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

  Mack’s notion of realism came as well from his work as a reporter in Chicago and from the many lives he’d lived before he became a full-time playwright: sailing to the South Seas with Jack London; prospecting for gold in Alaska; being an officer in the Northwest Mounted Police. He’d worked in vaudeville, become a stock actor in his own play, In Wyoming, and toured with it out west for more than two years on the John Cort “tank town” circuit.

  The cabaret girls of The Noose. Left to right, top row: Mae Clarke, Dorothy Shepherd. Left to right, bottom row: Erenay Weaver, Ruby, Maryland Jarbeau. (PHOTOFEST)

  Mack believed that his new play, The Noose, defied all conventionality in construction, speech, and action. He wanted the nightclub owner to sound like a gambler and bootlegger and the governor to sound the opposite. To Mack the world war had changed everything. Established standards had been thrown out: delicacy of speech had been prostituted by modern convention; the belief in chastity, the reverence for parental guidance, and the intimacies of domesticity were being talked about in ways that would have been considered an affront prior to the war. Mack wanted Dot to act and sound like thousands of other cabaret dancers, and he worked with Ruby during rehearsals to get that sense of truth in the part.

  “He threw the gestures out of all of us,” Ruby said. “Mack would say if we can’t come on stage without screwing up our faces or waving our hands . . . we’d just better make the next exit permanent.”

  Following Mr. Belasco’s command that Ruby learn how to walk, she traveled to the Bronx Zoo, where she watched the animals in their cages pacing back and forth. It was the panther’s stride with its purpose and beauty that captured her eye, and Ruby copied it until it became somewhat natural for her. “It is a way of walking that holds off fatigue,” she said.

  • • •

  The Noose went on the road for three weeks, opening first in Buffalo at the Shubert-Teck Theatre. The Buffalo Courier called the play “superb” and went on to say of the cast that it was as “fine and polished as we’ve seen in the theater in many a moon.” Cherryman’s performance was described as “remarkable . . . never once does he overplay the part.”

  Despite the positive reviews, there was a problem with the last scene of the third act. The society girl’s plea to the governor for the young man’s body was supposed to build to a pitch, but it had no emotional payoff. “It was a big nothing,” said Mae Clarke. The governor “granted it and the curtain came down.”

  Mrs. Harris called a meeting with Mack to try to solve the problem. She realized that the wrong woman was pleading for the boy’s body and told Mack to use “the girl who has the unrequited love that he doesn’t know about,” Mae said, describing Mrs. Harris’s vision. “They’re just friends as far as he’s concerned, but she’s nuts about him. Let her be the one to ask for the body.”

  Mrs. Harris told Mack to rewrite the part and give the scene to the cabaret girl. Mack finished the new dialogue and gave Ruby the additional pages. He told her in front of the cast to go home and learn the lines. “You’ve got a great voice,” he said. “If you can do the part, take it, you’ve got it for out-of-town until we can find an actress to play it.”

  Bill Mack left for New York that night to try to find a major actress for the role.

  Renée Harris worked with Ruby and Rex Cherryman on Mack’s new pages.

  “I was no actress,” said Ruby. “I was a dancer, not a great one but I knew left from right.”

  The next morning, Ruby rehearsed with the entire company, and Mrs. Harris thought her work was “dynamic.” Mack called several times from New York to suggest various names of actresses he thought would be right for the part, among them the Broadway star Francine Larrimore, niece of Jacob Adler, founder of the Yiddish Theater. Larrimore was traveling to Buffalo to meet up with the show.

  Mack returned from New York to Mrs. Harris’s excitement about Ruby’s work in the new role. That afternoon he watched Ruby in rehearsal and told Mrs. Harris that her work with the cabaret girl was an inspiration. Mack “proceeded to go on a drinking binge from sheer joy.”

  During the remainder of the week’s run in Buffalo, the director worked with Ruby, training her “hours upon hours upon hours,” said Ruby. “It was a living hell.” Except for catnaps backstage, Ruby didn’t sleep at all. Toward the end, she broke down and stormed and yelled that she couldn’t act—couldn’t and, what’s more, wouldn’t—and, weeping, said, “It’s no use. I can’t act. I don’t know how.”

  Up to this point, Mack had flattered and encouraged Ruby. Now he yelled back at her in front of the entire company that she was “dead right.” She was a chorus girl, “would always be a chorus girl, would live and die a chorus girl and be damned.”

  “Mack completely disarranged my mental make-up,” said Ruby. “The bejesus was scared out of me.”

  She fought back, said she could act, would act. “I told him I was Bernhardt, Fiske, all the Booths and Barrymores rolled into one.”

  Mack had seen temperament around the theater and fire, but he had never seen a performance to equal Ruby’s that afternoon. Then he hammered “every line, every inflection, every gesture of the part into my memory,” teaching Ruby how to read, how to walk, what tricks to use and not to use, and how to sell herself by entrances and exits.

  “Mostly he taught me to think,” said Ruby. “Acting is thinking.”

  Mae and Dorothy worked as Ruby’s coaches, sitting with the script and helping her run her lines. “We kept telling her,” Mae said, “you’re going to do it! You’re going to do it! Come on!”

  After rehearsals, Ruby and Rex Cherryman would go out for a sandwich and coffee.

  “Everything about him was so vivid,” said Ruby. “Or perhaps it was because he was an actor and knew how to project.”

  Rex was handsome and young. He had great talent and good humor. Ruby adored him, but Rex was married and had a small boy.

  Cherryman had recently appeared on Broadway in a play called Down Stream. He was from the Midwest, which he left to become an actor. He’d traveled to Los Angeles, where he found work in various stock companies traveling from Pasadena to San Diego to Denver, and then appearing in Alla Nazimova’s early 1920s pictures Madame Peacock and Camille.

  • • •

  The Noose left Buffalo for Pittsburgh, where it was to open at the Pitt Theatre on October 11. This was to be Ruby’s first performance in front of an audience with the new third act.

  The cast rehearsed that day down the block from the Pitt Theatre at the William Penn Hotel.

  The evening of the performance the curtain went up on acts 1 and 2 as the company had rehearsed and played them before. Ruby, Dorothy, and Mae went on in the second act as they had in Buffalo. “We were little chorus girls,” said Mae. Ruby had a few more lines than the others “but not by much.”

  Then Ruby went into the third act.

  “When I came out on the stage,” she said, “I was all alone. The farther I walked from the wings, the more frightened I became; each step I took toward the governor’s desk out there in the center of the stage the weaker I grew.”

  The governor’s secretary met Ruby halfway and escorted her to him.

  “The governor looked up at me,” said Ruby. “I was supposed to be frightened, hopeless, desperate. My hands were clammy. I had that awful feeling that the muscles in my throat were paralyzed, and that when it came time for me to speak, I wouldn’t be able to utter a sound.”

  The governor spoke his line: “Are you the young lady that wanted to see me?”

  Ruby said her lines in response and “didn’t recognize her own voice.”

  “I’ve come to ask you,” she said as Dot, “if we could have his body because we’d like to give it a real funeral . . . You see he ain’t got no relatives, ain’t even got a father and mother, he told me—so nobody wants it but us . . . That’s what I came for, ain’t no reason why I can’t have it—is there—if nobody wants it.”

  Then Dot sinks her head
on the desk and begins to sob softly. The governor tells her there is no reason why she shouldn’t claim the boy except that he is not dead, he was not executed. Dot asks, “He ain’t dead?” and then asks the governor not to tell the boy she was here.

  The governor pauses. “You love him don’t you?”

  Dot confesses she was “always crazy about him—even if he never gave me a tumble. But—there’s a girl—somewhere—’cause Nickie told me he wanted to have a wife. And if he lives, I’ll find out who she is—and fix it up between them . . . You see, caring about him—that was the reason I came. He never gave me a break while he was out and around so I thought that when he was dead I could take the body away somewhere to a little cemetery I know and then I could go there once in a while and tell him the things I couldn’t say when he was alive—see?”

  The governor asks her if she wants to see the young man, and she is taken offstage by his secretary.

  Mae and Dorothy grabbed hold of Ruby in the wings; they “didn’t say a word because nothing was happening,” said Mae. “Usually they give a little polite applause when an actor leaves the stage. Nothing. And there was nothing else to be said . . .

  “Then, the heavens broke loose,” said Mae. “The people screamed. They stomped their feet. They stood up. She was so terrific!”

  • • •

  The Pittsburgh Post called the play “a simple melodrama dressed up in modern accoutrements . . . there were times,” said the Post critic, “when the sound of a pin hitting the carpet would have resembled the advent of a small boy’s new Fourth of July,” and reported that “the house lights put an end to the curtain calls.”

  Mack had assured Ruby during the endless hours of rehearsals that she would be able to “do it when the time comes.”

  Ruby said later, “I did it. Somehow I did it.”

  The Noose went to New York and opened at Mrs. Harris’s Hudson Theatre on October 20, 1926. Ruby was nineteen years old and had worked on and around Broadway, just barely getting by, for five years. Now she was earning $100 a week.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about being a dramatic actress. “It’s noisy back stage in a musical or a night club,” she said. “But in a dramatic show you don’t even whisper for fear the people out front will hear you. Where before there’d been kidding and laughs, the silence made me nervous.”

  The Noose was being compared to another play that had opened five weeks before at the Broadhurst Theatre, Jed Harris’s hit production, Broadway, by Philip Dunning and George Abbott.

  Sam N. Behrman, a young press agent for the production, described Broadway as being as “realistic as a metronome without a grain of sentimentality,” a “gutter play about the lowest forms of human life, set in a degraded cabaret frequented by rival bootlegger gangs with guns at the ready.” The play received strong notices and was a big hit, bringing in as much as $31,000 a week, making its writers and producers rich. It was also making a name for its star, Lee Tracy.

  Broadway was considered gritty and real, and The Noose “melodrama of a slightly old model,” though tough and thrilling. The word was out that the second act of The Noose was almost identical to Broadway, with only minor differences.

  On opening night of The Noose, following the second act, Bill Mack went in front of the curtain to make a statement to his audience. He assured them that The Noose had been written a year before Broadway opened and that his play had remained largely unchanged from the initial draft.

  The reviews for The Noose ran the following day. The New York Sun, in a review by Stephen Rathbun, warned that the play would “grip you if you don’t watch out!” The reviewer mentioned “a moving scene in the last act” by “Miss Barbara Stanwyck,” who “played it well enough to make first nighters wipe tears from their eyes.” The New York Telegraph called The Noose “sentimental” but described Cherryman’s performance as “splendid” and, in the final line of the review, said that “Barbara Stanwyck brings the handkerchiefs forth with expediency.” The Telegram said it was “the most authentically teary play of the season” and that “there is an uncommonly fine performance by Barbara Stanwyck who not only does the Charleston steps of a dance hall girl gracefully, but knows how to act . . . After [she] breaks down and sobs out her unrequited love for the young bootlegger in that genuinely moving scene . . . there was nothing for the Governor to do but reprieve the boy. If he hadn’t, the weeping audience would probably have yelled at him until he did.” The New York Times described the play as “good entertainment when it gets going” with “several good performances.” After singling out the work of its star and praising George Nash’s “characteristic performance,” the Times mentioned the “further good work of Dorothy Stanwyck.”

  There were moments when even Ruby had to ask “Clarke (Mae) what my name was.” Another time Ruby heard someone calling “Miss Stanwyck, Miss Stanwyck” around the Hudson Theatre and said, “Where is that dame? Why doesn’t she answer?”

  Ruby sent wires to her family in Flatbush inviting them to come to the show. On the day of the performance, when Ruby went onstage in the second act, she looked out at the front row expecting to see her sisters and nephew, but instead the seats she had paid for were empty. She felt “utterly forlorn and friendless,” she said.

  After the performance Ruby found out that her family had come to the theater, claimed their tickets, taken their seats, and, full of pride, looked through the program in search of Ruby’s name. When they didn’t find “Ruby Stevens” listed, they assumed they were in the wrong theater and had been given tickets that were meant for others. They were sure the management would ask them to leave and were so uncomfortable they left before they could be ejected.

  Ed Kennedy frequently went to see Ruby in the show. It was during the run of The Noose that their romance began to fall apart. Their working hours were diametrically opposed. Ed finished his work at the office as Ruby was getting ready to go to the theater.

  “We both had these terrible driving ambitions, which conflicted,” Ed said. Ruby was serious about her work, and Ed about his. “And we’d get impatient with each other.” The relationship cooled for a while, but Ed had not yet given up. He was jealous of Bill Mack, but “he was wrong there,” said Ruby. “He should have focused on Rex [Cherryman]. I adored him.” She and Rex began to spend more time together, and she brought him home to Avenue L for everyone to meet.

  Ruby with Rex Cherryman, February 1927, Mineola, New York.

  “I think she was in love with him in her way,” said Dorothy.

  • • •

  Despite The Noose’s mixed reviews, the play ran through the winter months, into 1927 and through part of the spring. Its competition during the 1926–1927 season included Anita Loos’s adaptation of her best-selling comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with June Walker as Lorelei Lee and Frank Morgan as Henry Spoffard, the famous Philadelphia Presbyterian (and moralist) who preferred “a witless blonde.” In November, Gertrude Lawrence opened in George Gershwin’s Oh, Kay! by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton; Ethel Barrymore was playing in The Constant Wife, Somerset Maugham’s comedy about infidelity; and Eva Le Gallienne as director, actress, and founder of the Civic Repertory Theatre in its revival of The Three Sisters.

  A number of plays that opened that year were considered sexually outrageous, decadent, not fit for the stage.

  When The Captive opened early in the season, many theatergoers were prepared to be shocked. Édouard Bourdet’s play La prisonnière had first appeared in Paris, and word of its audacious theme had reached New York. The play was about a woman struggling against her passion for another woman who marries in a desperate attempt to save herself and escape her terrifying feelings. Ultimately, she abandons her marriage in pursuit of the woman whose love for her has held her captive. It opened at the Empire Theatre and starred Helen Menken (who had just married another Broadway actor, Humphrey Bogart) and Basil Rathbone.

  Many critics who expected the worst were surprised by the deftness of
Arthur Hornblow’s translation and adaptation of the play, produced and directed by Gilbert Miller. Brooks Atkinson thought its treatment of “the theme and the austere quality of the performance cleared the humid air like a northwestern breeze.” Alexander Woollcott in the New York World saw the play as “unprecedented . . . a study of an abnormal erotic passion, made with infinite tact and reticence.” George Jean Nathan called The Captive “profoundly wrought.” Other critics, many under the auspices of William Randolph Hearst, were outraged by the subject and the play.

  Hearst had a personal bias against The Captive. His mistress’s niece Pepi Lederer was an avowed lesbian. Marion Davies was unfazed by her niece’s sexual preferences, but Hearst was made furious by Pepi’s refusal to adhere to what he believed was moral and decent; Hearst was made even more enraged by Pepi’s public display of her liaisons.

  Articles condemning The Captive appeared in the Hearst morning and afternoon New York newspapers, the Journal, the American, and the Daily Mirror. Despite the bad press, the play was having a successful run. But Hearst’s campaign began to take hold. Public outcries of obscenity and calls for censorship reached a pitch, and the Citizens’ Play Jury, formed several years before, made up of theater managers, playwrights, actors, and civic associations, was pressured into putting the play on trial for indecency. The Captive was tried and cleared of its charges. It continued with the run, as did the campaign against it.

  The Society for the Suppression of Vice, under the leadership of John Sumner, who saw Broadway as a “sewer,” was determined to rid the theater of the indecency and filth that had overtaken the New York stage. Sumner was joined in his relentless campaign by the Catholic Church and other religious organizations. The result was the newly passed Padlock Bill that allowed the police to raid any “obscene, indecent, immoral or impure drama.” Theater owners, directors, agents, and actors were all to be held accountable for any indecent productions in which they were a part. They could be arrested, tried, and imprisoned. In response to the hysteria, Texas Guinan began to wear a necklace of miniature gold padlocks.