Authors: Donald Spoto
In her subsequent divorce complaint, Kasha stated that Hal was indifferent to her and “not interested in being married"—the same charge his first wife leveled, which may have implied all sorts of unmentionable details. Kasha then departed with her baby, who was, years later, known as Joan Lowe when she appeared occasionally as an ensemble dancer on Broadway (most notably in
Funny Girl,
in 1964). Despite Auntie Joan’s claims, she did not raise her niece as her own child, although she contributed financially to the baby’s welfare.
Offscreen, it was evident that over the years, Joan had learned a great deal from Metro’s hair, makeup and lighting experts. As Annette Tapert has demonstrated in an important book on the history of Hollywood glamour, actresses like Claudette Colbert and Norma Shearer never altered their particular signature looks. But Joan reinvented herself and changed her appearance according to the styles of each decade and the requirements of each role. In this regard, one of her most memorable talents developed over the course of forty years: her skill in knowing how to accentuate her large, expressive eyes, enhance her sensual mouth, exhibit to best effect her pronounced cheekbones and angular jawline and—thanks especially to Adrian—emphasize rather than camouflage her broad shoulders.
Joan’s cleverness at the vanity table and in selecting her wardrobe made her one of movie history’s unique and uniquely beautiful women. “I was a flapper in the age of flappers,” she wrote later, “and I became a sophisticated lady in the age of sophistication.” And she used in life what she learned in the movies: that wardrobe is like a supporting player—the face registers emotions, the body moves to express reactions. “Underdress,” she advised her fans. “Play down the accessories. Leave the startling hat or jewel at home. But for a public appearance, give them something stunning.”
From 1933, in response to Mayer’s injunction that she ought not to go out casually attired, Joan adhered to a self-imposed convention: she promised that no one would see her in public unless she looked like Joan Crawford, the movie star. No one ever did. As she famously remarked, “If you want the girl next door, go next door.” Convinced that this was as much a matter of respect for her craft as it was for her fans, it also had something to do with pride. “No actress living works harder at her job,” according to publicist Cameron Shipp, who knew her for thirty years and was echoing Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Similarly, Helen Louise Walker, a journalist who knew her well for twenty years, wrote that Joan “cares more than anyone I have ever known about what people think of her.”
One “startling jewel” she had to leave at home in 1933 and thereafter was a large, outlandishly expensive blue-white diamond ring that seemed to flash scarlet. This was a present from none other than Franchot Tone, with whom she was (as the saying goes) romantically involved from the time of
Dancing Lady
—an affair that interrupted her fervent dalliance with Gable. She was by then a trusted soul mate and confidant for Gable, and although they would from time to time be lovers again, their relationship after 1934 was often a deep, noncarnal friendship.
FROM THE START OF
the Crawford-Tone affair, Joan considered him “a different fiber” from anyone in Hollywood, her first husband included. But here she was in many ways off the mark: the two men were in fact very much alike, even in appearance, and her attraction to Tone suggests a kind of repetition compulsion—a desire to revise a situation in which she had once stumbled. “Franchot was the son of society, of wealth,” she said—but so was Doug. The difference lay mainly in the direction and arc of their mature years. Doug lived creatively and prosperously to ninety, leaving a legion of friends and admirers, while Franchot went through several fortunes and died penniless at sixty-three.
Franchot’s theatrical experience, however, had been substantial. Born in February 1905 in New York, Stanislas Pascal Franchot Tone was the son of ascientist who became an enormously rich corporate director. While studying languages at Cornell University, Franchot acted in plays, and after graduating and rejecting the family’s offer to enter their prospering business, he went to New York to pursue a career in the theatre.
From 1928 to 1933, Tone appeared in no fewer than fifteen prestigious Broadway productions, in which his costars were the likes of Katharine Cornell, Sylvia Sidney and Ruth Gordon. He was a charter member of the influential Group Theatre, founded by Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, and he worked with Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, San-ford Meisner and Lee J. Cobb. His achievements onstage soon attracted the interest of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and he quit New York for Hollywood.
In
Today We Live,
Franchot gave an awkward, mannered performance for which his stilted faux-British accent was no help. But in Joan’s eyes, he could do no wrong. “I saw him watching me [during the shooting of
Today We Live],
his great, thinking eyes so penetrating, a little crooked smile on his aesthetic face … and his well-trained, scintillating mind stimulated mine.” At her home after their workdays, he read Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw aloud to her, and while she hooked a rug, he hooked her. “He taught me to respect my own mind—not just to absorb things emotionally, but to
think
… [and] we both started studying opera. He was imaginative and charming.”
When
Dancing Lady
was completed, Franchot whisked Joan away to New York, to see the Group Theatre’s production of Sidney Kingsley’s play
Men in White.
After the final curtain, Franchot whispered to her: “Here’s where we’ll be someday—you and I, Joan—in the
theatre,
where you belong.” She was flattered and excited by his confidence and respect. Perhaps she should also have sensed a certain danger. “His dignity, culture and charm were entrancing,” she continued. “So why fight it?”
For two years, Joan and Franchot were a couple in every way except legally. He was Professor Higgins (if not Svengali); she was Eliza Doolittle (if not Trilby). For much of the time, the uneducated, always insecure Joan was receiving more from the polished, confident Franchot than she could have dreamed—or so she said. She seemed not to know, nor did she acknowledge (as did he), that he had come to Hollywood completely ignorant of the demands and skills necessary for film acting. In short order and with her typical intensity, she gave him the equivalent of a four-year course of study in studio lighting, voice modulation, makeup, subtle reactions—everything she had mastered while appearing in four dozen films during the previous eight years. To the press, she repeated that she would not marry again, and the more she insisted, the more Franchot pressed his case. He was with her when she received notice of her final divorce decree from Doug, in May 1934.
That news came just as Joan and Franchot were completing their third collaboration—
Sadie McKee,
produced from February to April. In this uneven movie, which hovers between romantic melodrama and low comedy, the hands of many writers were all too evident, for the plot has twists past counting. Joan played the title role of a housemaid for a rich family. She goes to New York, survives three troubled relationships and becomes remarkably mature and self-sacrificing before she is rewarded with serenity, wealth and true love.
Episodic though it is, Joan had several poignant scenes and a few deliciously comic moments in which she mimicked being riotously drunk, and her final scene is moving without arch sentiment: at the bedside of a dying former lover who abandoned her, she is forgiving and compassionate, avoiding all traces of movie mush. As for Franchot, he still seemed uncertain, overacting rather childishly for the camera; in addition, the role of a privileged playboy was wearing thin for him and moviegoers. “I was pretty unhappy with the way the picture was cut,” Joan wrote to her friend Genie Chester in New York on May 17. “Perhaps it will make sense, but I doubt it.”
2
From
Sadie McKee,
she hurried at once into
Chained,
another picture with Clark Gable. At the same time, Mayer and Thalberg put Franchot in
The Girl from Missouri,
a Jean Harlow comedy. Completed in July,
Chained
was essentially a comic-romantic piece about a love triangle in which Joan falls for a wealthy rancher (Gable) while she is the mistress of an equally wealthy but married tycoon (Otto Kruger) whose wife will not agree to a divorce. Absurdly titled and drenched in high fashion,
Chained
is nevertheless noteworthy in relation to two events in Joan’s life.
Just as the production began, a weary man arrived nervously at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s front gates, announced himself and was shown to the soundstage where Clarence Brown was about to film close-ups of Joan sipping a cocktail. While key lights were rearranged, the visitor was taken over to meet the star. He was, he said shyly, Thomas Le Sueur, her father—a man she perhaps knew was still alive but of whom she had not the remotest memory. After a few moments in the hot spotlight of a movie set, he faded back into the darkness of her history as the baby girl he had abandoned. They never met again.
A far happier event during the production of
Chained
involved Joan and Clark. For all his efforts to separate them, Mayer now behaved with astonishing perversity, insisting that they be reunited romantically on-screen. In this picture, the two friends shared several unusually long dialogue scenes, set in a ship’s swimming pool and at lunch. The script they received for these sequences consisted of inconsequential remarks intended to be mere filler but disguised as exchanges—and after the two actors had seen their lines, they agreed to take matters into their own hands. When the scenes were filmed, Joan and Clark improvised their own dialogue, ad-libbing hilariously to the point that they both broke up with laughter—as did the crew and, later, audiences. The swimming scene was particularly effective, as they glided smoothly back and forth through the water, chatting, politely arguing and giggling uncontrollably.
Wisely, Clarence Brown kept his camera rolling, and these scenes are forever memorable for what they reveal about the comic inventiveness and expert timing of two professionals who had become quite comfortable working together—and who were gifted at devising spur-of-the-moment lines and gestures to lift the movie out of its nearly terminal torpor. If only for thesemoments,
Chained
continues to reward viewers decades later. Clarence Brown had been right and Joan wrong when she protested, at the start of production, that she believed she was “too stiff” to play comedy. “Joan, goddammit,” he told her, “you’re one of the three actresses in this town who can do anything, so do it!” And so she did, although she never learned whom else Brown had in mind.
CRAWFORD AND GABLE HAD
no need to improvise lines for the next assignment, their sixth together. The script (yet another romantic triangle) was the work of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, adapting a Broadway play of the previous year. He worked with Joan as the writer and/or producer on no fewer than nine Crawford movies, and their collaboration was memorable. “Whatever I can contribute technically to a characterization,” Joan said years later, “I learned through the years working with Joe Mankiewicz. He was first a writer, then a producer-writer, and we worked closely together—it was one of the happiest times of my professional life. As we worked on new scripts, I was allowed to sit day after day during writer-director-producer discussions, listening to each new development of the story and the characters.”
3
Production of
Forsaking All Others
began in September, just weeks after the premiere of
Chained.
Franchot had hoped to be included in the new picture, but Metro kept him busy elsewhere; in 1934 he appeared in six films, most of them on loan-outs to other studios. But he was indifferent to the roles and begged Mayer to put him back to work again with Joan. He also bristled when he learned that the role he had coveted in Joan’s next movie had gone to Robert Montgomery.
Forsaking All Others
expanded the limitations of action imposed by its theatrical antecedent and simultaneously exploited the new screwball comedygenre, with its variations on the abandoned bride, an unsuitable groom and, eventually, the right man—all of it punctuated by satiric sideswipes at the idle rich and slapstick races through the countryside. Mankiewicz and director W. S. Van Dyke sharpened the story of a woman who has been pursuing the wrong man since childhood—until he becomes the right man, and then the wrong man again. None of this confusion mattered: it was the breakneck speed of the story and the sheer, sleek, art-moderne beauty of the actors and the sets that audiences loved. “This is one of Miss Crawford’s best performances,” noted the critic for
Variety,
pleased that the “tongue-in-cheek moralizing” of her recent movies was not to be heard.
From the opening scenes—a long sequence in which Joan receives an almost sadistically tough workout from a German masseuse while welcoming friends—she dealt neatly with any objection that she could not handle comedy. Her timing was deft, her gestures modulated, her voice more varied in pitch than previously.
The production posed no problems—but when the script and the edited picture were presented to the recently formed board of Hollywood censors,
Forsaking All Others
ran into trouble. The administrators of the Motion Picture Production Code fumed when they heard the words
tramp
and
sex appeal
and they demanded more polite language; otherwise they threatened to withhold their seal of approval, which meant that very few theaters would screen the movie. In addition, the censors did not like very proper scenes in which people took showers, even if only their heads were photographed. Nor did they approve of unmarried characters staying in the same hotel, unless they resided in separate suites and preferably on distantly separated floors. But somehow they ignored lines like “I could make a fire by rubbing two Boy Scouts together"—spoken on a cold and rainy night by Montgomery when he needs firewood. Van Dyke, Mankiewicz and producer Bernard Hyman yielded to the censors on a few minor points, but they simply ignored most of the foolish objections. The film went out with a seal of approval and made a fortune.