Authors: Donald Spoto
Produced by Harry Rapf,
The Hollywood Revue
was devised to showcase Metro’s talent roster. Not entirely on pitch, Joan sang a solo (“I’ve Got a Feeling for You”), and her dance number, filmed without cuts and released unedited, was a bit clunky. She was also included in the final sequence, which burst into Technicolor while Metro’s stars crooned “Singin’ in the Rain.” For this number, everyone was outfitted in yellow slickers and drenched with a downpour of water; they seem by turns surprised, amused or annoyed with the inundation.
THAT SPRING, JOAN AND
Douglas secretly finalized plans for a June wedding in New York City, where Anna Beth was living with her lover, Jack Whiting, a Broadway musical comedy performer. Because his mother had agreed to witness the nuptials, Doug could marry at the age of nineteen; Joan turned twenty-three in March.
Details of the forthcoming nuptials were not released to the press, and Joan had to ask permission to be absent from the studio: “It was Louis B. Mayer’s rule,” recalled the Metro contract player Pamela Blake, “that no one should leave town unless one had his say-so.” This was duly granted, and then Mayer came up with the idea to cast the happy couple together in a movie—not a sequel to
Our Dancing Daughters,
but a movie made in the same spirit and style, about jazz babies speeding, drinking and dancing their way from party to party and affair to affair. The result, written and photographed hastily, was
Our Modern Maidens,
and Mayer decided to delay its release until late summer, the better to exploit the upcoming Crawford-Fairbanks wedding.
The picture was Joan’s last silent film and her only one with Douglas. She thought it would be great fun to name her character “Billie” so that he would address her in the story as he did offscreen; the writer and director did not object. After the movie’s opening quarter-hour montage of wild parties, the story gets down to its somewhat tired melodramatic business. Billie is engaged to Gil (Douglas), whose diplomatic career can be hurried along if she flirts with Abbot (Rod La Rocque), a man with good political connections. While she does so, Gil falls for a girl named Kentucky (Anita Page)—briefly but ardently, and with enough time to get her pregnant. The wedding of Billie and Gil is interrupted by Kentucky’s announcement of her imminent maternity, which gives Billie the chance to be brave and self-sacrificing—conduct for which she is eventually rewarded by being reunited with Abbot, a far better catch. Gil, of course, does what was once called The Right Thing and slinks away to marry Kentucky.
The protracted silliness of the movie nevertheless had its compensations during production. During one of the party sequences, Douglas was permitted to include his expert pantomimes of John Barrymore, Lon Chaney and John Gilbert—a skit that concludes with a hilarious imitation of his father as Robin Hood, complete with a feather in his cap. As for Joan, she was given ample opportunity to dance and even to join a jazz band, wielding her drumsticks like a pro.
The picture wrapped at the end of May, and Joan and Douglas left immediately for New York where, on the morning of June 3, they were married at Saint Malachy’s Church, beloved of actors because of its location in the theater district. As promised, Anna Beth was present with Jack, who apparently found the happiness contagious: three weeks and three days later, they, too, were married.
Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. quickly returned to work in Los Angeles, where reporters met their train in crushing numbers. The newlyweds were then invited to a very warm reception at Pickfair, where “Billie cried with relief” as Doug recalled.
On September 14, he accompanied Joan to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where, according to the hallowed movie-star tradition, she embedded her hand-and footprints in the stone court. “May this cement our friendship,” she inscribed above her dated signature.
Douglas was not asked to do the same. “I had no particular desire to be a personality like my father,” he said, “nor was I equipped to be one. I was determined to be my own man.” So saying, he began rehearsals for a revival of Philip Barry’s play
The Youngest.
Joan made herself a sort of volunteer theater attaché, carrying out the duties of box-office cashier for every evening performance, selling tickets and helping Douglas with his makeup. When word ofher presence circulated, the play sold out, and the engagement at the Vine Street Theater had to be extended.
“NEITHER BILLIE NOR
I had much opportunity to settle down in the conventional sense,” Fairbanks recalled, “we both worked too hard and hectically … [and she] let nothing stop her admirable though humorless dedication to professional advancement. Never, before or since, have I known any other professional who expended more personal energy on self-improvement courses and on her relations with her fans and the press as did the girl known as Joan Crawford. She went to dance classes once or twice a week, took swimming lessons and daily exercises and massage. Her powers of concentration were immense.”
For Joan, everything related to her career. “But I was interested in a wider variety of other people and things,” said Doug—and this caused considerable tension between them—as did, for him, the fact that his salary was half of hers.
“He wasn’t as ambitious as I was,” according to Joan. “He had a dozen talents and indulged them all in his easygoing way, but he’d never had to fight his way up the way I had, and he had no taste for it. I wanted Douglas, but I wanted work, too, and the rest of the time with him. I took my work with deadly seriousness.”
Joan certainly had to do just that for her next picture,
Untamed,
her first talkie. Because many film actors had poor diction, or voices that were too high or too low, or had accents they could not lose, a large number of them could not negotiate the new sound barrier and lost their jobs. At that anxious time, Metro engaged the noted Italian voice professor Mario Marafioti to help those with real or imagined problems. Having coached Enrico Caruso, Marafioti was in a good position to do the same for screen actors.
“I didn’t know enough to be afraid,” Joan said years later, but she did as instructed and made an appointment to see the professor.
When she told him that she wanted to learn how to speak for the movies,he handed her a copy of his book,
Caruso’s Method of Voice Production: The Scientific Culture of the Voice.
“Read it, child,” said the professor. “Study it.”
Joan was puzzled. “Learn to talk from a book?”
“Study the book.
Then
we begin.”
“But Dr. Marafioti—I start a talking picture tomorrow!”
He shrugged.
She politely said good-bye and never saw him again.
“So I just went and did
Untamed,
with Bob Montgomery"—the first of six films in which the pair costarred. (Coincidentally, Robert Montgomery was a great friend of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s.)
“BELOW THE EQUATOR’S PATH
across South America, the Valley of Zoro lazes through sunswept days and awakens to welcome each tropic night with dance and song.” With that florid opening title card,
Untamed
begins. Inter-titles occur occasionally in this movie, which was also released as a silent for the benefit of the many theaters not yet equipped for sound.
Untamed
is the unlikely story of Alice “Bingo” Dowling (Joan), who has been brought up in the tropical jungle and knows little of civilization—this we gather while watching Joan leap into a wild and sultry “savage dance.” Soon her father dies in her arms (after the longest death scene since Mimi’s in
La Bohème).
Bingo then learns that she is heiress to millions, earned from Daddy’s oil prospecting in the tropics. Her uncles then decide she is “not yet housebroken” and needs a little polish, so they send her off to New York. On board ship, Bingo meets the handsome but impoverished Andy (Robert Montgomery), who honorably refuses to marry her because he’s poor and she’s terribly rich. What a guy.
Manhattan does grand things for Bingo, and before we know it, she has perfect diction and manners, wears a wardrobe designed by Adrian and sings beautifully while Andy plays the guitar or she plays piano. She also wins dance contests and soon has New York society in the palm of her hand. She finally wins Andy, who is given a job in the oil business and so will match her dollarfor dollar. Joan’s performance in
Untamed
was praised for her clear and unaffected voice, but the movie did little for anyone’s career.
THE NEW YEAR
1930 began with a few weeks of free time, and so Joan and Douglas attended to some of the many tasks in the home he now shared with her on Bristol Avenue—"where everything had to be spotless all the time,” as he recalled. Then and later, large residences in Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades were built, enlarged, torn down and replaced in a lavish and often wacky mélange of styles inside and out.
The Crawford-Fairbanks house had, depending on which contemporary magazine article one trusted, ten or fourteen or seventeen or twenty-four rooms. Excluding the pool house and the later addition of a movie theater, the original residence seems to have consisted of twelve extraordinarily spacious rooms and four baths, including servants’ quarters over the garage. An issue of
New Movie
magazine thus described the place:
The house, which they call “Cielito Lindo” or “Beautiful Little Heaven,” is of Spanish architecture, white with a red tiled roof. It is set far back off a road that winds up into the green foothills. {There are] grilled doors, tiled borders, wrought iron stairways, artistic balconies and arched doorways. Cool pepper trees and tall palms supply shade, and there is a gaily-flowered patio. The interior furnishings are Early American, with rare old prints, Chippendale chairs, grandfather clocks, hooked rugs, Queen Anne chairs, Maplewood beds, curio racks, old glass, pewter bric-a-brac and Miss Crawford’s collection of two thousand dolls …
The walls and beamed ceiling of the living room are finished dull white. The carpet is tan. The draperies are of brown glazed chintz and a flower design of tan, brown and red. In the dining room, white walls set off the apple green rug. Miss Crawford’s bedroom has a great canopied bed with three hundred yards of antique rose taffeta. Her husband’s bedroom is
of genuine maple, with every window valanced
[sic]
in the same wood
1
, and there is a play-room {i.e., a den] furnished with black and white linoleum, a gilded baby grand piano, a modernistic davenport, a victrola and radio, all the latest novels, and a card table.
Like the fictional Auntie Mame, Joan went through a dizzying array of design and decorating styles. Previously, she had decorated the Beverly Hills house in what she and Billy Haines later called “Cocktail Chinese” décor. Then came Early American, followed by Italian Baroque. But with Billy’s help, things eventually settled down. She soon got rid of her massive doll collection, softened the living room colors, replaced gaudy brocades with modern white sofas and English antiques and chose Wedgwood blue for the accent color. The “play-room” lost its black-and-white hospital appearance, and a white Steinway grand replaced the old piano. The effect was eclectic, but basically the style was eighteenth-century English.
AND SO, WHILE DECORATORS
, painters and deliverymen labored that February of 1930, Joan worked on her next assignment, shot mostly in the northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley.
Montana Moon
is certainly the low point in her early career—a bundle of Western-movie clichés with an impossible plot in which she plays Joan Prescott, an East Coast debutante who travels to the wilderness, incautiously weds a real gosh-a-mighty cowboy (again, John Mack Brown, later Johnny Mack Brown) and then abandons him. On the way back to New York, she is overtaken by bandits and saved by her husband, to whom she darn well happily returns. There are also, incredibly, two Yiddish vaudevillians among the wranglers, and lots ofcowboys baying at the eponymous moon. “It was awful,” said Joan, and she was right.
Almost immediately, and doubtless with some relief, she started work on something more familiar. The characters in
Our Dancing Daughters
had grown up (but not much) to become
Our Modern Maidens,
so it was perhaps expected that they would turn into
Our Blushing Brides.
(That year, some wit asked if the next installment would be
Our Dizzy Divorcees.)
As so often, the title bore no connection to the story of Jerry/Geraldine (Joan), Connie (Anita Page) and Frankie (Dorothy Sebastian), who dream romantically of the proverbial better future while sharing a cramped Manhattan apartment and working at tedious jobs. Alone among her roommates, Jerry is cool and sensible, rejecting the advances of Tony (her employer’s son). Frankie marries a crook, while Connie leaps into bed with Tony’s caddish brother, who abandons her, thus precipitating her suicide. At the somewhat damp finale, Tony and Gerry are duly united.
The highlight of
Our Blushing Brides
is a musical fashion show featuring Joan as a model and Adrian’s designs as the wardrobe that every woman simply must have. This sequence, at the structural midpoint of the movie, suddenly turns the remaining action very grave indeed—themes of infidelity are introduced along with abandonment and suicide. It’s hard to avoid feeling that after the wardrobe extravaganza, the writers and the director felt that they had to take seriously the fact that the Great Depression was at its peak.
Critics reserved their praise for Joan: “It would all be quite lamentable if it were not for the humorous and intelligent acting of Joan Crawford … She carries the burden of dramatics in this photoplay and comes off splendidly and intelligently.” Even as the collapsing economy continued to affect lives all across America, people put down their nickels and dimes to see
Our Blushing Brides,
which cost $337,000 to produce and within weeks grossed more than $1.2 million.