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

  Elizabeth Zilker and Malcolm Byron Stevens, Brooklyn, New York, circa 1926. (COURTESY GENE VASLETT)

  Maud’s son, Albert, would raise his eyes and gesture in his mother’s direction and say, “Oh . . . Queen Marie,” referring to the queen of Romania, who had arrived in New York on the Leviathan and was being written about daily in the newspapers.

  Ruby was delighted that her sister Mabel was now seeing a wonderful man: Roland Munier, a traveling salesman for Masury Paints whose sales territory was the northern part of New Jersey and who lived in a small apartment in Flatbush with his mother. He was welcomed into the Merkent family; Gene called him Uncle Rol. Each Saturday night, the Merkents, Mabel, and Roland played cards at Avenue L.

  As spring turned into summer, Anatol Friedland let go of most of the dancers in the revue but invited a few—among them Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy—to the Ritz-Carlton Grille in Atlantic City, where Mae’s family lived. The three stayed with the Klotzes.

  • • •

  While working for Anatol, the three girls met Carter De Haven, who had been around Broadway for a long time, first as a successful child actor, then as a headliner in vaudeville on the Orpheum Circuit as a singer and dancer. He had the reputation of being the most correctly dressed man on the American stage. De Haven had built a theater on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine Street and El Centro, Carter De Haven’s Music Box, and wanted Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy to join him in a show he was putting together there.

  He tried to sell Ruby on California, talking to her about its beauty and about how the girls should see it firsthand. Dorothy was tempted; Los Angeles sounded interesting; in fact she was sold on the idea. But Dorothy was too fond of Anatol to leave.

  Ruby (left) with unidentified and Dorothy Shepherd (right), Atlantic City, 1926.

  • • •

  During the summer months, Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy modeled for various magazines—even modeling swimsuits on the beach—and swam in the ocean as often as they could. Ruby and Dorothy were swimming along the shore one day and didn’t realize that they were being pulled out to sea until they noticed how small the boardwalk looked. Ruby, the better swimmer, began to make her way back to the beach. Dorothy swam along but struggled against the tide, tired quickly, and began to call for help. Anatol heard the calls from the boardwalk, made his way out to the swimmer, and was surprised to find he was rescuing Dorothy. Ruby made it back to shore on her own.

  At the end of the 1926 summer season, the triumvirate returned to the Club Anatol in New York City.

  • • •

  James J. Walker was in his first eight months as the mayor of New York. Nightclubs and cabarets were more popular than ever; vaudeville’s draw was beginning to fade. Between the Keith-Albee and the Orpheum Circuits, there were fewer than fifteen two-a-day vaudeville houses in New York. Most theaters that carried vaudeville with continuous shows throughout the country featured them with a moving picture like the sensational Torrent, which presented Greta Garbo in her first American picture; Ben-Hur with Francis X. Bushman; Dancing Mothers with Clara Bow; Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter; Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil; or The Sea Beast with John Barrymore and Dolores Costello. By late summer, theaters were giving moving pictures top billing over their stage shows.

  In the first week of August at the Warner Theatre, on Broadway and Fifty-Second Street, Warner Bros. released its most expensively made picture ever, Don Juan, with John Barrymore, offering the greatest sensation of the decade since radio: sound that was recorded and synchronized to moving pictures. If movies were taking business away from vaudeville, radio was taking audiences away from movie theaters.

  • • •

  Ruby, Dorothy, and Mae were dancing onstage at Anatol’s one night when Mrs. Henry B. Harris, wife of the late producer, came to see the revue. With her was the much-admired and successful actor, writer, director, and producer Willard Mack.

  Mrs. Harris and Mack were casting a contemporary play that she and Martin Sampter were producing and that Bill Mack had co-written and was to direct. Mrs. Harris and Mack were looking for girls to fill the parts of cabaret singers in the play’s second act. She liked the way Ruby, Dorothy, and Mae looked and arranged for them to come to her office at the Hudson Theatre on West Forty-Fourth Street.

  When they arrived, three other young women were there as well. Mrs. Harris talked about the play and described the roles. The play was called The Noose, a contemporary drama about bootlegging and gangsters, the recklessness and violence of Prohibition, and capital punishment. The roles were cabaret girls with lines for them to speak. “This made all the difference,” Ruby said. “This was big time stuff.”

  Without Mack’s knowledge, Mrs. Harris had them read a few lines and hired them.

  The Noose was based on a story by H. H. Van Loan, who began as a newspaperman and short story writer and who went on to become a screenwriter, selling his scripts to Maurice Tourneur, Norma Talmadge, William Desmond, and others. By 1920, Van Loan was the director of publicity for the Universal Film Company.

  Bill Mack, successful Broadway playwright, was interested in capturing life as it was reported on the front pages of the newspapers, “with human frailties and hopes at the play’s center.” The realism of his characters and consistency of setting and action were central to his notion of the successful contemporary play.

  By the time The Noose was to go into production, Bill Mack, then forty-eight, had written more than forty Broadway plays. Mack was rugged, romantic, swashbuckling, a heavy drinker, an outlaw of sorts, and a scorner of conventions. He wrote plays visualizing people as they were, “their ways of living, their home, their associates, conversations and ambitions.”

  At the center of The Noose is a young man who has murdered a notorious bootlegger and nightclub owner and is hours away from execution by hanging. The setting is a back room in a nightclub. Cabaret girls and bootleggers are in a swirl of hot jazz. In the third act, the governor’s daughter, in love with the boy, goes before the governor to plead for the body of the young man following his execution.

  Rex Cherryman played the part of the young man. He was a “handsome, wonderful actor,” said Mae Clarke. Cherryman, then twenty-nine had already had a career in the theater, though he began as a bank clerk in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Lester Lonergan played the governor; Ann Shoemaker, the governor’s wife; George Nash, the gangster club owner. “George Nash was the villain,” said Mae. “And there was no worse one, but he was a great guy and a wonderful actor. We used to ask him, ‘How do you act?’ He would say, ‘Now you girls, I’m not going to talk to you unless you get one thing straight with me. Are you serious about this business? Because I want you to be “actresses,” not “asstresses.” ‘”

  Ruby played a cabaret girl called Dot. Dorothy Sheppard was Frances, and Mae Clarke, Georgie. When the script was handed out, each had the same-size role.

  Mrs. Harris was amazed at the way Ruby read and asked Mack to enlarge her part in act 2.

  Bill Mack wanted to rehearse with Ruby in private, as he had Marjorie Rambeau before she became the second Mrs. Willard Mack; as he had with the great film star Pauline Frederick before she became the third Mrs. Mack.

  Miss Rambeau had forcefully urged Mack to rehearse with her alone; Miss Frederick, stately and magnificent, had simply expected it. Ruby Stevens wanted the work but had no such expectations and was grateful to have the director’s help whenever he could spare the time.

  David Belasco, playwright, producer, director, stage genius, the “Wizard of the American Theater.”

  Mack one day took Ruby to see his longtime associate David Belasco, the maestro, the old master whose name was synonymous with the theater. By 1926, Belasco at seventy-three was considered eternal, a god.

  He had produced hundreds of plays and helped to establish even more careers, from Mrs. Leslie Carter and Ina Claire to Maude Adams.

  Belasco was seen as a force; he’d le
d the theater from the nineteenth century into the modern world, from the old Madison Square Theatre on Twenty-Fourth Street to the theater that carried his name on Forty-Fourth Street.

  Belasco had started in the theater of gaslight flares forty years before and worked in a time when footlights were the dominant source of illumination on the stage, casting false shadows without control. Belasco had a notion about lighting and saw it as a way to dramatize the mood of a play. His experiments resulted in diffused light. He took a mica slide frosted with emery and oil, placed it on a series of coins, over a beam of light, and, by using silver reflectors, was able to control the spread of a beam of light. The harshness and unreality of footlights were banished from the Belasco stages.

  By 1915, Belasco was able to re-create the different lights of a day, from a morning sunrise to the light of dusk, from the threatening light of a storm to the light of the moon. By using manually operated spotlights, sometimes with up to twenty electricians working at the same time, and nonreflecting spotlights, Belasco found a way to project differently colored lights that didn’t clash on any number of people standing side by side on the stage.

  Belasco and Willard Mack had just finished work on a play about a Yiddish vamp that starred Fanny Brice in her first drama. The play, produced as well by Belasco at the Lyceum, had opened in September and closed soon thereafter.

  • • •

  Belasco’s office on West Forty-Fourth Street was above the theater. Ruby and Mack climbed a set of winding golden oak stairs that led to the cranium of the theater. Mack opened a small door with the name Belasco on it. He wanted the great director to hear Ruby read from her expanded part.

  Belasco was then a silver presence with a white mane and piercing eyes staring out from under shaggy brows. Though he was born a Jew (the name was Velasco, his father had been a Harlequin in the London theaters), he wore the clothes of a cleric, and his manner was that of a mystic.

  Belasco’s private office was at the end of a series of rooms, fourteen in all. One held his many collections—of rosaries, rare and ancient glassware, vases, silver, urns, precious stones, armor standing against the walls, jester’s sticks made of ivory and encrusted with jewels. Another housed the book-lined walls of his library, with a grand fireplace and a mantelpiece that had belonged to Stanford White. A Japanese room had bamboo walls; an Italian room, old velvet and an indoor garden with a fountain. Another room had only a crucifix. And then, finally, Belasco’s office itself, with a simple desk given to him thirty-two years before by his mother and now held together with string.

  Ruby was “scared pink,” she said. “Scared of the office that looked like a cathedral, scared of the priest’s collar, the white hair, the terrific power and prestige of the great impresario of the theater.” Mack had Ruby read through her expanded scene from The Noose. “I kept wondering what the hell I was doing here,” she said. “Me, Ruby Stevens.”

  Belasco told Ruby that she didn’t know how to walk, that most women didn’t know how to walk. “Go to the zoo!” he said. “Watch the animals!”

  After Ruby’s audition with Belasco, she sat in the visitors’ room, waiting. She heard Mr. Belasco and Bill Mack talking. Belasco spoke slowly. He was telling Mack that she would have to change her name, that “Ruby Stevens” was too much like that of a burlesque queen.

  “He sounded as though he was spitting my name right out on the floor,” she said.

  As Ruby tells the story, Belasco was looking through old theater programs, one from a quarter of a century before of a Clyde Fitch play of the Civil War, Barbara Frietchie, starring a Jane Stanwyck, about a Southern woman in love with a Union soldier, loosely based on the life of a real Barbara Frietchie of Maryland, “bravest of all in Frederick town,” wrote John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem about her. Frietchie had been a fierce supporter of the Union, and as legend tells it, at ninety-five years of age, with rebel soldiers approaching her house, “took up the flag the men hauled down.” “. . .To show that one heart was loyal,” Frietchie waved the Stars and Stripes from her attic window as Brigadier General Jesse Reno and his troops passed by on the road to Washington County and the Battle at Antietem.

  Fitch’s play was fresh in the public’s mind since Thomas Ince had made it into a two-hour movie—one of the big hits of 1924—that starred Florence Vidor and Edmund Lowe.

  Julia Marlow had created “The Frederick Girl” in the original production that opened in Philadelphia on October 10, 1899, at the Broad Theatre and two weeks later in New York at the Criterion.

  When the play returned to Broadway the following year, Effie Ellsler, “the uncommonly efficient and sympathetic actress,” was the “ravishing young creature” of Frederick town.

  Jane Stanwyck may have appeared in a touring production of the Fitch play, but there doesn’t seem to be a record of it—or of her.

  It might have been another theater program that caught Belasco’s eye, one of Victor Herbert’s comedy opera, Dream City, which opened in New York in 1906 for a three-month run. Among those listed in the ensemble: Addison Stanton and Dorothy Southwick. America’s great theatrical wizard might simply have conflated the last two names, the Stan from Stanton; the Wick from Southwick, thrown in a ‘y’ to make it appear more regal and come forth with Jane Stanwyck as a new name for Ruby Stevens.

  Mack said, “Jane Stanwyck won’t do because of Jane Cowl,” one of the great ladies of the theater, revered with the same passion as Laurette Taylor and Eleonora Duse. A few years earlier, Cowl had astounded audiences in her twenty-week run of Romeo and Juliet and triumphed over Ethel Barrymore’s Juliet. On the last day of Cowl’s run, three thousand people had stood outside Henry Miller’s Theatre in the hope of catching a glimpse of the great actress; a thousand people who hoped to see her in her final performance as Juliet were turned away from the theater. Cowl was due to come to New York at the beginning of the New Year—1927—with Philip Merivale in a debut play by Robert E. Sherwood called The Road to Rome.

  Mack and Belasco looked at the Frietchie program again. “As one man, they said, ‘Barbara Stanwyck,’ ” said Ruby. “I was rechristened with Mr. Belasco and Mr. Mack as my second sponsors in baptism.”

  Later, when Ruby signed her contract, she wrote “Barbara” but had to be reminded of how to spell her new last name.

  • • •

  At Mrs. Harris’s suggestion, it was to be Ruby’s character, Dot, in The Noose, who was in unrequited love with the young man rather than the governor’s daughter. Mrs. Harris cast and staged her plays and had been producing this way a decade before The Noose. She’d learned from her brother, Edgar Wallach, and her husband, Henry B. Harris, both successful showmen and theatrical producers.

  Henry Harris was from a theatrical family: his father, William Harris Sr., began as a blackface comedian and became a famous minstrel man and was one of the founders of the Theatrical Syndicate. The younger Harris had learned the business from his father and set out on his own to produce shows and manage theaters, among them the Hudson Theatre. In 1911, Harris, with Jesse Lasky, built the Folies Bergère dinner theater. Shortly before Harris and his wife left on a tour of the Continent, the dinner theater was converted into the Fulton Theatre.

  The Harrises’ journey abroad ended with a tour of North Africa. Mrs. Harris broke an arm, and both Harrises were happy to be returning to America on the White Star liner Titanic, bound for New York from Southampton. On the fourth day out to sea, four hundred miles south of Newfoundland, the Harrises were in their cabin playing a game of double Canfield when Mrs. Harris felt the ship’s engines stop.

  The Titanic’s captain, Edward J. Smith, realized the ship had struck an iceberg and was taking in water. The crew sent up distress rockets to radio CQD signals, to which the Cunard liner Carpathia signaled back; it was making its way northward toward the Titanic. The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away when it radioed back and would take four hours to reach the Titanic. The more than twenty-two hundred passengers of the Titan
ic were not going to be rescued in time. Women and children were loaded into the twenty lifeboats for eleven hundred passengers.

  Henry Harris, then forty-five years old, escorted his wife of fourteen years to the crew that had formed a ring around one of the lifeboats. The boat sat forty-seven; there were sixteen hundred people left on board. Renée (listed on the ship’s manifest as Irene) Harris was helped onto lifeboat collapsible D, the last boat to be lowered from the Titanic.

  Following a long period of mourning, Mrs. Henry B. Harris, as she was thereafter referred, took over the estate of Henry B. Harris, brought suit against the White Star Line for $1 million for the loss of her husband, and, rather than “living the life of an idle rich woman,” began to produce plays herself. One of the first to be presented was a play called Damaged Goods with Richard Bennett, about the taboo subject of syphilis, that became one of the most controversial plays of the 1913 season.

  Willard Mack, who before becoming a playwright and director was a stock actor touring America’s West. (NEW YORK TRIBUNE)

  Renée Harris became a theatrical manager, designer, and technical director; she understood that producing and directing were not as romantic as appearing on the stage, but at the age of thirty-seven she felt strongly that hers was a profession to which women ought to belong and one that in the long run would prove more profitable than acting.

  • • •

  Willard Mack assembled The Noose’s cast for rehearsals. Instead of the actors reading their parts aloud, Mack read to them as he wanted each part to be played, using the power of his voice to virtually hypnotize his company. Mack was tough and demanding and wanted perfection, and for him that meant a naturalism, a realism.

  His desire as a playwright to capture realism came from his decades-long association with Belasco, who had acted in more than 130 plays before starting to write and direct. Belasco was a stickler about realism, not just with the lighting and the look of the play, but with the actors.