Barbara Stanwyck — Not a Pattern Girl (1931) 🇺🇸

The stampede is over. Recruits from the stage have come — and, well, gone, too. But Hollywood goes on talking forever!

by Myrene Wentworth

Well, we did have fun looking them over. Maybe we were a bit rude, growling and muttering about our own pet movie stars the way we did. Then came that "Lady of Leisure" with Lowell Sherman and Barbara Stanwyck, remember? Hmfffffff! We scoffed. Not beautiful. Not gorgeous, not even glamourous. We got out our purple lorgnettes. We put on the glossy high hat. We 'tushed' and we 'poohed.' It didn't make a bit of difference. We had to uncross our fingers and take it all back. And that. And that. Here was something cut from a different pattern! Remember?

It's true. Barbara isn't a pattern girl. That's why it all happened. That's why the name is spelled in bright lights. That's why she isn't just another voice with a smile, another wrong number. For she started out on a career as a 'hello' girl (honest) and then was fired from her first job selling patterns!

Fate, the sly thing, got in her work because she didn't know her patterns. No, not Fate's patterns. But Vogue patterns; Paris lines and Rue de la Paix fashions. But even then Barbara didn't care about such things as — patterns.

"Before I ever thought of the stage," confesses Barbara, "just about the first job I ever had was with Condé Nast selling Vogue patterns. Not that I knew anything about them. I was in a little box of an office up on the fourteenth floor and I was supposed to demonstrate how the patterns were used. Well, it didn't last long. Of course, Condé Nast wouldn't be so plebeian as to come right out and fire anyone! They told me they were cutting down expenses and I would have to go. Isn't that a kick? Imagine Condé Nast getting economical. I knew I was being fired, but I took it gracefully." That's Barbara.

See how Fate sneaks up on us? She crooked her lean brown forefinger and the next thing Barbara knew she was with the Remick Music Publishing Company, also in New York, as combination typist and switchboard operator. Oh, she knew her wrong numbers, no doubt of that, but not her asdfgdkjh. Still, she got the job. That's Barbara, too.

While plugging in on the switchboard Barbara heard the song writers, Broadway's little gifts to the muses, singing their wares. She, too, got a yen for the footlights. She begged to try out as song plugger, but after her first B-flat they sent her back to her busy signals. Slightly damp, but not entirely squelched by this wet blanket, she decided she'd show them a step or two. She did.

For, here it must be confessed, Barbara is a native of Flatbush, which as everyone knows is a large slice of Brooklyn. Left an orphan at the age of two she was brought up by her three older sisters, and practically her first step was a two-step. Many's the ten and fifteen dollars she brought into the family exchequer dancing for Masonic and other benefits, while the sisters, unlike Cinderella's, went along and held the dancing shoes. So she knew her mazurkas, her waltzes and her glides.

It wasn't long before Earl Lindsay, who had a school of stage dancing and often put on revues on the Strand Roof, gave her her first chance. She was sixteen when she first appeared there in the chorus of "Keep Cool."

While keeping cool on the Strand Roof, Barbara got off some hot numbers and received her first official Croix de Theater when she and five other chorines were chosen to do imitations. Barbara was to do Louis Wolheim in "The Hairy Ape." She aped the rugged Louis so well that when Ziegfeld bought the show, as eventually he did, she did this as her bit for the following two seasons.

Four or five years rolled by of one chorus after another. Barbara with Mae Clark, who has also been heard of in the talkies, and another member of the chorus, had an apartment together and did the town. She danced in a number of New York cabarets, including Club Anatole, and finally was featured in the Shubert production of "Gay Marie."

Then gossip sped along Broadway that Willard Mack was looking for some girls to do bits as chorines in "The Noose." Barbara applied, and again she got the job. The part was just a small bit at first but was built up until on the opening night she found herself the featured lady. Being in the front row then, it didn't take long for Fame to find her. Arthur Hopkins appearing in this role, saw her in "The Noose" and decided she was just the type for the girl lead in "Burlesque." Barbara got the part and was a Broadway star. And all because she didn't know her patterns — but her lines!

"Then," laughs Barbara, "came my big moment!"

No. It wasn't names in electric lights. It wasn't reviews or bouquets over the footlights. It was 'love' with big gilt capitals. Terpsichore and Euterpe having done their parts, Fate gave Cupid a shove. Cupid in this case in the guise of a peppy piano player in "Burlesque," who was a great friend of Frank Fay's. Frank at that time was at The Palace for an engagement and it was Cupid who carried messages, sweet nothing's, tidbits and gossip from one to the other; who fanned the flame. And romance grew. It is two years later and they are still living happily after.

Barbara is what they call a 'natural.' She never learned to act. Except coaching by Frank Fay, she will tell you. She also explains that she has only played one kind of role and that is the kind of girls she has actually known, but then she's modest! She used to have yearnings to do dramatic things in a big way. She used to watch Jeanne Eagels and then come away and think 'what's the use?' She feels the same way now when she sees Ann Harding.

She likes the movies, finds them interesting, feels she learns something from them, but the stage will always be 'home' to her.

She'd like to settle down, just she and Frank — and only come back to do something that interested her. She'd like to do a play with Frank, like Vilma Banky and Rod La Rocque are doing in New York, and then take the play to London. She'd like to do different roles, something she's never attempted. Maybe foreign parts full of accents and things. As it is now, practically her only equipment has been to learn to say 'ain't' and drop her g's, which is not such a good habit for polite society and one which Frank tries to correct.

She'd like to have a child now when she's young; she'd like to work with Frank, so they could be together, because they wouldn't be jealous of one another in their work.

She doesn't smoke — or at least she hasn't smoked in eighteen months because Frank doesn't want her to. Only when a scene calls for it, and then she doesn't cheat by taking more puffs than the script allows!

At present she is doing another girl that she knows, a taxi dancer in a dance hall who falls in love with the wrong man, but marries the right one when the curtain falls.

She started out selling Vogue patterns; then she tried typing. She wasn't the type — that's why she's a hit today.

Collection: Screenland Magazine, January 1931