She arrived in Hollywood with nothing anyone would have called an advantage. No money, no family, no schooling to speak of. What Barbara Stanwyck had was a childhood that had taught her to survive, a dancer’s discipline, and a will that never once, in sixty years of work, showed a crack. By the time she was done, she had made more than eighty films, played con artists, murderesses, and ranch matriarchs, been nominated for four Academy Awards, and become, in the mid-1940s, the highest-paid woman in America.
This is the story behind the legend: the orphan from Brooklyn who became the toughest dame in Hollywood.
The Orphan of Brooklyn
Barbara Stanwyck was born Ruby Catherine Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York, the fifth and youngest child of Catherine Ann and Byron E. Stevens. Her parents were working-class people, her father a bricklayer of English descent, her mother an immigrant from Nova Scotia. For the first four years of Ruby’s life, the family held together. Then, in a single cruel season, it fell apart.
When Ruby was four, her mother was knocked off a moving streetcar by a drunken stranger. Pregnant at the time, Catherine Stevens died of complications from the accident. Two weeks after the funeral, her father joined a work crew digging the Panama Canal and was never seen by his family again. In the space of a fortnight, Ruby Stevens lost both her parents, one to death and one to disappearance.
Ruby and her older brother, Malcolm Byron, whom the family called By, were taken in by their eldest sister, Laura Mildred, a showgirl five years older than Ruby. But Mildred’s work took her on the road, and when she toured, the two younger children were placed in a series of foster homes, sometimes as many as four in a single year. Young Ruby often ran away from them. She would later say that the foster care system was not cruel, only impersonal. But impersonal was enough. A child who is passed from house to house learns early that nobody is coming to save her, and that if she wants a life, she will have to build it herself.
The Chorus Girl
Ruby Stevens went to work as soon as she could. She took low-paying jobs as a child, and by her early teens she had set her sights on the stage. In 1923, a few months before her sixteenth birthday, she auditioned for a place in the chorus at the Strand Roof, a nightclub above the Strand Theatre in Times Square. She got the job. Within months she was dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922 and 1923 at the New Amsterdam Theatre, a sixteen-year-old in the most glamorous revue in America.
It was not glamorous work, not really. For the next several years she danced in revues and in speakeasy nightclubs, sometimes performing from midnight until seven in the morning in clubs owned by the legendary Texas Guinan, where the clientele often included gangsters and the liquor laws were cheerfully ignored. She learned to hold her own in rooms full of hard men and to keep her feet moving and her head clear. The toughness that would define her screen persona was not an act she learned in Hollywood. It was the education of a teenage girl working the night shift in Prohibition New York.
She also learned the discipline of the chorus line, where there is no room for a missed step and no sympathy for a late arrival. It was a lesson she carried for the rest of her life. One of her directors, Jacques Tourneur, would later say of her, “She only lives for two things, and both of them are work.”
The Noose and a New Name
Ruby’s break came in 1926, when the writer and impresario Willard Mack cast her in his play The Noose. She played a nightclub dancer, and her big scene, an emotional breakdown, stopped the show night after night. The Noose opened on October 20, 1926, and made her a minor sensation. It was also the play that gave her a new name.
The story goes that Mack and Ruby spotted a playbill for an old-time actress named Jane Stanwyck in a play called Barbara Frietchie, and combined the two names into Barbara Stanwyck. The new name stuck, and Ruby Stevens disappeared into it. Barbara Stanwyck sounded like a star. Within a year, she would prove she was one.
Her first leading role came in 1927, in the hit play Burlesque, and it established her as a Broadway star. She played a burlesque dancer with a directness and an emotional honesty that critics had not seen from a girl of her background, and the play was a smash. It was while playing in Burlesque that she was introduced to her future husband, the vaudeville star Frank Fay, by their mutual friend Oscar Levant. She was twenty, a Broadway star, and about to take the two biggest leaps of her young life.
Burlesque and Frank Fay
On August 26, 1928, Barbara Stanwyck married Frank Fay, her Burlesque co-star. Fay was a famous vaudeville comedian, one of the biggest names on the stage, and at first the marriage looked like a partnership of equals. Soon after the wedding, the couple moved to Hollywood, where Fay’s Broadway fame was supposed to open every door. It did not work out that way. Fay’s career never translated to the screen, while Stanwyck’s took off with a speed that startled everyone, including her.
She made her first real mark in films with Ladies of Leisure in 1930, directed by Frank Capra, who became her great early champion. Capra saw in her what the chorus line had taught her: a woman who could be direct, unsentimental, and utterly believable. He cast her again in The Miracle Woman in 1931 and The Bitter Tea of General Yen in 1933, and each time she grew stronger. Meanwhile, Fay drank, and grew jealous of the wife whose star was rising as his fell. The marriage turned bitter. The couple had adopted a ten-month-old son, Dion, on December 5, 1932, later amending his name to Anthony Dion, nicknamed Tony, and Stanwyck won custody of him when the marriage finally ended in divorce on December 30, 1935.
Hollywood and the Rise of a Star
She worked constantly, and she worked with the best. She made five films with the director William Wellman. She was a favorite of Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra. In 1939 she starred in Golden Boy, in 1940 in Remember the Night, and in 1941 she delivered two of the great comic performances of the decade, as the con artist Jean Harrington in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve and as the nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea in Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire. Ball of Fire earned her an Academy Award nomination, and The Lady Eve is still regarded as one of the finest comedies ever made.
What directors valued most was not her range, remarkable as it was, but her reliability. She arrived on time, knew her lines, knew her marks, and could deliver a scene in one take that other actresses needed a morning to find. She understood cameras and lighting, and was known to correct a director’s camera move, and to be right. She was, in the truest sense, a professional, and in a town built on temperament, that made her priceless.
Robert Taylor: The Second Marriage
In 1936, while making the film His Brother’s Wife, Stanwyck became involved with her co-star, Robert Taylor, a young MGM contract player four years her junior, fresh from a small town in Nebraska. She was his mentor as much as his lover, guiding his career and easing him into the sophisticated world of Hollywood, and he called her Queen while she called him Junior. They were married on May 14, 1939, in San Diego, in a ceremony arranged with the help of Taylor’s studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after a magazine exposé about unmarried Hollywood couples had embarrassed the studio into insisting on a wedding.
For a time they were one of Hollywood’s golden couples. But the marriage, like the first, could not survive the pressures around it. Taylor spent the war years in the service, and when he came home the two had grown apart. They decided to divorce in 1950, and the marriage formally ended in 1952. Stanwyck never remarried. She remained close to Taylor, and when he died in 1969, she took time off from work to mourn him. She had loved twice and lost twice, and after that she gave her heart to the work.
The Work Ethic
Ask anyone who worked with Barbara Stanwyck what they remembered, and the answer was almost always the same: she worked harder than anyone else on the set. She was famous for her preparation, her punctuality, and her refusal to indulge in the star behavior that Hollywood tolerated in others. A second take, the director Garson Kanin recalled, felt to her like a rebuke, and a third could send her into a depression. She wanted to get it right the first time, because getting it right the first time was the standard she had set for herself when she was sixteen years old and dancing until dawn.
That ethic made her the most trusted actress in Hollywood. In 1944, the year of Double Indemnity, she became the highest-paid woman in the United States. It was earned the only way she knew how: by showing up, every day, and doing the job better than anyone else.
It also made her beloved by crews. She knew the names of the electricians and the grips. She did not keep people waiting. She did her own stunts when she could and learned her lines so thoroughly that directors could move the camera anywhere and she would still be ready. The toughness was not a pose. It was a system, built in childhood and refined over sixty years, and it never broke down.
The Long Twilight
When the film roles thinned in the late 1950s, Stanwyck did what she had always done: she went where the work was. She moved into television, and in the 1960s she became one of the most popular actresses on the medium, winning Emmy Awards for The Barbara Stanwyck Show in 1961 and for the western series The Big Valley, in which she played the matriarch Victoria Barkley, in 1966. She was fifty-eight when The Big Valley began, and rode, shot, and fought on screen like a woman half her age.
Her last great triumph came in 1983, when she played the formidable Mary Carson in the miniseries The Thorn Birds, winning her third Emmy and a Golden Globe. The honors piled up: an Honorary Oscar in 1982, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1986, the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1987, and a 1999 ranking as the eleventh-greatest female star of classic American cinema. She accepted the Honorary Oscar with typical bluntness, telling reporters backstage, “Of course I was disappointed those times I was nominated before and lost. Anyone who says they’re not is lying.”
She died on January 20, 1990, in Santa Monica, of congestive heart failure and chronic lung disease, aged eighty-two. She left no memoir and no grand statement. The work was the explanation.
Barbara Stanwyck’s life is the rarest kind of Hollywood story. It is the story of a child who lost everything before she was five years old and decided, without ever saying so, that she would never be helpless again. The chorus girl, the Broadway star, the movie star, the television matriarch: they were all the same person, a girl from Brooklyn who learned early that the world owes you nothing, and that the only answer is to work, to endure, and to get it right the first time. She did. For sixty years, she did.