Possessed (22 page)

In any case, Joan was far too busy to proceed at once with adoption plans. Because of an unfortunate overlapping of production schedules, her work on
The Shining Hour
that autumn coincided with her scenes in a monumentally ill-advised picture,
The Ice Follies of 1939.
Eager to replicate Fox’s recent huge success with
One in a Million,
an ice-skating extravaganza starring three-time Olympic medalist Sonja Henie, Mayer and company engaged the same writer and an entire professional company of skaters. The only purpose of the fragile story was to provide a long prelude to a twenty-minute Technicolor skating finale. Joan rehearsed with her skates during late-hour sessions, but she could not manage to remain vertical—hence she never appears skating in the finished picture. That hardly mattered, for her role was that of a former ice queen who turns glamorous actress.

“That movie was trash,” said Joan. “Everyone was out of their collective minds when they made this picture. It was a catastrophe, and the public thought so, too. MGM hired the entire company of the International Ice Follies and tossed in an old stage play they had sitting on the shelf called
Excess Baggage,
and Jimmy Stewart, Lew Ayres and I kept trying to figure out where we came in. Advertising art showed me on skates, but I was no skater.”

Stewart, appearing with Joan for the second time (after his small role in
The Gorgeous Hussy),
recalled that she was not aloof or temperamental, but full of tremendous vitality and always friendly. “We have both been referred to as perfectionists but being a perfectionist means learning your craft so thatyou can do it and not have the ‘acting’ show. It means being believable when you’re surrounded by machines and cameras and technical men with lights and everything else—that takes learning, and that’s when you can understand why Joan Crawford was so good at her job.”

ACCORDING TO THE CRITICS
, the public and everyone involved in Joan’s next picture, she was much more than merely good: in
The Women,
she gladly accepted a minor role and performed it to mordant, wicked perfection. Nor did Joan balk at assuming a part in support of her old rival, Norma Shearer: “I’d play Wally Beery’s grandmother if it was a good part,” she said famously, and she meant it. In fact, she had to fight for the part, which Mayer thought too small and too unsympathetic; she landed the role only after she convinced director George Cukor, who recognized how much she had learned from (and since)
No More Ladies.

Based on Clare Booth’s long-running Broadway play,
The Women
has a sizable all-female cast, each character concerned in some direct or tangential way with the leading lady’s unseen and unfaithful husband. As a satire on morals in American urban society and as a commentary on the emotional battering endured by ecstatically masochistic women, the play is entirely of its time and curiously difficult for audiences to enjoy in the twenty-first century. The invective is forced, the noble wife, played by Shearer at her noblest, is almost insupportable, and the constellation of ladies is variously irksome, flighty or downright pathetic. Only the department store salesclerk played by Joan—the husband-stealing, opportunistic foil for all the other ladies—is recognizably human, both venal and single-minded.

Once before, in
Our Blushing Brides,
Joan had played the role of a shop-girl—a job with which Joan Crawford is usually and wrongly associated.
The Women
is under way a half hour before her entrance, but when she is present, she demands the audience’s complete attention. Lowering her voice almost below mezzo range, she is the complete schemer, her words marinated in the oil of feminine wiles and egoistic seduction. She is the woman every otherwoman loves to hate, and whom many men would hate to love. Only very rarely did Joan play a thoroughly rotten character, and perhaps only this time was the role well enough written and the actress prepared to play it without a moment of artifice or mitigation. “I knew that Norma would walk off with the audience sympathy and that Roz [Rosalind] Russell would walk off with the picture, and that I’d be hated. All came true, but I gave a damned good performance and Cukor’s direction was superb.”

George Cukor had the respect of his entire cast; whatever their offscreen histories, the women received a full education in the craft of movie acting—and none was a more willing learner than Joan, who said that George made her forget her limitations and found subtexts for every line and reasons for every scene. “With George in command,” Joan wrote to a friend, “we are being guided every step of the way—he’s brilliant! It’s long days, but I’m loving every minute of it, so I always feel guilty for complaining that I need more sleep.”

“She was serious about improving herself as an actress,” according to Cukor. “She played the role with fierce determination, holding back nothing. As the bitchy shop-girl in
The Women,
she knew perfectly well that she would be surrounded by formidable competition from the rest of the all-female cast, many of whom were playing funnier and certainly more sympathetic parts. Yet she made no appeals for audience sympathy: she was not one of those actresses who have to keep popping out from behind their characters, signaling, ‘Look—it’s sweet, lovable me, just
pretending
to be a tramp.'”

But by all accounts (including Joan’s), she did not behave well toward Norma Shearer during the filming. She whispered rude remarks about her within Shearer’s hearing; she repeated her own lines in a quick monotone for Shearer’s close-ups, while noisily plying her knitting needles off-camera—and she spoke unflatteringly about Norma to anyone who would listen. “Joan did act up on that set,” recalled Sydney Guilaroff. “She shouldn’t have done that. In my opinion, Joan was too big a star to engage in such antics and jealous actions. It’s a pity, because Miss Shearer was really such a lovely person.”

WITH THE EXCEPTION
OF the ice-skating folly, Joan had received very good and often enthusiastic reviews thus far in her career. She received solid endorsement from everyone at Metro, where she was treated as both friend and investment; she was a favorite of critics and audiences; she had learned from directors like Brown and Cukor—and even to her hypercritical gaze, what she saw on the screen gave her fresh confidence in her dramatic abilities.

Now, after her most recent success in
The Women,
she was prepared to depart even more radically from any formula or preceding type of role. Cukor was right: she was serious about improving herself, and improvement meant the welcome challenge of new breadth and depth. Although she longed to work on the theater stage, she also knew that psychologically she could not, for she was terrified of live audiences. She wanted to be a star, she wanted the income, the perquisites, the awards—but, as she said years later, “I wanted only what I could deserve.”

For quite some time, Joan Crawford had been one of the Hollywood players who did not simply wait to be handed a role to play in fulfillment of her contract: she actively sought good literary bases, novels and plays that, her experience and intuition told her, would not only be good vehicles for her talents but also right for the movies. She read widely, she spoke with those outside the studio whose opinions she respected—and she often came up with projects that, although the final realizations were disappointing, had been selected with more than prudent caution and limited self-interest in mind. So much had been true of the direct recommendations or indirect pressure she exerted in order to assume her roles in
Rain, Letty Lynton, Today We Live, Sadie McKee
and
Forsaking All Others.
Joan was no scholar, but she recognized the value for the movies of writers like Maugham, Belloc Lowndes, Faulkner, Delmar and Lonsdale.

Thus it happened that she urged Metro to make a movie of Richard Sale’s 1936 novel,
Not Too Narrow … Not Too Deep,
which was turned over to
Mannequins
screenwriter, Lawrence Hazard. In short order, Metro approved what became
Strange Cargo,
which began filming in October. For the eighth time, and again at her request, Joan’s leading man was Clark Gable, even though they had to shoot other scenes while he was doing retakes and pickup shots for
Gone With the Wind.

Regarding her continuing relationship with Clark, Joan was completely realistic. “I don’t think Clark would make a good husband—a great lover, yes, and a fine friend, but I imagined him as an unfaithful husband. I didn’t think he would be satisfied with only one woman, even me, and he would face endless temptation. I was also certain that he would prefer not having as a wife an actress with a career on par with his—that he would prefer someone who could be happy simply devoting herself entirely to him.” That someone turned out to be Carole Lombard, whom Gable married in March 1939, just three weeks after his divorce from Ria Langham and during the production of
Gone With the Wind.

Joan also petitioned for Frank Borzage, her director on both
Mannequin
and
The Shining Hour,
to return for
Strange Cargo.
Born in Salt Lake City, he was known as a man for whom ethical, moral and spiritual values (but not parochially religious ones) were not just important abstract notions—they also infused and enriched his pictures. He foresaw the horror of Fascism in his pictures
Little Man, What Now?
and
Three Comrades,
and he went immediately from
Strange Cargo
to the intensely moving anti-Nazi drama
The Mortal Storm.
All but forgotten by the general moviegoing public after his death in 1962, Borzage acted in or directed more than two hundred films. Winner of the first Academy Award for directing (the film was the enduring fable
Seventh Heaven),
he was particularly adept at telling, in his own haunting and romantic style, stories about ordinary people facing adversity. No director could have handled
Strange Cargo
with more understanding.

THE PICTURE CONCERNS A
motley group of Devil’s Island prisoners who escape and cut a path to freedom through the jungle and then by a perilous sea journey. Led by a tough rogue named Verne (Gable), the men are joined by the cabaret performer and sometime hooker Julie (Joan) and by a mysterious, mystical figure named Cambreau (Ian Hunter).
Strange Cargo
is simultaneously a suspense yarn, a sea epic and a love story—but most of all it is a meditation on the nature of human solidarity, the possibility of forgiveness and thenature of redemption. This complex of ideas emerges in a film made with tact, restraint and unpretentious depth—a rare combination of qualities in Hollywood at any time.

The impressive and provocative themes coalesce in the character of Cambreau, a role given enormous dignity and quiet credibility by Ian Hunter, cast as an emissary from the world of the spirit who becomes both mystical guide and patient, wise counselor for the ill-fated prisoners. As many critics recognized, he is a Christ-like figure, but without the typically explicit Hollywood brand of saccharine piety routinely associated with that analogy. Compassionate but realistic, gentle and strong, Cambreau brings each of the characters to a recognition of his or her sins and a confrontation with their fears—and each to the point of contrition. In his comforting presence, four of the renegade men die from the rigors of the journey, and at the conclusion, Cambreau—after safely setting Verne and Julie back on land—bids farewell to a helpful fisherman, and walks into the distance. The final shot of the picture shows the fisherman, making the sign of the cross as he gazes after the departing stranger.

For her role as Julie, a wandering crooner and woman of easy virtue who is attracted to Verne, Joan insisted on two things: utterly realistic clothes and a downright haggard, drawn appearance appropriate for a woman struggling to survive in wretched conditions in the jungle and then aboard a sun-baked schooner. To this end, Joan worked with cameraman Robert Planck to achieve a deglamorized look, and she refused even a hint of flattering makeup; gone were the thick eyeliner and the long lashes. In
Strange Cargo,
Joan has the look of an ill and frightened patient, feverish and neurasthenic. And instead of the usual inflated budget for Adrian gowns—her outfits in
The Women
were said to have cost forty thousand dollars—Joan drove to bargain shops in downtown Hollywood, where she and a wardrobe assistant selected three dresses off the rack. The bill was forty dollars.

No one was prepared for Joan’s shockingly raw and unalluring appearance on-screen, and to some she was even unrecognizable. But she had wanted to do something completely different—to demonstrate to herself and others that she was a serious actress who had no need of glamorizing techniques to succeed. She wanted to prove that she was not a fashion plate or a model or someone who had just stepped from the pages of a glossy magazine—and so to hell with the glamour. She achieved her goal, and the picture offers one of her most deeply realized performances.

“We both had good parts,” said Joan of her work with Clark. “On the second day of shooting, all of a sudden, he said, ‘Joan, whatever you want to do and whatever you want
me
to do, that’s the way it’ll be. You’ve become an actress, and I’m still Clark Gable.’ I think he underestimated himself, but he was awfully generous with me.”

Joan and producer Mankiewicz wanted to do something “good, even fine” (as Mankiewicz said), and this they accomplished, although neither Hollywood nor the American public knew what to do with
Strange Cargo.
The professional dailies saw its virtues:
Film Daily
described the acting as “high-grade—Clark Gable fits his role admirably, Ian Hunter has never done better work, and Joan Crawford gives her best performance to date.”
Variety
agreed: “Crawford’s role is a departure from those handed to her during the past several years, and her characterization ought to encourage studio execs to cast her talents more properly in the future.” Perhaps surprisingly, in light of its usually condescending attitude toward Crawford movies,
Time
considered it “a formula turned into a highly unusual picture, compassionate without becoming mawkish, and with a strange power.”