Joan Crawford: a bewitched creature of extremes

Joan Crawford in her prime was a bewitched creature of extremes. If Crawford’s relentless pursuit of perfection kept her youthful, then it also trapped her inside an impossible time capsule from which there was no escape. All five of Crawford’s marriages were more short-lived than some of her ephemeral film plots. Although Crawford remained on amicable terms with all her former husbands she was also quick to recognize that there was only one great love in her life – her career.

Joan Crawford’s relationship with men in general had always been very complex. Arguably, she craved their affections and attention, yet quickly grew tired of them once the initial flourish of excitement had ended; somehow unable to reconcile her private life within her own career. In truth, Crawford’s career had always been paramount and would remain so until her death. In 1935, Crawford made I Live My Life – a minor melodrama in which she emerged as a truly independent woman of the world. In reality, she was preparing for another marriage – to Franchot Tone on October 11, 1935 – despite the fact that she had recently told a fan magazine that “…if anyone catches me marrying again, I hope they give me a good sock in the mouth!”

Crawford’s marriage to Franchot Tone could not have been more different from her first to Fairbanks Jr. The newlyweds spent quiet secluded evenings at home. Tone introduced Crawford to high culture; art and literature and even encouraged her to expand her range and do radio-plays of imminent stage classics by Ibsen and Shaw. Ironically, with this newly acquired sophistication, a sudden downturn in Crawford’s box office popularity occurred. MGM cast her with Gable once again in Love on the Run (1935) a romantic comedy in which their usual sexual chemistry was strangely absent.

For The Bride Wore Red (1937) – costarring Tone - Crawford adopted an entirely new look that failed to gel with her fans. Tone’s frequent dalliances with starlets (at one point he was accepting calls on Crawford’s dressing room wire while she was being made up in between takes), eventually broke both Crawford’s spirit and the marriage. Each began to rapidly deteriorate.

When Ladies Meet (1941) casts Crawford as a thoughtless authoress, Mary Howard, who begins an affair with her married publisher, believing his lies that the wife (Greer Garson) is a terrible person without ever having met her. Thankfully, Crawford’s own boyfriend (Robert Taylor) decides to intervene, introducing the wife to the mistress before either knows who the other actually is. A friendship ensues and Mary realizes what a little fool she’s been. Playing the ‘other woman’ was not good for one’s career, however, and Crawford could see the writing on the wall. Although she deeply resented Mayer for giving up on her career, Crawford asked to be released from her MGM contract. Unfortunately for Jack Warner, he underestimated Crawford’s own resilience in refusing projects until she was absolutely satisfied with the material being offered. Although the ink of Joan’s contract had dried in 1942, she would not appear in a Warner Bros. movie until nearly three years later.

Crawford’s personal satisfaction eventually settled on Mildred Pierce (1945) a film noir based on James M. Cain’s scathing novel of family incest and marital deceptions. Originally, the project had been offered to Davis, and then Rosalind Russell. Both turned it down. Told of Crawford’s interest in the property, director Michael Curtiz was less than enthusiastic until she agreed to do a screen test. The test won over Curtiz almost immediately and the resulting film became both a critical and financial success, winning Crawford her one and only Best Actress Academy Award.

For the next few years, Crawford continued to dominate with a string of hits – an achievement not lost on Bette Davis, whose own box office and backstage clout continued to slip in proportion to Crawford’s success. Crawford’s next two movies Humoresque (1946) with John Garfield and Possessed (1947), a psychological melodrama costarring Van Heflin, elevated both her stature and her popularity. She was suddenly the grand dame at Warner’s; a note of distinction once exclusively occupied by Davis. Crawford’s next two films were almost as good.

In Flamingo Road (1949) she plays a sideshow performer who refuses to be chased out of town by co-star Sidney Greenstreet’s corrupt city official, and in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), Crawford ran the gamut of emotion and situations to deliver a high caliber performance as a sales girl masquerading as a socialite. In between Crawford even found time to spoof her own image with a cameo in It’s A Great Feeling (1949) – slapping costars Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan across the cheek. When asked why she had struck them, Crawford shrugs her shoulders and coyly replies, “I do that in all my pictures!”

During Flamingo Road, Crawford had begun a behind-the-scenes affair with married director Vincent Sherman. It was fleeting at best and ended bitterly when Sherman refused to divorce his wife. Crawford could perhaps forgive the snub. But she would never let Sherman forget it. By the time the two collaborated on The Damned Don’t Cry, director and star were at odds. At one point during the shoot, Crawford was admonishing her son Christopher for a minor indiscretion. When Sherman quietly suggested that perhaps there was another time and place for such hysterics, Crawford redirected her anger at Sherman, attempting to trip him as he exited her trailer. In retaliation Sherman turned around and severely struck his star in the face.

Esther Williams has told some interesting tales about what occurred before, during and after the cameras stopped rolling. Crawford had come to Williams’ dressing room to beg for the services of director Charles Walters who was finishing up Easy To Love (1953) for Williams; then shooting on another part of the MGM back lot. Crawford made it known that she intended to pursue Walters romantically. “But Joan, he’s gay,” Williams reported told Crawford. “Oh, hell what does it matter?” Crawford is rumored to have replied with a sly wink. Another story told by Williams has Joan standing alone on a soundstage after cast and crew had gone home for the day, screaming, “Why have you left me? What have I done?” presumably to the imaginary audience that had stopped going to see her pictures.

Robert Aldrich had his hands full on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). “Joan never hated Bette as far as I could tell,” long-time friend Betty Barker once said, “The animosity was all the other way.” Indeed, Bette Davis repeatedly challenged Crawford and Aldrich throughout the shoot, trying the director’s patience. “It was odd to see how intimidated Crawford would get,” costar Victor Buono once commented, “They would rehearse a scene together and Bette would look at Joan from under her eyelid and say something like ‘Is that the way you’re going to play it?’ and Joan would say ‘yes’ and Bette would just shrug her shoulders. I could see Joan losing her nerve. It was belittlement – subtle. But it worked.”

Davis did, in fact, have the more plum role in the movie and she relished its theatricality. After Davis ‘accidentally’ kicked Crawford in the head during their confrontation scene Crawford was taken away to get stitches, sobbing and heard saying “I just don’t know why she hates me so much.” In another scene, where Davis binds Crawford to a hook to keep her from leaving her bedroom, Crawford declared that the rope around her wrists was too tight, to which Davis simply replied “It has to look real” before applying a tape patch to Crawford’s mouth to stifle any further objections while Davis and Aldrich discussed the scene.

While it is true that Crawford adored her fans, she was also not reserved in her condemnation of all that Hollywood had become by the early 1960s, telling guests during a televised interview with Dick Cavett in 1968 that the industry had changed for the worst. “Today they are little cliques full of little people and you may have it!”

Crawford once told a reporter, “When I hear people say, ‘There’s Joan Crawford’ I turn around and say, ‘Hi! How are you?’” Indeed, the public always came first in Crawford’s estimation. Perhaps, it is one of Hollywood’s small ironies that a similar code of career ethics belonged to Crawford’s arch rival - Bette Davis. In retrospect, both Crawford and Davis seem to have run parallel courses, converging as a train wreck on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Both Crawford and Davis were prone to extremes and personal obsessions. Each was driven to excel at their respective alma maters and both ended up with unrepentant children who wrote unflattering alternate truths to their lives from the skewed perspective of a parent’s shadow.

The undoubted reality is that Joan Crawford ought never to have considered becoming a mother. She was, after all, a driven creature of varying ambitions; all energies converged on attaining and maintaining her peerless screen image. Yet, despite Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford’s star is much more pervasive and everlasting today. “There’s that ‘you’re only as old as you feel business’”, Joan once suggested, “…which is fine to a point. But you can’t be Shirley Temple on the good ship lollipop forever! Sooner or later, damn it, you’re old!” Yet, Crawford never quite took her own advice.

In the 1960s and 70s she readily appeared to be tempting the specter of youth with flashes of flirtation as she waxed affectionately about the good ol’ days in Hollywood while on the talk show circuit, all the while unconscious of the fact that her own youth had passed. Her stardom was by then practically a relic from that bygone age. -Nic Zegarac for "The Hollywood Art: Joan Crawford" (2013)