"Fifteen years in the making, the first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound--the first to delve deeply into Stanwyck's rich, complex life and to explore her extraordinary range of eighty-eight motion pictures, many of them iconic; her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century.Frank Capra called her, "The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known." Yet she was one of its most natural, timeless, and underrated stars. Now Victoria Wilson, gives us the most complete portrait we have yet had, or will have, of this magnificent actresses, seen as the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of oldNew England stock...her years in New York as dancer and Broadway star...her fraught marriage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius, who influenced a generation of actors and comedians (among them, Jack Benny and Stanwyck herself)...the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with the "unfunny" Marx brother, Zeppo, together creating one of the finest horse breeding farms in the west; her fairytale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America's most sought-after male star...Hereis the shaping of her career working with many of Hollywood's most important directors: among them, Capra, King Vidor, Cecil B. Demille, Preston Sturges, all set against the times--the Depression, the rise of the unions, the coming of World War II and a fast-evolving coming-of-age motion picture industry. At the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself--her strengths, her fears, her desires--how she made use of the darkness in her soul, keeping it at bay in her private life, transforming herself from shunned outsider into one of Hollywood's--and America's--most revered screen actresses. Written with full access to Stanwyck's family, friends, colleagues, and never-before-seen letters, journals and photographs"--

#8220;What you have done is extraordinary. It is an amazing book, brilliantly written, enhancing the whole life, Barbara’s life, happenings around her—people of the industry, people in the theater and in politics. The way you have shown her life to include other situations, all that you interject . . . it makes her life, to me, more historically important. You have brought her wonderful career magnificently to life, and as her friend, I thank you.”

Autorentext
Victoria Wilson is a vice president and senior editor at Alfred Knopf. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the US Commission on Civil Rights and has served on the boards of PEN American Center, the National Board Review of Motion Pictures, the Writing Program of the New School of Social Research, and Poets & Writers.

Klappentext

The first full-scale, monumental life of Barbara Stanwyck, the first to delve into her complex life and to explore her extraordinary range of films.

Leseprobe
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck

ONE

Family History

My grandparents on both sides were probably horse-thieves. No one ever told us anything about them. Therefore I suspect the worst. I imagine they were born and raised in Ireland. But wherever the family tree is planted, whether its branches are rotten or sound, I’ll never know.

—Barbara Stanwyck, 1937

It has been written about Barbara Stanwyck, born Ruby Stevens, that she was an orphan. Her mother, Catherine Ann McPhee Stevens, Kitty, died in 1911, when Ruby was four years old. Following Kitty’s death, Ruby’s father, Byron E. Stevens, a mason, left his five children and set sail for the Panama Canal, determined to get away and hoping to find work at higher wages than at home.

The story goes that Ruby and her older brother, Malcolm Byron, then six years of age, were passed from Brooklyn home to home, from tenement to tenement, to whatever family would take them in for the few dollars the family would be paid for their care. Ruby would earn her keep scrubbing toilets, doing whatever she could to stay alive. Her three sisters, who were much older, two of whom were married, were busy with their own lives. One sister was in show business, a dancer who frequently traveled and was barely able to care for herself, but who looked out for Ruby and Byron and earned enough money to keep both children off the street.

In and around that story is the notion that Ruby Stevens came from nowhere, that she was a tough Brooklyn girl, educated on the streets, who never finished high school, who became a showgirl as a young teenager, hoofing her way from one club to another, from one musical revue to another, until she landed a job in a play, got her big break, and was a sensation on Broadway.

And some of this story is true.

•  •  •

Ruby Stevens from the streets of Brooklyn, who danced in cabarets and clubs, a Broadway star at twenty, was a daughter of the American Revolution.

The Stevens family can be traced in America as far back as 1740. Ruby’s great-great-grandfather Thomas Stephens Sr. was from New England—Georgetown, Maine. Her great-great-grandmother Mary Oliver was from Marblehead, Massachusetts, and married Thomas Stephens when he was nineteen and she sixteen.

Stephens established a business in maritime shipping. During the Revolutionary War, his ships were used against the Crown in a massive seaborne insurgency that helped to win the War of Independence.

Thomas junior, Ruby Stevens’s great-grandfather, one of five Stephens children, was born in Georgetown, Maine, nine years before America won its war of independence. Her grandfather Joseph, one of ten children, was born on July 4, 1809, and married three times—first to Isabelle Morgan, who died soon after; then to her sister, Arzelia Morgan, two years later (together they had four sons); and then to a young woman from Derby, Vermont, living in Lowell, Massachusetts. Joseph Stephens, at almost six feet tall, dark with dark hair and blue eyes, was fifty years old; Abby Spencer, twenty-seven. The Stephens family bought farmland on the main road of Lanesville, Massachusetts, near Gloucester, which, with a voting population of 350, was the largest town in Massachusetts. The Stephens house at 16 Langsford Street between Lanes and Folly Coves was built with the compactness of a ship’s interior. Behind it was a carriage barn with an old cherry tree that dominated the Stephenses’ front lawn. Off to the parlor side the branches of a mulberry tree spread out over the wooden fence that surrounded the property.

Cod and mackerel fishermen used Lanes Cove, taking their pinkies and schooners out before dawn and returning by three to unload their catches. They kept their nets and tackle and pots in wooden sheds that faced the water along the curve of the beach.

•  •  •

In 1862, almost a year after the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and at the age of fifty-three, Joseph Stevens (spelling now changed) traveled to Boston and enlisted in the U.S. Army, a private in Company L of the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Volunteers. Months later, Stevens, as a sergeant, was engaged in the Second Battle of Bull Run and was discharged in mid-October 1863, days before two of his sons, Melville and Sylvanus, enlisted.

Stevens returned to Lanesville and found work as a ship’s navigator and caulker, putting jute rope between the joints of the ship’s boards and sealing the joints with tar. His wife, Abby, gave birth on July 16, 1864, to their only child, Byron, Ruby Stevens’s father.

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. The people of Lanes Cove celebrated by blowing fish hor…