Possessed (34 page)

She slaps the two leading men, and they ask, “What’s that for?” Joan replies politely, “Oh, I do that in all my pictures!” And with that, she smiles engagingly, blows them a kiss and rushes off in a haze of mink.

This brief scene was worth several productions like
Flamingo Road,
and critics took notice of Joan’s rarely exploited gifts as “an amazingly deft comedienne.” As Joan said, “It was the first comedy I’d done in ages"—since
Above Suspicion,
in any case—"and I loved every minute of it. It was marvelous therapy after doing all those heavy parts, one after another, starting with
Mildred Pierce
.”

CRAWFORD AND GABLE WERE
often seen together during 1949, dining at this restaurant or having drinks at that nightclub—so frequently, in fact, that their wedding plans were all but announced in the papers. Soon afterward, all kinds of interpretations and analyses were attached to their joint appearance at a party also attended by Greg Bautzer. The gossips were further confused when Joan was seen in the company of an executive with the National Dairy Association. Finally, in October, she and Greg were guests at a party hosted by Louis B. Mayer. But when Bautzer took Ginger Rogers for a turn around the dance floor, he wrote his own romantic epitaph: later that night, his long melodramatic intrigue with Joan ended forever.

She was neither unoccupied nor alone for long. That autumn, Joan beganwork on
The Damned Don’t Cry,
a first-rate story of crime and criminal personalities, partly based on the real histories of Virginia Hill, Bugsy Siegel and various mobsters during the 1930s and 1940s. Joan had read widely about these fascinating, terrifying people, and she went to Jerry Wald with the idea for a movie based on a story by Gertrude Walker. Joan also mentioned her choice of director—Vincent Sherman, who had drawn fine performances from Bette Davis in
Old Acquaintance
and
Mr. Skeffington.
From the start of
The Damned Don’t Cry,
as Sherman recalled, Joan was involved in every stage of the production; it was she, for example, who suggested to Wald the four leading actors engaged for the movie—Richard Egan, Kent Smith, David Brian and Steve Cochran. No casting agent or studio executive could have improved on her choices. “I had heard so many stories about her,” Sherman recalled, “and I thought she’d be very demanding, overpowering and overwhelming. But Joan was very much down to earth, very simple, unpretentious and very smart about filmmaking.”

“She phoned me almost every day to discuss some story point,” Sherman remembered, “or she would come to the studio to talk about her wardrobe. I found her excellent to work with—intelligent, perceptive, and she presented her thoughts in a way that was never high-handed. I had never worked with an actor who knew so much about filmmaking. She could have been imperious, but she never was. She always asked rather than told, and she listened. She appreciated being part of the process of working on the script, even though she had that power [in her contract].” He recalled daily script conferences, at which Joan was present along with Sherman, Wald and writers Harold Medford and Jerome Weidman—meetings to which she came prepared with detailed notes, questions and valuable ideas.

When filming began, the director had more reasons to praise his leading lady. On the set, she at once understood and appreciated his instructions and suggestions. “If she had an idea, she always presented it in a way that never undermined my authority, which she could have done if she wanted to, with her star power. And that attitude gave me even greater authority with the others on the set.”

The Damned Don’t Cry
begins like a silent movie. A car races through the desert … stops … a corpse is dragged out … and then the body is tossed down a sandy hillside. This provocative sequence is followed by the discovery of the remains—and then, ten minutes into the story, the film’s long flashback begins, when a glamorous figure, wrapped in mink, is seen on the run. Everything that follows explains who this woman is and how she came to this point.

Joan was in complete command of her material, inhabiting every fiber of the character who is transformed from a simple innocent to a frightening cauldron of ambition. At first, as the housewife and mother Ethel Whitehead, living on the edge of poverty, she wears no makeup, no eyeliner, no false lashes. Ethel loses her child in an accident, and so has the audience’s sympathy. Quitting home and husband, she is defiant: “I’m leaving because I don’t have anything to hold me here any longer. I want something more than what I’ve had out of life—and I’m going to get it!” She sounds very like Marian, her character in the 1931
Possessed.

So begins a film created with admirable economy, combining realistic characters with crackling dialogue in a disturbing story that effectively takes several of Joan’s characters from the 1930s, moving them not toward triumph but disaster. At first sympathetic and then downright repellent, Ethel eventually becomes a refined but hardboiled moll with the assumed name Lorna Hansen Forbes. She uses and is used by progressively more wealthy and powerful men, each of them more extreme in criminal activities; in this regard, the picture succeeds most of all as a dark moral fable that contradicts every unspoken assumption about American life just after World War II—especially the notion that money and possessions can buy happiness. As Ethel learns, they cannot even rent it.

The movie explores the psychological development of a woman through her relations with no fewer than four men, as she learns how to climb her way up in their world. But because the men are either domineering (her husband), morally compromised (the character played by Kent Smith) or downright criminal (those played by David Brian and Steve Cochran), Ethel is doomed. “I got enough nerve for both of us,” she says to one of them; alas, she is tragicallyright. She becomes tough in a tough society and cultured and sophisticated to no good purpose in a world of wealthy, well-dressed, cultivated crooks. From
The Damned Don’t Cry,
there is but a short step to the ethos of the
Godfather
movies.

As Vincent Sherman discovered early in their collaboration, Joan not only wanted the role, she also made it her own, precisely because the character contained something of herself. Putting behind her a life of deprivation and disappointment, Ethel is willing to do anything for status, acceptance and love. “The world isn’t for nice guys,” as she tells one man who degrades himself for her. “You gotta kick and punch and belt your way up, ‘cause nobody’s gonna give you a lift.” One almost hears Joan Crawford speaking to a studio boss. It was this aggressiveness in the character that Joan wanted most of all to be sharpened in the screenplay, and which Sherman soon saw for himself, up close and personal.

There is something quietly revolutionary about
The Damned Don’t Cry,
which implies that women have virtually a constitutional right to walk out on a depressing home and a husband who is a poor provider. The censors were still powerfully active in Hollywood in 1950, when the final release print was submitted for approval, but they apparently blinked, for
The Damned Don’t Cry
insisted that a housewife was not doomed to live out her fate at home, no matter how grim the circumstances. Joan never liked this noteworthy picture—"a big mistake” was her description of it—and the critics were not even remotely well inclined toward it. This is difficult to understand, for her achievement here was complex, with a subtle but rich emotional range, and the finished film, provocative and uncompromising, offers one of her strongest performances. If
Mildred Pierce
defines Crawford in the 1940s, the same is true of
The Damned Don’t Cry
in the 1950s.

According to Sherman, Joan was “the most cooperative actress I ever worked with—and very knowledgeable about what worked and didn’t work for her in the story and in her career. When we were preparing the picture, she looked back over her own life as raw material for the character. She had risen from Broadway chorus girl to silent-movie dancer to wealthy and influentialstar. Her entire past had been a toughening experience for her, and she used it brilliantly.”

YEARS LATER, VINCENT SHERMAN
discussed in frank detail his love affairs with Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford. During the preparation of
The Damned Don’t Cry,
he learned that Joan had just ended her tortured relationship with Greg Bautzer—an affair that had left her particularly sad and vulnerable. Sherman, too, was in an anxious state, trying to resolve serious marital problems as his wife, Hedda, grew more impatient with his serial infidelities.

No matter what rumors of Joan’s freewheeling sexual life he might have heard before they began work on
Damned,
Sherman was taken off guard when she asked him to watch
Humoresque
with her in a studio screening room. There, as the two sat in the dark, Joan removed her clothes and aggressively initiated a wild afternoon. “Never,” he said, “had I encountered such female boldness. I was confronted with a woman who went after what she wanted with a masculine approach to sex.” Thus began an intense and passionate liaison that continued for almost two years, during the production of a trio of Crawford movies directed by Vincent Sherman.

And what of his marriage and Joan’s attitude toward it? At first, he believed that Joan would be satisfied with a passing affair—that she had staked a claim on her director that would be for her good and the picture’s. “She was trying to take control of me and the film,” he recalled. But then Joan invited Vincent and Hedda Sherman to dine at North Bristol Avenue. Later that evening, Hedda said to her husband, “She’s still a stunning woman, and there’s something about her I like and admire. I found her gracious and considerate, and if you look beneath all the Hollywood crap, you can detect a woman who has refused to become a loser, who has pulled herself up from nothing and made something out of her life.” Hedda asked straightforwardly if Vincent was having an affair with Joan, and he answered truthfully. “Well,” Hedda said, “I guess it’s too much to ask of any man that he turn down the opportunity to sleep with Joan Crawford.”

“Joan had a constant need for approval and admiration,” Sherman said later, “and in this regard, she was like Bette Davis.” The need for endorsement, respect and esteem, especially from a talented man like Sherman, was not surprising, but there was another side to Joan’s infatuation with her director. “I could sense the heart of an incurable romantic,” he said later. “I felt she was much more a romantic than Bette. Joan was still looking for her Prince Charming, and still expecting him to arrive—in a white convertible, if not on a white charger. It was an appealing quality, a kind of naïveté.”

A dressing room that was nothing less than a private apartment had been constructed for Joan at the studio, and there she lived from Monday through Friday while appearing in the Sherman pictures. “It was more convenient this way for me to see her at the end of the day,” he said; on weekends, she went home to be with the children, who were cared for by housekeepers, nannies and cooks from Monday to Friday.

Eventually, Joan demanded that Vincent divorce Hedda and marry her—a step he had no intention of taking. When he refused, there was a temporary interruption in the affair, and for a while Joan occupied herself, apparently briefly, with another married man—tall, blond David Brian, her costar in
The Damned Don’t Cry
and, later, in
This Woman Is Dangerous.

The first Sherman picture was completed at the end of 1949, and Joan wasted no time in arranging for the second, a remake of a property already twice filmed. For this, Warner acceded to her request that the studio loan her out to Columbia Pictures, which owned motion picture rights to George Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play,
Craig’s Wife.
This was something that held a kind of morbid fascination for Joan, and which she recognized as having particular relevance to herself: it was the story of a middle-aged, middle-class woman with a pathological need to maintain a perfect, spotless home and to dominate her husband. This was to be Joan’s next film, directed by Vincent Sherman.

She had seen the earlier movie versions (made in 1928 and 1936, with, respectively, Irene Rich and Rosalind Russell), and she knew there was something of Harriet Craig in herself, as she had written to a friend in 1938: “Thepart of me that is ‘Craig’s Wife’ often comes out, and I wander around my heavenly home [looking for cleaning to do].”

Harriet’s arrogance causes her to destroy everything of real value, and finally her perfect home becomes an isolating tomb. Joan may have seen it as a cautionary tale, a warning against some of her most ingrained and potentially destructive habits. If she could not show her less attractive side in real life, she certainly did so by her choice of material and by her deliberate shaping of it before and during production.

In making her final revisions to the screenplay, Joan made certain that some specifically autobiographical elements were inserted: “I’ve come a long way since working in that laundry,” Harriet says. And at the climax of the movie, as Harriet is abandoned in the house she has placed before her husband, Joan herself composed a long speech unlike any other in her career—a description of her childhood that goes a long way toward providing an understanding of both Joan Crawford and Harriet Craig:

I wouldn’t trust the love of any man after the things I’ve seen. I learned all about what you men call love the day my father left us. He always pretended to love my mother, and I worshipped him. One day after school, I went to his office. I found him with a woman—a cheap, vulgar blonde. What a sight they were! And I saw him for what he really was—a fat old fool with liquor on his breath. He said he was ashamed and that this event had nothing to do with his love for us. I told him I never wanted to see him again. I hated him and I would always hate him. That night, he didn’t come home. He never came home. I watched my mother tramp the streets looking for a job. And at fourteen, I had to quit school and go to work, first in a factory and then in a laundry. We almost starved. So don’t talk to me about protection. Don’t try to tell me about love.