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5 Orphan of the Storm The฀Locked฀Door,฀Mexicali฀Rose Barbara Stanwyck had a hard childhood, that’s certain. She didn’t linger over it, and I’m not going to, either, but it’s worth mulling over some of the available information and considering what it might tell us about her. We’ll never be sure just how hard this childhood was and what experiences might have scarred her for life. In his memoir, Robert Wagner writes that he thought she had been “abused” in some way, and maybe she was abused in all ways imaginable. When pressed about this issue late in life, Stanwyck put on her toughest mask and said, “Alright, let’s just say I had a terrible childhood. Let’s say that ‘poor’ is something I understand.” The distinctive Stanwyck note of fast-talking, “moving right along” blitheness and bitterness is right there in that “Alright,” as if she’s just going to level with you, and the repetition of “let’s just say” as “let’s say,” which has the same effect as that wonderful little shrug she did in so many of her middle and late period films. She was born Ruby Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, at 246 Classon Avenue. Stanwyck wouldn’t recognize the old neighborhood now. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Classon Avenue is within walking distance of my house, so I ventured out on a snowy day to see what was left of her past, only to discover that the house wasn’t there anymore . In its place is the Pratt Institute, an architectural and design college . Ruby Stevens never even made it to high school, but not many people of her class and generation did in those days, and college was out of the question. She was the fifth child of Byron and Catherine McGee Stevens of Chelsea , Massachusetts. Byron was English and Catherine was Irish. There’s a lot of the Irish about Stanwyck; Hemingway met her on a hunting o r p H a n o f t H e s t o r m 6 trip with her second husband, Robert Taylor, and commented on her “good tough Mick intelligence.” In 1905, Byron abandoned Catherine and his growing family to do some bricklaying in Brooklyn. Catherine chased after him, and Byron was apparently not happy when she found him. Their first four children all had names beginning with the letter M: Maud, Mabel, Mildred, Malcolm—and then little Ruby, the special child, the gem, born in Brooklyn on Classon Avenue. A photo of Ruby at two years old shows a very unhappy-looking toddler; her entire head seems to frown protectively, as if she’s saying, “Please don’t hurt me.” In the winter of 1909–10, Catherine, pregnant again, was knocked off a streetcar by a drunk and hit her head. A month later, she died. Two weeks after the funeral, Byron went off to help dig the Panama Canal. Little Ruby was left in the care of her sister Millie, who was making her living as a chorus girl (“[S]he didn’t pay much attention to me,” said Stanwyck), and her brother Malcolm, whom they called Byron, after their absent father. When Millie went on the road, Byron and Ruby were placed in foster care. In later life, Stanwyck strived to remain objective about this eventuality, too, saying that the foster care system wasn’t “cruel,” just “impersonal.” At the beginning of Axel Madsen’s unreliable Stanwyck biography, he tells an unattributed story about Ruby repeatedly running away from foster care and always heading back to 246 Classon Avenue, where her brother Byron would find her sitting on the steps, waiting for her mother to come home. It’s a haunting image. Trying to picture it in my head, I’m reminded less of the sort of Hollywood tearjerkers Stanwyck made in the thirties and more of the unloved little girl in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), an awkward, rough kid so totally on her own that she freezes any sentimental impulse, any inclination toward tears. If Stanwyck really was that abandoned little girl, mired in poverty, always waiting for her dead mother at 246 Classon Avenue, surely the seasoned pro she became would not want us to cry for her. She had to get tough and stay tough, and she did, but the well of permanent hurt inside her would remain as pure in The฀Thorn฀Birds...

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