#helen ferguson

“Of all the people Barbara Stanwyck was close to, her most consistent relationship was with her very loyal, sometimes live-in girl Friday, the prototypical actress-turned-publicist Helen Ferguson. The two never defined their relationship, but if Stanwyck’s marriages to men were described as lavender, the Stanwyck/Ferguson’s union may very well have been of the Boston variety. Ferguson was by Stanwyck’s side for the bulk of her career, from the Hollywood heyday to the 1960s, when Stanwyck started portraying a series of pioneering women on television shows like Wagon TrainandThe Big Valley.

In the book, Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture, Luca Prono states that in the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, Stanwyck was seen as a cultural and personal template for lesbians. ‘Stanwyck acquired the status of icon within lesbian communities,’ Prono writes. 'Stanwyck was a woman whose screen persona challenged respectability because of the strong and independent women she embodied in the 1940s.’”