Authors: Donald Spoto
Louise was perhaps the most difficult role Joan had yet undertaken, for it would have been easy to get her wrong—to play the woman merely as a terrifying psychotic, and so to risk losing her audience. Instead, Joan found the woman beneath the tragedy, and so made Louise comprehensible, if not particularly warm and likable. And yet at odd moments, Bernhardt seems not to have exerted control over his star. Occasionally, Joan is uncharacteristically somewhat over the top, and she reverts too often to silent-movie histrionics—as, for example, when her eyes widen with madness, and when (far too often) she wrings her hands and then runs them through her hair.
Those moments of fake hysteria notwithstanding, she was nominated for a second Academy Award (but lost to Loretta Young, who played a much cozier farmer’s daughter).
The picture opens with disjointed shots of a distracted, neurasthenic woman wandering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Taken to the hospital in a state of catatonic withdrawal, she is treated by doctors—and so begins the story, told in a long flashback, precisely the structural framing device used in
Mildred Pierce
and
Humoresque.
Joan dominates the action, “performing [as critic James Agee wrote] with the passion and intelligence of an actress who is not content with just one Oscar.” Indeed, she seemed to
demand
another statuette.
This was a portrait of a woman possessed by a derailed notion of love—something Joan knew not only from her hospital visits and research meetings with psychiatrists that summer, but also from her ongoing relationship with Bautzer, which existed on a level very close to psychosis. The character of Louise Howell and the personality of Joan Crawford were more than uninhibited: they were often on the edge of destruction that year.
Not all troubled women find their way to treatment. Some, like Louise, kill; others, not so far gone, like Joan, merely flirt with the madness of multileveled possession. In considering the fusion of actress and role, it is critical to recall that these were projects and characters Joan Crawford fought to play, and she played them with an almost manic intensity precisely because something of them existed in her. Actors, after all, have no other raw material with which to work than their own experiences, their intuitions and their correspondences with those they wish to represent, however briefly. No wonder
Possessed
was both unpleasant and frightening for its star. No wonder, too, that she required an interval before she felt well enough to begin another movie.
1
In 1943, Postman was filmed in Italy by Luchino Visconti, as Ossessione; it was remade in Hollywood under its original English title in 1945. Billy Wilder’s movie of Double Indemnity was released in September 1944.
2
Contrary to rumor, only Joan was offered the title role; see LaValley, 47. But he is wrong in stating that Scott, Arden and Blyth were not hired until January 1945: the “Daily Production and Progress Report” sheets for Mildred Pierce indicate that these players worked as early as December 13, 1944.
3
The Warner Bros. script library at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research contains scripts for Mildred Pierce written by Catherine Turney, Margaret Gruen, William Faulkner, Louise Pierson Randall and Ranald MacDougall.
4
Some accounts wrongly claim that Joan inherited the role in Possessed when Bette Davis went on maternity leave before the birth of her daughter Barbara. But this could not have been the case: Joan signed the contract for Possessed in March 1946, and Davis’s child was not born until May 1947.
CHAPTER TEN
Children! Children!
| 1947–1951 |
M
ILDRED PIERCE, HUMORESQUE
and
Possessed
were enormously successful movies, and this trilogy restored Joan Crawford to secure stardom worldwide. Her agent could therefore renegotiate her Warners contract for $250,000 per picture, for which once again Joan had the right to approve every screenplay, director and leading man. But for her first movie under the new deal, she was loaned out to Twentieth Century-Fox, for Otto Preminger’s production of Elizabeth Janeway’s fine, best-selling novel
Daisy Kenyon.
“I seem to be the follow-up girl,” she said at a dinner party given by Billy Haines and Jimmy Shields in February 1947. “I’m to make a picture
[Daisy Kenyon]
at 20
th
that was intended for Gene Tierney, and I’m negotiating with Columbia about doing
No Sad Songs for Me,
which Irene Dunne stepped out of.” In reply, another guest at dinner observed aloud that this was a pattern: Joan had followed Lana Turner in Greg Bautzer’s affections. Her reply has not been documented.
1
While the screenplay for the Preminger picture went through the usual revisions, Joan again contacted baby brokers. Eager to give more children a home, she was informed that illegitimate twin girls had been born on January 13 in Dyersburg, a small town in western Tennessee. A week later, their mother died of kidney failure, and the babies were deposited in an orphanage known as the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, in Memphis. In fact, this place was a notorious cover for the kidnapping and illegal sale of children, an operation under the control of none other than Georgia Tann, Joan’s baby broker. In September, the twins were brought to her in Los Angeles after the adoption had already been legalized outside California’s jurisdiction. She named the babies Catherine and Cynthia, and they were always called Cathy and Cindy.
2
Daisy Kenyon
was produced that summer of 1947 and released at year’s end. Joan worked amiably with costars Dana Andrews and Henry Fonda, and she described director Otto Preminger as “the kindest, sweetest man"—not a typical sentiment about a man with the reputation of reducing actors to tears, nervous collapse and feverish anxiety. None of those involved in the production of
Daisy Kenyon
retained a high regard for it—which is odd, for it not only offers one of Joan’s most forthright and warm performances, but also showcases her in a story of striking complexity and maturity, one of her most important and appealing pictures. Joan was fortunate to work with Andrews and Fonda, first-rate actors she specifically requested, both of them remarkable in this movie for giving deeply affecting performances.
Very faithful to the novel, the film tells of Daisy, a commercial artist living in New York’s Greenwich Village, an independent woman with a busy career and a complicated love life. A long and frustrating affair with a married lawyer (Andrews) is made even more complicated when she responds to the attentions of an Army veteran (Fonda) haunted by the death of his wife and by his experiences in the war. The structure of the picture, a kind of realistromance, follows not only the course of her romantic dilemma—which man will claim her in marriage?—but also the challenges facing career women in postwar America. A clever woman who knows how to exploit her feminine wiles, Daisy is neither hypocrite nor femme fatale. Instead of status or wealth, she yearns for love—but not at the price of her career.
Daisy Kenyon
presents, with a rare kind of emotional honesty, a trio of credible adults struggling with unhappy situations. After the labyrinthine psychological corridors of the previous three Crawford films, this was a refreshing return to more everyday situations, but it was no less dramatically compelling. Joan employed neither tics nor tricks, and Preminger paced her scenes—composed mostly of intelligent dialogue—with admirable respect for the integrity of the story and the feelings of the characters.
3
THE MOVIE WAS COMPLETED
in early autumn 1947—just as the twins were being settled into their new home—and for the next year, Joan did not work on any picture. Although she read scripts and literary properties constantly, most of her energies were now spent attending to the children. She was also trying to sort out her increasingly violent relationship with Greg Bautzer, which did not end until 1949.
By 1948, Christina Crawford was eight years old and quite naturally beginning to assert her own personality. In her late twenties, she began to compile notes for a memoir of her childhood and young adult years. Redrafted, edited and given focus by New York editors, Christina’s voluminous but disorganized pages were eventually turned into a book, thanks to the sheer tenacity of the publisher; it was released the year after Joan’s death with the title
Mommie Dearest.
In light of what occurred in the children’s lives from the late1940s onward, it is worthwhile to consider the contents and claims of this controversial book at this point in an account of Joan’s life.
There is a strange and enduring paradox about
Mommie Dearest
and its author—indeed, there seems to be a glaring logical flaw at its center.
Christina Crawford asserted that her life was blighted by Joan’s cruelty. But from the age of ten—precisely when she claims the punitive disciplinary acts shifted into full gear—Christina was in fact having considerable success at several schools, where she enjoyed the admiration of her teachers and the friendship of her classmates. From her elementary years through her college education, she achieved high marks and was awarded diplomas and degrees with honors. She worked hard from a very early age, trying to be as successful, in her way, as her mother.
Mommie Dearest,
and the grotesque 1981 movie based on it, shaped a lasting but unbalanced view of Joan Crawford that endured for decades after. Downplaying Joan’s talents, the collective significance of her movies, and her impact on popular culture, Christina portrayed her mother as a monstrously abusive, alcoholic tyrant. Virtually all other considerations of Joan’s life and career were minimized or dismissed. With the passing of years and the accumulated witness of other voices than Christina’s, it became clear that
Mommie Dearest
offered at the least an overstated, skewed image of its subject. At its worst, it was a vituperative act of revenge after Joan excised her two oldest children from her will after many years of discord. “When Joan didn’t include [Christina] in her will,” according to Nolan Miller, one of Joan’s couturiers, “Christina wrote the book as a retaliation.” He was not alone in this opinion, which was shared by a legion of Joan’s friends—and by Joan’s adopted twins.
4
The tone of Christina’s book is summed up in her own words: “That evil goddamned BITCH!!!” she wrote. “She’s just a mean, rotten bitch to the marrow of her bones … God, I hated her.” Throughout, the text is not remarkable for nuance or understatement.
Christina’s reasons for her undiluted antipathy were put forth unambiguously: Joan, she contended, was a fierce disciplinarian who inflicted painful corporal punishment for minor acts of disobedience, withheld meals for venial infractions of household regulations and inflicted horrific penalties during bouts of alcoholic delirium.
Perhaps most notoriously, according to Christina, Joan became psychotic with rage when she went to her daughter’s closet and found some of the clothes suspended on wire hangers instead of the upholstered ones mandated to prevent stretch marks on the fabrics. This incident, which inspired the movie’s most bizarre and infamous scene, actually reflected a time when Joan
forbade
hangers rather than a time when she nearly killed the child for
using
those hangers. (Christina never wrote that she was beaten
with
wire hangers, but rather that she was beaten
because
she had wire hangers in her closet.)
But the truth of the matter is that the laundry company and the dry cleaners to which Joan entrusted the family’s clothes were under strict instructions to return all clothing on the richly covered hangers Joan provided. Could the company have failed once and thus caused Joan’s irrational outburst? Possibly—except that the task of returning the clothes to the wardrobes after the deliveries was assigned to the housekeeper. Had this instruction been contravened or omitted, heads (or at least jobs) would have rolled. Hence, the episode of the hangers refers to an injunction from Joan reworked by Christina as an actual event that precipitated a mad scene worthy of Italian opera.
The horror stories accumulate in
Mommie Dearest
almost without interruption. According to Christina, Joan tore to shreds the child’s favorite dress after the girl absentmindedly picked at a piece of wallpaper. On one occasion, Joan supposedly tied up Christina in the shower; on another, she locked her in a linen closet. Christina also implied that her mother was constitutionally incapable of seeing anything wrong with this kind of tyrannical behavior, for which Joan never apologized.
unfortunately, Christina’s credibility was not strengthened by the manyerrors of simple fact that crept into her book—mistakes that could have been corrected before the book was rushed into print. She states, for example, that she was “not yet ten years old"—that is, it was before June 1949—when Yul Brynner came to the house in Brentwood while he was in Hollywood filming his role in
The King and I.
But that movie was produced from early December 1955 to late January 1956. Christina also claims that, in the late 1950s, “no movie star did commercials for television.” But beginning in 1954, Ronald Reagan was one of many who did just that—in his case, as pitchman for General Electric, when he pronounced the company motto, “Progress is our most important product"—a magnificent example of high-toned meaninglessness.