Stanwyck by Axel Madsen

Author:Axel Madsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781475923773
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2001-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

22

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

TAYLOR WAS NERVOUS THE FIRST TIME WE WENT UP TOGETHER,” Lieutenant Tom Purvis would remember. “He was concerned that I was thinking to myself, These handsome Hollywood stars don’t take anything seriously except their box-office ratings.’ We got up to five thousand feet in an open plane and I said, ‘Get ready for a right slow roll. It was perfect, but when we came out of it Taylor looked like he was going to throw up. I asked him what was wrong.

‘”Hell, I just lost my cigarette lighter,’ he cried. ‘It’s down there in the Mississippi River!’”

Purvis laughed and said, “So what?”

‘”So what!’ Bob came back. ‘”That was a solid gold Zippo with a raised gold replica of the naval station emblem. Barbara gave it to me. She’ll flip her lid! What the hell do I tell her? A $300 lighter is at the bottom of the Mississippi?’”

Purvis thought Bob should just tell his wife. “If you ask me, it’s almost funny.”

‘”You don’t know Barbara.’”

After the first adjustments, Bob liked going from celebrity to dog-tag serial number. On his completion of basic training at the naval air station in Dallas, the navy assigned him to its Aviation Volunteer Transport Division. He quickly became all navy, caring little about what was going on at home. He was dashing in uniform and on one of his furloughs posed with Barbara for news cameras on their front step.

He looked awfully young in his crew cut next to Barbara in a dressing gown with her hair in a bun.

Bob requested active duty overseas. He was turned down on the grounds that at thirty-one he was too old for combat. When he made a second request, he was told he was needed as an instructor. He was never satisfied with that line of reasoning and suspected he was being denied overseas assignments because of his movie stardom. Barbara came to New Orleans once while he was stationed there. Fearing her wifely concerns might hurt his warrior image, he vetoed any publicity in connection with her visit.

WILLIAM WELLMAN WAS THE DIRECTOR OF LADY OF BURLESQUE, which had Barbara as a nightclub dancer solving a string of backstage murders. When Gypsy Rose Lee decided she was too old to be taking her clothes off in front of strangers, the famous stripper tried writing. To everyone’s surprise, The G-String Murders was a bestseller. James Gunn’s screenplay was less than lively, but as Dixie Daisy, Barbara sang the Sammy Cahn-Harry Akst “Take It off the Ε-String, Play It on the G-String” and did comedy skits with Michael O’Shea. Barbara tried to get Hermes Pan to work with her, but Lady of Burlesque was a United Artists production and Pan was at Fox doing My Gal Sal. Even without the choreographer, however, Wellman and Barbara managed to stand a cliché on its head by staging a striptease in which she never takes off a thing.

Iris Adrian was a hoofer who joined the cast and became a friend of Stanwyck’s.

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