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On Buck Mack, Stanwyck’s “Uncle Buck”
August 17 was the birthday of Buck Mack (1888-1959), best known to vintage film fans as “Uncle Buck”, the somewhat shadowy friend, fixer, butler, bodyguard, and all around caretaker for Barbara Stanwyck.
Hailing from Erie, Pennsylvania, Mack was a member of the vaudeville team of Miller and Mack. He was apparently unrelated to Willard Mack, who gave Stanwyck her breakthrough role in 1926 in The Noose, or Charles Mack of Moran and Mack, or for that matter Vantile Mack, the Ohio Fat Boy; Hughie Mack, plus sized star of Vitagraph comedies; Ted Mack, who inherited The Amateur Hour from Major Bowes; Helen Mack of Myrt and Marge; or Irish singer and songwriter Andrew Mack.
In 1918 Miller and Mack were booked in a Broadway show called Glorianna. Buck began dating Stanwyck’s older sister Mildred “Millie” Stevens, who was a chorus girl in the show. As suitors will do, he also befriended the kid sister. A complex relationship developed. Millie, ten years older than Ruby (Stanwyck’s real name) had became her surrogate mother. (Their actual mother had died in a trolley accident when Stanwyck was four; the father had vanished). Though Buck and Millie had never married, he played a rough paternal or avuncular role in Stanwyck’s life, the closest thing she had to a family.
In the early ’30s, two crucial things happened. Millie died, and Stanwyck became a star. As a close friend, and now “widowed”, Mack was a logical person to run the personal side of her affairs. (On the business side, her agent was none other than Zeppo Marx, who also became a close friend). In addition to running the Stanwyck household, Buck also became the principal caregiver to her adopted son Dion (Anthony Dion Fay — the surname comes from Stanwyck’s first husband, the universally reviled Frank Fay).
Yet Uncle Buck was showfolk. It would be almost strange if he didn’t continue to keep a hand in the business himself. As it happens, he played bit parts in at least 18 Hollywood movies. The best known of these are Bringing Up Baby (1938), the Marx Brothers At the Circus (1939), Maisie (1939) and Gold Rush Maisie (1940), Citizen Kane (1941) and Billy the Kid (1941). You can also see him in more obscure ones like The Crime of Helen Stanley (1934) with Gail Patrick, Ralph Bellamy. and Shirley Grey; One Hour Late (1934) with Helen Twelvetrees and Joe Morrison; F-Man (1936) with Jack Haley and William Frawley; Three Married Men (1936) with Frawley, Lynne Overman, and Roscoe Karns; Rose Bowl (1936) with Buster Crabbe, Tom Brown, Eleanor Whitney, and Frawley once again; The Plough and the Stars (1936) with Stanwyck; Nancy Steele is Missing (1937) with Victor McLaglen; Something to Sing About (1937) with James Cagney, and once again Frawley; The Mad Miss Manton (1938) with Stanwyck and Henry Fonda; Footlight Fever with Alan Mowbray and Donald MacBride (1941); My Life with Caroline (1941) with Ronald Colman and Anna Lee; and The Great Man’s Lady (1941) with Stanwyck and Joel McCrea.
Notice anything? That’s right — few of them are Stanwyck pictures. This was Mack’s side hustle. He pursued it on his own time. Stanwyck needed him in her camp; she had no interest in making a movie star of him. The frequent presence of William Frawley in these pictures makes me wonder if he and Mack weren’t old vaudeville friends, and reminds me of Frawley’s My Three Sons character “Uncle Bub”, who does a job for the Douglas family not unlike Mack’s in the Stanwyck household. Most interesting. Well, somewhat interesting. Also, did Mack inspire the name of the John Hughes character played by John Candy? I wouldn’t die of shock.
We have accumulated quite a few posts on Stanwyck by now. If you’re a fan of the great star (I’m pretty obsessed), please see these earlier posts:
On husbands Frank Fay and Robert Taylor
For more on vaudeville history consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.
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