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Stanwyck: A Biography

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People are reacting pretty strongly in their reviews of this book, I suspect primarily because of the claims that Madsen makes about Stanwyck's sexuality. But the fact is that while this isn't a terribly good book, it is also not a truly horrible one, either. If one wants a basic, serviceable biography of Stanwyck, which lays out the main facts and events in her life, this one will do.

The virtue of the book is that is it fairly thorough and comprehensive. One gets a feel for her life, for the way she viewed both herself and the world, and for some of the dynamics in her relationships. A portrait emerges of a woman who was both very admirable and quite disappointing. One admires her drive and enormous professionalism as an actress, and is impressed by how giving and helpful she was to her fellow professionals. Away from her vocation as an actress, however, Stanwyck emerges as someone less than admirable. Other accounts of her life have emphasized her difficulty with intimate relationships, her failure as a mother (not quite "Mommie Dearest" but definitely not a role model), and her lamentable political commitments. Although not the political activist that her husband Robert Taylor or his friends John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were, she nonetheless was pretty much part and parcel of the Hollywood Anticommunist movement that ruined so many people's lives in the 1940s and 1950s.

On the negative side, Madsen's prose is drab at best. Madsen seems to be the essence of the "professional" writer, who lives by writing a certain number of pages in a certain amount of time. There is a workmanlike dullness to his pages, and multiple signs of minimal rewriting, such as almost verbatim repetition of passages and restatement of quotes. Constant repetition is a prime mark of sloppy writing and inattention in the final editing.

But I suspect that most people will hate or love this book based on its portrayal of sexuality. I am an utterly nonhomophobic, and really couldn't care less what someone's sexuality is. Some of my greatest personal heroes were gay, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marcel Proust, and Cole Porter, and some of my favorite Hollywood actors and directors were gay or bi. I have three general statements to make about this issue in regard to this book.

First, I speculate that Mr. Madsen is himself gay and sees it as his job as a gay writer to "out" a famous individual who was gay but is not popularly perceived as being gay. I assume he is gay partly because of his constant reference to individuals as being gay when the issue of their sexuality is utterly irrelevant. Thus, he might mention that Barbara knew a certain individual, a "gay" producer. Not a "producer," but a "gay producer," though his being homo, bi, pan, or asexual is without the tiniest bit of relevance. But part of the assumption of the outing movement is that if all of us--straight and gay--realize how many people are gay, our attitudes towards homosexuality will change. I can't argue this point at length, but I find "outing" to be reprehensible, especially when evidence is minimal. I also assume that he is gay because bi sexuality has featured as a dominant issue in some of his other books. It is unquestionably an issue that preoccupies him.

Second, though Madsen alludes to Stanwyck's bisexuality, he doesn't really adduce any actual evidence of this. Much of his "evidence" seems to be based on the perception by many lesbians that she was "one of us." There are also multiple references to a possible lesbian relationship with her publicist, but when looks closely, this appears to be more speculation than fact. Although it has long been held that Robert Taylor, Barbara's husband, was at least bi and perhaps gay, the evidence for Barbara seems to be pretty weak, at least as presented by Madsen. And glancing through the pages of Madsen's THE SEWING CIRCLE, which discusses love relationships among women in the thirties and forties, I didn't find anything much more convincing that was contained in these pages.

Third, to those who are so terribly offended by suggestions that Barbara Stanwyck might have been a lesbian or bisexual, I have to say: haven't we gotten past stuff like this yet? To be blunt, who cares if someone is gay or bi? Is THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD less enjoyable because Errol Flynn was unquestionably bisexual? Although Madsen's evidence isn't very convincing or substantial, if it were, it wouldn't really matter all that much.

In the end, Madsen's biography is disappointing as much because it is flatly written than because he successfully or unsuccessfully uncovers Stanwyck's sexual secrets. But the book also fails because he is never able to help us get a sense of the immense excitement that Barbara Stanwyck generated in dozens of films in a long film career. Dislike this book if you must, but please dislike it for the correct reasons.

Poor Barbara Stanwyck! She made the unpardonable error of living a relatively scandal-free life in Hollywood. If what Madsen says about her sexuality is true, he fails to back it up with any substantiative evidence; Stanwyck made few enemies during her reign in Hollywood; with the exception of Maureen O'Sullivan, and who was she? Whatever she did, she was discreet, unlike her contemporaries Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Her personal life was her personal life, and while many of us would give our left arm to really know the more intimate details of her personal life, you have to respect her for keeping a hermetically sealed lid on it.

Also, Madsen does not use enough photographs in this book, it would have been nice to see more.

Flat, passionless, lazy, pointless...I don't think there are enough words in the English language to communicate that this is a completely crap biography. Why did Axel Madsen even bother? He doesn't seem to have any enthusiasm for his subject. He gets so lazy in points that he gets concrete facts wrong. (Barbara DID share a scene with Ava Gardner in "East Side, West Side" - did he not even bother to watch Miss Stanwyck's movies?) It's like he wanted the money, researched which actress hadn't had a biography written on her in awhile and decided he would pound out some boring pages on this one. Just look at the title - "Stanwyck" - it just screams passion project!

Barbara Stanwyck was a fascinating mixture of brains, beauty, talent, humility and guts. She had a hell of a rough life but never outwardly felt sorry for herself. She gave intelligent, honest and layered performances in every movie she worked on, no matter the quality of the overall picture. Many of the great directors and leading men of her time site Barbara Stanwyck as the greatest actress they ever worked with. They don't say it in trite statements, they gush about her for paragraphs. She deserves something far better than this rubbish. Hopefully a more thoughtful biographer will come along some day and do her the justice she deserves. But Axel Madsen seems to think the world of himself and not much of anything for poor Missy. Well, in the words of Miss Stanwyck herself: "Egotism - usually just a case of mistaken nonentity." Go ahead and ignore this one.

No matter what Axel Madsen writes about Barbara Stanwyck, I find her to be someone I would love to have met and known. He tries to make her "toughness" sound like something negative; but, as a matter of fact, I admire that quality about Stanwyck. She was tough, she was strong, she was independent, she was sharp, and she was a brilliant actress. Her vulnerability, still visible beneath that tough facade, always goes straight to my heart, somehow. She couldn't help the facts of her early life, her being an orphan, poor, abandoned by her father...the woman's drive to succeed was phenomenal and she should be remembered for that, for her refusal to wallow in self-pity, and for her professionalism, both on and off the screen. I've always loved her and I always will. She was a private person; her personal life was her personal life, entirely her own business. Her refusal to "let it all hang out" should be copied by today's "actresses," as I loosely call them. The book is laced with mistakes about the facts of her life. But, as these books go, I'll have to admit it isn't as lurid or as vicious as some of them are. Madsen seems to own up to a grudging respect for Stanwyck; that's a step in the right direction.

After a great star dies, and is incapable of self-defense, the vultures come out. The same fate awaits them all, and the current fad is to focus on the departed's real, or imagined, sexuality. No one is immune, because that's what sells. This sloppy hack-job is the result of Axel Madsen's rush to be the first to dignify in print totally unsubstantiated rumors about Stanwyck and Robert Taylor. But his desperate efforts simply confirm what I've found in my own research: There simply isn't a single piece of solid evidence involving Barbara, OR Bob, to justify these rumors (and don't think plenty of people haven't been searching). Madsen places Stanwyck and Taylor in questionable company and situations, without corroboration, simply because it's within the realm of possibility. Employing this tactic, one could claim that Stanwyck and President Coolidge had a love affair --- since they both were ALIVE at the same time and Coolidge visited New York at least ONCE while Barbara was a chorus girl there.

The book's "notes" are just a smokescreen, giving the IMPRESSION of verification, while TOTALLY FAILING to support the book's most sensational passages. For example, one source cited is Oscar Levant's "Memoirs of an Amnesiac". In that book, Levant writes that while appearing in a play with Stanwyck (in 1927) he would sometimes walk her home at night. The ONLY place he ever took her was to the Palace Theatre, because its star, Frank Fay (her future husband), was eager to meet her. Using this as a jumping-off point, Madsen depicts Levant and Stanwyck carousing through Harlem and encountering every 1920's lesbian he can think of. But, unless you read Oscar's book, you won't know that LEVANT NEVER WROTE ANYTHING OF THE KIND!

Remember this: A writer is judged by the sources on which he chooses to rely. In Axel Madsen's case it's the supermarket tabloids (no kidding). He repeats, verbatum, absurd stories from these publications --- one such being that Stanwyck's home contained a "shrine to Robert Taylor", and that she kept her Oscar by her bedside because Bob's ghost would come to her whenever she touched it.(!) The simple truth is this: Although Barbara never stopped loving Robert Taylor, not a single photograph of him was on display in her home. And her Oscar NEVER left her office.

IN SHORT: NOBODY WHO KNOWS ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT BARBARA STANWYCK WILL TAKE THIS GARBAGE SERIOUSLY.

Stanwyck, by Axel Madsen, is an informative book. The problem is that most of his information is incorrect or insubstantiated. He repeats errors made by other authors (i.e., his dating of Stanwyck's injury of her arm, which he suggests is an attempted suicide, in Oct. 1941), and devotes several pages to people who only marginally influenced Stanwyck's life -- If you want to know Lana Turner's life history, read this book! Also, he constantly refers to the rumor of Stanwyck's lesbianism or bisexuality, often treating it as fact, when he in fact provides no evidence whatsoever. I've tried with no success to decide why Madsen wrote this book; he obviously dislikes Stanwyck, so why spend his time writing 300+ pages about her? The real Stanwyck lies not in the pages of this book, but in the 84 films and countless television programs she left behind.

What can you say about a "biography" that uses articles from the National Enquirer for some of his information? This book is badly written with tons of speculation but little solid information. The author clearly wants Stanwyck to come across as a fool. There's scarcely a word about how beloved the actress was on her film sets and at the studios but plenty of conjecture about her private life. Madsen is outrageously inconsisent. On one page he tries to paint Stanwyck as a closeted lesbian, on the next she is absolutely obsessed with her ex-husband Robert Taylor (how many lesbians do you know who won't let go of an ex-husband?) Similarly, he pushes an image of Stanwyck as a Bible thumping right-wing fanatic which again hardly seems to fit with his image of Stanwyck as a hardcore dyke. Lesbians will no doubt be as offended as everyone else for the negative spin he puts forth. I suspect Madsen is smart enough to know the gay rumors about both Stanwyck and Taylor are bogus but they are a strong starting point if one wants to write an salacious book. He barely acknowledges Stanwyck's talent and seems to not admire anything about her.

Biography can be a tricky thing. It's inherently gossipy, inherently exploitative. A biographer opens herself up to accusations of slander when she writes without cooperation from her subject, to accusations of pandering when she writes with it. Perhaps more importantly, a human life--any human life--is too nuanced and fickle a thing to be completely reduced to words. This is especially true when the biographer aims not just to plot a step-by-step map of the subject's life, but to expose his or her inner demons, as Axel Madsen endeavors to do in his biography of Barbara Stanwyck.

Ultimately Stanwyck proves too elusive and complicated a subject to present a clear picture, but that's no reflection on Madsen. Instead, it's a reflection on Stanwyck. There may never have been a movie star more protective of her privacy or more prickly when it came to talking about her feelings and foibles. Stanwyck would have despised Madsen's biography, not necessarily because what it says isn't true, but because she hated being talked about, hated being stared at and prodded like a laboratory specimen. Some of this probably goes back to her childhood, which was by all accounts one of the most miserable a future Hollywood star ever had.

Stanwyck's reticence may account for some of the seeming structural problems with Madsen's book. For one thing, the book is frustratingly short on direct quotes and named human sources. This might be due to laxness on Madsen's part--or it might signal that he received no cooperation from Stanwyck's friends--but it seems equally likely that many of his sources simply refused to be quoted or named, perhaps not wanting to be thought to have betrayed Stanwyck. In any case, the lack of quotes adds more uncertainty to an already uncertain subject: we are never sure whether Madsen is reporting what he was told or his own conclusions drawn from what he was told.

Some would accuse Madsen of outright fabrication--especially in his page-and-a-half treatment of Stanwyck's possible bisexuality, which has somehow dominated all discussion of his 400+ page book. Indeed, for whatever reason, there's never been a star whose putative heterosexuality has been more hotly championed than Stanwyck's. Not Cary Grant, not Errol Flynn, not even Kate Hepburn--Kate Hepburn, for pity's sake!!!--has been "defended" so vigorously against similar charges. You'd think Madsen had questioned Mom and Apple Pie, or accused John Wayne of wearing girl's panties under his chaps.

In fact, however, Madsen neither fabricated the rumors about Stanwyck's bisexuality nor lifted them from tabloids. Stanwyck's own press agent has been quoted as saying that she had "no doubt" that Stanwyck was "intimate" with Joan Crawford on "more than one occasion." (Lawrence J. Quirk, Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography). Tallulah Bankhead reportedly claimed to have had an affair with Stanwyck. (David Bret, Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life). So, incidentally, have men, including Robert Wagner, who is more than 20 years Stanwyck's junior.

Of course, any or all of these claims might be false, but that doesn't mean a biographer has to ignore them. Unproven statements are all the evidence there is ever likely to be about a person's sexuality. Moreover, sexuality is no less a part of a person's life simply it might make other people--or even the subject himself--uncomfortable. Bisexuality is not a disease, but even if it were, a biographer would still be entitled to explore evidence of it after her subject's death. If a life story is to have any value at all, it must be allowed to track the full range of life experiences. Anything else isn't life, but someone's sham idea of what life "should" be.

That said, Madsen struggles and ultimately fails to describe Stanwyck's life below the surface: what drove her, how she thought, what feelings she had about whom. Madsen suggests that Stanwyck said virtually nothing publicly that wasn't scripted, nothing privately that might have left her vulnerable. He implies, moreover, that she couldn't have begun to open up if she'd wanted to, that she simply didn't know how. That seems believable enough: Stanwyck had virtually no formal education, virtually no stable family relationships, especially in early childhood. The hurts from her early life may have simply been too deep; maybe the reason we can't know Stanwyck from her biographies is that no ever quite knew her, because she couldn't let them.

If this is true, it isn't fair to besmirch Madsen's book because of it. His book has flaws, but he's given us the best psychological study of Stanwyck to date, and very likely the best we'll ever get.

This man seems so intent to defame Stanwyck's name is subtle, deragatory ways. His sources are unbelievable.....the tabloids?????? Come on, that should say something right there about his credibility as an author.

Stanwyck was a legend and had to much class to be relegated to garbage like this from someone who obviously felt like he had to make some money off a great film star's life but failed to research his subject adequately and got most of his information from other biographies already published about her and of course...the tabloids..."The National Enquirer", "The Star" and "The Globe".

Mr. Madsen ought to be ashamed of himself for taking a great subject and making a book about her life mediocre. If Stanwyck were alive she'd slap his face and spit on it too!

This book is an insult to Barbara Stanwyck's memory. It is full of untruths, imaginings, and unsubstantiated fantasy. Mr. Axel Madsen is very Lucky Barbara is not here to sue the pants off him.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it has some nice photos but one can find these elsewhere. Don't waste time on this garbage.

If you want to read a good biography of Barbara Stanwyck read: Barbara Stanwyck A Biography Author: Al DiOrio ISBN 0-698-11247-4 copyright: 1983