Bert Stevens

Helen Ferguson is eight months pregnant and penniless. She’s on a train crowded with people heading home from New York for the 4th of July, but she doesn’t have a home to go to; she’s simply using the one thing her cheating boyfriend left her with when he suddenly dumped her, which is practically the only thing of value she possesses -- a one-way ticket out of town. 

She’s in a distracted daze as she hauls her suitcase down the carriage, still in shock. She doesn’t notice anyone around her. She doesn’t see the skinny guy in the bowtie and braces who’s trying to find somewhere to hang his jacket; the old woman mopping her face with a handkerchief as if she’d run all the way to the station; the weasel-faced man who rudely squats down in front of her to talk to his friend. 

And she doesn’t see the tall, silver-haired man in the light suit who she walks past as he reaches up to place his wife’s hat box in the luggage rack: 

Helen Ferguson didn’t notice him, but Barbara Stanwyck -- playing her in this scene from No Man of Her Own (1950) -- would have. He’s Bert Stevens, a board member of the Screen Extras Guild who spent most of his career milling around in scenes set in train stations, nightclubs, courtrooms and so on. 

He was born in 1905 to working-class parents with a decade-long mania for the letter M -- they named him Malcolm, to go with his older sisters Maud, Mabel and Mildred. The appeal of that letter might have worn off around then, though, because they always called him Byron, which was his middle name. By the time the next child came along three years later, they appear to have finished with M entirely, as they called her Ruby. 

When Bert was six and Ruby was three, their mother cracked her skull open on a kerbstone when she tripped while stepping out of a Brooklyn streetcar. Not long after she died, their father abandoned them when he got work on a construction team digging the Panama canal, and that was the last the five children saw of him. 

The older girls could just about take care of themselves, but Bert and Ruby found themselves shunted between various homes, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Whenever Ruby ran away from one of the homes, Bert would go to the old tenement in Brooklyn, where he’d find her sitting on the stoop, hoping that her mother or father would come home. 

Like a lot of orphaned siblings, Bert and Ruby clung to each other and Bert, as the older of the two, naturally became his sister’s protector. The youngest of their older sisters, Mildred, had become a showgirl, and Ruby would go backstage to watch her and would learn all her routines by heart. Bert disapproved of Ruby hanging around with all these show people, but she was hooked -- one day she’d be a famous dancer and Bert would be proud of her! She chalked her name in huge letters all over the sidewalk to show him how it would look when it was up in lights. Ruby Stevens! Ruby Stevens! 

Ruby was always in trouble at school and had no friends. Bert tried to help by forcing his friends to let her join in their games, but it was no use: there was no way she was going to stick around in Brooklyn, and if Bert was trying to keep her away from show business, he was bound to lose. Ruby dropped out of school at fourteen and, within a year, was working as a chorus girl in Manhattan nightclubs and on the touring circuit. This picture was taken a couple of years later, when she became a Ziegfeld girl: 

Not long after that picture was taken, Ruby moved to Hollywood, and Bert, at the age of 18, was all on his own. 

He was quiet, a bit of a daydreamer and seemingly without ambition -- his one driving force seems to have been his attachment to his sister. Naturally, therefore, he followed her out west. When she started working in movies, he soon followed. And when she ditched her childhood dream of seeing Ruby Stevens up in lights and changed her name, he changed his name, too, although not as radically as she did. He simply swapped the “Malcolm Byron” part of his name for plain old “Bert”, whereas Ruby opted for an entirely new name altogether: Barbara Stanwyck -- which is why she would have been very well aware of who she was shoving past in that train carriage in No Man of Her Own. 

That wasn’t the only film Bert and Ruby worked on together. The year before, they'd shared a scene in The File on Thelma Jordon (1949), with Bert appearing in a few shots as one of her defence lawyers (seated on the right): 

By this point in their lives, the once inseparable siblings rarely saw each other except for the few occasions when they happened to be on the same set. They were still close, however, and Stanwyck would help Byron out whenever he needed her to. That might have happened fairly often because, although he appeared in dozens of films in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the roles were strictly low-earning atmosphere parts with no dialogue, such as his urbane, white-suited nightclub patron in this still from Song of the Thin Man (1947): 

It’s hard to say whether being the brother of one of the biggest stars of his time affected Bert’s career one way or the other, particularly as there’s no evidence that he desired to be anything other than what he was: a steady, reliable background player. 

Of course, Ruby Stevens wasn’t the only New York dancer to make it in Hollywood. However, what is surprising is that she wasn’t even the only one who had an older brother who worked as an extra in a Thin Man film. 

On Ruby’s chorus line in the Shubert Theater in Manhattan back in the 1920s was a dancer called Lucille LeSueur. She went to Hollywood around the same time as Ruby did and, like Ruby’s brother Bert, her brother Hal tagged along. Like Ruby, Lucille changed her name -- we know her better as Joan Crawford -- and became a major star, and, like Bert, Hal became a dress extra, appearing as reporters, chauffeurs and nightclub patrons like the one in the centre of this still from After the Thin Man (1936): 

Bert and Hal must have known each other and would have bumped into each other on nightclub sets and so on from time to time. It's possible that they passed the time by swapping gossip about Barbara and Joan but it's far more likely that they avoided the subject altogether, each taking pleasure in the company of the only other guy in Hollywood who knew what it was like to be absolutely dwarfed by his little sister.

Bert had a heart attack in 1959, which he survived, and a second one in 1964, which he didn’t. He was 60. His career had been so obscure that even many Hollywood insiders were surprised to learn that Barbara Stanwyck had ever had a brother.

Sources: Madsen, Alex, "Stanwyck--A Biography", HarperPaperbacks 1995; Picture of Ruby Stevens from the US Library of Congress, public domain; Fabian Cepeda of Hollywood Clasico tipped me off about Hal LeSueur.

Comments

[Lance]

Awesome!

[FABIÁN CEPEDA]

That was a really amazing story of life and affections. I didn't know their private lives before Barbara's super-stardom, but it seems that, contrary to what it is said about her temper, she never forgot what Bert did for her when they both were childs, and helped him the way she could. Maybe more than what we know. Good researching, as usual!

[Diarmid]

Thanks, guys.

[Petrea Burchard]

What a fascinating post, fascinating blog.

[diarmid mogg]

Thanks, Petrea!

[Michael Reese]

Very interesting link from the Perry Mason blog. It seems that would be a lot of fun, at least I thought so until a few years ago, when the Chicago Studio opened up for business near my place of employment in Chicago (bordering on Cicero, if you know where that is) and I had a chance to see what extras go through. Maybe they treated Bert a little better, I don't think Barbara was some one you wanted to mess with!!

[Phillip Arnold]

Bert was actually Barbara's secretary of sorts. He would handle her mail. I have a letter written by him on Barbara Stanwyck's letterhead in regards to somebody trying to get donations from Barbara.