Centennial Appreciation: Willa Cather’s ‘A Lost Lady’

In the fourth quarter a century ago, Alfred A. Knopf published a new novella by perhaps the hottest in its stable of authors at that point: Willa Cather, who had received the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in May.

A Lost Lady reflected Cather’s recognition, as she put it, that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts." The period it covers—1873 to 1916 to the early 1920s—marked the passage of the Old West from the pioneers, “dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were impractical to the point of magnificence,” to a new, rapacious generation who would “dispel the morning freshness, [and] root out the great spirit of freedom.”

After a few false starts (including a first-person narrator), Cather settled into a more comfortable narrative mode. Soon, everything fell into place. The plot, tightly sprung, moves swiftly; the characters are rendered in pinpoint detail; and, most of all, Cather exhibits her usual exquisite feeling for how setting molds their lives, in this case Sweet Water, Colorado, a frontier town “of which great things were expected.”

In the idyllic early days of the plot, for instance, a group of boys “behaved like wild creatures all morning; shouting from the breezy bluffs, dashing down into the silvery marsh through the dewy cobwebs that glistened on the tall weeds, swishing among the pale tan cattails, wading in the sandy creek bed, chasing a striped water snake from the old willow stump where he was sunning himself, cutting sling-shot crotches, throwing themselves on their stomachs to drink at the cool spring that flowed out from under a bank into a thatch of dark watercress.”

For her two main characters, Captain Daniel Forrester and his graceful, vivacious second wife Lyra, the novelist overcame her reluctance to rely too heavily on real-life models to summon memories of the magnetic couple in her childhood town of Red Cloud, Neb.: Silas Garber, a banker and former governor of the state, and his much younger spouse, Lyra.

So strongly did this magnetic couple affect the social consciousness of Red Cloud that Cather had stayed abreast of their doings even years after she left the prairie town. The news of the 1921 death of Lyra, a woman that Cather "loved very much in [her] childhood," shook and saddened her, then catalyzed her into finishing the novella in only five months.

As much as Cather had tried to camouflage details of the Garbers’ lives, in the end she couldn’t help herself, and the real-life story of the couple becomes incorporated in the Forresters’ history: the two-decade difference in their ages, “The Captain’s” deterioration from physical vigor to invalidism, the decline in their fortunes after the Panic of 1893, and Mrs. Garber’s move out of state and remarriage after her husband’s death.

Though Cather frequently resorted to composite characters to camouflage the sources of her characterization, she stuck quite closely to a woman she knew in creating Marian Forrester: Lyra Garber. She ended up with a vividly realized protagonist who ranks with Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Edith Wharton's Lily Bart among literature's most vibrant but complicated beauties.

When seen early on by the admiring boy Niel Herbert, Marian brings heightened sophistication, grace, and beauty to her husband’s circle, standing “in her long sealskin coat and cap, a crimson scarf showing above the collar, a little brown veil with spots tied over her eyes. The veil did not in the least obscure those beautiful eyes, dark and full of light, set under a low white forehead and arching eyebrows. The frosty air had brought no colour to her cheeks,—her skin had always the fragrant, crystalline whiteness of white lilacs. Mrs. Forrester looked at one, and one knew that she was bewitching. It was instantaneous, and it pierced the thickest hide. The Swede farmer was now grinning from ear to ear, and he, too, had shuffled to his feet. There could be no negative encounter, however slight, with Mrs. Forrester. If she merely bowed to you, merely looked at you, it constituted a personal relation. Something about her took hold of one in a flash; one became acutely conscious of her, of her fragility and grace, of her mouth which could say so much without words; of her eyes, lively, laughing, intimate, nearly always a little mocking.”

As Niel sets off for college, a seismic shift occurs in the dynamics of the Forresters’ relationship. “The Captain” suffers physical and financial reverses, and Marian embarks on an affair with a bachelor friend of her husband’s that, from Niel’s judgmental perspective, results in her moral degradation.

The novella ends with yet another reversal: After Daniel Forrester’s death, Marian moves out of state, remarries, and Niel comes to feel “very glad that he had known her, and that she had a hand in breaking him in to life….She had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.”

Just as Marian Forrester had many admirers, so did her creator, in the artistic sense. One of them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was then hard at work on a novel that he hoped would demonstrate that the witty, youthful promise of his initial books was now being invested with a mature perspective.

After finishing The Great Gatsby, the 29-year-old author wrote to the veteran writer from the island of Capri “to explain an instance of apparent plagiarism” in how he described the voice of Daisy Buchanan in one sentence. Cather generously reassured him that there were only so many ways of conveying beauty, so she did not perceive any plagiarism on his part.

In less obvious ways than style, A Lost Lady may have helped influence the structure and themes of The Great Gatsby.

Both novels feature an ambivalent character: a male moved, despite moral misgivings, by the romantic instincts of the title characters, and an elegiac sense that the men who built “built up the country” had been replaced by “careless people” lacking scruples or a sense of responsibility (Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady, Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby).

Hollywood, with its appetite for tragic women’s pictures in its early days, seized on Cather’s property twice, for a 1924 silent and a 1934 talkie starring Barbara Stanwyck.

TCM has evidently run the latter at some point, but I doubt very much that I will ever get around to seeing it, and not just because the cable station runs it in ungodly hours. From its plot summary, it’s immediately evident that Warner Brothers made wholesale changes that upset Cather so much that her will prohibited further adaptations.

More than 30 years after her death, that restriction was relaxed, allowing viewers to see TV adaptations of her short story “Paul’s Case” and novels O Pioneers! My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark (starring, respectively, Eric Roberts, Jessica Lange, Jason Robards and Alison Elliott).

Beginning in the Great Depression and continuing for several decades, critics such as Granville Hicks and Lionel Trilling, writing from an urban, sometimes Marxist, perspective, thrust Cather, with her focus on agrarian environments and the past, outside the circle of “major” writers.

Time has blunted the force of such arguments. In particular, A Lost Lady is now seen, in the words of Benjamin Taylor in his new biography of the novelist, Chasing Bright Medusas, as inaugurating her “late style,” constituting a breakthrough to “a simplified manner in which earlier preoccupations are dispensed with in favor of a new expressiveness, a new simplicity.”

Quote of the Day (Preston Sturges, With His ‘Rules for Box-Office Appeal’)

“1. A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
2. A leg is better than an arm.
3. A bedroom is better than a living room.
4. An arrival is better than a departure.
5. A birth is better than a death.
6. A chase is better than a chat.
7. A dog is better than a landscape.
8. A kitten is better than a dog.
9. A baby is better than a kitten.
10. A kiss is better than a baby.
11. A pratfall is better than anything.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959), “Eleven Rules for Box-Office Appeal,” quoted in Alessandro Pirolini, in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study (2010)

The image accompanying this post is from my favorite Preston Sturges comedy, The Lady Eve (1941). I love how Henry Fonda plays bumbling brewery heir Charles Pike with a mix of enthrallment and alarm as he falls under the spell of the alluring gold digger Jean (played by Barbara Stanwyck). 

And well he might: As Jean tells a confidante, in one of the great lines in Sturges’ hilarious script: “I need him like the ax needs the turkey.”

Flashback, December 1936: Ford’s Irish Project, ‘Plough and the Stars,’ Misfires

Eighty years ago this week, RKO released the passion project of one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded directors, starring one of its best young actresses. But The Plough and the Stars, once highly anticipated, pleased none of the principals involved: the studio, director John Ford, star Barbara Stanwyck, and the Irish playwright whose work was adapted, Sean O’Casey. It raised legitimate questions over how faithfully the film industry would treat complex, provocative subject matter.

Probably Ford’s most famous utterance, at a legendary 1950 Screen Directors Guild showdown over the blacklist (“I am John Ford and I make Westerns”), could just as truly have been rephrased as “I am John Ford and I am Irish-American.” Ireland was second only to the West as a favorite subject.

In the mid-1930s, his most recent Irish project had given him a virtually unrivaled reputation as an artist. The Informer, adapted from the Liam O’Flaherty novel, not only brought him a Best Director Oscar but, for a few decades, a distinction that has since gone to the likes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: critical acclamation as the greatest film of all time.

In other words, he was now close to the hottest director in Hollywood. Within the strict bounds of the studio system of the time, his RKO bosses wanted to make him happy.

From the first, everyone should have known that problems would need to be surmounted in translating the material from stage to screen. The Plough and the Stars, like the other parts of the “Dublin Trilogy” by Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, is a tragicomedy about boastful, cowardly or delusional men and their long-suffering women, set in the tenements of Ireland’s largest city amid the nation’s war of independence and civil war.

The Irish themselves were divided over the meaning of the play, as indicated by a riot during its initial 1926 run at the Abbey Theatre (an event described in this prior post of mine). Certain scenes—including an off-screen orator using phrases from a leader of the Easter Rising, Padraig Pearse, the Irish tricolor brought into a bar, and a prostitute soliciting business—had aroused the ire of the patriotically correct. If the Irish, the people with the most direct knowledge of the events depicted, couldn’t agree about it, how could one ever expect the band of callous outsiders in Hollywood to make sense of it?

John Ford would have none of that.   

What could go wrong? As it turned out, way too much:

*Pleasing the Puritans. One source of the Dublin rioters’ anger was O’Casey’s prostitute character Rosie Redmond. Such fallen women, they complained, were not emblematic of Irish womanhood. No matter how much O’Casey complained about these critics and the censorship they advocated, however, they did not succeed in significantly diluting Rosie’s depiction on stage; only Hollywood managed to do so. It might be argued that this did not affect the political stance of the movie. But it did soften the Marxist O’Casey’s picture of the desperate lengths to which Dublin’s tenement dwellers would go in order to live to tomorrow. Nor was the cantankerous playwright happy about satisfying British censors who requested the removal of any references to God.

*Miscasting of leads. Ford got his wish to hire four members of the Abbey Theatre (including Barry Fitzgerald, who would go on to an Oscar-winning career of his own as a character actor). In return, however, RKO insisted that he hire American stars for the leads in order to assure some box-office revenues. The result was two markedly different acting styles: the stage-based, naturalistic emoting of the Abbey players, vs. the broader manner, honed for the big screen, of Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster as, respectively, Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Stanwyck looked particularly out of place, despite the fact that, consummate pro that she was, she threw herself into the role, including trying to get her Irish accent just right. But, according to her biographer Victoria Wilson: “One night, in the projection room, one of the producers decided that somebody had to be understood. The Abbey players couldn’t change their dialect. Barbara was chosen, but the early sequences in which she used a heavy brogue were never reshot.”

*Disagreement over politics. Playwright, director and studio held sharply different views on the justice and effectiveness of the Easter Rising, leaving the point of view of the finished film a muddled mess. O’Casey, at one point a member of the Irish Citizens Army, eventually parted ways with the republican movement for putting nationalist goals above socialist ones. Surviving family members of Irish executed during the rising believed he was ridiculing the patriot cause. On the other hand, the opportunity to plead that cause was part of what drew Ford to the project. His nocturnal scene of Irish soldiers listening to their commander lent the troops an ineradicable dignity. “Events and actions which are only reported in the play (the meeting, the occupation of the GPO) all now appear on the screen,” observe Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill in their 1987 study, Cinema and Ireland. “Inevitably, these additions undermine the importance of the domestic sphere as the central site for action and with it the virtues that are to be found there.” But Ford’s views clashed with Sam Briskin, RKO’s recently hired production chief, who couldn’t understand what the Irish wanted in the fight. To Ford’s reply—“What did George Washington want? They wanted liberty”—Briskin responded in a way that could only have made Ford bristle: “They’ve got liberty.” In the end, Hollywood’s requirement for a happy ending made a hash of O’Casey’s point about the futility of Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” for nationalism when ordinary human needs for food, shelter and dignity went unmet.

*An ornery director. “Terse, pithy, to the point,” actress Mary Astor once characterized Ford’s directing style. “Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal.” Astor understood him well, and Katharine Hepburn, whom he had directed earlier in 1936 in Mary of Scotland, did more than that: she loved him. Stanwyck did neither. Her early remark about her role—that it was so insubstantial that she could “walk through” it—led Ford to continually taunt her later on with, “Come on, Barbara, and walk through.” After filming was completed, Ford departed for his boat and refused to come back to supervise any additions. That opened the door to Briskin, never comfortable with such a political picture, to changing Jack and Nora Clitheroe from a married couple to lovers, necessitating additional scenes shot without Ford’s approval.

According to Scott Eyman’s biography of Ford, Print the Legend, the movie cost nearly a half-million dollars but only grossed three-quarters of that. That failure made the studio reluctant to take on future potentially prestigious projects, even low-budget ones, if they couldn’t promise a predictable revenue stream. (One of those was another O’Casey masterpiece that had caught Ford’s eye, Juno and the Paycock.) RKO’s post-production alterations led Ford both to depart for Twentieth Century Fox, where he would have a somewhat freer hand, and to become a driving force at the Screen Directors Guild (later the Directors Guild of America) as a counterweight against studio interference.

Ford was in no way done with Irish subject matter, however. In 1940, he wove several Eugene O’Neill one-act plays into The Long Voyage Home. Throughout his Westerns of the 1940s, Irish characters frequently appear as soldiers who perform lonely and dangerous duty on the American frontier. And, in the same year he suffered through one of his most frustrating projects because of his passion for an explicitly Celtic subject, he optioned another short story that, when he finally filmed it 15 years later, netted him his fourth and final Best Director Oscar: The Quiet Man.

Amazingly, for all his negative experience with The Plough and the Stars, he wasn’t done with O’Casey, either. Shortly before the latter’s death in 1964, the playwright agreed to allow filming proceed on the portion of his autobiography dealing with his early life. Unfortunately, Ford could not bring his vision to pass in this case, either. When he fell ill, Young Cassidy fell into the hands of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Ford, in declining health, made only one other movie thereafter.

This Day in TV History (Film Queen Stanwyck Rules Over ‘Big Valley’)

Sept. l5, 1965—Finding big-screen roles for women of a certain age in short supply, even for an actress of her proven range and box-office appeal, Barbara Stanwyck blazed a different trail with her typical fearlessness in the TV western The Big Valley, which premiered on this date on ABC. It culminated years of the 58-year-old star’s lobbying of TV execs to air a Western series with a woman at its center--a step they had been reluctant to take because of the view that Westerns were an action genre and women were soft, dainty things.

In the mid-to-late 19^th century, the British Empire was ruled by Victoria; in the 1870s, in the world of this ground-breaking series, the area around Stockton, Calif., also had a regal widow with the same first name: Victoria Barkley, who inspired absolute devotion from her children, not least because she faced down anyone who threatened them or their sprawling ranch.

To American TV audiences who had never seen a tough, 50-plus woman as the central figure of America’s most venerable video genre, the Victoria of this Wild West must have been quite a surprise when she whipped a gun out on an unsuspecting villain. But anyone with even the most nodding acquaintance with Miss Stanwyck’s considerable film (and somewhat less ample TV) work would have known what to expect. 

This, after all, was a star with 10 Westerns on the big screen, including Union Pacific, The Furies, and Cattle Queen of Montana. Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957) should have given viewers an especially good idea what to expect. Even at age 50, Stanwyck, in her role as rancher Jessica Drummond, speeds past a coach carrying a U.S. marshall. “I need a strong man to carry out my orders,” she tells him later. “And a weak man to take them,” he replies, correctly.

Stanwyck had been nominated for four Oscars and gained an unparalleled reputation for versatility in such films as Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire, and Sorry, Wrong Number. But, after movie roles dried up in the late 1950s and Stanwyck transitioned into TV, many of her appearances were in Westerns on the youthful medium, such as Zane Grey Theater. It was not that great a stretch of the imagination to believe that, in a landscape in which self-reliance and independence were necessities, this toughest of screen heroines was well placed.

Even though she had won an Emmy for her prior foray into a network show, the anthology series The Barbara Stanwyck Show, the star had not felt comfortable as host and performer in the series, which only lasted one season.

In contrast, at the start of The Big Valley, Ms. Stanwyck (or, as she was billed in the opening credits, “Miss Barbara Stanwyck”) would appear in a petticoat in her room, or in high-necked satin as she descended her staircase, Loretta Young-style. But when you’re riding around a 30,000-acre spread—not to mention getting ogled by home invaders, kidnapped, thrown into an insane asylum on trumped-up charges, tortured and flogged by a village worth of villains—you’d better dress comfortably.

And so, Stanwyck’s Victoria would soon be donning leather jackets, pants and cowboy boots—a sartorial feminist manifesto. The actress was the central force field of the show, appearing in 103 of its 112 episodes—more than any other actor in its four-year run. The role brought her three Emmy nominations and one win.

It would be a mistake to think of The Big Valley as a simple horse opera a la Bonanza. There were, to be sure, dynastic elements to both, with a single middle-aged parent hoping to leave the family estate intact to adult children.

But, right from the start, dysfunction comes into play in the lives of the Barkley in a way it never did for the Cartwrights. In the very first episode, Victoria is astonished to discover that the late husband she mourns, Thomas, has sired a son out of wedlock, Heath—now showing up at the ranch as a hired hand, all seething resentment.

(Easily shocked viewers would have had heart attacks had network execs yielded to Stanwyck’s original suggestion: that Heath be the illegitimate child of Victoria, not Thomas.)

By the end of that first season, any hope that Heath might turn into something like King Lear’s scheming Edmund or Wuthering Heights’s brooding Heathcliff had been dashed, with the headstrong young man embraced by his stepmother and siblings alike.

In one sense, the Barkley estate—loud with the comings, goings, quarrels and reconciliations of three sons and one daughter, not to mention all that hired help—was an unfamiliar environment for Stanwyck. Her first marriage, to alcoholic comedian Frank Fay, ended after several years of his physical and emotional abuse. Her second marriage, to actor Robert Taylor, collapsed because of his adultery. Never close to her adopted son, she had nothing more to do with him when he descended into scandal as an adult.

But on the set, Stanwyck inspired the kind of fiercely protective feeling accorded a mother, as she had throughout her career. Crew professionals adored her: the woman they nicknamed “Missy” invariably arrived on set knowing her lines and was never so big that she couldn’t crack jokes with the lowliest of personnel. Fellow actors knew her as professionally and personally supportive. Linda Evans, for instance, who played daughter Audra on The Big Valley, would tell Larry King in a 2004 interview that Stanwyck’s tough exterior was a front “just to make sure you didn't find out what a softie she was.”

Back in 1890, historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the frontier. It took more than three-quarters of a century more for the art form inspired by the frontier, the Western, to slip from the scene—and it happened so fast that nobody saw it coming. In 1959, there were 31 weekly westerns in prime-time television—including the premiere of the first one in color, Bonanza. But in 1969, when The Big Valley went off the air, the three networks stopped making new Westerns.

For a long time afterward, the memory of Barbara Stanwyck would depend less on her once-weekly TV episodes and more on the movies that had burnished her illustrious (albeit Oscar-less) reputation in the first place. (That is even considering her last Emmy-winning performance, in the 1983 TV miniseries adaptation of The Thorn Birds—as the elderly woman who, despite herself, carried a torch for the handsome young priest Ralph de Bricassart.)

Back in 2004, in her contribution to the Douglas Bauer-edited anthology PrimeTimes: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows, novelist/short-story writer Jayne Anne Phillips issued a heartfelt cry to “Bring Back Big Valley.” She wrote the essay when it was increasingly hard to find any trace of the show.

But there’s far less need to worry that the show won’t be seen or forgotten these days. In 2006, the series appeared on DVD. Such cable outfits as MeTV and Inspire have run it as part of their regular program schedules. And, for those wanting it in small doses, portions of episodes can be found on YouTube.

Even by the time Ms. Phillips had voiced her plaintive plea, Ms. Stanwyck had left her imprint on popular entertainment about the West. In 1973, the actress was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, in Oklahoma City, for “Outstanding Contribution to the West Through Motion Pictures.”

Not bad for a self-described “tough broad from Brooklyn.”

Movie Quote of the Day (Gary Cooper, Unnerved by Barbara Stanwyck)

Professor Bertram Potts (played by Gary Cooper): “Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.”—Ball of Fire (1941), written by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on an original story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks

Today marks the 70^th anniversary of the release of Ball of Fire, which came toward the end of Hollywood’s magnificent screwball-comedy era. Five days later, Pearl Harbor would be bombed, and once Hollywood was done with its propaganda products and home-front dramas, it began to explore in earnest a genre it only began to touch this year, in The Maltese Falcon: film noir that reflected a newfound understanding of man’s darkest impulses. The world would never look so bright again.
 
Ball of Fire would be the last film that Billy Wilder, chafing under the restrictions placed on his work by the men behind the camera, would make only as a screenwriter. The following year, The Major and the Minor began his nearly 40-year career as a director. In the meantime, he convinced the studio to allow him to observe the work of Howard Hawks, whose films he greatly admired.

For all the fast-and-furious action that Hawks packed into this two-hour film about a “nightclub singer” holing up with a group of linguistic professors to avoid police questioning about her mobster boyfriend, the film really can be seen as one long wink to the audience. 

Even the quote marks in that prior sentence represent a raised eyebrow. Barbara Stanwyck’s “nightclub singer” is a stripper, one of two she would play in her long, illustrious career (the other being Lady of Burlesque, based on a mystery by Gypsy Rose Lee, whose pretensions as an intellectual exotic dancer were mocked by lyricist Lorenz Hart in the musical Pal Joey.)

The more knowing members of the audience would also catch on to the film's central satiric premise,  seven professors studying slang centered around one brassy female with an especially vivid sense of it--Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, if you will. 

And Hollywood insiders were probably beside themselves guffawing over box-office champion Gary Cooper--so laconic that Art Buchwald, in one of his funniest early columns, used the actor’s characteristic “nopes” and “yups” to respond to Coop’s own questions--as the chief linguistics professor. (How Cooper got around the formal, polysyllabic but hilarious lines above, addressed to Stanwyck, can only be imagined.)

And how can you not find a place in your heart for a stripper named Sugarpuss O’Shea?

The queen of film bloggers, Self-Styled Siren, has a characteristically astute analysis of what made this film so worthwhile here.

Movie Quote of the Day (Barbara Stanwyck, Putting the Make on Poor Henry Fonda)

Charles Pike (played by Henry Fonda): “Now you, on the other hand, with a little coaching you could be terrific [at playing cards].”

Jean Harrington (played by Barbara Stanwyck): “Do you really think so?”

Charles: “Yes, you have a definite nose.”

Jean: “I'm glad you like it. Do you like any of the rest of me?”—The Lady Eve (1941), written and directed by Preston Sturges

The Lady Eve, released 70 years ago today, furnished Barbara Stanwyck with one of her golden opportunities to do what she did best onscreen: demonstrate that she was forever deadlier than the male. Even the sharpest of studs become inadvertent prey for "Stanny," as demonstrated in the unforgettable moment she sidles down the stairs in Double Indemnity, making you sense immediately that Fred MacMurray’s seemingly wised-up insurance salesman is already toast.

Henry Fonda’s Charles Pike is such a poor dumb sap that, had his character been transposed to film noir, it would have been a case of cruel and unusual punishment. Instead, this shy, none-too-bright heir to an ale fortune provides Stanwyck with some of the great moments in the screwball comedy genre that Hollywood buffed to a high sheen in the Forties and Fifties.

Even before Jean’s nose becomes the topic of conversation, it’s Jean’s legs that get Charles’ attention: this card sharp trips the ale heir when they’re on an ocean liner. Later, annoyed by his rejection, she puts him through another scam: impersonating a grande dame.

Early on, she evokes chuckles when, sizing Charles up, she announces, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” By the film’s denouement, she’ll discover, to her surprise, that she needs him, period--the most unlikely and delightful of love stories.

One of the great crimes of Hollywood is that it never saw fit to present Stanwyck an Academy Award while she was in competition, waiting until she was in her mid-70s before giving her one of those honorary Oscars that attempt to redress wrongs to aging former box-office idols while there’s still time. (The presenter that night was John Travolta, who admitted later to being stunned that he was standing there next to a woman who had long been an idol of his family growing up in my hometown, Englewood, N.J.)

The year that The Lady Eve came out was one of the years she could have won. (Instead, the Academy awarded the Best Actress trophy to Joan Fontaine, for Suspicion.) She could easily have been nominated that year for The Lady Eve, or even for her tough-as-nails reporter in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe. Instead, her nomination was for a turn maybe even funnier than the one she had in The Lady Eve: the deliciously named nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire.


In a wonderful centenary tribute published three years ago in The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane wrote of the female in the accompanying photo: “It was a face that launched a thousand inquisitions: the mouth too tight to be rosy, and a voice pitched for slang, all bite and huskiness. When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck.”

This Day in Theater History (Sean O'Casey's 'Plough and the Stars' Opens at Dublin's Abbey Theatre)

February 8, 1926 – With Sean O’Casey afflicted with his usual painful eye condition and worse-than-normal pre-performance jitters, his latest play, The Plough and the Stars, opened before an appreciative audience at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

As the roar of the crowd cascaded over him, the playwright, disturbed by tensions with his director and cast during rehearsals, figured his troubles with the production were over. In fact, they were about to worsen, leading to one of the great donnybrooks in the annals of world theater.

I love that word “donnybrook,” and its use here harks back to its Irish origins: a seemingly festive occasion that became notorious for drunkenness and disorder.

I alluded to this quintessentially Celtic controversy in a prior post on the American media. But today seems a good time to revisit the play and its part in Irish history.

The Plough and the Stars was the third and final portion of what would later be seen as O’Casey’s nationalist trilogy about boastful or cowardly men and their long-suffering women, set in the tenements of Dublin amid a war of independence and civil war. 

Naturalistic in style, tragicomic in form, the first two O’Casey plays mounted by the Abbey, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, had helped rescue the theater from financial ruin earlier in the 1920s.

Origins of a Controversy

But news must have quickly circulated that Plough was dynamite, because only a day after the rapturous opening night, O’Casey was hustled into the office of William Butler Yeats, founder of the Abbey and, with a Nobel Prize in hand, the nation’s leading literary light.

Certain scenes—not only involving vainglorious men during the Easter Rebellion, but also an off-screen orator using phrases from a leader of the Rising, Padriac Pearse, and a prostitute soliciting business—had aroused the ire of the patriotically correct. 

O'Casey's instincts—pacifist, even Marxist, deeply skeptical of a populace that now praised the independence movement to the skies but had as little as possible to do with it during the Easter Rebellion—only irked them more.

Such a commotion was occurring, with objects even being tossed at actors, that Yeats was requesting O’Casey’s agreement that the police would be called so the show could go on. 

The scene was all too reminiscent of the tumult—fueled equally by nationalism and Puritanism—that interrupted the performance of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World nearly a generation before. As the reluctant playwright contemplated all this, the room was shaken by the roar of the mob, so he glumly gave his assent to police control.

An Angry Playwright in His Memoirs

From a childhood with enough financial, physical and emotional misery to rival that of Charles Dickens, O’Casey mined not only his Dublin trilogy but an autobiography that eventually numbered six volumes.

The fourth volume, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, took up the period when he experienced his greatest success and worst controversy. In his late 60s by this time, the playwright looked back with a bitter wit that anticipated Frank McCourt’s, lambasting not just Irish intellectuals and theater critics but also former associates at the Abbey such as Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Lennox Robinson.

At times the memoirist could be unfair, as when he wrote that Gregory, the Abbey figure who had done the most to further his career, looked like “an old, elegant nun of a new order.” 

But his derision could also reach heights of brilliance, as in his description of what ensued immediately after his agreement to call in the police:

“Rowdy, clenching, but well-groomed hands reached up to drag down the fading black-and-gold front curtain; others, snarling curiously, tried to tug up the very chairs from their roots in the auditorium; while some, in frenzy, pushed at the stout walls to force them down…The high, hysterical, distorted voices of women kept squealing that Irish girls were noted the world over for their modesty, and that Ireland’s name was holy; that the Republican flag had never seen the inside of a public-house; that this slander would mean the end of the Abbey Theatre; and that Ireland was Ireland through job and through tears.”

With the help of Yeats, in all his scornful brilliance, and the police, in all their bewildered authority, the show did indeed go on.

A Painful Fallout

But the riot led O’Casey to consider why he remained in Ireland while one of his other plays was doing so well in London. By the end of the year, the former soldier in the Irish Citizens' Army had decamped to the British capital, never to live in his native land again.

Just as bad, after Yeats turned down his next, more expressionist play, The Silver Tassie, O’Casey never submitted another original work to the Abbey. The dramas he wrote for the remaining 30 years of his life are now regarded as almost exclusively proletarian propaganda, and rarely performed anymore.

O’Casey’s luck with Hollywood was about as good as it was with the nationalists in Dublin: slim to none. 

With a cast that included Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Fitzgerald (yes, the charming scene-stealer of Going My Way, The Quiet Man, and other films too numerous to mention) and directed by John Ford (director of two classics set in Ireland, The Informer and The Quiet Man), this 1936 production should have been a classic. 

It probably would have been, too, except that the studio, RKO, insisted on ratcheting up the romantic elements of the script at the expense of what mattered most to Ford (and, even more so, to O’Casey): its politics.

''Th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis!,'' an inebriated O’Casey character announces in Juno and the Paycock—and the ironic statement applies just as well to the tumult surrounding The Plough and the Stars, on stage and on screen.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the film adaptation of The Plough and the Stars, starring Ms. Stanwyck as Nora Clitheroe and Preston Foster as her husband Jack.)