Doesn't Even Deserve One Star
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!
She deserves better...
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.
A Decent Crack at an Elusive and Complicated Subject
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.
Pure Junk
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.
Stanwyck Still a Great Woman
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.
