Authors: Donald Spoto
The filming of
The Bride Wore Red
occurred during an anxious period in Joan’s life, for she knew her second marriage had by this time irretrievably broken down. As usual, work distracted her—but not from her concerns with the welfare of others. Dickie Moore, a popular child star who was cast in the picture, recalled the day when an electrician fell from the catwalk high above the set and landed not more than two feet from her.
A light fell on top of him, also narrowly missing her. I was whisked away, and production, of course, was halted. The studio ambulance arrived and he was taken immediately to the hospital. Eventually, the scene resumed. I was impressed by Miss Crawford’s concern for the man, for his family, for the medical attention he received. She wanted absolute assurances that he was cared for properly, that he remained on salary, and that his family was provided for. She would not resume shooting until those assurances were given, and she called the hospital each day for reports on his condition.
For all the expense and effort that went into making it,
The Bride Wore Red
was a critical and financial catastrophe, and even the fans were dissatisfied: “it was a waste of time for everyone,” as Joan said. Critics, weary of the familiar triangular goings-on in a Metro-Crawford picture, agreed—the picture was “a vapid Cinderella pipe dream” whose gowns and sets could not conceal its “underlying shabbiness.”
The film’s failure was particularly disappointing because buried somewhere in the story’s awkwardly paced episodes were provocative, satiric observations on a dying class system. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whose films were never released without his marked contributions, inserted these into the shooting script. But such points went unobserved, and the negative response to the movie apparently encouraged Mankiewicz in a paradoxical approach to the next project.
On the one hand, he played it safe:
Mannequin
returned Joan to her role as a poor working girl who becomes a rich wife (as in
Possessed, Sadie McKee
and
Chained
)—a formula that was always a surefire Depression-era crowd pleaser. This time, she left a shiftless, opportunistic husband (Alan Curtis) for a generous and adoring tycoon (Spencer Tracy), whom Mankiewicz deliberately cast because Tracy was less “movie-star handsome” than Curtis.
But there was another element in
Mannequin,
and Mankiewicz worked it out in the final script early that autumn, with Joan at his side. This time, in the role of Jessie Cassidy, she is not so much a victim of circumstances as a woman who shapes her destiny by wise choices and a will to work hard: “I’ll work in a chorus,” she says at one point, echoing her own past in words she added to the script. “I’ll work in a laundry!” By matching the character to the actress, and inviting the actress to participate in the creation of the character, Mankiewicz turned
Mannequin
into something more than a return to formula. “I took one look at those poor Delancey Street sets and knew I was back home,” Joan recalled. “I
was
Jessie—there was no trick in conveying her.”
Jessie appealed to the women of a postflapper era who had learned from the Great Depression not to rely on men for their economic salvation, and Joan’s performance was perhaps her most mature thus far. At thirty-one, therewas something knowing and wistful about her beauty—something that suggested the confluence of her role and her life. When Jessie is in love, Joan’s eyes are not blinded by dreams; when Jessie is outraged by her husband’s betrayal, Joan’s gaze is not naive but resolute. And Tracy’s unaffected performance as the magnate with a conscience broadened the picture’s social scope with a pointed political subtext about labor-management conflict and the rights of workingmen.
Joan’s only unhappy memory of the production was Tracy. “We whooped it up a little bit off the set,” she said, alluding to their brief affair, “but he turned out to be a real bastard. When he drank he was mean, and he drank all through production"—a habit noted by many others throughout Tracy’s long career. “He did cute things like stepping on my toes when we were doing a love scene—after he chewed on some garlic. Metro tried to costar us again later, but I begged them to let me off, and they did.”
JOAN HAD ASKED MAYER
to buy the film rights to Keith Winter’s play
The Shining Hour,
and she requested Margaret Sullavan and Fay Bainter—two experienced and respected actresses—as her costars. Reminding her that the three women’s roles were equal in scope and importance, Mayer tried to dissuade Joan from demanding such stellar coplayers: “Those two talented actresses could steal your picture!” Her reply was immediate: “I’d rather be a supporting player in a good picture than the star of a bad one.”
During the coming year, Joan was heard on no fewer than eleven nationwide radio dramas, several of them with Franchot as her costar. In addition, marriage on the rocks or not, they often traveled to New York for Broadway premieres, for Joan was also on the lookout for properties suitable for the movies. While in Manhattan on New Year’s Eve, she learned that her father had suffered a stroke at his home in Texas. Declining to attend a party, “she remained in her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel throughout the night,” as the press reported, “and she received calls from relatives.” On January 1, 1938, Thomas Le Sueur died at age sixty-nine; there had apparently been no contactbetween father and daughter, in person or by telephone, since their brief, awkward meeting in 1934.
Back in Brentwood, she routinely assisted, or even dismissed, those servants she regarded as less than fastidious. “The part of me that is ‘Craig’s Wife’ comes out every day,” she wrote to a friend in New York on January 25, referring to the character in George Kelly’s 1925 play about a woman obsessively concerned with the standards of her home.
Joan’s increasing obsession with cleanliness—her mania for an almost impossibly tidy and sanitary existence—was certainly a sign of her interior need to cleanse and purify, as much as it was a sign of her longing to unite her
actual
life with her
ideal
life, to join the reality of the kitchen to the art of her perfect movie-fake kitchen. The laundry assistant was a permanent part of her personality, and something in Joan prevented her from eradicat
in
g
it
.
IN MAY 1938, THE
Independent Film Journal,
published by the Independent Theatre Owners Association of America, fired a warning shot at certain complacent Hollywood producers. The results of box-office receipts (not mere popularity polls) revealed that certain names were “poison” for business—among them Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn. “Practically all the major studios,” ran the article, “are burdened with stars receiving tremendous salaries, whose public appeal is negligible.” The problem was not the actors, “whose dramatic ability is unquestioned … but the fact that their recent offerings have been so disappointing and their box-office draw nil.”
This was actually no news at all, and although the denizens of Hollywood affected to be shocked,
shocked,
they had indeed known this for some time. A month earlier, independent producer Samuel Goldwyn had said, “It used to be that one picture of a double feature would be bad. Now you got to expect both of them will be terrible. The American picture industry better do something, and do it soon.”
Metro’s response to the sight of Joan’s name on the “box-office poison” list was immediate. Scripts were to be much improved and productions to be designed more impressively, ran a studio memorandum—which meant more expensively—a situation that prevailed at least until wartime restrictions on movie budgets began in 1942. More to the point, Mayer at once concluded negotiations with Joan’s agent for a new contract—$330,000 annually over the next five years. “Box-office poison?” asked Joan rhetorically. “Mr. Mayer always asserted that the studio had built Stage 22, Stage 24 and the Irving Thalberg Building, brick by brick, from the income on my pictures.” That was no exaggeration. Indeed, the tight-fisted, cheese-paring Mayer regarded the financial failure of Joan’s recent films as but a temporary setback due to the quality of the
films,
not to anything like a lack of talent on her part. Had they seen her as no longer profitable, Metro’s executives would not have eagerly acceded to her agent’s demands and quickly closed the deal that guaranteed her a record income for five years to come.
The news of her undiminished star power and the continuing executive decisions that dismissed any notion that she was “box-office poison” might have been cause for celebration, but there were too many counterbalances affecting Joan’s life in 1938. The most critical reason for her intermittent depression was the failure of her second marriage, a union weakened by their mutual and ongoing infidelities—he with this or that leading lady or aspiring player, she with (among others) Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Spencer Tracy.
“Franchot loved the theater and despised Hollywood,” Joan said years later, “and I wasn’t as nice to him, or as considerate, as I should have been. I was extremely busy during those years, and I didn’t realize that his insecurities and dissatisfactions ran so deeply.” Her own dalliances may have been occasioned at least in part by Franchot’s alcoholic rages—"physical rows,” as she called them. Clarence Brown apparently wanted to knock Franchot out flat when Joan arrived on the set one day with black eyes and a swollen face. She told him that retaliation would only make things worse when she returned home.
Nevertheless, she remembered her second husband as “mature and stimulating. I missed him a lot, for a long, long time. The breakup was another career casualty. If I’d tried a little harder—well, who knows?”
FOR JOAN, THE MOST
unfortunate and certainly the most enduringly harmful consequence of this time was what she called “the drinking problem that began in my middle years in Hollywood.” As witnesses past counting confirmed, Joan’s drinking never affected her work: she had too much respect for the business to allow that to happen. “I used to have a few [drinks] before I had to meet the press, but at that time I handled liquor well. We all drank. The film community drinks more than its share—there were parties at home and lunches on and off the set. But I think the problem really began when I had to meet people—it was all because of fright, a type of fright worse than stage fright. Vodka relaxed me, chased away the butterflies, put a certain safe distance between me and everybody else. I didn’t cross over the line until much later.”
On June 13, Joan told a reporter from the
Los Angeles Herald-Express
that, rumors to the contrary, she and her husband were certainly not going to dissolve their marriage. But on July 20, they announced (via a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer press release) that they had in fact filed for divorce. “We regret this action, but we feel it is better for us to part.” That, of course, was typical lawyer language; in any case, the marriage was finally dissolved the following spring. “I hope we will always be friendly,” Joan told Judge Benjamin Schein-man, “but we could not make a success of our marriage. Mr. Tone told me that he was sorry we had married, that marriage was a mistake for him, that he was not the marrying kind and that he wanted his freedom.” Wed in October 1935, they had separated in July 1938—a union of less than three years.
THE SHINING HOUR
WAS
finally ready—or at least the script had been approved—for production to begin in August. Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas, playing brothers, joined the cast under Frank Borzage’s direction. This was another muddled romantic triangle (Crawford-Douglas-Young) complicated by the men’s jealous sister (Fay Bainter), who certainly seems to have incestuous feelings toward at least one of her brothers. Also on hand is one brother’s wife (Margaret Sullavan), a case study in self-sacrificing nobility. Unfortunately, the characters’ motivations were blurry, and for all the crisp invective and politely murderous conversations in an elegant country mansion, the movie is oddly uninvolving.
At several important moments, both Joan Crawford and Margaret Sulla-van come close to redeeming the picture with their restraint and dignity—but then something absurd occurs in the story, and everyone is left to founder. A singularly wooden performance by Robert Young and an overwrought one by Fay Bainter are at least partly to blame. The picture, which begins with Joan’s first long dancing duo in five years, is notable for her insertion of several pieces of her own autobiography, improvised on the spot between takes and placidly accepted by Borzage. “I couldn’t go to school much,” she says in character. “I was too busy doing shirts in the laundry, and when I finally landed that job in the chorus, it was too late for school.”
The experience of working with Margaret Sullavan was, however, extremely important in the development of Joan’s emotional life. Maggie, as friends called her, had been briefly married to Henry Fonda and to William Wyler, and in 1936, she had contracted a third marriage, with the theatrical agent and producer Leland Hayward. Their daughter Brooke was born in July 1937, and Maggie often brought the sixteen-month-old baby to the set, where Joan, for one, was thoroughly delighted with the tiny, well-behaved visitor. She helped Maggie with baby chores and looked after Brooke when her mother was called to the set for close-ups. To Joan, Maggie’s life seemed complete, more fulfilled than her own. “The baby and I were devoted to each other,” Joan recalled, “and I confess I permitted her [to do] what I never permitted a child of my own [to do]—she wrote on my dressing room walls with lipstick.”
At the same time, Maggie was again pregnant—a condition in which she took enormous delight, and through which she again sailed without so much as an uncomfortable morning. Children make the world of differencein a woman’s life, Maggie told Joan, who had suffered several miscarriages during her marriage to Franchot. Then and there, Joan Crawford resolved to adopt a child. Considering this a quixotic, transient desire, Mayer advised Joan to wait: after all, the notion of a single person adopting a child was all but unknown at the time, and her hope was almost certain to be stymied by custom, prejudice and California law. She took his advice, but not for very long.
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