Authors: Donald Spoto
She also knew how to dress, how to comport herself in strange or difficult situations and how to put people at ease. From 1955, wherever they traveled, crowds turned out to see Joan Crawford, the wife of Alfred Steele; all over the world, Pepsi executives, factory workers and truck drivers brought their wives to conventions and bottling-plant openings, vying for the chance to meet her,to shake her hand and to obtain her autograph. All this, of course, was marvelous publicity for Pepsi-Cola, which was now identified with glamour.
At home, Alfred often asked Joan, on short notice, to host a reception for Pepsi executives, and he presumed (rightly) that she would somehow provide food and drinks for ten or twenty men, most of them as eager to meet the movie star as to discuss business with her husband. “He wasn’t as handsome as Doug or Clark or Franchot or Phillip,” Joan said years later, “but Alfred had a virility, a sense of assurance, that made him the center of attraction in any room. Women were crazy about him and men liked him. He made everyone feel at ease. I didn’t mind going into semi-retirement as an actress, because life with Alfred was so fulfilling. We traveled a great deal, and we established wonderful relationships with the children.”
Steele not only took pride in his glamorous wife, he exploited her movie-star image for the good of business, and she loved every minute of it. Thus her movie career declined even as she had an ongoing real-life role as the wife of a highly placed American executive. If her life had been planned like a traditional drama, this would have marked the beginning of the third act.
But it was not a third act without tensions. According to her children and her publicist John Springer, Joan and Alfred had regular disagreements that sometimes escalated into shouting matches. Because he was aware of Joan’s sexual history, Alfred nursed a latent but constant suspicion about her intention and ability to be a faithful wife—a doubt he frequently expressed to her in the course of this or that altercation. There was no reason for his distrust of her, for now she had no lovers, but that did not allay his anxieties.
BUSINESSMAN’S WIFE OR NOT,
Joan still had to fulfill a three-picture deal with Columbia that had begun with the unsavory histrionics of
Queen Bee.
After the Steeles returned from their European honeymoon in midsummer, she hurried to Los Angeles to appear in Robert Aldrich’s film of
Autumn Leaves,
which was produced from late August through November 1955.
At first glance, this seemed to be just another soap opera on the rocks, witha twist. In Los Angeles, a lonely middle-aged spinster named Millie Wetherby (Joan) types manuscripts for a living; her only friend is her wisecracking landlady (Ruth Donnelly). One night at a diner, Millie meets Burt Hanson (Cliff Robertson), a soft-spoken romantic half her age who pursues her with touching sincerity. After considerable hesitation, she finally agrees to marry him. At first, this is bliss unspeakable, and the couple even gets to repeat the most famous scene in Columbia’s
From Here to Eternity,
as they embrace on the sand while waves crash over them.
In the bittersweet by and by, Millie learns that her darling is a liar, a kleptomaniac and a schizophrenic who was pitched over the edge when he discovered his first wife in bed with his father. The violence continues when Burt beats Millie and then attacks her with her typewriter. Reluctantly, she realizes she must commit him to a psychiatric institution, with full knowledge that, as she cries to a doctor, “if he’s cured, he may not need me any more!”
But her doubts have not taken Hollywood into account. Burt undergoes electroshock therapy (twice detailed in close-ups by the director, who had a fondness for things gruesome) and receives intravenous infusions of some milky miracle drug (also shown twice). Millie anxiously paces her kitchen at home, and Burt is at last cured and ready for release. She goes to meet him at the hospital. Will he still adore her? Will they revive the ardor of their passionate December-May marriage? Veteran moviegoers may well guess.
Because the performances by Crawford and Robertson were pitched so perfectly—because the hysterics were kept to a minimum and the menace neatly tuned
—Autumn Leaves
turned out better than it might have in other hands. Perhaps because Alfred Steele had recently dispersed the clouds of her own real-life loneliness, Joan knew how to portray a woman existing in a gray haze of solitude. Her transformation by love never seems incredible, her rapture is poignant and her heartache credibly rendered without exaggerated facial reactions. She was more than competently accompanied by Cliff Robertson in his first important movie role. His performance was notable for understatement and for finding the proper balance between terrifying a loved one with lunatic rages and evoking her compassion by his dependence and anguish.
Joan’s estimation of the movie was on target: “This was one of my veryfavorite pictures. It was, I think, the best film of its type ever made—the older woman with a younger lover. The loneliness and desperation of her situation came through with no need for melodrama or overacting—in fact, I played it down. And Cliff Robertson was stunning; very few actors could have brought that kind of credibility to such a demanding part. His mad scenes can’t be topped. Good story, believable characters, good script, good acting—consequently, a good film.”
Film critics were in her corner. As one wrote,
Autumn Leaves
was best seen as “a mature study of loneliness and mental distress, and the strength of Miss Crawford’s performance is that it is natural and controlled. A lesser actress would bring more than a touch of ham to such a juicy role.”
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Director Aldrich did not find his star an easy colleague. “I admired her,” he said, “but I could not get her to [appear like] a drab, ageing woman, and that threw off the balance of the picture.” A week before filming began, Joan wanted to bring in Ranald MacDougall for rewrites, but this request Aldrich denied. She then rang the director at home, at two o’clock in the morning of the first day’s filming, to announce that she would not appear on the set without “her” writer. In that case, Aldrich replied, they would not make the picture. “The writer didn’t show up, but she did, and we proceeded. I really think that’s the only way you can deal with Miss Crawford.”
Joan refused to speak with him during the first week of production: the first assistant was called on to relay directions to her, and she replied through him to the director. “Then one day,” as Aldrich recalled, “she was doing a scene terribly effectively. I was really touched, and when she looked up after finishing it, I tried not to be obvious in wiping away a tear. That broke the ice, and from then on, we were good friends for a long time.”
Aldrich was right to be disappointed when Joan refused to appear “drab and ageing,” for with her own glamorous makeup and the stylish costumes designed by Jean Louis, it is not easy to accept her as a somewhat frigid spinster, living a lower-middle-class existence. Her hair is too perfect, her clothes too attractive—and most regrettably, her lipstick and eyebrows are grotesquely exaggerated.
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For Joan Crawford, her cosmetics were not negotiable: as in years past, she again regarded the thickly arched eyebrows and over-the-lip gloss as an infallible sign of female desirability, and no director could shake her from that imprudent conviction. In this regard, she began to substitute the intransigent behavior of a diva for that of the agreeable professional. “I think she felt fraudulent,” said Cliff Robertson in defense of his leading lady, “precisely because she had crossed the railroad tracks—had come up from nothing—and that therefore she felt she wasn’t the real thing because she was just ‘acting.’ But Joan was the real thing.”
In the last years of her career, it is often difficult to find one’s way toward an appreciation of Joan’s performances: her appearance is something to get beyond, before the quality of the acting can be assessed. Alas, performers of drag quickly got to work and offered depressingly accurate parodies.
AS SOON AS
AUTUMN LEAVES
was finished, Joan helped her children pack their trunks and valises, for they were to join her and Alfred on a long winter holiday in Europe. As they prepared to depart, Joan gave Christina her first passport and her birth certificate, “with all the pertinent data on her birth date and the names of her original father and mother.” On December 8, they all left by train for New York, and eight days later, the entire family boarded the
Queen Mary
for a memorably happy time in France, Switzerland and Italy. They returned in February 1956.
At this time, sixteen-year-old Christina told her mother that she wantedto be an actress. Joan used her influence (and Alfred’s) to open doors that allowed her to see both the glamorous and arduous sides of the business. “She will be able to study all the things I never had time for,” Joan said.
First, she introduced Christina to Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden, whose many successes included three plays by Arthur Miller. She then arranged for Christina to meet seventeen-year-old Susan Strasberg, then starring on Broadway in
The Diary of Anne Frank.
She took Christina to an exercise class with drama coach Claudia Frank. They went backstage to visit Margaret Sullavan, who was appearing in
Janus,
and they audited classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “If you ever decide to make this your life,” Joan told Christina, “I want you to know it won’t be easy. It has to be your own choice, and I’ll never push you. But if you do it, I want you to do it well.”
Joan urged her daughter to study drama formally at a university, but after a year, Christina abandoned her studies at Carnegie Tech and took a small apartment in Manhattan. Joan expressed her “displeasure” at this turn of events, “but once she’d made those decisions, my attitude was that if she wanted to tackle the adult world, more power to her.” Thus began a long period of estrangement between mother and daughter that matched the emotional distance between mother and son. At the same time, Joan explained the very different rapport she had with Cathy and Cindy: “Unlike Christina and Christopher, the twins don’t resent my life.”
“I want to try to be an actress,” Christina told a reporter in 1956, “and I’ll work hard.” But as so often in that profession, success was elusive, and she worked only sporadically. Of the roles she had, Christina admitted that they were not large, “and yet after each day I found myself too exhausted to eat. It was much easier after that to understand what it must have been like for Mother all those years ago.” Between 1961 and 1972, Christina appeared in a few regional theatre productions, three films and six television shows.
“I began to have a fuller understanding of the process of [Mother’s] early years, when she, too, was a struggling actress,” Christina wrote years later. “Those were the years that I now knew were filled with pain, frustration and perhaps even humiliation. I wrote her letters about my feelings, about theexperience of setting foot on a soundstage myself for the first time, to perform rather than just to visit her. I’d felt her presence everywhere.”
Joan responded, referring to one of Christina’s recent screen tests:
Christina dear, I saw your test, and I thought you were just lovely. I am glad you had the loving care of {producer} Jerry Wald, {cinematographer} Bill Mellor, {publicists} Perry Lieber and Don Prince, and {screenwriter} Philip Dunne. I am sure you will have great success, and nobody wishes it for you more than your
Mommie.
But Christina’s acting ambitions were never fulfilled: “I continued to get a few acting jobs in Hollywood, but without much success. Finally, I just gave up … I disappeared. My life was in a shambles … my personal stability turned out to be mere quicksand, and for a while all I could do was try to put myself back together.” Later, she tried writing.
THAT SPRING OF 1956,
Joan was fitted for costumes for her third and final picture for Columbia—this one to be made in England and directed by David Miller, who had done so well on
Sudden Fear.
“This was my last really top picture,” she later said, discussing
The Story of Esther Costello,
which was filmed from August to December. The press, noting her twenty-eight pieces of luggage, forty-eight costumes, a trunk full of furs and her millionaire husband, duly covered her arrival in England.
Based on a 1953 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, Esther’s story was alternately heartwarming and provocative. Injured in a childhood accident, she is left in a state of nervous shock that has deprived her of hearing, speech and sight. A wealthy American named Margaret Landi ( Joan) finds the teenage Esther (Heather Sears) living in appalling poverty in rural Ireland and brings her back to the United States, where she learns Braille and other means of communication.
Soon, Margaret’s estranged husband, Carlo (Rossano Brazzi), pops up like the proverbial bad penny and recognizes an opportunity for easy money. He and a team of unscrupulous publicists force Margaret and Esther to travel on a worldwide fund-raising tour to help disadvantaged children, while Carlo embezzles much of the proceeds. But theft is not his worst vice: this Latin lover is a notorious womanizer, and one night he goes so far as to rape young Esther. The shock restores her senses, and Margaret brings the story to a conclusion by causing the deaths of Carlo and herself. Esther is now free to fall into the waiting arms of a handsome reporter who has been covering her case.
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(It seems regrettable, not to say incredible, that something so appalling as a rape immediately restores the girl’s sight, hearing and speech.)