Pieces of My Heart Page 6

  But I wasn’t going there for acting tutorials. I was in love with her. She was very loving, very caring, very involved with me, and highly sexed. Making love with her was an entirely different thing than I had ever experienced. I had been with girls, and I had been with women, but I had never been with a woman with her level of knowledge, her level of taste. I was so incredibly taken with her, taken by her.

  We were both at turning points in our lives. She had been married to Robert Taylor for over ten years when he went to Italy to make Quo Vadis and had an affair, at which point Barbara threw him out. She was bitter about Taylor; she acted very quickly, almost reflexively, although I don’t know that she thought it was too quick. I don’t know precisely what went on between them; we never got into it. In fact, I went hunting with Bob Taylor a few times, and I think he might have known about us.

  At any rate, she had just gotten her divorce when we met. She was at a very vulnerable moment in her life and career. The forties are a dangerous time for any woman, and especially so for an actress whose work is her identity—definitely Barbara’s way of life. The transition to playing middle-aged women has unnerved a lot of actresses—some of Barbara’s contemporaries, such as Norma Shearer and Kay Francis, quit the business rather than confront it—but she faced it straight on because that’s the kind of woman she was. The continuity of her career was more important to her than any individual part. Like so many people in show business, she was a prisoner of her career. Because of my youth, I suppose in one sense I was a validation of her sexuality.

  She had an old friend from the vaudeville days named Buck Mack who lived with her. Buck had been part of a vaudeville team called Miller & Mack and had been an extra in Citizen Kane. In modern terms, he was a personal assistant: he ran the house, kept everything running smoothly, and watched over her. At first, Buck regarded me as an interloper, but it wasn’t long before he saw that Barbara and I genuinely loved each other, and he and I became good friends.

  Because of the age difference, neither of us wanted to have our relationship in the papers, and with the help of Helen Ferguson, her publicist and one of her best friends, we kept it quiet. There were only a few people who knew about us. Nancy Sinatra Sr. was one of them, because she and Barbara were close friends. I didn’t tell anybody at Fox about our affair, although Harry Brand might have known, if only because Harry knew everything.

  Likewise, I always assumed that Darryl Zanuck knew, although he never said a word about it to me. That might have been because Darryl and Barbara had something of a history, a bad one: Barbara told me that Darryl had chased her around his office years earlier, and I got the distinct impression that she hadn’t appreciated the exercise.

  And my parents knew, because Barbara called their house a few times looking for me. I finally told them we were seeing each other, although I didn’t give them all the details. They met her once, at a party at Clifton Webb’s house, and my mother was upset that I was in love with an older woman. As for my father, as with most other events in my life, he was not in my corner.

  And I eventually told Spencer Tracy about it. All he said was, “Wonderful! Are you happy? If you’re happy, that’s all that matters.”

  Because I was so involved with Barbara, I was off-limits for other women, which was something of a problem for the studio. They wanted to promote the image of a carefree young stud—never my style—so I had publicity dates with young actresses around town like Lori Nelson or Debra Paget. This was a relic of the days when the studio system was in its prime. The studio would arrange for two young stars-in-waiting to go out to dinner and a dance and assign a photographer to accompany them. The result would be placed in a fan magazine. It was a totally artificial story documenting a nonexistent relationship, but it served to keep the names of young talents in front of the public. As far as I was concerned, it was part of the job, and usually pleasant enough.

  When reporters would ask me about my romantic life, which they did incessantly, I had to say things like, “If I go out with one woman a few times, it’s considered a romance. If I date a lot of girls, I’m a Casanova. It’s one of those ‘heads-you-win-tails-I-lose’ deals. I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what I do.” The last sentence contained my true feelings.

  In most respects, Barbara was a man’s woman, although her home was lovely. Like me, she was an animal lover—she kept poodles. Her son, Dion, was in the service at this point—I never actually met him—and she was hopeful that the Army might help him. She had adopted Dion when she was married to Frank Fay, one of the most dreadful men in the history of show business. Fay was a drunk, an anti-Semite, and a wife-beater, and Barbara had had to endure all of that.

  I don’t think she was going to an analyst at this point, but she did make regular visits to a man who gave her sodium pentothal. It wasn’t like the LSD therapy that came later, which Cary Grant tried and got so much out of. Barbara had a lot of things going on in her head, but she didn’t put it out there for conversation, let alone public consumption.

  When I was with her, it was all about us. There wasn’t a lot about anybody else, not Frank Fay, or even Bob Taylor. She had a small scar on her chest, where someone had once put out a cigarette on her. I think it was Al Jolson, speaking of sons of bitches. Jolson had been crazy about her back in the New York days, when she was a young actress on Broadway. She would talk about him once in a while, mainly about what an asshole he had been.

  Spending time around her house, I came across a cache of 16mm movies in her basement. It turned out that Barbara had a lot of her own movies, and I convinced her to spend some time watching them with me. I ran the projector. She had prints of Union Pacific, Ball of Fire, and Baby Face, among others. She didn’t particularly like watching them, but she did enjoy reminiscing about their production: how she got the part, what the location was like, that sort of thing. She liked people with humor and always spoke highly of Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, and Frank Capra. Oddly enough, she wasn’t crazy about Preston Sturges; she seemed to feel that he expended all his charm and humor for his movies and that there wasn’t anything left for his actors.

  In broad outline, all this sounds a little bit like the scene in Sunset Boulevard where Gloria Swanson sits with William Holden and watches a scene from Queen Kelly, rhapsodizing about her own face. But Barbara couldn’t have cared less about how she looked; as I watched her films with her, it was clear that, for her, the movies were a job she loved, as well as a social occasion for a woman who was otherwise something of a loner.

  Barbara and I were together for four years. What ultimately broke it up was the fact that it couldn’t go anywhere—it was a classic backstreet romance. I was going on location to make movies, she was going on location to make movies, and there was no chance of a marriage in that place and time, so it was bound to run out of steam. She finally sat me down and told me that it was too difficult for her. She loved me, but….

  I couldn’t argue with her reasoning. There was simply no way we could have been married at that time. I would have always been Mr. Stanwyck, and we both knew it.

  And that’s how it came to an end.

  She was an enormous influence in my life, and still is. I remain immensely grateful. I gave her things, nice things, such as a four-leaf clover necklace made out of platinum and diamonds, a piece of jewelry she always set special store by. But the things I gave her were dwarfed by the things she gave me. If I had to limit it to just one thing, I would say she gave me self-esteem. To have a woman of her beauty and accomplishment see value in me and give herself totally to me couldn’t help but have a powerful impact on my psyche. Barbara was the first savior in my life.

  More concretely, she gave me values I never had before. I’ve mentioned that she gave me a love of reading, but she also taught me to appreciate art. I still have two landscapes she gave me, one of San Francisco, the other of Paris. Without her, there’s no doubt in my mind I would have gone in a different direction, and not a better one. For o
ne thing, I would have spent more time with my contemporaries, and frankly, none of my contemporaries were in Barbara’s league.

  I always kept in touch with Barbara. I don’t know who the men in her life were, although I’m sure they existed. I know she had escorts, although I assumed most of them were gay.

  Toward the end of her life a burglar broke into her house and pistol-whipped her. She was an elderly woman by then, and it sent her into a downward spiral. When she was in the hospital dying, I called, and she asked me not to come and see her; she wanted me to remember her as she was. I felt I had to honor her request. As we talked, she told me she was wearing the four-leaf clover necklace I had given her. Barbara was cremated wearing it, and her ashes were scattered over Lone Pine. The fact that a piece of me remained with her at the end was and is some consolation for her loss.

  Occasionally, on screen, Barbara had a wary, watchful quality about her that I’ve noticed in other people who had bad childhoods; they tend to keep an eye on life because they don’t think it can be trusted. After her mother was killed by a streetcar, she had been raised in Brooklyn by her sisters, and from things she said, I believe she had been abused as a child. She had lived an entirely different life than mine, that’s for sure, which is one reason I found her so fascinating. I think her early life was one reason she had such authenticity as an actress, and as a person.

  Barbara was the first woman I ever loved.

  FIVE

  “MAINLY, IT WAS THE WIG.”

  On location in Tarpon Springs, Florida, with J. Carroll Naish and Gilbert Roland in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. (BENEATH THE 12-MILE REEF © 1953 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

  Each of the major studios was like a royal court that was in competition with the other royal courts. Each studio had a social lion who maintained a prestigious individual salon, and it wasn’t necessarily the studio head. Then there were the salons that owed no special allegiance to any studio but cherry-picked from all the elites, such as the one maintained by Bill and Edie Goetz.

  At Fox, the elite circle was presided over by Clifton Webb. I worked with Clifton on Stars and Stripes Forever, a biopic about John Philip Sousa, then Titanic, and I was invited into his group. Clifton’s friends included people like Noel Coward and Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder’s partner, who never got much credit from anyone, especially Billy. Charlie was a kind, well-educated, very bright gay man who was fairly deep in the closet.

  Clifton lived with his mother, Mabelle, who was a total character and ruled the roost. The father had left when Clifton was very young and he was out of the picture, if he’d ever been in it. Mabelle had opened a dance school in Indianapolis, and she and Clifton gave dancing lessons together. He teamed up with Bonnie Glass and formed a very successful duo that followed in the footsteps of Vernon and Irene Castle. I never saw Clifton dance on the stage, but people who did told me he was a magnificent talent, the equivalent of Astaire but with a fey manner that he managed to get away with and always high-style: white tie and tails. Certainly, he had a major career, starring in shows like Sunny and Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer.

  Clifton and Mabelle were completely devoted to each other; Clifton would dance with her at parties. She was outrageous and would order Clifton around. “We are going to sit here,” she would announce, “and then we are going to move over there.” Mabelle was always at the head of the table, and Clifton was very respectful of her, although he had his eccentricities as well: he had an African gray parrot he would wrap in a napkin and put in a brandy snifter at the dinner table.

  It was as if they were competing to see who could be the most like Auntie Mame. They both had a larger-than-life quality, and the bond between them was very thick. Sometimes too thick. One time Noel Coward called Clifton, and Clifton was going on and on about Mabelle, as he tended to do. And Noel said, “Dear boy, if you want to talk about her, do it on your nickel.”

  Clifton was gay, of course, but he never made a pass at me, not that he would have. I never saw Clifton with a man; I never knew of Clifton being with a man, or having a lover.

  Clifton had a very rich deal at the studio, and his house reflected it. It was Victor Fleming’s old place, and Clifton had done it in a bright, comfortable style, in the mode of Billy Haines—the go-to decorator in that era. I remember that at one point Clifton did the bar in a Greek style, full of things he brought back from the location of Boy on a Dolphin. The word was that Clifton earned the same money that Darryl Zanuck earned. He didn’t get the stock that Darryl got, but he earned the same money. Clifton had a string of enormous successes. There was Laura and The Razor’s Edge, then Mr. Belvedere and two sequels, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Stars and Stripes Forever, and Titanic—all big hits.

  I was learning that this kind of moviemaking was typical of Darryl. He never had the money that MGM or Paramount did, so he couldn’t buy stars, he had to make them. If he didn’t have enough stars to make a movie, he had the extraordinary ability to make the movie itself the star. Darryl had the vision to see real possibilities in an effete stage star and to build very effective vehicles around a personality centering on asperity and waspish intelligence—hardly the stuff of mass audience entertainment then or now, but somehow Darryl and Clifton made it work.

  Clifton was very social; he gave wonderful parties, so he had a lot of leverage by dint of his position as well as his commercial cachet. It was Clifton who introduced me to Noel Coward. Noel was playing Las Vegas, and Clifton threw a lunch for him. Eventually, everybody else left, and I was alone with Noel. And he said, “Come and sit over here.” So I went over and sat down, and he put his hand on my leg.

  “Are you by any chance homosexual?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not.”

  And he said, “Ah, what a pity.” His hand came off, and that was it. After that, he couldn’t have been more of a gentleman, and I always adored him.

  Living with Barbara, hanging around with a social set that was a generation older, I was very consciously styling myself after an earlier era and in a sense swimming against the tide, which in that era consisted of Marlon Brando and Monty Clift. But my interest in associating with people my age was no more than nominal. I wanted to see the great stars I had watched at the movies up close. I wanted to learn their secrets; I wanted to learn how they did what they did.

  One day in New York I walked into “21” with Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. The restaurant…stopped! It was like a freeze-frame in a movie. Diners froze in midbite, waiters froze in the midst of waiting. It was as potent a demonstration of the power of great stars as anything I’ve ever seen.

  Clark Gable always liked me because I had caddied for him, and I had been shooting with Gary Cooper and knew his family quite well. I idolized Clark and watched every move he made; Gary I admired for being such a terrific actor, such a wonderful man.

  In many ways they were alike, but in other ways they were different. Gable had been born poor, while Cooper was a judge’s son from Montana who never dressed in anything but Brooks Brothers. Both of them, however, had a way that suggested they came from the earth. Gable loved to hunt, loved to fish, loved automobiles and beautiful women. So did Coop, but offscreen he always gave the impression of being terribly chic.

  Gable’s personality was closer to what he played than Cooper’s was, but they both read, were interested in what was going on, and didn’t hover around Hollywood. Neither of these men was sitting in his dressing room worrying about his next picture or who was up for what part. They got out of town. Coop would go to Sun Valley with Hemingway, while Clark liked his duck blinds and skeet shooting.

  Beneath their likes and dislikes, they were alike in their tremendous craft. They had a way of taking the material that was written for them, much of which was very slight, and making something out of it because of the depth of their behavior. They took the material and filtered it through their own personalities. Because they were their own men and weren’t trying to be someone else, the strength
of their own character was bestowed on the characters they played. They didn’t have neuroses, or if they did, they didn’t inflict their neuroses on the audience.

  That craft didn’t come easily, and the self-confidence they projected was not something they were born with. I watched Coop work in a western he did for Fox called Garden of Evil. He put himself under tremendous stress when he worked; during a take his knuckles were white. But he concealed that stress magnificently; a lot of the time it looked like he wasn’t really doing any acting at all. Now, here was an actor acting, and you couldn’t see him acting. That is hard to do, the highest achievement in the business, and Coop never got enough credit for his ability.

  Every actor’s goal is to make it look like it’s the first time he’s ever done that scene—to make it look fresh. These men were masters of that. You were never aware of Gary Cooper acting, but he could move you to tears. As an actor, and as a man, I admired him without reservation.

  Making friends with so many older actors gave me an invaluable tutorial in how to handle the paraphernalia of the business. Take, for instance, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the two women who invented and defined the trade of gossip columnists. They were both tricky, and you had to know how to play them. Moreover, although they had been around for years—Louella had started in the silent days!—they were still important because they were so widely syndicated: Louella through the Hearst syndicate, and Hedda through the Los Angeles Times syndicate.

  You had to pay court to Hedda and Louella; if I had an interview with Hedda, for instance, I went to her house. I would go to the racetrack with Louella all the time, but you quickly learned that either of them could turn on you. One time Hedda got upset at me over something, and it was thought necessary that I come back from Catalina and go directly to her house to get things straightened out.