Authors: Donald Spoto
In the role of a shallow Frenchwoman, Joan was all wrong, and she knew it (“I really wasn’t suited to the wartime melodramas they were turning out”). Although her emotions as a war victim are never less than subtle, she was always (and remained here) an American: by no stretch of a viewer’s imagination could she be regarded as a native Parisian—especially because she is surrounded by a cast speaking English in heavy German and French accents. Worse, she is shown, scene after scene, in a series of Metro’s most stunning gowns and in perfect makeup—hardly appropriate for an unemployed woman in occupied France. Nor was she helped by John Wayne, whose performance was carved out of wood. “Take John out of the saddle and you’ve got trouble,” she muttered years later. The talented Dutch actor Philip Dorn, as the apparent traitor, was cruelly out of place: attractively urbane and properly low-keyed, he endured the fate of many Europeans whom Hollywood imported and then wasted in inferior roles.
“Making it was hell,” recalled director Jules Dassin. After reading the screenplay, which had been tortured into submission by a squadron of poorly equipped writers, Dassin asked for a meeting with Mayer and company and outlined his gravest reservations. “But they wanted only to talk about one thing—Joan’s clothes and her hats. They wanted to dress her for her fans, and they were going to do just that—and this was talked about for hours.” Hence a character stripped of every resource and all dignity never appeared in the movie looking less than wealthy and dazzling.
Joan was tense and annoyed at having to appear in this dreadful concoction—hence her collaboration with the director had none of the easy confidence that had distinguished her performances when she worked with Clarence Brown, George Cukor and Robert Z. Leonard. When Dassin called “Cut!” for the first time and approached her to revise a scene, she turned her back and left the set.
That evening, Mayer fired him, but his unemployment was brief: Joan invited Dassin to dinner at Bristol Avenue and asked if he rated her a poor actress. He protested the opposite, but added that perhaps like any good actor, she could, from time to time, improve a gesture or a line reading during another take. She then instructed him never to call “Cut!” but furtively to draw a finger across his brow, and that would be her signal to stop and
ask
to repeat the shot. Anxiously aware that Metro executives were scrutinizing her every moment in the picture, Joan attempted refuge by playing the diva with her director, an unfortunate pose that she sometimes repeated (to no good effect) in the years to come.
“I think Joan was just about at the end of her rope,” recalled Natalie Schafer, who appeared in a small but effective role as the wife of a Nazi officer. “She wasn’t brutal or offensive to me or to anyone else, just tightly wound. I think she knew her days were numbered at MGM, [and] she was smarting over the assignments they had given her.
Reunion in France
was not right for her, and she just did not want to be in it. But she remained very professional in spite of all that. That was Joan. Whatever was going on in her mind, you might see glimmers of it in her expression and in her off-camera mood, but she was always about getting the work done and being a pro.”
The critics were merciless.
“Reunion in France
is glibly untruthful on serious matters,” ran a typical notice. “It infers [sic] that the French [Resistance] comes from its moneyed society folk and spendthrifts—hardly an ordinary French citizen appears in the film.” Making matters worse, both the situations and dialogue seemed to be lifted from a bad Italian opera, as when a dressmaker asks, “How can you expect a woman to cry at the collapse of an empire?”
Time
summarized the entire mess: “Whatever it is, it is not France.”
PUTTING THIS DISAPPOINTMENT
behind her, Joan was grateful for no duties more exacting than household chores and giving parties for friends and her daughter, for which no expense was spared. But she did not separate herself from the world. Before America entered the war, Melvyn Douglas and Edward G. Robinson had spearheaded a movement in which they asked Congress to end all trade with Germany. Joan was among the first to sign their doomed plea-for-peace document. After Pearl Harbor, she exploited her name by joining a group offering daytime care for children whose mothers worked in airplane and munitions plants. She also raised money for various medical and civilian defense programs.
But Joan was still bound to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in November she went back to work on yet another movie set in war-torn Europe. This one turned out to be a remarkable and effective entertainment, however. Based on a novel by Helen Maclnnes,
Above Suspicion
successfully treated the horror of war and the futility of murderous espionage by satire and allusion. Director Richard Thorpe economically guided Joan, costars Fred MacMurray, Conrad Veidt, Basil Rathbone and a large and capable roster of European actors through the episodes of a literate and witty screenplay.
Much of the success of
Above Suspicion
derived from its frank adherence to a formula already perfected by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s, in his successful seriocomic thrillers
The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps
and
Secret Agent.
Hitchcock had come to America in 1939, and after completing
Rebecca
had turned out the masterful
Foreign Correspondent,
which is virtually a template for
Above Suspicion.
All the major Hitchcock elements are here, enclosed within an espionage caper that involves a romantic couple unwittingly drawn into foreign intrigue as they try to uncover a secret in prewar Europe—precisely the situation of
Foreign Correspondent.
In their picaresque journey from England to Germany and the Tyrol, the newlyweds (MacMurray and Crawford) encounter agents and double agents, informers, underground Resistance workers, Nazi troops and unrepentant villains who (as always with Hitchcock) seem like the most civilized and sophisticated members of polite society. At the structural midpoint of the movie is a sequence lifted straight from
The Man Who Knew Too Much
—a symphony concert at which the firing of a bullet is timed to coincide with a
fortissimo
from the orchestra.
The movie pleased critics as
Reunion in France
had not. “The hour and ahalf pass like twenty minutes in this completely entertaining thriller,” read a typical review, “and Joan Crawford is a very convincing heroine.”
Above Suspicion
certainly seems to be a kind of homage to Hitchcock. The absurd story is spun so deftly that there is time only to enjoy the polished performances and the breakneck pace of the comic action. Although she chafed more than ever under Metro’s incautious handling of her career, Joan nevertheless created a portrait of a spritely, loving and confident bride who becomes a resourceful spy. Although she claimed not to have enjoyed the production, this is never apparent. As in
Chained, Love on the Run, Susan and God
and
When Ladies Meet,
Joan’s talents extended beyond flaming-youth clichés and romantic melodramas. The dark
film noir
roles and unsympathetic female antagonists were yet to come, but she put her producers and fans on notice that the techniques of first-rate, literate comedy were on her palette, too. Contrary to conventional wisdom, she had an acute sense of comedy and comedy timing. It was unfortunate that these gifts were not exploited more often.
1
Stewart worked notably on (among many others) the screenplays for Dinner at Eight, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, No More Ladies, Holiday, Love Affair, The Women and The Philadelphia Story.
2
Joan Fontaine won the Academy Award as Best Actress of 1941, for Suspicion; the other nominees were Bette Davis (for The Little Foxes), Olivia de Havilland (for Hold Back the Dawn), Greer Garson (for Blossoms in the Dust) and Barbara Stanwyck (for Ball of Fire).
3
After a second, happier adoption, Marcus Gary Kullberg was known for the rest of his life as D. Gary Deatherage.
I
IMAGINE YOU’VE
heard about our adopting little Phillip Terry II,” Joan wrote to a friend in May 1943. “He is just ten months old and has light hair and very blue eyes. He is such a little angel.”
Above Suspicion
had wrapped in February, and at once she asked for a leave of absence from Metro. This Mayer allowed her, aware that she wanted the time to seek and find a second child for adoption. “I was so pleased with my little girl that, after Christina was a few years old, I knew I wanted to have another child. I didn’t want her growing up alone.” So it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Terry welcomed a ten-month-old boy into their home in April 1943, and henceforth Christina had a brother they called Phillip Jr., or, more whimsically, Phillip II (after the sixteenth-century Spanish king and emperor).
For the first time in eighteen years—since the winter of 1925—Joan did not receive any calls, memoranda, ideas, suggestions, treatments or screenplays from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She had appeared in more than sixty films, had attained as much privilege and power as any contract worker and was among the most reliable and profitable players on Metro’s roster. But the studio neverconsidered her an actress of any stature: she was a star, which is something very different.
Things had changed in Culver City. Garbo and Shearer had slipped into effective retirement, and the attention of the corporate bosses in New York and Culver City was now turned to projects favoring Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Greer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, eleven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and a three-year-old male dog called Pal, then being groomed for stardom as a female named Lassie.
In such circumstances, what was an actor to do—change careers? retire? Not Joan Crawford. She simply found pastimes until she could resume working, and it was natural for her to pursue challenges or chores she could dispatch with the same urgency and energy she applied to movie acting. Now she was a more attentive mother than ever. She also broadened the scope of her volunteer work; she raised money to open nursery schools for the children of working parents; and she hosted receptions for servicemen on their way to war. When Phillip was not working on a film (invariably in a minor role and for a brief time), he helped her tend their Victory Garden—those rows of fruits and vegetables planted at homes across America to reduce the pressures on a public food supply during World War II.
Because the war meant a shortage of servants, Joan did all the housework: cooking, sewing, decorating, repainting and, with Phillip’s help, a fair amount of repairing and rebuilding. Most of all, she had her own intensive method of cleaning, which was a way of putting her seal on something, of exerting control, of making something turn out right. Her methods of housekeeping were excessive and needlessly repeated, but this was a benign compulsion. And so she scrubbed and cleaned and reorganized her closets, and then she cleaned some more, and applied fresh paint to the cupboards. “There were spells between cooking, cleaning, washing and sewing when I never gave movies a second thought!” Joan told columnist Hedda Hopper.
In June, she arranged a lavish party for Christina’s fourth birthday, and friends and neighbors were invited to enjoy magicians and clowns, pony ridesand a private circus—"a miniature Disneyland before one ever existed for the public,” as Christina recalled.
“Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina,” recalled Brooke Hayward (Margaret Sullavan’s daughter), who was a frequent guest, “was the most envied party hostess, because invariably she offered the longest program: not only puppet shows before supper and more and better favors piled up at each place setting, but movies afterward; besides, her wardrobe was the fanciest—layers and layers of petticoats under dotted Swiss organdy, sashed at the waist with plump bows and lace-trimmed at the neck to set off her dainty yellow curls.”
But life without gainful employment was ultimately intolerable to Joan, and so she went to Mayer. After two long and intense meetings, she agreed to Mayer’s demand that she pay one hundred thousand dollars to MGM to cancel her contract for several more pictures. For the rest of her life, Joan never uttered a word against Mayer—although she confided to friends that she felt shabbily treated during her last few years at the studio. Before and after Louis B. Mayer’s death in 1957, she spoke of him only with gratitude and respect, even when it became fashionable and profitable for people to complain of the bad deals they had been dealt, the unjust treatment, the harassments and unfair dismissals. “Mr. Mayer was a beautiful man,” she said as late as 1973.
On the morning of Tuesday, June 29, Joan drove to her dressing room at the studio. She packed her belongings carefully, carried them out to her car and then took her vacuum cleaner and scrub brushes inside and thoroughly cleaned the room, the small kitchenette and the private bath. When she departed through the gates of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios that summer afternoon, no one acknowledged that she had been a star there for eighteen years—and one who had substantially enriched the studio’s coffers.
“It was difficult to leave Metro after eighteen years,” she wrote to Lotte Palfi Andor, an actress who had appeared with her in
Above Suspicion.
“But when I started to feel too depressed, I suddenly remembered what lousy stories they’d given me, and then I got good and mad and walked out without a tear. The people I hated leaving were my crews—the electricians, makeup people, hairdressers, wardrobe. They really seemed like family to me.”
One worker who had been at Metro more than twenty-five years recalled Joan’s departure that day. “It was as if we had lost a part of our history,” he said. In fact, they had.