Authors: Donald Spoto
Joan’s appearance was memorable in this otherwise unremarkable movie—not least of all because of “her clever use of those huge saucer eyes,” as Douglas said. “She knew how to use her makeup to carefully exploit hereyes, and she knew that if she held her head down and looked up, they seemed even larger.”
But her talent went deeper than mascara and canny glances. Her performance in
Our Blushing Brides
was an important step forward in her career, and Mayer and company took notice. Joan had dropped her silent-screen mannerisms, and she credibly conveyed the character’s emotional dilemmas and inner struggles with subtle expressions and small gestures; in fact, the picture may be the first full example of her effort to do less and imply more. “Joan Crawford displays a dramatic power and a fascination that overcomes all the little inconsistencies of plot and locale,” wrote a Hollywood critic. “We all know that she can dance, sing and make whoopee, but she can also be serious and has great potentialities as a tragedienne. It is time that MGM gave her an opportunity for deeper characterizations.” That time would come soon enough.
But first, Joan began work on a musical called
Great Day,
a production that was suddenly abandoned and forever shelved by Metro after important scenes had been filmed. It had not been successful on Broadway the previous year, but it had a few songs by Vincent Youmans that quickly became standards—among them, “Without a Song” and “More Than You Know.” At the insistence of Thalberg, who conceived the movie as a lavish extravaganza that would improve on the stage version, Metro bought movie rights. The screenplay was finalized, and the casting, sets and wardrobe designs were completed. Publicity for
Great Day
began, too, and still photos were taken of the principal actors in full costume on several sets. After long and complicated rehearsals, filming began in July.
But Joan was horrified when she went to see the early “rushes,” unedited scenes hurriedly developed for the review of a few executives and stars. “They were God-awful,” she said, and ran at once to Mayer, who had left the entire production to Thalberg. “I am dreadful,” she told Mayer. He went to see for himself. Whether in fact her performance was as frightful as she claimed can never be confirmed, but after he sat through some of the scenes, Mayer put through a call to Joan: “You’re right—stay home.” On his order, the production was at once shut down, and except for a few photos, all traces of
Great Day
vanished forever from Metro’s archives (including the processed film, negatives and all documentation). This represented a studio loss of almost three hundred thousand dollars (over $4 million in 2010 valuation).
The true reason for Mayer’s drastic action may not have had to do with Joan’s performance, but with the picture’s bloated budget, which was increasing daily—a situation that Mayer had already complained about to Thalberg. Joan’s displeasure occurred at just the right time, for now Mayer had his chance to bring the boy wonder down to earth from his high perch.
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As for Joan, she was (at least outwardly) placid about the whole affair, not to say sanguine. “The time had come to move forward,” she recalled. “I wanted to be a serious dramatic actress. I’d proved I could play the dancing girl I’d once been, and so I told Mr. Mayer, ‘Now let’s have something new!’ ”
BEFORE THAT COULD HAPPEN
, Joan took advantage of a rare hiatus, and she and Douglas repaired to a luxury resort known as the Norconian Club, three hundred fifty miles outside Los Angeles. When they returned home, she continued her redecorating chores and interviewed potential servants. “Douglas had been reared in style,” she recalled, “but I had not. I came from a poor family, and I came up the hard way. It was Douglas who taught me graciousness and introduced me to a way of life I had never known before, with servants and cars and secretaries.”
Some of her education in this new way of life also derived from visits that year to her in-laws at Pickfair, to which the young couple were now more regularly invited for Sunday luncheons and pool parties. “I was out to tear up the world in the fastest, brashest, quickest way possible. And then I saw myself through the Pickfair eyes, and every last bit of my self-confidence dropped away from me. Shyness overwhelmed me, and I got a terrific inferiority complex. Immediately, I set out to change myself in every way.” Thus began Joan’stransformation to society doyenne, a self-imposed metamorphosis sustained with her usual single-minded energy.
She longed to be regarded as the proper companion for her wellborn husband and more than merely tolerated as a daughter-in-law. And so she emulated Douglas’s every refinement. She studied French, engaged a vocal coach and learned opera arias, she learned to dress with better taste, and she toned down her hair color from its natural bright red to a sedate chestnut brown. She also read voraciously, picking up a book whenever she had a quarter hour to herself at home: the Romantic poets, the classics, history, the nineteenth-century novelists, Shakespeare, H. G. Wells and more.
All this effort to pursue what Douglas called her “self-improvement courses” was done with absolute seriousness. Vincent Sherman, one of her later directors and lovers, understood that after her marriage to Douglas, “she wanted to develop herself artistically and culturally. She was looking for identity, dignity and importance—and a more serious life.”
As word of the “new” Joan Crawford circulated and changes became visible in her appearance and audible in her conversation, she found to her disappointment that everything she did was counted as loss. In her early days in Hollywood, the gossips dismissed her as merely a hey-hey girl from the provinces; now that she was discussing literature and the arts, she was called high-hat. When Joan chatted with the crews at the studio, people said she was posing and accused her of currying favor; now that she conversed with visitors like conductor Leopold Stokowski or Lord Louis Mountbatten, she was tagged as a snob.
In these circumstances, she simply could not win, and eventually she stopped trying to convince people that she was at heart a woman who took life, like her career, seriously. Like many celebrities, she began to find it difficult to trust others and so did not make friends easily. In this regard, it is easy to understand why she often doubted people’s motives: did they like her for herself or for the cachet attached to her name and fame?
Fairbanks admired and was encouraged by his wife’s intellectual, cultural and social ambition, by her wide tastes and interests, by her acceptance ofpeople on their merits and not their social standing and, perhaps most of all, by her admiration for him.
One of the things that pleased me so much about Billie was her estimation of me. Everything I did and said, everything I suggested and recommended she received with attention and respect. Besides that, a part of her always depended on me. Whenever we were out in a crowd, she clung to me like a frightened child. People did not know that Billie was really a terribly vulnerable person, all during her life. A lot of her so-called toughness was part of the pose, part of being “Joan Crawford.” Only when she clung to me and I held her, protecting her from the crowds she never trusted, could she stop shivering with fear.
When we went up to Pickfair to visit my father and stepmother, he did not really have contempt for her—she was convinced that he did, and she was sure he rejected her because she was from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. No, what my father really resented was that the public now knew that he was old enough to have a married son and even to become a grandfather. Mary {Pickford} didn’t share that resentment, and in fact she became a very important influence in my father’s progressively warmer attitude toward Billie and me.
During the Crawford-Fairbanks marriage, there was a moment Joan never forgot—and it came from her father-in-law. One afternoon at Pickfair there was a discussion about acting in silent movies versus talkies. There was a long pause, and then Douglas Fairbanks Sr. said quietly, “Feelings are for silent pictures—thoughts are for the talkies.”
This was perhaps the single most important aphorism Joan Crawford took to heart for the refinement of her craft, and she thought the statement was worth years of formal dramatic training. Indeed, it expressed and confirmed what she had begun to practice, perhaps without awareness, in
Our Blushing Brides.
From this remark, she began to understand that the open, often grand gestures of silent pictures, once taken for granted, were meant to express feelings
in the absence of dialogue
—but that in movies
with
sound, it was important to convey thoughts visually rather than to rely on words. With the subtlest reactions, the blink of an eye, the lift of a brow, a tilt of the head, a slight movement of the lip or a finger, so much could be conveyed—partially by means of the judicious close-up, but mostly through the skill and sensitivity of a gifted motion picture actor who understood that, in the movies, less is more.
JOAN WAS ALWAYS HONEST
(and sometimes too generous) in assigning credit for her successes to directors, and especially to Mayer and his colleagues, of whom she said, “They took me out of the chorus line and made me a star, with all the money and preferential treatment that went with that magic word ‘star.’ And when I decided that I could actually become a serious actress, they tried their damndest to make me one. They helped me with coaching and had the guts to give me good, demanding parts.”
That kind of challenge, that longing to be “a serious actress in something new,” as she said, finally came with her next project—a dark and complex movie called
Paid.
Her role had at first been given to Norma Shearer, who became pregnant just as filming began; Thalberg then insisted that his wife stop work until the baby’s birth.
“Paid
was my first really heavy dramatic role,” Joan recalled, “and I did a good job—a damned good job, thanks to Sam Wood [her director] and a script by Charlie MacArthur.” This was the third (and not the last) filmed version of the successful 1912 Broadway play
Within the Law.
However one assesses Shearer’s talents, it’s virtually impossible to imagine her in the role of the brooding, furious and finally redeemed Mary Turner, a shop clerk sent for three years to prison for a theft she did not commit. Vowing vengeance, she is released, joins a band of thugs and almost fulfills her promise by hatching all sorts of nefarious schemes. But she is, of course, converted by the love of a good man—and saved from a life of desperation and crime by the memory that she had vowed never to return to jail.
This was a character and a performance unlike any Joan had previouslyplayed. “If I have to do one more of those three-girl, dancing-daughter stories, I’ll kick somebody,” she said at the time. “I like the drab. I like to play human beings in the gutter.”
Paid
gave her just that opportunity.
She affected a haunted appearance, at first dry-mouthed and fearful when introduced to the dangers and consequences of prison life—particularly in the provocative scene in a communal shower and later, in the company of crooks. Joan’s performance more than carried the film: she lifted it above clichés to the point of almost unbearable pathos. This was a multileveled portrait, unerringly right, never overstated but always restrained. Her glances communicate her feelings; her voice is always on a pitch proper for the moment.
Shot in only thirty-one days,
Paid
demonstrates that Joan could indeed, as she hoped, “be a serious dramatic actress,” and this was her “something new.”
Time
magazine, usually not so enthusiastic about her, summed up the general critical response: “Joan Crawford can hold her own with any of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s other actresses, including Greta Garbo.” The picture contributed vast sums to Metro’s accounts, and Joan received an envelope from Mayer: “In appreciation of the cooperation and excellent services rendered by you, we take great pleasure in handing you a check in the amount of $10,000.” This bonus, Mayer added, was in addition to the salary stipulated by her contract (then two thousand dollars per week).
No such good fortune attended one of Joan’s costars, Marie Prevost, who had been a Mack Sennett bathing beauty before she undertook a series of light comedies and melodramas. Marie’s sense of humor lightened several bleak moments during the production of
Paid,
and her performance as another jailbird was funny, disturbing and affecting. She continued to work for a few years, but producers—failing to appreciate her gift for mimicry and low comedy—told her that she ought to lose weight (although she was far from obese).
Depressed, Marie dieted mostly on alcohol. Eventually, she could not find work, and soon she was living in dire poverty. When Joan learned of her predicament, she tried to help, sending regular checks and sometimes delivering them in person. In 1937 Marie died alone in a derelict room in a seedy part of Hollywood. Her death was due to acute alcoholism and malnutrition, andher body was not discovered for several days, after neighbors had complained about the constant barking of her pet dachshund. Marie Prevost was thirty-eight years old.
DURING THE FILMING OF
Paid,
Joan continued to improve her acting skills. She began to study an entire script, not only her part—"in order to learn the overall story, and particularly my evolution as a character in relation to that story. I changed from A to B to C as the film progressed for the audience, but as far as the shooting schedule was concerned, I had to be A on Monday, D on Tuesday, B on Wednesday and so forth. So there I was, mini-talented and scared, but determined to make it—so I worked hard.”