Possessed (16 page)

Desperate, Letty goes to Emile’s hotel suite, intending to take poison in his presence. She empties a vial of arsenic into her champagne, but before she can drink it, Emile drains her glass. “Yes, I did it,” she hisses at him as he lies dying. “I meant it for myself, but I’m glad I did it, you dirty, filthy mongrel—I’m glad I did it!” At the finale, Hale and her mother provide Letty with handy, mendacious alibis for her whereabouts on that fatal night, and she is free to go forward with her marriage.

Letty Lynton
transfers to the screen none of the novel’s ironic gravity or drama, and all that remains is the possessive lover, the incriminating letters and the death by poison. But the movie does offer a superb Crawford performance that combines her trademark vitality with a sense of stern inevitability—not a shallow pantomime, as Garbo had delivered in
Grand Hotel
and which, at first, Clarence Brown thought might be apt for
Letty Lynton.
Once again, Joan found her own voice—for example, in a long dialogue in her shipboard suite with Montgomery, as they sit in opposite lounge chairs to discuss their aspirations. Both performances are full of subtle tensions and suppressed romance. She fears the exposure of her past, while he dreads that he will be an insipid companion. But Robert Montgomery is otherwise only a supportingplayer; the picture is Joan’s. She makes murderous intent and perjury seem the stuff of every socialite’s day.

SHE WAS COMPLETELY OFF
the mark in dismissing her next effort, for which she was loaned out from Metro to United Artists. As the notorious Sadie Thompson in Lewis Milestone’s film of Somerset Maugham’s
Rain,
she was, she insisted, “simply awful [in an] unpardonably bad performance … I was wrong every scene of the way.” This complete miscalculation of her achievement may well have been caused by the overwhelmingly negative fan mail Joan received about the movie: even her admirers were unable to see that the actress wearing tawdry clothes, portraying a woman of easy virtue who sneers at male hypocrisy, was not that woman in real life. The public’s negative reaction was a classic example of moviegoers rejecting a performer because they did not like the role: “our Miss Crawford” was playing the role of (gasp!) a prostitute, and the vast majority of the critics and public would have none of it. And Joan, always responsive to her fans as well as the reviews, nurtured an inappropriate contempt for her performance, which is actually one of the finest of her career.

The dreary exterior sets for
Rain
were constructed on rugged Catalina Island, twenty-two miles southwest of Los Angeles, which also provided close proximity to the deserted beaches needed to resemble the faraway South Pacific. Filming was a round-the-clock hardship for cast and crew alike: artificial rainstorms were provided by the studio’s special effects wizards, but violent squalls actually slammed the island almost constantly. Accommodations were modest, tempers grew short, and there was nothing to provide comfort or amusement. Joan counted the days until her assignment concluded. But her colleagues never saw her impatience turn to temper. At work, she behaved much as she did at home: “I do not recall her occasional anger ever boiling over into a temper tantrum,” insisted Douglas.

Notwithstanding her low opinion of her achievement, Joan’s Sadie Thompson is a fully limned character. “Your God and me could never be shipmates!” she cries out to the sanctimonious Reverend Davidson (Walter Huston), whocontemptuously sets out to reform her. During her long speeches, which rise to real moral outrage over his condemnation of sinners, Joan sustained an admirable, vivid intensity that was never merely shrill. The problem is not in her character, it is that Davidson thinks of God as an accountant, which Sadie cannot. “And the next time you talk to him,” she tells the preacher, “you can tell him from me that Sadie Thompson is on her way to hell!” (We know she doesn’t believe this, but it’s what he wants to hear, and she wrongly thinks that it’s one way to shut him up.) Joan knew when to cry out, when to pull back, how to underplay and how to reveal a soul battered by confusion.

With that, Reverend Davidson begins to recite and to repeat, several times over, the Lord’s Prayer—in which at last she joins him, whispering the hallowed, half-remembered phrases. So begins Sadie’s conversion and the emergence of Davidson’s repressed libido—both eventualities doomed when he rapes her, then walks toward the sea and slits his own throat. Author Maugham, director Lewis Milestone and Joan Crawford were quite aware of who was finally redeemed: Sadie, who utters the words of forgiveness and compassion even after her trust has been dreadfully exploited. Told of Davidson’s death, she turns aside. “Now I can forgive him for what he did,” she whispers. Moments later, when Davidson’s widow says, “I feel sorry for him—and I feel sorry for you,” Sadie has the last line: “Well, I feel sorry for just about everyone in the world, I guess.” Joan’s delivery—plangent, weary, without sarcasm—concludes the film on a note of quiet, pacifying wisdom.

Rain,
destined for a negative reception until wiser reactions were offered decades later, was finally completed in June. In her haste to quit the uncomfortable filming conditions, and perhaps to avoid traveling by ferry back to Los Angeles, Joan agreed to ride with a crew member in a small airplane. But the quick trip was also a frightening one. As they approached the mainland, a sudden, strong wind hit them violently for a few disorienting seconds. Joan and her pilot landed without incident, but she announced that it would be her last journey by airplane. She kept the promise for twenty-three years.

BY JUNE 1932, JOAN
had completed three demanding and important pictures. With her salary at almost four thousand dollars a week, Mayer and Thalberg would normally have rushed her into a new assignment, if for no other reason than to realize a continuing return on their investment. But
l’affaire Gable
was now an open secret in Hollywood. With the whispering campaign growing louder each day, Metro could not rely on the continued silence of the press—and once the general public knew about the romance between these two married actors, the careers of both would be jeopardized, and the studio would suffer major losses.

To separate the lovers, Louis B. Mayer cleverly announced that MGM was offering Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. a belated wedding gift. In 1929 their work schedules had denied the couple time for a honeymoon, but now they would have one—a trip to Europe. They were to travel in grand luxury, and by happy coincidence, their companions would be the Oliviers, who were weary of Hollywood and had work waiting for them in England.

And so, in late June, Metro’s publicists escorted the two couples to New York, whence they boarded ship for London. “Jill kept mostly to herself during the trip,” Doug recalled, “and it was clear that their marriage was as strained as ours. But Billie, who was extremely sensitive and always dependent on the good estimation of others, took Jill’s coolness and apartness for outright rejection. She felt certain that the Oliviers just didn’t think she was good enough to be seen with them. Of course, Larry could be a terrible snob, but I must say, he was Mr. Congeniality—terribly nice to both of us.”

Olivier, who was soon to begin working in London on a picture with Gloria Swanson, put many questions to Joan about her idol—and that helped to thaw the chill of the trip. Recalled Doug: “Larry told me—privately, of course—that he thought Billie was very bright, very observant about people, and that what she had to say about Hollywood was right on target and very helpful to him. I was proud of her.”

But there was really no help for the Fairbanks marriage, and the delayed honeymoon became in fact the calculus for eventual divorce. “I am sorry to say that I crept out of our suite at night to visit another lady traveler,” Doug lateradmitted. He was not so naive as to think that Joan was unaware of this—just as he was aware of her relationship with Clark Gable.

Things did not improve in London. The round of parties and West End shows to which they were invited provided pleasant distractions, but Joan felt ill at ease among British theatre folk, aristocrats and members of the royal family—a society in which her husband moved gracefully and in which he counted many friends.

Away from her normal round of hard work and achievement, Joan became acutely nervous, and by mid-July she begged Doug to book their passage home. As he recalled, Joan “couldn’t wait to get back to work. She was so frightened and felt so alien. She thought the public would forget about her, and that there would be no more good roles for her if she stayed away too long. Of course this was nonsense—six weeks wasn’t too long—but there was no convincing her. She wanted the security of what she could recognize.”

1
In an important shipboard scene, Joan wore an Adrian-designed outfit whose subsequent popularity put it into both the myth of movies and the folklore of fashion—the so-called Letty Lynton gown, a floor-length dress of white organdy with a ruffled hemline. Metro announced that tens of thousands of copies were made and sold in stores across America; this was completely untrue, but their story provided great publicity for the movie.

CHAPTER SIX
Mrs. Tone
| 1932–1937 |

I
WAS ALWAYS
an outsider outsider,” Joan said years later of her time in Hollywood. “I was never good enough—not for the Fairbanks tribe, not for Mayer, not for his so-called film society.” In fact, these people did not regard Joan Crawford as “never good enough.” That was a judgment she applied to herself.

Although the source of every feeling in adulthood ought not to be blithely sought in childhood experiences, it is certainly true that Joan’s lifelong tendency to see herself as a social reject derived, at least in part, from her unhappy backg ound. She preferred, therefore, the image of Joan Crawford that she herself refined, developed, altered and maintained by sheer force of will—and that image was not, despite the opinions of her critics, far from the reality. This had not so much to do with the roles she played on-screen as with the person she chose to be in real life, off the screen—someone who was ultimately a success, a living example of Cinderella who became a movie queen, not a mere princess. And this image was not a fiction—although there was no charming prince with whom she lived happily ever after.

Evidence that she was “good enough” for moviegoers—people who mattered to her more than any others—was waiting when Joan returned home from England in the summer of 1932. The
Motion Picture Herald,
a trade publication, reported the results of its recent poll of movie exhibitors in America, who were asked to identify “the biggest money-making stars of 1931–1932.” Joan Crawford was listed third, after Marie Dressler and Janet Gaynor but before Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer.

Apart from any consideration of her acting talents, Joan was celebrated in the many magazines of America. With the country enduring the worst years of the Great Depression, the glamour industry thrived as the single most visible escape mechanism—not only in the movies but also in the press and the fan monthlies. Metro continued to commission idealized, glorified and dramatized photos of the stars, none more than Joan Crawford, who posed for many hours each month for master still photographers like George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, John Engstead and Laszlo Willinger.

“She liked to pose,” recalled Hurrell, Metro’s senior stills photographer and the head of its portrait gallery. He collaborated with Joan on more than fifty photographic sessions over the course of a decade.

She was very pliable and gave so much to the stills camera. She really worked at it. She would spend a whole day, changing into perhaps twenty different gowns, different hairdos, changing her makeup … In a sense, she used {these changes] to present a new image that might possibly work for her whole screen personality. Every time, there was a different kind of lighting or different backgrounds or poses. Crawford had the closest face to Garbo’s—perfect proportions. Crawford had strong jawbones, her cheekbones were good, and her forehead and her eyes were good … She had a classic beauty and a kind of spirituality—practically everything she did was a picture.

After Joan’s death, Hurrell defended what some called her excessive vanity. Recalling that on an average day he took more than a hundred different photos of her, Hurrell added that after they had worked together for eight orten hours, he pleaded exhaustion. “But she never wanted to stop—she said, ‘Let’s get one more, just for luck!’ She was the most decorative subject I ever photographed. There was a strength and vitality about her that always shows in the finished print. If I were a sculptor, I would be satisfied with doing only Joan Crawford, all the time.”

Nobody wakes up in the morning looking glamorous. Hence the photographed Joan Crawford, like any other actress in Hollywood, was fundamentally a highly technical fabrication that transcended the ordinary. Something in the subject’s face had to be there to build on, but photographers were not paid to document: their skill was glamorizing. Most movie fans probably knew this when they admired and collected the photos, but admire and collect they did. In a way, it was the very otherworldliness that made the photos desirable.

HOWEVER IMPORTANT THEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN
to the studio’s fortunes and her own, photos of Joan were always an adjunct to the moving pictures. But during the late summer and autumn of 1932 there was no immediate project at Metro that seemed right for her, and the studio had to do something fast, for she was now being paid forty-five hundred dollars a week and had a long-term contract.
¹
In addition, the advance word on
Rain
was not good: the picture was, however appropriately, dark, its setting was unattractive, and its action was violent. Nothing about it was pretty, and on its release it had nothing for Depression-era audiences, for whom life was dreary enough, thank you.