Victoria Wilson - A Life of Barbara Stanwyck

Ruby Stevens, 1923, age sixteen. Note the spelling of her name: Rubye.

My grandparents on both sides were probably horse-thieves. No one ever told us anything about them. Therefore I suspect the worst. I imagine they were born and raised in Ireland. But wherever the family tree is planted, whether its branches are rotten or sound, Ill never know.

Barbara Stanwyck, 1937

I t has been written about Barbara Stanwyck, born Ruby Stevens, that she was an orphan. Her mother, Catherine Ann McPhee Stevens, Kitty, died in 1911, when Ruby was four years old. Following Kittys death, Rubys father, Byron E. Stevens, a mason, left his five children and set sail for the Panama Canal, determined to get away and hoping to find work at higher wages than at home.

The story goes that Ruby and her older brother, Malcolm Byron, then six years of age, were passed from Brooklyn home to home, from tenement to tenement, to whatever family would take them in for the few dollars the family would be paid for their care. Ruby would earn her keep scrubbing toilets, doing whatever she could to stay alive. Her three sisters, who were much older, two of whom were married, were busy with their own lives. One sister was in show business, a dancer who frequently traveled and was barely able to care for herself, but who looked out for Ruby and Byron and earned enough money to keep both children off the street.

In and around that story is the notion that Ruby Stevens came from nowhere, that she was a tough Brooklyn girl, educated on the streets, who never finished high school, who became a showgirl as a young teenager, hoofing her way from one club to another, from one musical revue to another, until she landed a job in a play, got her big break, and was a sensation on Broadway.

And some of this story is true.

Ruby Stevens from the streets of Brooklyn, who danced in cabarets and clubs, a Broadway star at twenty, was a daughter of the American Revolution.

The Stevens family can be traced in America as far back as 1740. Rubys great-great-grandfather Thomas Stephens Sr. was from New EnglandGeorgetown, Maine. Her great-great-grandmother Mary Oliver was from Marblehead, Massachusetts, and married Thomas Stephens when he was nineteen and she sixteen.

Stephens established a business in maritime shipping. During the Revolutionary War, his ships were used against the Crown in a massive seaborne insurgency that helped to win the War of Independence.

Thomas junior, Ruby Stevenss great-grandfather, one of five Stephens children, was born in Georgetown, Maine, nine years before America won its war of independence. Her grandfather Joseph, one of ten children, was born on July 4, 1809, and married three timesfirst to Isabelle Morgan, who died soon after; then to her sister, Arzelia Morgan, two years later (together they had four sons); and then to a young woman from Derby, Vermont, living in Lowell, Massachusetts. Joseph Stephens, at almost six feet tall, dark with dark hair and blue eyes, was fifty years old; Abby Spencer, twenty-seven. The Stephens family bought farmland on the main road of Lanesville, Massachusetts, near Gloucester, which, with a voting population of 350, was the largest town in Massachusetts. The Stephens house at 16 Langsford Street between Lanes and Folly Coves was built with the compactness of a ships interior. Behind it was a carriage barn with an old cherry tree that dominated the Stephenses front lawn. Off to the parlor side the branches of a mulberry tree spread out over the wooden fence that surrounded the property.

Cod and mackerel fishermen used Lanes Cove, taking their pinkies and schooners out before dawn and returning by three to unload their catches. They kept their nets and tackle and pots in wooden sheds that faced the water along the curve of the beach.

In 1862, almost a year after the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and at the age of fifty-three, Joseph Stevens (spelling now changed) traveled to Boston and enlisted in the U.S. Army, a private in Company L of the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Volunteers. Months later, Stevens, as a sergeant, was engaged in the Second Battle of Bull Run and was discharged in mid-October 1863, days before two of his sons, Melville and Sylvanus, enlisted.

Stevens returned to Lanesville and found work as a ships navigator and caulker, putting jute rope between the joints of the ships boards and sealing the joints with tar. His wife, Abby, gave birth on July 16, 1864, to their only child, Byron, Ruby Stevenss father.

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. The people of Lanes Cove celebrated by blowing fish horns and decorating their ships. Six days later, a horse and rider galloped into the village with the shocking news of President Lincolns assassination. Churches were draped in mourning cloth. Mourning flags flew with black-and-white stripes and white stars on a black background. Women sewed black-and-white ribbon rosettes and wore them on the left shoulder as mourning badges.

Byron Stevens grew up in the small fishing village of Lanesville and came to love the sea. His mother was a favorite of the fishermen who passed her house on their way home from Lanes Cove and offered Abby lobsters from their daily catches. The Stevens family wasnt rich, but by 1870 Joseph Stevens had amassed a great deal of land, and they were comfortable.

The Stevenses were careful in their rearing of Byron. Joseph and Abby were formal people, strict Methodists. Each Sunday they traveled the mile by horse and carriage to the neighboring town of Bay View to attend the Bay View Church and often invited the minister to dinner.