Product Description

Best remembered today as the victim of Richard Nixon's smear campaign in their 1950 senatorial race in California, Helen Gahagan Douglas had a truly remarkable double career, in entertainment and in politics. A tall, stunning woman, dignified and fashionable, Douglas dropped out of Barnard College in her sophomore year to star in Dreams for Sale, a Broadway play written by Owen Davis, who would win a Pulitzer Prize that year. With nothing more than sheer talent and little training, she was soon the peer of Helen Hayes and Katherine Cornell--Heywood Broun called her "ten of the twelve most beautiful women in the world"--and she played the lead in a string of hits. Then she changed course, and after two years of intensive training in a tiny Manhattan apartment, she debuted in Europe as an opera singer, and sang there for several seasons. And in the late '30s and early '40s, as she and her husband (actor Melvyn Douglas) became deeply involved in FDR's Democratic Party, she once again rose rapidly to the top, serving as a Democratic National Committeewoman after only five months in politics, and winning a seat in Congress in 1944, 1946, and 1948.

In Center Stage, Ingrid Winther Scobie presents a sweeping biography of an unusual and talented woman, set against the background of the Great White Way in the 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and California and national politics in the 1940s. We see young Helen Gahagan growing up in posh, turn-of-the-century Park Slope ("really the Park Avenue area of Brooklyn," as she described it), developing an intense passion for acting. We witness her first meeting with Melvyn Douglas, in famed producer David Belasco's office (Belasco asked Helen for her opinion of Melvyn as a possible leading man and she answered simply, "he will do"). And we follow their life together, moving from coast to coast, trying to raise a family and maintain two careers, and gradually becoming more involved in politics--Helen especially with the plight of California's migrant workers. Scobie describes Douglas's long, close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, traces her political rise as one of the most outspoken liberals in Washington, examines in detail her three terms in Congress, and sheds considerable light on the most notorious event in Douglas's political career: her defeat in the 1950 senatorial race at the hands of Richard Nixon, long considered the quintessential red-smear campaign. Indeed, this is the first book to examine the 1950 campaign from Douglas's side, and its conclusions are revelatory. Based on extensive archival research, on exclusive access to Douglas's private papers including letters to and from Melvyn spanning fifty years, and on interviews with Douglas's colleagues, friends, and family, this absorbing biography skillfully interweaves the private and public life of a woman who was both a glamorous celebrity and a charismatic political figure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2930562 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 369 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Remembered as the candidate smeared by opponent Richard Nixon in the 1950 U.S. Senate elections, Douglas comes out admired and respected in Scobic's biography.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Douglas never played by the rules. She became an actress and opera singer despite very little training in the 1920s, moved into California politics in the 1930s, and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1946 to 1950. She was defeated in the 1950 senate election by Richard Nixon, who labeled her "the pink lady." The first third of this biography is choppy and stiff, and Scobie (history, Texas Women's Univ.) relies too much on Douglas's autobiography ( A Full Life , LJ 6/1/82). The book's strength is Scobie's account of Douglas's political career and the glimpses of the complex levels of California's political arena in the 1940s. For large women's studies and political science collections.
- J. Sara Paulk, Concord P.L., N.H.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"For young women of today who may not know of Douglas, this book is an inspiration in terms of the struggle for equality."--Jean Bissonnette, Texas State Networks newsanchor
"Center Stage is more than a careful biography of a fascinating personality: it is a sensitive and thoughtful exploration of the dilemmas of a woman in public life."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
"The script of Helen Gahagan Douglas's extraordinary life included Broadway stardom and political stardom; but Douglas' real drama is one lived today by countless ordinary women. It is the story of a strong, intelligent and ambitious woman coping with the choices, pressures, and conflicts she encounters in her attempt to shape a meaningfully balanced private and public life. "--Ruth B. Mandel, Director, Center for the American Woman and Politics, Rutger's University
"Professor Scobie's book, Center Stage, is well researched and brings to life a colorful era in American politics. I am pleased to recommend it."--Liz Carpenter
"With this book, Helen Gahagan Douglas becomes more than a well-known victim of Richard Nixon. Scobie's study is at once an intimate, absorbing biography of a multi-facted individual and one of the finest accounts ever of the emergence of women on the American political scene."--Richard Fenno, Jr., University of Rochester
"Helen Gahagan Douglas helped to shape the agenda of postwar liberalism, and represented the contributions that women made to politics in the postsuffrage era. She also embodied the modern woman's struggle to balance marriage and career. In Ingrid Winther Scobie's skilled hands, the life of Helen Gahagan Douglas comes together as an integrated whole."--Susan Ware, New York University
"Profiling Douglas with sweep and richness....Scobie...successfully evokes more than one emblematic era in American history."--Los Angeles Times

Customer Reviews

Political Performer
Two-and-a-half stars

Ingrid Winther Scobie is a history professor at Texas Women's University. For her biography of the woman whom Richard M. Nixon is supposed to have dubbed "the pink lady," Scobie got the cooperation of Douglas before the latter's death.

Helen Gahagan Douglas (1900-1980) was a successful stage performer and less successful film actress who married her leading man, Melvyn Douglas (1899-1981). The Douglases were politically engaged lefties in 1930s and '40s Hollywood. When films fizzled for Helen Gahagan Douglas, she had a successful career as one of America's first congresswomen (1944-1950). Her electoral career was abruptly ended by "tricky Dick," her opponent in California's 1950 U.S. Senate race.

I was raised to think of "Nixon's" sobriquet as Scobie does -- as merely a smear. The facts are, however, that Douglas WAS pretty darn "pink." Indeed, members of her own party (as opposed to her Republican opponents) considered her "red," and said so publicly.

Apparently, neither Library Journal reviewer J. Sara Paulk nor the anonymous writer of the book description above carefully read the book, or they'd know that it was not Nixon, but Douglas' Democratic opponent, Ralph Manchester Boddy, who coined the phrase "the pink lady." If they weren't such hardcore, leftist Democrats, they'd know that Nixon never smeared Douglas. It was Boddy who strongly suggested that Douglas was not a "liberal" or even a socialist, but a "traitorous" communist ("red hot") with a "blueprint of subversive dictatorship."

Even forty years later, neither Scobie nor the reviewers can accept that Nixon, who was a moderate Republican, was the much brighter, more capable candidate, and that California voters -- including Democrats, and indeed, much of the Democratic Party -- had soured on socialism. Hence, they must cling to the myth of the Nixon "smear."

As historian Irwin F. Gellman writes, "The U.S Senate contest in California during 1950 has become the stuff where legend has replaced fact. `Tricky Dicky' smeared Helen Gahagan Douglas, the `Pink Lady,' thus relying on the anti-Communist hysteria to propel the dirty trickster into the upper house...."

But in point of fact, Gellman continues, "[Douglas'] painfully inept stewardship - not Nixon - guaranteed her demise."

And so, the real smear was the one invented by leftwing Democrats as revenge against Nixon, which they and their successors in politics, academia, and the media have repeated ever since - even after Nixon's death.

Douglas' story fills Scobie's personal need to narrate the life of a strong mother/career woman role model. (She often refers, inappropriately, to her subject as "Helen," as if Douglas were her personal friend, rather than her subject.) Although my role model is gone, I'm not in the market for a new one. Besides, while writing about heroes is a worthy purpose for historians (although feminists heap contempt on that project, if the heroes are white, heterosexual males), the writing must be in service of the truth. But the truth is not Scobie's priority. She considers herself a "feminist biographer," for whom providing a usable past trumps the search for truth.

When it originally appeared, Center Stage had value for me as a chronicle of the postwar swing, in California, away from FDR's left/center, New Deal coalition, and to a center/right (though Scobie sees it as merely right-wing), Republican politics. But with the 1999 publication of Irwin F. Gellman's painstakingly researched, much more honest biography of Nixon's early career, The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952, the already limited value of Scobie's highly partisan work fell even more. Read Scobie, read Gellman, and then tell me what you think.