My imagination was shaped by the television shows I watched, and the soundstages I wandered onto when visiting my father at his office at Radford Studios Center. He produced a series called The Big Valley, starring Barbara Stanwyck, a once great but now aging movie star whose time had come to surrender to the boob tube. She played the tough matriarch on a large ranch who thought nothing of stringing up cattle rustlers on her land. When I pictured the woman who lived in the house before us, I imagined Barbara Stanwyck tossing a rope over the sturdy pipe in the basement to hang herself instead
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Barbara Stanwyck
