AFI IN STAR-STUDDED SALUTE TO STANWYCK

Friendly persuasion goes a long way in Hollywood--and sometimes it goes too far. There is nothing friendly about asking an actress as private as Barbara Stanwyck to face a crowd of 1,200. But once you do--as Stanwyck herself would say--you do it right. Thursday night at the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom the American Film Institute did it wrong. Stanwyck, this year’s recipient of the AFI’s Life Achievement Award, always demanded of herself vitality and attention to detail. After 15 straight Life Achievement evenings, the AFI may need a shot in the arm--or a hiatus.

Fortunately, Stanwyck--Hollywood’s most enduring star (her career began in 1927)--got the last laugh. Rather than have to sit out front for three hours, Stanwyck (due to a back injury) only appeared late in the evening. Of course, 10 minutes of the 79-year-old Stanwyck in the flesh more than made for the wait.

The pallor could be felt from the evening’s start; a master plan seemed not to exist. Major studios, like 20th Century Fox and MGM, were seated on the second tier, and in corners. And another seating tip-off was apparent right away: There was no dais, an AFI fixture. The most emotional AFI moments are the walks from the dais through the room to the stage: Two years ago Gene Kelly practically danced from dinner partner Edie Wasserman to colleague Fred Astaire to host Shirley MacLaine--and the room was alive.

In fairness, Barbara Stanwyck wasn’t well enough to dance, and she came to the Hilton directly from St. John’s Hospital. Just before dinner, AFI co-chairman George Stevens Jr. took the stage: “If you have a sinking feeling, you are perceptive,” he told the crowd. “I visited Barbara Stanwyck this morning at St. John’s . . . “ The reaction was that Stanwyck wouldn’t appear, but Stevens softened the blow. “She said, ‘I will be there,’ and she will be here. She will be backstage and hear your applause.”

Yet if Stanwyck was in the wings, nobody who took the stage--not Walter Matthau, Linda Evans, Jane Fonda--mentioned it. Not that one would. With a nonstop career entering its seventh decade, Stanwyck (and the audience) at least deserved specific bons mots, not mere bouquets. When AFI President Bonita Granville Wrather told the audience, “I first met Missy when I was 13,” the room got excited. The movie was John Ford’s “The Plough and the Stars” (1937). Remembered Wrather: “It was a true Irish cast, and there was tension. But suddenly the tension completely dissolved when Missy appeared.” What tension? How did it dissolve?

When host Jane Fonda made her entrance, she told the room, “I only made one picture with Barbra Streisand.” It was an understandable faux pas , but perhaps an omen for the evening. (ABC will air the AFI tribute later this spring, but aside from Fonda’s gaffe what will they do with Walter Matthau’s and Billy Wilder’s intentional mentions of “Barbra Streisand” instead of Barbara Stanwyck? Fonda, though poised, left questions unanswered: “I don’t remember when I first met Barbara Stanwyck. She’s just always been there.” Where? At dinner, in the Henry Fonda household? In her imagination? “My dad--who made three pictures with her--said, ‘Barbara Stanwyck is a friend like nobody else.’ ” How? The Fonda-Stanwyck friendship was just that, a bona-fide friendship, loaded with chemistry and history. Some specific daughterly reminiscences would have been illuminating.

Granted some of Stanwyck’s co-stars are gone--Cagney, Cooper, Gable, Holden, Bogart--but film remains. Or does it? What the AFI usually does best is utilize film clips; last year’s Billy Wilder evening was a one-night crash course in the history of vintage movie making. Stanwyck has a body of work probably unmatched by any living actress, and yet the clips were choppy and skimpy. Her shot to stardom came from director Frank Capra; some moments from the five Capra-Stanwyck films (“Miracle Woman,” “Ladies of Leisure”) were shown, but not differentiated.

Clips from the early ‘30s were grouped willy-nilly with clips from the late ‘40s. Virtually none of the later Stanwyck stunt work was shown. And a novice might have thought “Sorry Wrong Number” and “Double Indemnity” were her only thrillers.

Unthrilling, too, was the reminiscence of Fred MacMurray, the one co-star present who worked four times with Stanwyck: “Once I sent her to jail, once I shot her, once I left her for another woman, and once I sent her over a waterfall . . . But all four films have one thing in common: I was in love with Barbara Stanwyck.” Period.

Better was Billy Wilder, who convinced MacMurray and Stanwyck to play killers in “Double Indemnity,” which Wilder directed and co-wrote with Raymond Chandler. “I used my Rasputin-like persuasion,” cracked Wilder, “to get the two of them to play murderers. The movie took 10 weeks to write, 41 days to film, and it cost $1.1 million. There was no haggling over rights to cable or videocassettes, though maybe there should have been.” Then, speaking of Stanwyck, Wilder added: “You should never say, ‘This is the best actor or actress I ever worked with.’ Say, ‘This is one of the two greatest I ever worked with.’ Except, of course, for tonight.”

Stanwyck, as Walter Matthau explained simply and eloquently, “never just played the good side or bad side of a character. She just played the truth. I once asked her how, and she said ‘Just be truthful. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ ”

What Stanwyck didn’t fake, on screen or off, was that she had not only a grip on stardom but also a grasp on how it works. Robert Cummings, who worked with her in “The Bride Wore Boots” (1946) remembered “a very long day of shooting a steeplechase at a country club. Missy was a fine horsewoman, and I was . . . Well, anyway, 14 times we shot it. The director (Irving Pichel) just wasn’t happy. I didn’t think I could do it again. Then I saw this tiny figure coming toward us. It was Missy. She said to the director, ‘If Mr. Cummings rides that race one more time, you and I will never work together again.’ The director quickly said, ‘That’s a wrap.’ ”

In the audience, among those who worked with Stanwyck: Robert Wagner (“Titanic”); director Robert Wise (“Executive Suite”); Eve Arden (“My Reputation”); John Forsythe (“Dynasty”); Charlton Heston, Katharine Ross (“The Colbys”); Ross Hunter (“All I Desire”), and Glenn Ford (“The Violent Men”). Among those co-stars missing: Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Joel McCrea and Ronald Reagan.

Among those present who didn’t work with Stanwyck: John Huston (who got the evening’s only standing ovation, aside from Stanwyck), James Stewart, Ann-Margret, Sylvester Stallone, Allen Ladd Jr., Shirley MacLaine, Catherine Deneuve, Tess Harper, Brooke Adams, Henry Winkler, Jack Valenti, Grant Tinker, Nancy Sinatra Sr. (Stanwyck’s best friend) and Hugh Hefner.

Three hours after the evening began, the woman with the unparalleled career took the stage, in pink bugle beads and full command. Using her hands to quiet the crowd, Stanwyck thanked Frank Capra, “who taught me what film could do for me and what I could do for film” and Billy Wilder, “who taught me to kill--and thank God for him!” And she thanked her “boys,” the crews who looked after her and the stunt people “who taught me well and safely. And in my own way I also tried to help people,” Stanwyck said in a speech so brief it was perfect. She thanked writers and actors and others who counted, too.

The evening’s only real untruth: Stanwyck’s telling the crowd, “Honest to God, I can’t walk on water.”

Nobody believed her.