Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face
By Scott Eyman
Simon and Schuster, 468 pages, $30
It’s not certain when Joan Crawford was born — various sources say 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, and 1908 (that’s showbiz) — but she definitely died in 1977, and just a year later her image as one of the most beloved stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood took an atomic-level hit when her adopted daughter Christine Crawford published Mommie Dearest. It depicted Joan as a controlling, emotionally unstable mother, was the first of a long line of nasty so-called memoirs by famous people’s brats, and was made into a movie that became an instant camp classic.
“If Crawford wasn’t already dead, Mommie Dearest would have killed her.”
In the years that followed, many if not most people, when they heard the name Joan Crawford, didn’t think of Mildred Pierce but of the line “No wire hangers!” Then, in 2017, came a limited TV series, Feud: Bette and Joan, which dwelled at epic length on the production of the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the focus being on the purportedly epic discord between the film’s two purportedly egomaniacal stars, Crawford and Bette Davis.
The posthumous public image of Joan Crawford, then, has not been a pretty one. Perhaps that will change now, with the publication of Scott Eyman’s elegant, intelligent, comprehensively researched, and thoroughly absorbing new biography Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face. If you take Mommie Dearest and Feud as gospel, you’ll think of Crawford as an unbearable diva — demanding, imperious, and fiercely competitive with her fellow actors.
On the contrary, as director Joseph Mankiewicz testified, “Joan was never a pampered star. She would mark up lines in a script that she thought were problematic and come in before the film started to discuss any changes. If she played records in her dressing room, they were her own records, unlike Lana Turner, who would have the sound department set up a record player for her.” Eyman tells us that “crews loved her,” and with good reason: every time she started a new picture, she’d “arrive early and individually welcome every crew member as they showed up on the set. She’d inquire about their wife by name, ask after the health of any family members who had been sick.”
As for competitiveness, only one colleague came remotely close to being a real professional enemy: Norma Shearer, who, as the wife of producer Irving Thalberg, kept getting parts that Crawford had lusted after.
Meanwhile Crawford had a huge number of genuine friends, many of whom remained friends for decades and to all of whom she was intensely loyal. Among them were Jack Oakie, who discovered the lowborn Texan in a Broadway chorus line in 1924 when she was still going by her birth name, Lucille LeSueur; Ruby Stevens, a Ziegfeld girl whom she befriended during the same period and who would become known as Barbara Stanwyck; Myrna Loy, whom she met when they were tyros at MGM; and Gretchen Young, who would change her name to Loretta.
One of Crawford’s earliest L.A. friends was William Haines, a silent film star who gave up the limelight because he was openly gay and whom Joan helped establish as the film colony’s favorite interior decorator; another gay friend was Crawford’s New York hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, whom she persuaded to come west, where he became MGM’s chief hair stylist (and the first member of his profession ever to get a screen credit in American movies).
Competitive? Crawford had first been snapped up by MGM because of her dancing, but when Eleanor Powell arrived in 1935 “and quickly came to be regarded as the best female tap dancer in the world,” Crawford, far from exploding with jealousy, was so full of admiration that she “would lie down on the stage floor for hours to watch Powell rehearse.”
Not that she needed to be jealous. By 1927 — the year that talkies started — she was already MGM’s golden girl, described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see at smart night clubs … dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes.”
Eyman puts it like this: “Crawford was not like Garbo, not even like Shearer, both of whom aspired to high-toned elegance. Crawford would be frisky and down-to-earth, a striver with a sardonic knowledge of the world, her place in it, and how sex can occasionally come in handy.”
The public and private Crawfords differed dramatically. In public, she was glamour personified (she felt she owed it to the public); in private, she dressed down, cooked for friends (and even her servants), and spent hours answering fan mail.
She was also touchingly frank about her lack of formal schooling. At a dinner party one night, she asked her seatmate, Irving Berlin, what a certain word meant, to which he replied: “You’re the only person I know, except me, who’s not ashamed to admit they haven’t had an education.”
But if she was uneducated, she was far from dumb. She read extensively. At one point she hired a literature tutor. At MGM, she became a savvy student of studio politics as well as an expert in filmmaking. Raymond Massey, her co-star in Possessed (1947), called her “the best technician I ever met. Could match close-ups and long shots flawlessly. Knew everything about lighting, camera lenses, and dressed for the camera, and not the other actors.”
Throughout the 1930s, Crawford reigned at the box office, headlining films like Rain (1932) and Dancing Lady (1933). Then her career dipped. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie version of Mommie Dearest, Crawford is called into studio boss Louis B. Mayer’s office to be fired in a cruel and condescending manner because her last few films have been flops. She walks away in humiliation.
In reality, Crawford left MGM in 1943 of her own accord. Yes, she’d just done two of her best pictures, The Women (1939) and A Woman’s Face (1941), and had even turned a profit for the studio with two second-rate programmers, Reunion in France (1942) and Above Suspicion (1943). But she was no longer the queen of the lot: the crown had passed to Greer Garson, who’d won Best Actress for Mrs. Miniver (1942) and in the course of five years would get five Oscar nominations for five truly first-rate vehicles.
But Crawford was not fired: she ended her MGM years with a phone call to Mayer from New York. In fact, Nick Schenck, head of MGM’s parent company, Loew’s, was determined to hold her to her contract, but Mayer argued that she should be allowed to leave, pointing out that she’d been “extremely loyal, not to mention hardworking, and had made the company millions of dollars.” Schenck relented.
It was typical of Crawford that on her final day at MGM, “she drove to the studio alone” and “cleared out her dressing room by dumping all her belongings into valises, then washed the small kitchen and vacuumed the carpets. Nobody was going to be able to say she left any mess behind.” Far from being hostile toward Mayer, she would always think of him fondly, saying that he “was my father, my father confessor; the best friend I ever had.”
Another misrepresentation in the movie Mommie Dearest: in it, Crawford is portrayed as chewing up men and spitting them out. Au contraire. Her old lovers inevitably remained her friends. Her most serious affair was with Clark Gable, who remained a friend after his marriage to Carole Lombard; indeed, it was Joan to whom he turned to for comfort after Lombard’s death in a plane crash — and no, there was no sex: “she just held him while he cried.”
Divorced three times, Crawford stayed on excellent terms with all of her ex-husbands. A half century after she and the first of them, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., parted ways, he “had nothing but kind things to say” about her: “I can honestly say I never saw her in a temper.” Her last husband was Alfred Steele, chairman of the board of Pepsi-Cola, with whom she spent four years until his untimely death at 58. “I was more in love with Alfred than any other man in my life,” she said afterwards. “I fell madly in love with him the night we met and the all-too-few years with him were the happiest years of my life.”
In the movie Mommie Dearest — more fiction — Steele’s death leaves Crawford high and dry financially, and after Pepsi-Cola’s directors try to shunt her aside she reads them the riot act (“Don’t f*** with me, fellas!”), bullying her way onto the board by threatening to give the company’s product bad publicity. In real life, Steele’s contract guaranteed Crawford a seat on the board in case of his death — and the board was delighted to have her, for she was a remarkable corporate asset, as hardworking in her promotion of Pepsi as she was in her acting career.
A few words about the two films for which Crawford is probably best known today. Mildred Pierce (1945), a cinema classic that was made at Warner Brothers after her departure from MGM, won Crawford her only Oscar, but had more than its share of production problems: the script went through many hands (including William Faulkner’s); the director, Michael Curtiz (Casablanca), “didn’t understand the story” because “[h]e couldn’t believe anyone cared about a Glendale housewife who baked pies”; Jack Warner considered Crawford a “has-been”; and Joseph Breen, who administered the Production Code, found many aspects of the story “sordid and repellent.”
Then there was Ann Blyth, who, because she was nice, had trouble playing Veda, Mildred’s bitch of a daughter. Crawford was generous to her, even taking part in Blyth’s screen test. “It was practically unheard of for a star of her caliber to do any kind of test, much less with an unknown trying for a supporting part,” writes Eyman. “They remained friends for life.”
In 1962 came What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In Feud, Davis and Crawford are bitches who do everything on the set short of strangling each other. There was some truth in this, but only some: the director, Robert Aldrich, would say that while Davis could be “difficult,” she was, for the most part, “fabulously cooperative even if explosive and occasionally trying.” As for Crawford, she proved to be “ever malleable” — for example, she granted Davis top billing — even though the challenges of her role put her “in a continuing state of bitchiness” that led her to “pou[t] from morning till night.”
Yet while there was definitely no love lost between them (on the day of Crawford’s death in 1977, an “ebullient” Bette Davis approached Burt Reynolds at a party and said: “Well, the c*** died today!”), both women “behaved absolutely perfectly” together: “no upstaging … totally professional.”
Davis and Crawford, by the way, were both signed for Baby Jane’s quasi-sequel, Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), also directed by Aldrich, but Crawford was soon forced out. When Aldrich asked Barbara Stanwyck, and then Loretta Young, to replace her, both actresses refused to do such a thing to their old pal; Aldrich had to fly to Europe to persuade Olivia de Havilland — a longtime chum of Davis’s — to take the part.
After Baby Jane, Crawford “was clearly downshifting and taking whatever was on offer.” Her pictures — all of them now horror flicks — got worse, cheaper, stupider. The last was Trog, which featured “a former wrestler wearing an ape-man mask reputedly left over from Kubrick’s 2001.” For Joan, the only plus about these wastes of celluloid was that nobody minded when she personally worked in shameless product placements for Pepsi.
One high point amid all the rubbish was the premiere episode of Rod Serling’s TV series Night Gallery, in which she was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg. “She was not Mommie Dearest,” he recalled. “She was kind and understanding … the only person on the crew who treated me like I’d been working for 50 years. She was just sensational.” The greenhorn director also “realized very quickly that Crawford knew more about filmmaking than he did”: “She (could) look at a light and say, ‘Steven, that’s F4, not F11.’”
Even as Joan was longing to get decent film work, her daughter Christina was striving to get her own acting career off the ground. She was the opposite of her thoroughly disciplined mother: as Myrna Loy, who appeared with her in the road company of Barefoot in the Park, observed, Christina was “recalcitrant…. Her stubbornness was really unbelievable. She would not do a single thing that anyone told her to do…. Christina completely disregarded her blocking, throwing the rest of us off.”
Loy’s theory about Christina was that “she wanted to be her mother” — she “envied her mother, grew to hate her, and eventually wanted to destroy her.” Loy, who admired Joan immensely — in part because “[s]he remembered anniversaries and milestones in the lives of her friends,” never forgetting “names, dates, or obligations” — was so appalled by Christina’s unprofessional behavior that, “I wanted to beat the hell out of that girl after only one rehearsal.”
In the movie Mommie Dearest, the idea of trashing Joan in print doesn’t come to Christina (Diana Scarwid) until after Joan’s death. In real life, Christina was working on the book long before that — and Joan knew it, telling her friend Jeanine Basinger that it would be “upsetting, but I don’t want you to be upset.” Basinger was upset, and so were Joan’s other friends. For Fairbanks, the book was “about someone I never knew.” Pat Tone, the son of Joan’s second husband, Franchot Tone, said: “I didn’t believe Christina for a second.” And a “distressed” Myrna Loy called the book fiction.
Yes, some friends admitted they’d found Joan’s form of parenting unusually strict — but the kind of abuse Christina described? Sheer fantasy. Even Bette Davis weighed in: “I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan, but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter.” (In 1985, four years before Davis’s own death, her daughter, B.D. Hyman, would publish her own Mommie Dearest under the title My Mother’s Keeper.)
Then, in 1981, came the movie version of Mommie Dearest, which, in Eyman’s words, made Crawford “a camp joke. If Crawford wasn’t already dead, Mommie Dearest would have killed her.” As it was, the book and the movie killed her image. My impression is that most of that damage has since been undone. To be sure, the book, to my surprise, is in print, having been re-released in 2017 by a publishing house I’ve never heard of — but is anybody reading it today?
The movie is still around too, of course, but it’s now seen as a camp classic that no sane viewer could possibly regard as a serious portrait of the real Joan Crawford. Christina, now 86, who wanted so desperately to be an actress, has to realize at this point that she’ll never be anything but an ugly footnote to her mother’s superb career. Meanwhile the best of her mother’s own films live on, providing entertainment to new generations of movie lovers and showcasing the unique talent of a woman whom most of her intimates considered a very fine soul. Kudos to Scott Eyman for writing a smart and sensitive account that captures Joan Crawford in all her humanity.
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