. She acted as if nothing could hurt her but cried long after he left.

  Malcolm told his older sister nothing of his plan. One day, Maud expected her brother home early for dinner and didn’t see him for the next year and a half.

  The Merkents soon moved again to a quiet pristine street away from the noise and crowds of Flatbush and Bedford Avenues. Vanderveer Place was a street of well-tended two-story brick row houses. Mabel, Giles, and their three-year-old son, Gene, moved in with the Merkents.

  Ruby slept in Al’s bedroom; her cousin slept on the couch in the living room. Behind the Merkents’ house was a large tomato farm where Gene and Al would go to play baseball, steal tomatoes, and try to outsmart the farmer, who shot poachers with a pepper gun.

  Ruby entertained her nephew Gene with her favorite record, “The Japanese Sandman” (“Here’s a Japanese sandman/Sneakin’ on with the dew/Just an old secondhand man/He’ll buy your old day from you”), playing the song over and over on the phonograph while Gene built model planes of the Great War. Ruby was packing her trunks to join Millie in Chicago for the summer. The song of the sandman reassured her (“He will take every sorrow of the day that is through/And he’ll give you tomorrow just to start a life anew”).

  Ray Merkent, the Merkent with the most spirit and ambition, was back from the war and was an active member of the Masonic Temple as well as most of the clubs in Brooklyn. Ray, who spent a good deal of time at his brother Bert’s house, was seven years older than Ruby and liked her, maybe too much. Through his intervention, Ruby was given a part in a dance recital to be held at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn.

  The night of the performance—the first time Ruby danced in public—her gold-tasseled short skirt could h
ave been ruined by heavy rains had she not been carried to the car. Her debut was a big occasion, and the whole family was there to see it: Mabel and her son, Gene, Maud, Bert, and Albert.

  Ruby began appearing in pageants and amateur theatricals that were put on in neighborhood movie houses. She became part of an amateur dramatic group that rehearsed in Maud’s living room and was drawn to one young man, Frank Chauffeur, who lived in Flatbush, was Ruby’s age, and was equally taken with her.

  In one of the productions at the Rialto Theatre on Flatbush Avenue, Ruby was given a line to speak: “Be careful with that knife.”

  • • •

  The Merkents bought a larger house at Avenue L and Thirty-Sixth Street, a couple miles from Vanderveer Place. The house was newly built and more spacious than anything the Merkents had lived in before, with a porch, living room, dining room, kitchen, and three bedrooms upstairs. The house had a finished basement with a bathroom and was heated by a coal furnace, which Bert Merkent stoked each night.

  Ruby’s school, P.S. 152, was six blocks from the Merkents’ house. From her classroom she could see the tops of the trees of Prospect Ridge and beyond it a small patch of ocean. She could see the spire of the Dutch Reformed Church. At school Ruby suffered through a hundred or so crushes, though the boys never paid any attention to her. She had crooked teeth and straight hair. “And,” she said, “not one of the hundred knew I was around.”

  Ruby was able to get a job at the five-and-dime working in the novelty department. When the counter got busy with customers and the pressure was on, she had trouble making change. The other girls working alongside her would vanish, and Ruby became even more flustered as customers called to her to take their money.

  Gene Vaslett loved his aunt Ruby and thought her special. To him, Ruby at the age of thirteen was a woman of the world. Gene would look over his aunt’s shoulder as she wrote and try to identify the letters and words he saw on the page, with Ruby correcting him when he got them wrong. On Sunday mornings Gene and Ruby sat on the floor and read the comics together, Ruby showing her nephew the letters of the alphabet.