Barbara Stanwyck: I'm A Tomorrow Woman
It was after the third or fourth letter came asking where she was buried that Barbara Stanwyck ended a self-imposed retirement.
By Aljean Harmetz in The New York Times, from March 22, 1981
''You have to know when you've had your hour, your place in the sun,'' Miss Stanwyck said on a spring-like day in her 73d year. ''I pity an actor who doesn't understand that.''
Her hair is silver - but it has been silver for more than 30 years. When it turned prematurely gray, she refused to dye it, just as she refused to lie about her age. ''Everybody said, 'Oh, my God, no actress can have white hair. No one wants to make love to a gray-haired lady.' Everybody said, 'To be over 40 isn't possible.' To be old is death here. I think it's kind of silly. Be glad you're healthy. Be glad you can get out of bed on your own.''
Ironically, on the eve of being honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 13 for 35 years of achievement, she looks extraordinarily lovely, with porcelain skin and a figure that has not varied one pound or one inch for nearly 50 years. A golden horse with a flaming mane is pinned to her magenta jacket and its bridled vitality is echoed in her own chiseled features. She started the day, as she always does, by walking half a mile on the slanted treadmill that dominates her bedroom. An exercise bicycle is now relegated to the garage because it was ''too easy.'' The uphill treadmill is more satisfying work.
Barbara Stanwyck withdrew into Hollywood shadow a decade ago, after her Western television series, ''The Big Valley,'' ended. Recluse? She shakes her head determinedly. ''I'm not a yesterday's woman. I'm a tomorrow's woman. If I don't have a job, what am I going to give interviews about? 'And then I did... And then I did...' Who the hell cares?''
Having reluctantly agreed to be honored by the Film Society, she has something to give interviews about now. On screen, she was, most often, fiercely independent. The titles of many of her 82 movies can be strung together as a portrait of a wisecracking strident dame of easy virtue from the wrong side of the tracks. ''Shopworn,'' ''Illicit,'' ''A Lost Lady,'' a ''Gambling Lady,'' one of those unsavory ''Ladies They Talk About'' paying ''The Purchase Price'' of ''Ten Cents a Dance,'' and always, always, in ''Jeopardy'' for her ''Crime of Passion.'' Two of her four Academy Award nominations came in classic Barbara Stanwyck roles - as the tough-talking but soft-centered mother in ''Stella Dallas,'' sacrificing everything for her daughter, and as the ruthless slut who orchestrates her husband's murder in ''Double Indemnity.''
Reel life bearing no arithmetically calculable resemblance to real life, Miss Stanwyck is noted for her generosity and modesty. ''She's atypical of actresses,'' says her close friend, Shirley Eder, the columnist. ''She has pride in her work, but I don't think she realizes her worth as an actress or as a person. She thinks she's average; she thinks it's an imposition to ask her friends to come help honor her.''
''At first I said no to Lincoln Center,'' agrees Miss Stanwyck. ''Talk about insecurity. I can go up on stage for Hank Fonda and for my Golden Boy Bill Holden. When I told Lincoln Center I couldn't go through it for myself, they very artfully asked Shirley to convince me.''
There was always a hard edge of candor in her screen performances. The same no-nonsense, forthright appraisal is part of her personal baggage. She sparkles, in the sense of giving off sparks, and her energy level is unexpectedly dazzling.
Sitting straight as a ramrod, she takes a cigarette from a gold Art Deco case decorated with the sunburst of her face and a ruby, her birthstone. It was a present from Robert Taylor, early in their marriage. That marriage ended in divorce as did her first marriage to Frank Fay, the comedian who starred at the Palace Theater in New York but shriveled in the shadow of his wife in Hollywood. She caresses the cigarette case. ''Losing somebody you love by death or divorce is hard. But if they decide they want to be free, there's nothing to battle for. You have to let go. Bob and I didn't stay friends. We became friends again.'' She lifts her chin in a jaunty gesture, and the husky voice is a remembrance of dozens of films. ''Time does take care of things.''
Time has, she says, been good to her. ''I had my job, my work. People talk about 'my career,' but 'career' is too pompous a word. It was a job, and I always have felt very privileged to be paid for doing what I love doing. I still look forward to living. I wake up looking forward to each day. Whatever comes, I'm alive! I'm existing. I'm part of it.''
Shirley Eder says of her that ''Barbara has learned to make do with life.'' Born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, orphaned at four, on her own and wrapping packages at a department store at 13, a nightclub dancer at 16, she is still grateful for the bounty that came afterward. She responded to fame neither with demands nor tantrums. Even now she is 10 minutes early to any appointment because ''I'd rather wait for people than have them wait for me.''
The women she played through four decades were active, even physically daring. ''I couldn't stand being passive,'' she says. ''I couldn't play the placid girl.'' According to film historians, that cocky independence appealed more to men than women. It appealed to the men on her sets, too. She was the favorite co-star of Robert Preston, William Holden and Henry Fonda. ''The love of my life, I absolutely adored her,'' says Mr. Fonda; and Mr. Holden has sent her roses every year for 42 years in gratitude for her kindness to him when she was a star and he was an untried actor who was cast as her ''Golden Boy.''
To the men who worked in the crew, she was known as ''Missy'' and that endearment became her nickname. Even today, if a grip or cameraman she worked with 20 years ago is having problems, Missy is there with money enough to make the situation easier.
She tosses her head in a typical Stanwyck gesture of impatience. ''I'm not Lady Bountiful,'' she says. ''There's no halo around my head. But there's always someone in trouble, and if anyone needs any help I'm there.''
If she has one regret, it is that she didn't return to the stage decades ago. She had become a minor stage star in ''Burlesque'' before United Artists brought her out for ''The Locked Door'' in 1929. ''But I fell in love with film,'' she says. ''Besides, how do you keep a marriage together if you're back there and he's here? Now I'm scared to try. Now I'm a coward. They keep asking me, and I wish I had the courage, honey.''
Unlike many actors of her generation who no longer bother to see films, she can still respond passionately to movies and ''absolutely adored'' ''Ordinary People.'' But she prefers the Hollywood that used to be - when she was ''an interloper, a usurper from the theater in 1932, and Ronald Colman, walking toward me, was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
''The amount of security that the star had - Crawford, Gable, Tracy, Taylor - was wonderful. Two or three pictures a year written for them by the top writers. It was like a baby being bathed and all wrapped in a blanket. You were safe. Today it's catch as catch can. Today someone buys a book or a play and asks, 'Who can we go to the bank with?' not 'Who's right for it?' It was a good system for a while, but Hollywood today is like a series of Mobil or Standard Oil stations leased to a distributor.
''And the salaries! In my wildest dreams, I never believed any actor would get a million dollars. All I could think of when I saw Marlon Brando with his white hair in 'Superman,' knowing he had gotten $3 million, was 'Why him? Why not me? I could use my own hair!' ''
There are no bitter memories. She remembers Preston Sturges saying he was going to write her ''a marvelous comedy because you're funny.'' And adding, ''Then I'm going to the front office and insist they let me direct it.'' She smiles. ''A lot of people said that sort of thing, and 15 minutes later it was forgotten. But, two months later, Sturges handed me 'The Lady Eve.' He was marvelous. He loved actors. Some directors get along with actors, but they don't really like them.''
Barbara Stanwyck was, with rare independence for a star of the 30's, never under exclusive long-term contract to a single studio. Her few years at Warner Bros. ''didn't work out. I was suspended a lot. If you were a bad girl, you were punished at Warner Bros.'' She characterizes Warner Bros. as ''cheesy,'' Hal Wallis as ''fair,'' and Sam Goldwyn as ''a man who had class.'' ''Make all the jokes you want of the way Sam talked, but he instinctively knew what was right. He wanted real flowers on his sets because he didn't want an actress to have to put her face in a piece of wax.''
She is, she says, ''contented'' with her life today. Even excited. ''I'm excited by learning how to cement pins into driftwood. I love to spend time watching people.'' Although she has given away her library of first editions because their value made her nervous, there are two or three new books to read each week; and she is supervising Spanish lessons for her 8-year-old great-niece because ''this is going to be a bilingual world.'' She wants to see as much of that world as she can, and there is a trip scheduled to Alaska next summer.
And - ''like an old warhorse'' - she is always open to the right offer. Even, she laughs at herself, from ''The Love Boat'' with its constant cargo of aging stars. She has turned down the producer of that television series but added, ''When you go to China, count me in. I've never been to China. It's high time I went.''