Gloria Swanson is another who can’t see straight today where her career as an actress is concerned. As a businesswoman in the dress industry she’s not nearly as sharp as Joseph P. Kennedy was when he was a movie tycoon and she was his reigning queen. She’d made a hit in Sunset Boulevard and her reputation was on the rise again when I suggested she might do a movie version, written by Frances Marion, of Francis Parkinson Keyes’ Dinner at Antoine’s. Not a chance. “I couldn’t possibly play the mother of an eighteen-year-old daughter,” she snapped. “The part’s too old for me.” At the time, she was the mother of two daughters and a son, and she had two grandchildren.
Most of the unhappy ones have no husbands. One unfailing cause of that brand of misery is lack of female charity. They turn their backs on the facts of life and refuse to forgive their husbands a single act of infidelity—I believe every man married to a movie queen deserves one break in that department.
Barbara Stanwyck lives in a two-story mansion with her only company an elderly maid, the books she reads by the score, and the television set which hypnotizes her into watching old movies into all hours of the night. You don’t see her around town much any more because people forget to ask her down from the ivory tower in which she’s locked herself. When you do invite her out, there are roses from her the next day and thank-you notes so pathetically grateful they’d melt a stone.
Up to the day in 1951 that she divorced Robert Taylor, she was one of the happiest women alive. He was such a handsome slice of man, highly desirable, a full-size star. When he went to Rome for eleven months to make Quo Vadis with Deborah Kerr, women everywhere mobbed him. But Barbara loved to act. The Taylors didn’t need the money, but she worked all the time, going straight from one picture into another, instead of taking time out to join her husband in Italy.
When he arrived home after nearly a year, Barbara disposed of him, while he found a much younger bride, Ursula Thiess. She has now had two children by him, although now they’re having difficulty with an older child by a former husband.
At fifty-five, Barbara remains a talented actress and a mighty attractive woman, though she gets thinner all the time. She’s kept her appetite for work, but suitable parts aren’t easy to find—I don’t rate her last role as a Lesbian madam of a New Orleans brothel in A Walk on the Wild Side as worthy of her. I have begged her to kiss Hollywood good-by and go to Europe. “There’s nothing for you here. I guarantee you wouldn’t be over there twenty-four hours without having at least two offers for pictures.”
But Barbara stays on; with her maid, her books, and Helen Ferguson, her press agent and one of her closest friends.
* * * * *
Dinah Shore used to say, in one of those standard quotes that queens come up with when life is sunny, “My family means more to me than anything in the world—nothing will ever interfere with that.” Then George Montgomery, her husband went off to work on his own, and seventeen years and 362 days of a good marriage went out the window.
Her place of purgatory now is an oversized mansion, built on a $75,000 lot, near that of Richard Nixon. There she sits in melancholy, alone much of the time, by the pool, which is equipped with a waterfall; or perhaps in the living room, which is proportioned somewhat like Grand Central Station. It’s a great spot for brooding, but nevertheless she kept on singing on her shows “It’s Great to Have a Man Around the House.”