Authors: Donald Spoto
THE NEW YEAR
1928 was even more crowded and productive than 1927. With her salary raised to fifteen hundred dollars a week before the end of 1928, Joan sped through no fewer than six more silent pictures. She was also speeding quite literally in January. Driving from home to Culver City in her new white coupe—a Christmas present from Mayer—Joan bumped a pedestrian who happened to be an employee of Cecil B. DeMille. The woman sustained a minor injury, and before anyone could cry “Lawsuit!” Joan was slapped with a complaint for reckless endangerment. Metro handled the matter out of court, the police were mollified, and the injured woman limped quietly away, comforted by a check for several thousand dollars.
Joan’s reason for the dash to the studio was the completion of
The Law of the Range,
a hilariously bad Western with Tim McCoy, in which she played a sweet, old-fashioned young thing caught between a villain and his virtuous twin brother—in other words, a romantic triangle yet again for the popular Miss Crawford. Miscast and uncomfortable, Joan seems to have been assigned this picture because, emboldened by her affair with Douglas, she frequently irritated Irving Thalberg by demanding better and stronger roles. Not above acting like a headmaster, the production chief instead showed her who was boss by giving her precisely what she did not want.
With her usual pluck, Joan turned her next film, a silent version of the successful Broadway musical
Rose-Marie,
into something of a holiday. Since there was location work that January in the Sierra Nevada range (doubling for the Canadian Rockies), she invited Douglas to join her when he could. “I felt uneasy as a French Canadian, but the critics didn’t notice.” In fact, they did: “Miss Crawford does rather a fine piece of work,” wrote one. “There is depth to her portrayal.” Another observed that, “as one of the most admired of the new leading women, this is just about the first time that she has been permitted to be anything but statuesque and patrician.” She brought her real-life alchemy of passion and vulnerability to the character, but her skill could not save the picture, about a turgid love triangle, a motif that was now a Crawford trademark. In addition, Rudolf Friml’s original score was nowhere to be heard.
Her next two pictures had a similar story structure. In
Across to Singapore,
produced quickly in February, both Joan and Ramon Novarro were, as she said, woefully miscast. In
Four Walls,
which followed, she was a crook’s gun moll, converted to righteousness by John Gilbert. The critics were impressed by this very different kind of role: her performance was “splendid,” cooed
Variety,
and the
New York Evening World
reported that “she simply walks off with the picture, stealing it right from under the nose of John Gilbert … This will go a long way toward lifting Miss Crawford to a point nearer the top in Hollywood circles, a point toward which she has been rapidly climbing in the last year or two.” That “top point"—the first of many in her long career—was reached in the next picture, which achieved a success no one at Metro anticipated.
Filming of
Our Dancing Daughters
began that spring—but after a few days, it continued without Joan. The reason for her delay in joining the cast was Metro’s dramatic proposal that she submit to dental surgery, to adjust her jaw-line and to straighten, cap and replace a number of her teeth. This has always been a common beautifying procedure in Hollywood and elsewhere, and Joan Crawford was but one of many stars who underwent various operations for the sake of their careers. But in the 1920s, such surgeries carried significantly greater risk than they did many decades later. Her sojourns in hospitals, all paid for by Metro, were scheduled with more reference to the doctors’ appointment books than the studio’s production schedule. This explains why Joan’s appearance varies in
Our Dancing Daughters.
On its release, however, the picture made Joan Crawford the equal in star power to Greta Garbo at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It also gave her an international prominence and respect she had not hitherto enjoyed; henceforth, all her pictures were easily marketed at healthy profits outside the United States.
The plot was concocted to exploit the wild lives of young people at the height of the Jazz Age—and therefore to entice that very same audience into theaters. “Dangerous Diana” Medford (Joan) is a wealthy, vibrant society girl—but she has neither the tarnished past of one friend (played by Dorothy Sebastian) nor the frank greed of another (Anita Page), who connives to steal Diana’s boyfriend, Ben (John Mack Brown). After the avaricious girl becomes a faithless wife to this upright fellow, she falls down a flight of stairs in a drunken stupor and dies. Now Diana and Ben are free to live happily ever after.
The movie was made as a silent, but it was released with musical recordings that were distributed to theaters to accompany the scenes of Joan’s Charlestons and Shimmies and for the sound effects of cheering and shrieking by the story’s silly partygoers. There were also recordings of occasional bits of offscreen dialogue, but the movie had no all-talking sequences.
Needlessly complicated, shallow in characterization and lacking any sense of pacing,
Our Dancing Daughters
is important only for what it reveals about a performer who is both star and actress. She rose above the material with inventive, wordless wit, finding subtle body language and facial expressions to convey what the lack of spoken dialogue could not; and she made credible the personality of a girl who has no reason to suddenly emerge as almost heroically unselfish. Modest about her achievement, Joan said simply that the film was “about a way of life I knew as a flapper who shakes her windblown bob and dances herself into a frenzy, a girl drunk on her own youth and vitality … But it was a field day for me: the script department was told to write strictly for me, and the picture had good dancing, good comedy lines, [and I had] good support from Johnny Mack Brown and Nils Asther. I loved every minute of it.”
So did the critics. The
New York Mirror,
for example, was not alone in proclaiming that Joan “does the finest work of her career.” As
Time
magazine noted, a month after the movie’s premiere that September, “Hundreds of young women [and their boyfriends] crowded the theaters where this picture wasshowing.” Long lines formed and tickets were sold for standing-room patrons. Within a week of its release, Joan’s name went up on the marquees. Her fan mail increased to thousands of letters each week, magazines and newspapers hounded the studio for interviews with her, and even she could not remain detached. “I drove around with a small box camera, taking pictures of ‘Joan Crawford’ in lights.”
Her publicity continued with another news story that ran nationwide at exactly the same time as the picture’s release. Douglas and Joan both issued announcements of their engagement, but they provided no date for the marriage. A year or two was added to his age and subtracted from hers when the proclamation was made.
On September 19, Douglas helped Joan move from her rented house at 513 North Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills, to a new, larger residence fit for a movie queen. Located at 426 North Bristol Avenue, in the western sector of Los Angeles known as Brentwood, this was a lavish estate consisting of a rambling house of eighty-one hundred square feet, situated on a tract of land spacious enough for a pool and guesthouse. Then and later, this was not exceptional for the neighborhood; among many others, Bette Davis, Cole Porter and Tyrone Power had nearby residences that equaled or even surpassed Crawford’s estate.
At the same time, Joan was busy at work, playing a gypsy girl who falls in love with a roguish prince, in a disappointing film called
Dream of Love,
based on a nineteenth-century French play by Scribe and Legouvé. She dismissed the finished movie as “another load of romantic slush"; as one New York critic observed, this was not “the right script material for such a fresh and vital actress.”
The studio’s on-set photographs of Joan, taken during the production of
Dream of Love
and reproduced in magazines and newspapers worldwide, surely helped attract the public, and much of this had to do with her costumes—from sultry gypsy outfits to exquisite evening dresses and ball gowns. For this movie, and for twenty-nine more Crawford films in the next dozen years, the designer Adrian was responsible for what she wore.
Adrian Adolph Greenburg, who changed his name to Gilbert Adrian and was known professionally simply as Adrian, was Metro’s chief costume designer from 1928 to 1941. During that era, he was responsible for the onscreen image of hundreds, including Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford and Janet Gaynor (whom he married in 1939). He also designed much of Joan’s personal wardrobe. “Adrian had a profound effect both on my professional life and personal life,” Joan said later. “He taught me so much about drama. He said nothing must detract. Everything must be simple, simple, simple—just your face must emerge … [and] he was so expert that he never made me feel as though I was being used as a clothes-horse in the pictures.”
THE PHOTOS AND THE
news of Joan’s success were particularly welcome to her family in Kansas. In October, her mother and brother wrote to her that they had decided to leave everything behind and live in sunny California. In early November, Hal and his new bride, Jessie, arrived at North Bristol Avenue, followed by Joan’s mother two weeks later. “That’s been quite a burden,” Joan wrote to a friend on November 22, “getting a place for them to live, and getting my brother and his wife jobs.”
Her family could not have arrived at a busier time in her life, as the letter explained: there were “thousands of exhibitors here at the studio having lunch, reporters from the four corners of the earth interviewing me, Mother’s birthday this week, Thanksgiving, starting Christmas shopping, more lawsuits, signing new contracts, still getting my house furnished …”
1
“If you can make it in the movies, with that funny face of yours and allthose freckles,” Hal said to Joan, “then I sure can.” He had not worked more than a day or two in his life, and now he was twenty-five. But he thought his good looks augured a surefire career as a movie star.
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” according to Shakespeare. So it was for Joan, beginning that season. Hal drank, he often stayed out all night with Joan’s car, which he scratched, dented and finally wrecked—and more than once, Joan awoke in the morning to find Jessie absent and some stranger sipping coffee at the kitchen table, after spending the night with Hal in his room.
She introduced her brother to the head of casting at Metro, but there was nothing for him until 1935, when he landed a job as an uncredited extra. After several months of this unpleasant intrusion, Joan found Hal and Jessie an apartment, paid the rent and hoped for some distance and peace. The following year, Hal began to complain that Jessie wanted an independent life; Jessie countered that Hal didn’t like being a husband, which suggested all sorts of unspoken problems. They were divorced in August 1929, after less than a year of marriage.
“Hal was a parasite and a drunk, and he made my life miserable,” Joan said many years after her brother’s death. “For over thirty years, I supported those two free-loaders [Anna and Hal], and I can count on one hand the number of times they said ‘Thank you.’ Hal was chronically mean, and nothing lasted long—not his jobs, not the men and women in his life. Liquor, then drugs, and always his distorted ego, took over. I supported that son of a bitch until he died.” Joan’s daughter Christina saw Hal’s decline for herself years later: “Mostly he seemed to be in constant trouble with women, with drugs and drinking, and finally with ill health. My mother bailed him out.”
Joan’s mother remained at North Bristol longer than Hal—until claims were made by several Los Angeles department stores where Anna (Joan recalled) “was spending money as if it were going out of style—hats, shoes, bags, clothes—she never showed me the bills, she just charged everything to my name and address—five hundred dollars at one place, four hundred at another …” Joan paid the stores, and then she found her mother a comfortable apartment; she also continued to provide support throughout her mother’s long life.
“She was old and tired,” Joan recalled years later, “but she was a good woman—even though she ignored me when I was a kid. She found life a lot easier during her last years. She was, you might say, intimidated by my friends, by anyone who was famous, and she preferred to stay out of the way. I let her live her own lifestyle, and that style included Hal. But I simply wouldn’t have him around—so her loyalties had to have been divided.”
Not long after Joan helped her mother move into an apartment, Anna legally changed her surname to Crawford.
1
The exact meaning of “more lawsuits” is impossible to determine. Some have claimed that Joan was cited as the corespondent in several divorce cases, but there is no documentary evidence to support these assertions. The phrase probably refers to the protracted legal tangle over the auto accident described above.
CHAPTER FOUR
Enter the King
| 1929–1930 |
M
ISS CRAWFORD IS
as gorgeous as ever and offers a vivid performance,” according to one newspaper critic, writing in early 1929. He was referring to
The Duke Steps Out,
Joan’s assignment for late January and early February; in it, she was (as she said) only “background” for William Haines, who played a professional boxer in love with a California coed. Nevertheless, the picture made a fortune when it was released in March, and the two friends again received good notices.
Following that tedious exercise, Joan joined every major MGM player (except for Garbo, Novarro and Chaney, whose contracts excused them) for an appearance in
The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
This plotless musical was designed to outshine even
The Broadway Melody,
which Metro had released in early February—that was the studio’s first all-talking picture and the first sound film to win an Academy Award as best picture.