A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [18]
Davis, who had helped small-town girls like Madelyn while away the Depression, was now one of the country’s biggest box-office stars. Her movie Now, Voyager became a hit across the country in November 1942, playing to audiences made up mostly of women. The film marked a shift in Davis’s image. As the government campaigned to recruit housewives into factory work, Davis shed what Martin Shingler, a film scholar, has described as her previously androgynous look and emerged as “the leading spokesperson for femininity, lipstick and glamour.” The transformation had begun six months earlier, Shingler suggested, with the May 1942 release of In This Our Life, in which Davis played Stanley Timberlake, a southern belle.
That spring, Madelyn Dunham, age nineteen, was pregnant. On November 29, 1942, one month after her twentieth birthday, she gave birth to a brown-eyed, brown-haired daughter with the same delicate coloring so admired in her great-aunt Doris, Miss El Dorado. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that his mother was born at Fort Leavenworth, the Army base where Stanley was stationed. But Ralph Dunham said he visited Madelyn and the baby in Wichita Hospital when Stanley Ann was a day or two old. Years later, Ann would say that she had nearly entered the world in a speeding taxi. Rushing to the hospital in a snowstorm, she told Maya, Madelyn almost gave birth in the cab. As Ann told the story to Maya, it had a parallel in Maya’s birth twenty-eight years later. On that occasion, Madelyn was arriving in Jakarta by plane, and Maya’s father, Lolo Soetoro, had gone to the airport to meet her. It was the eve of Independence Day (the Indonesian one), and Ann, waiting in a Catholic hospital in Jakarta to deliver, grew impatient and walked out into the street to look for her husband and her mother. As she told the story, she was on the verge of hopping into a pedicab, called a becak, when Madelyn and Lolo finally pulled up. Though delivered in the hospital, Maya, the inheritor of her mother’s wanderlust, was nearly born in a becak. And Ann, whose adventuring impulse came by way of her Kansan parents, nearly arrived in the Wichita equivalent.
They named her Stanley Ann.
In the years that followed, the explanation most often given was that her father, Stanley, had hoped for a boy. “One of Gramps’s less judicious ideas—he had wanted a son,” Obama wrote. But relatives doubted that that story was true. Ralph Dunham said his brother “probably would have settled for any healthy child.” Maybe he just liked the name. Or maybe that story originated as a joke, delivered teasingly by the great confabulator himself. The fact was, Madelyn was fully in charge of matters such as the naming and handling of the baby, some of her siblings said. Stanley would not have had veto power. “When I asked my grandmother about it, she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know why I did that,’” Maya told me. “Because she’s the one who named her Stanley. That’s all she ever said: ‘Oh, I don’t know.’”
On at least one occasion, Madelyn seemed to suggest that she had taken the name from the southern belle in the movie that just six months earlier had signaled the transformation in Bette Davis’s image on-screen. When asked about the name not long after Stanley Ann’s birth, Madelyn said cryptically, “You know, Bette Davis played a character named Stanley.”
Two
Coming of Age in Seattle
It wasn’t easy to be a girl named Stanley growing up in the wake of a restless father. By her fourteenth birthday, Stanley Ann had moved more often than many Americans in those days moved in a lifetime. At age two, she had moved from Kansas to California, where Stanley Dunham spent two years as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley; then she had moved from California back to Kansas, where, after dropping out of Berkeley, her father signed up for a couple of courses at the University