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

  Mae was a blonde, Dorothy a redhead. “They were both beautiful girls,” said Ruby, who felt she “wasn’t any beauty. In fact, all I was was a fairly good chorus girl.” But she loved the work. “I thought I was the star—the other 15 girls didn’t matter.”

  Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy scoured the town for jobs. “We worked nights, but we saw a lot of movies in the daytime,” said Ruby, pictures such as We Moderns, The Big Parade, The Merry Widow, and Sally, Irene, and Mary with Constance Bennett, Sally O’Neil, and Joan Crawford. Sally O’Neil called Billie “Freckles,” though Joan had long wanted to be called “Butch.”

  They shopped for clothes; went to the theater together to see Helen Hayes in Dancing Mothers, Katharine Cornell in The Green Hat, or Ina Claire in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney; and rarely went to parties.

  On Sundays, Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy slept, washed, and ironed. Ruby and Mae would often accompany Dorothy to church, usually to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. During the service that called on parishioners to rise and sit, Ruby and Mae would both lean in to Dorothy and whisper, “I wish you’d make up your mind about when you’re going to sit. Stand; sit; what are you going to do? Whatever you’re gonna do, let us know. We’ll catch up to you.”

  The triumvirate left to right: Mae Clarke, Dorothy Shepherd, and Ruby Stevens, circa 1925.

  On Sundays they rode horses in Central Park. Ruby was the most natural rider of the three; she and Mae wore proper riding habits: jodhpurs, boots, and a hacking jacket. Dorothy was content to wear a pair of old pants and a sweater.

  Ruby was seen about town with three or four girls from the Strand Roof. Dana O’Connell, a young dancer of nineteen in the Midnight Frolics, Ziegfeld’s supper club entertainment on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre, regularly went to Schrafft’s in the afternoons and saw Ruby sitting at a table, dressed in her riding habit. “Ruby was always with girls,” said Dana. “I never saw her out with men. I never saw her out with anyone except those afternoons when I would be going into Schrafft’s. It was just a casual Hello, how have you been? ‘Fine.’ One of those things. She always wore her riding suit. Someone asked her why. And she said, ‘I feel more comfortable in pants.’ ” In 1923 chorus girls and dancers wore dresses and stockings and gloves when not on the stage or going to and from the theater. “It was a smart-looking suit,” said Dana, “with a little jacket and the boots and the little hat. It was quite saucy.”

  Ruby with Dorothy Shepherd, New York, circa 1923. (COURTESY LARRY KLENO)

  Ruby and Mae pooled their money to buy Dorothy a formal riding habit for her birthday. Dorothy was overwhelmed by the pair of black broadcloth jodhpur pants, broadcloth jacket, and jodhpur boots. “Oh, but these are so expensive,” she said, embarrassed by the extravagance of the gift. Her concern about the gift’s expense hurt Ruby’s feelings; Dorothy knew Ruby’s feelings were easily ruffled.

  The triumvirate went out together to Reuben’s after the show for coffee and a sandwich; they hoped desperately to be taken out to dinner, and if they weren’t, they knew they could get a meal for thirty-five cents (“We ate a lot of ham and eggs”). When they had enough money, they ate at LaHiff’s chophouse, on West Forty-Eighth Street down the block from their hotel.

  LaHiff’s, or the Tavern, as it was known, was one of the best restaurants around Broadway, named after its owner, Billy LaHiff, a well-known Broadway figure. LaHiff’s Tavern was the kind of restaurant where, said Mae, “the latest boxing champion, or the contenders, on the night of the fight or right after it” would eat. “It was the gathering place and we thought of it as our place as well.”

  Everyone went to LaHiff’s: Broadway performers, chorus girls, politicians, studio executives like Gradwell Sears, sports figures, Broadway reporters such as Damon Runyon, Mark Hellinger, and Walter Winchell. Hellinger was thought to be the first of the Broadway reporters; his Broadway column appeared each week in the New York Daily News; Winchell was called the first of the Broadway columnists. Winchell’s column, Your Broadway and Mine, was running in Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Evening Graphic, a newspaper for the “masses not the classes,” written in first-person rather than hard-news stories to “dramatize and sensationalize the news.” Winchell and Hellinger were so linked that the saying was: “If Hellinger comes, can Winchell be far behind?” Winchell said, “The gintellectuals named us the Damon and Pythias of Broadway.”

  Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy knew they could go to the Tavern, “stony, and be sure of a welcome,” Ruby said. “We could eat anything we wanted, any time we wanted, on the cuff. That broad white cuff of Billy La Hiff’s. It knew more kindly erasures than any endowed Charity will ever know.”

  LaHiff’s night manager was the former nightclub bouncer Toots Shor, a huge hunk of meat and potatoes of a man, called by Hellinger “the classiest bum in town.”

  “La Hiff and his waiter Jack Spooner were great friends to all kinds of people,” said Ruby. “Down and out fighters, chorus girls on their uppers, the broken and the bent of Broadway. LaHiff’d feed us and slip us a ten or a fifteen besides, just to be sure we’d be okay. He had his and was grateful for it. So grateful, that he had his heart and his hand and his pocketbook open for those who hadn’t got theirs yet or who had had it and lost it.”

  • • •

  The three girls were on “the lookout” for their next opportunity, “our chance to step up to a dramatic part,” said Mae.

  Ruby was ambitious and determined to do things. Dorothy saw Ruby as strong, attractive, “full of life.” To Mae, Ruby was the most disciplined and ambitious girl she’d ever met. Ruby was an “entity” who went after what she wanted. Mae was serious about dancing; Dorothy wanted to make money, but show business wasn’t everything to her. She was interested in getting married and having a family.

  Ruby told Dorothy about the death of her mother when Ruby was four and about her father’s leaving to go to Panama. “Ruby acted like an orphan,” said Dorothy. “And talked about it a lot. She liked feeling sorry for herself.”

  “You seem as if you are proud of it,” Dorothy said to Ruby. “You almost brag about it.”

  “Well, I am,” said Ruby. “So I might as well make the best of it.”

  “You think about it too much,” Dorothy said. “Get on with life, you can do something about it.” Ruby replied, “Maybe some people can do that, but it’s difficult for me.”

  Dorothy believed that life for Ruby was “an enemy, not a friend.”

  Mae missed her mother’s cooking and her father’s love. Ruby didn’t want to hear about it and told Mae to stop going on about them. Dorothy was an occasional reader, but Ruby read constantly: the just-published Manhattan Transfer, An American Tragedy, The Great Gatsby. “Ruby would finish books really fast,” Dorothy said.

  Ruby didn’t speak much about her sisters Maud and Mabel, but she talked lovingly to Dorothy and Mae about her oldest sister, Millie. It was clear that Ruby thought she was wonderful.

  Millie was married again and living in New York’s Tudor City. Her husband, Arthur Smith, was a copywriter for Benton & Bowles. Ruby was fond of Maud’s husband, Bert Merkent, who she felt was down to earth, a quiet man who got along with everybody. While Maud always put on airs, Bert was content to be in the background. Ruby admired that in Bert, but she didn’t like Millie’s husband and made it known.

  One Christmas the whole family was gathered at the Merkents’ house in Flatbush to exchange gifts and have dinner: Maud and Bert and their son, Al; Mabel and her son, Gene; Millie, Art, and Ruby. At the end of the evening, Ruby said her good-byes and left to go back to Manhattan. Millie’s husband opened the door after her and threw the present Ruby had given him onto the street at her.

  • • •

  Earl Lindsay’s new revue was at the Everglades Café. Gay Paree was two months into its run when Lindsay hired Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy to be in the floor show of the Everglades’ Ship Ahoy. The Everglades Café was transformed into a nautical setting, from the menus and furniture to the sailo
r suit costumes.

  The Everglades Café was a gangsters’ haunt. “Bootlegging, speakeasies, murder, dope,” said Mae Clarke. “No gangster hurt anybody except another gangster . . . There were no accidental killings. They were good shots. They kept to their own reasons and their own people.”

  The dancers’ dressing rooms were underneath the stairs, separated from the rest of the club by a huge door made of concrete and iron. Gus the bodyguard was stationed there to protect the performers. “He loved every one of us,” said Mae. “He used to write poems and put them in pretty frames and present one to each little girl.”

  Ruby and Mae and the others were in the dressing room getting ready for the next number when one night they heard the sound of the concrete stage door being rolled shut. They knew Gus was locking them in. “Something was happening on the outside . . . [A] murder. Or a raid,” said Mae. It happened so frequently that Ruby and the other dancers thought nothing of it and continued with their conversation. After it was over, Gus refused to tell them what had happened.

  Mae noticed a man sitting at a corner table each night and found out he was the head of the New York narcotics squad assigned to the Everglades Café to monitor who entered and left and what went on in between. He and Mae became friends. He knew she was fifteen and that each weekend her mother took the train to New York to see if her daughter was all right and if Mae was still smoking cigarettes.

  The second show ended each evening at eleven. Often, Mae, Ruby, and Dorothy would go out after the show, “hopping from one [supper club] to another,” said Mae, “like the Silver Slipper, where Texas Guinan was,” or the Yacht Club. Mae’s escort became the head of the narcotics squad, who promised Mae’s mother that he would watch out for her daughter.

  Mae and Ruby were frequently guests of Billy Rose, with the head of the narcotics squad along as well.

  At other times Ruby and Mae went out with gangsters for a steak dinner and an occasional gift of a bracelet or necklace, which they quickly sold for extra money. To Mae the gangsters were nice men who happened to be in an illegal business. For the most part they behaved like gentlemen and treated Ruby and Mae to dinners. “Where else were we going to get steak dinners?” Mae said.

  Being in two shows a night seemed manageable to Ruby and Mae. The Everglades Café was a block away from the Shubert on Forty-Fourth Street. After a few evenings of doing both shows Ruby and Mae had the run figured out: they finished their numbers at the Shubert Theatre, got out of their costumes, threw on their coats (Ruby had bought hers on the installment plan and prayed the two jobs would hold out until the coat was paid for), ran out into the cold winter nights and down Forty-Fourth Street wearing nothing but a coat and a pair of shoes, “stark naked in freezing weather, and the coats were not so hot either. Papier-mâché.” They got to the Everglades Café in time for their Ship Ahoy numbers, performed their routines, stripped off their sailor suit costumes, put on their coats, rushed back to the Shubert, and were there in time for their next number in Gay Paree. Working in two shows, they averaged as many as thirty-eight dance routines a night.

  “We worked like dogs and were as strong as horses,” said Ruby, who danced even when she had pleurisy. “You can’t take a deep breath with pleurisy,” said Ruby, “so you take a short breath. And you go on, until you run out of breath. I danced with blisters on my heels because I didn’t want an understudy to take my place.”

  Ruby learned discipline to avoid being fired.

  “I couldn’t sing worth a darn,” she said. “It didn’t matter as long as [I] could belt it out so they could hear [me] in the back row.” Although Ruby “was far from [being] a singer,” she had a sultry look, a defiant gaze combined with an unadorned quality that was unusual for a showgirl.

  Al Jolson stood in the wings during the ensemble numbers, smoking a cigar. As Ruby came off the stage, she slid by him on her way to the dressing room and tried to ignore his sexual remarks.

  After one performance Ruby attempted to slide by him as usual. Jolson blocked her way and cornered her against a wall. Ruby was worried about the costume. It didn’t fit that well and was pinned to stay on. She tried to laugh off Jolson’s comments and hurry by, for fear of losing her job. Jolson told her he was going to take her home that night. Ruby forgot to make a joke of it. She became furious and struck him. He pushed her against the wall and ripped open her costume. She couldn’t scream out; there was a show going on. He took his lit cigar and held it up to her skin with its red-hot tip burning into her breast and held it there until she blacked out.

  • • •

  “Ruby was tough,” Mae said. “She was cool, very, very cool. She played men like she would any scene. She had a gentle side that she used to play up to men, but it could also be genuine.” Ruby could be cruel to Mae, but at other times she could be protective of her, almost motherly. She was becoming more of a mother to Mae than Mrs. Klotz, and Mae’s mother resented it. Ruby had a strength and toughness that Mae and Dorothy counted on. She advised them about what to wear and would lend them her clothes, even her shoes.

  If they were entertaining, Ruby could be curt with guests. If she wanted to go to bed, she would say, “This is it. Get the hell out.” She had a childlike gentleness that surprised her friends. “It was a sweet side that few people saw. If I was sick or tired, a warm, almost mothering side of Ruby came out,” said Mae. “It wasn’t what Ruby showed most people. She didn’t like standing naked before people.”

  Ruby told Dorothy and Mae that for their next shot, their next opportunity, they had to “wangle it, but do it legitimately, and always maintain [their] independence.”

  “I wouldn’t have known that,” said Mae, “but [Ruby] did. [Dorothy] and I listened to her. [She] was smart. We were harum-scarum kids, mad-caps who did crazy things but I never knew Ruby to do an unrefined thing.”

  “She was the Duchess,” Mae said. “Always.”

  SEVEN

  On Being Actresses, Not Asstresses

  1926–1927

  Pleasure was the color of the time.

  —Harold Clurman

  Ruby remained with Gay Paree until the end of the year, when the Shuberts put on a new edition of the show. During its run, Anatol Friedland, songwriter, composer, and producer of revues, went to see the show and noticed her. Friedland had earlier collaborated with Lee Shubert on the music for a show at the Winter Garden and thought the Misses Stevens, Clarke, and Sheppard talented and hired them for the Club Anatol on West Fifty-Fourth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, next to Texas Guinan’s. Throughout the next few months, Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy performed their specialty dances: Ruby, the Charleston; Mae, a buck dance; and Dorothy, something Hawaiian.

  Friedland, who knew his way around Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, became protective of the trio and advised each about what she should do and whom she should see. Although he’d planned to become an architect after graduating from Columbia University, Friedland had drifted into vaudeville and appeared as the lead in musical productions, performing at the piano singing his own songs, and during the next two decades performed in or produced lavish revues. A year before he opened the Club Anatol, he was headlined on the Keith Circuit in Anatol’s Affairs of 1924.

  Dorothy Sheppard said of him: “Whatever he did was all right. He was like a father to us.”

  • • •

  Barbara’s brother, Malcolm, was back from the sea and was living with Maud and Bert on Avenue L, working at Merkent’s Meat Market.

  Malcolm at twenty-one was in love with Elizabeth Zilker, the daughter of the Ecuadoran consul, and was about to be married. His sister Mabel was about to be divorced. She had had it with her second husband coming home at the end of each day from his job at Condé Nast to their apartment on Church Avenue, taking out his handkerchief, and running it along the molding to see how meticulously his wife had dusted.

  To get out of the house and out of the heat (moving picture theaters and the big vaudeville houses were installing refrige
ration at a cost of $100,000 per theater), Mabel took Gene to the pictures as often as she could. After nine months of trying to get away from her second husband, Mabel had had enough of Darse Griffiths; she and Gene were going back to Avenue L to be with Maud and Bert and Al, she was returning to her job at Best & Co.

  Ruby visited her sisters and brother in Brooklyn and asked Dorothy or Mae to come along. They took the subway to the end of the line at Nostrand Avenue and the trolley to Avenue L, walking the three blocks to Thirty-Sixth Street. Gene would watch for his aunt Ruby, and when he saw her a couple of blocks away walking toward his street, he would run out of the house and down the block and throw himself in her arms.

  Each time Ruby came to visit, she carried with her a pile of ten or twelve books tied together to give to Gene, among them a series of stories about the Great War called Boy Allies with the Army—The Boy Allies at Liege; or, Through Lines of Steel and The Boy Allies on the Firing Line—and another series called The Motion Picture Boys as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island. Gene was thrilled to have them.

  In late April, Malcolm was married to Elizabeth at the Kings Highway Methodist Episcopal Church in a ceremony officiated by Norman Vincent Peale. A few friends were there, as were Elizabeth’s brother, Frank, and Malcolm’s family. Ruby’s arrival with Mae and Dorothy caused a stir. On a whim the three had decided to dye their hair, and Ruby’s hair, naturally a reddish auburn, as was Dorothy’s—Mae’s was brown—was now in a flame of spectacular red. Maud was not pleased at the color nor the disruption of decorum.

  Bert and Mabel teased Maud about her grandness; she expected only the best, and it was often beyond her means. Maud wanted things to look right, to be just so, and it annoyed Ruby, who hated any pretense.

  “My sister thinks she’s high society,” Ruby said of Maud. “And I always say to her, ‘Look at me, am I high society? And I come from the same loins you do.’ ”