I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood's Legendary Actresses by Robert J. Wagner

Author:Robert J. Wagner [Robert J. Wagner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525429111
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2016-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

Barbara Stanwyck

Whether it was a movie or TV show didn’t seem to make much difference to her; she just wanted to keep acting. And the fact was that, after a certain point, she was no longer offered films, but still got roles on television, which is where the audience that had grown up with her had migrated. Since she loved Westerns, she was quite happy making The Big Valley, even though a lot of people thought the show was beneath her. But then almost any TV series would have been beneath Barbara—certainly one of the two or three best film actresses of her time.

Living with someone like Barbara at an early stage in my life made me appreciate the vulnerability of even strong women in a way that would have been impossible had I been associating strictly with younger women.

When you’re a kid, you’re confident that you’ll never fail, you’ll never die. But loving Barbara, and knowing some of the older actresses I’ve talked about, made me realize that people can be crushed, and time and disappointment can make them become something other than their best selves.

One of the big might-have-beens in Barbara’s life was losing the female lead in The Fountainhead, a picture she very much wanted to do. She had actually taken the property to Henry Blanke at Warner Bros., for whom she had done My Reputation. Blanke and she had hit it off, so she wanted to work with him again.

The Fountainhead was set up to star Bogart and Stanwyck until King Vidor was assigned to direct. Vidor had made a lot of great pictures, and Jack Warner gave him a fair amount of authority. Vidor simply didn’t think Barbara was sexy enough to play the part of Dominique. This was brutal and it was also unexpected, as Barbara and Vidor had worked together so magnificently on Stella Dallas a dozen or so years earlier. Of course, Stella Dallas is a character part, not a sexy role. (It has one of the great endings in movie history, as Stella strides proudly away from her daughter’s wedding. With her girl taken care of, Stella’s work is done, and she can go on to the next thing.)

Bogart eventually drifted away from The Fountainhead and was replaced by Gary Cooper, and on came Patricia Neal to take the female lead. Pat Neal was indeed beautiful, and she was also quite a bit younger than Barbara. Gary and Pat flared up into a huge affair, even though the picture itself wasn’t very good.

Barbara’s attitude toward all this was philosophical. She didn’t like being rejected, of course, but her attitude was “What are you going to do? You have to take these things in stride.”

It’s an attitude that became my own and has stayed with me all these years. She was right—if we didn’t take such setbacks in stride, the streets would quickly fill up with the bodies of actors committing suicide. Every actor or actress who ever lived, every great star, has lost parts he or she would have killed to play.

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