Her comments went public. A quick google search yields this:
"This is the biggest pile of garbage I ever did -it's lucky I only signed for thirteen episodes. I'll be surprised if it lasts half that long. It's one thing to know you are making a lot of money off vulgarity, but when you don't know it's vulgar - it's plain stupid!
She also called the show a a turkey saying, "I've played the same damn scene twenty-four times!"
Ricardo Montalban himself mentions how harshly she characterized the show and he explains how his main motivation, besides money, on doing the show was to be opposite Stanwyck, and was disappointed he only had a scene with her that was insignificant. In the same interview he also talks of how he agreed with Stanwyck that it was the same repetitive, not imaginative scene again and again (he calls it crap himself) and not very well written. He also seems to think the show was more successful in Europe than in the US. Considering how badly it did in the US, maybe it fared better there by comparison.
Do you know to whom Barbara Stanwyck said that?
What caused BS to leave the show? (On the assumption it hadn’t anything to do with any TC storyline based off 1935’s Charlie Chan’s Secret.)
Do you want me to think that one event was the direct consequence of the other? To whom did she say she was quitting the show because it was garbage?
For some reason, you didn’t understand what I asked.
I’m not surprised. Many people seem unbothered about whether Ms Stanwyck actually said what she said, just happy to endlessly repeat her alleged comments about The Colbys like gospel truth.
Problem is, as the
New York Daily News realised in 1986 when they tried to verify reports coming out of Hollywood, Ms Stanwyck was not available for comment because “one of the perks in her contract with Spelling Productions was that she would not be required to give any press interviews”. …So the tabloids went to town on heresay in 1986. They were lent pseudo legitimacy by a highly questionable biography of Barbara Stanwyck, written without her and published in 1994. That became fodder for new generations of The Colbys haters to score points ever since, to be mindless regurgitated by sheeple even in 2018.
I’ve known BS was unhappy about her role on The Colbys. She didn’t like the new TV landscape, how they were writing for her. The crux of her discontent: She preferred the writing of the Hollywood she used to know, not ‘modern’ TV writing. RM had an easier time with it because he had more substantial and recent TV industry involvement. His discontent lay with the 2nd season, where his scenes were repetitious. But then the 2nd season was when the series focussed on the stories of the younger generation. Plus there was a stretch of months when they were without direction because of the suit the Shapiros brought against Aaron Spelling’s company.
I never doubted RM when he said BS used a worse word than crap to describe the writing she was seeing …It's just I've wondered how BS’s discontent about their writing for her came to be tied to comments about “only 13 episodes” (she appeared in 24) + how her discontent about the way they were writing for her got blown up to encompass all of the writing for the series + how much of her colourful pronouncements described by tabloids are true.
The best that I’ve been able to trace it, Axel Madsen said that one day in March 1986 she faced down Esther Shapiro on set, saying: “This is the biggest pile of garbage I ever did – it’s lucky I only signed for 13 episodes. I’ll be surprised if it lasts half that long.” ....Holy cow, is there logic in the latter statements? I mean, when did she sign for those 13 episodes? And now it was March, and it seems that the veteran actress was expecting The Colbys to be cancelled by end April-early May 1986. Seriously?
What she allegedly told Mrs Shapiro is found in the biography of Ms Stanwyck that Mr Madsen wrote without her. (I don't know where else before then.) For his direct material on her he relied on a handful of old interviews he’d had with her back when she did the Big Valley TV series. The rest he made look like fact.
Mr Madsen went on to say that in the next month (ie, April), “Stanwyck’s revolt was out in the open. Tabloids had a field day.
The Star (me saying this: then a cheap supermarket tabloid printed on newsprint) quoted her as telling Shapiro ‘It's one thing to know you are making a lot of money off vulgarity, but when you don't know it's vulgar - it's plain stupid!’ She called the show ‘a turkey’.”
So Mr Madsen may have been using
The Star wholly as source material. Who
The Star was using as source material is a mystery to me. Did Barbara Stanwyck actually say any of these things, I dunno. I wonder what Mrs Shapiro can or can’t confirm if she could.
