Authors: Donald Spoto
But the outcome was disastrous. This time, there was no doubt about Joan’s insobriety: she had poured herself too much hundred-proof false courage before each taping, and so she was seen and heard slurring her speech and all but ruining the episodes. Embarrassed at that time, Christina recalled the experience years later. Joan, she wrote, “was beginning to relive her life through me … she needed the youth and vitality of my life. In that context, it is not so impossible to understand how she could even consider playing a woman more than thirty years younger than herself. The boundaries of where she left off and I began had become so enmeshed in the projections and imaginings of our lifelong relationship that there were times when we were one and the same person.” Unfortunately, Christina’s published memoir of her mom-mie dearest is not always so perceptive.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1969,
Joan returned to London for her second film with Herman Cohen. “I refuse to apologize for this movie,” she said about
Trog
when it was finished in September. “One never intentionally makes a bad picture. Besides, I like to work. Inactivity is one of the great indignities of life. Through inactivity, people lose their self-respect, their dignity. The need to work is always here, bugging me. In this case, I had never played a scientist or a doctor, so I thought this would be fun to do.” It was not.
In
Trog,
Joan played Dr. Brockton, an anthropologist in charge of an English research center. After a prehistoric cave dweller is discovered alive and very much kicking in the English countryside, Dr. Brockton tries to study and even to educate this troglodyte. Growling and mindlessly killing like Frankenstein’s monster, he is incapable of speech and badly in need of complete facial reconstruction, although he wears a neatly tailored loincloth and somenifty booties. But Dr. Brockton insists that “Trog,” as she sweetly calls him, can be studied and even humanized.
At first, the creature seems on his way to moving up from his missing-link level of half ape, half man. He plays a game of catch-the-ball with the good doctor; he grunts menacingly or purrs contentedly; he learns to identify colors; and during this tutelage, Dr. Brockton encouragingly says things like, “Come on, Trog—you can do it—that’s my good boy!” and gently strokes his face. At this point, the creature resembles the disheveled Esther Costello on speed. Of course, a human villain emerges, urging the townsfolk to kill the beast, a favor obligingly performed by the police.
Exteriors were filmed in Berkshire and interiors at Bray, but all during production Joan suffered a heavy cold that developed into bronchitis, which may be detected in her voice for most of the movie. As the
New York Times
acknowledged,
Trog
“proves that Joan Crawford is grimly working at her craft” Indeed, this picture was a regrettable coda to a distinguished motion picture career of forty-five years.
Obviously unwell for most of that summer, Joan was nevertheless alert to the problems of others. Favored with a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur for transport to and from the studio and location shooting, she learned that a crew member had a dental emergency. Joan sent her car and driver to collect the man and deliver him to a clinic, and then she instructed the chauffeur to proceed to a restaurant famous for its chicken soup, which she had delivered to the patient’s home. This was revealed only when the crew member reported it to producer Herman Cohen.
“She was always doing this kind of thing during
Berserk
and
Trog”
Cohen recalled. “She was very close to the crew and knew them all by their first names.” Cohen also recalled that Joan gave Christina a check for five thousand dollars and told her to spend it on a holiday. “I was right there at the time it happened,” he added. “She was giving her daughter a big dinner party at Les Ambassadeurs [a restaurant club in Mayfair]. None of this is covered in
Mommie Dearest,
because Christina doesn’t mention the nice things Joan always did.”
One chilly day on location, Cohen’s assistant brought the news that Joan’s respiratory infection had worsened. He hurried to her caravan and found herpale and short of breath. “Oh, Herrn—please get me a doctor—I can’t work.” He turned to leave the large trailer, smashed his head against the low door frame and reeled dizzily. With that, Joan leaped to her feet—"Oh, Herman, Herman, darling—are you all right? Come here, lie down.” As he recalled, “she found a cold compress for my head, and then said, ‘You rest—I’ll work!’ “ Within an hour, she was back on the set, “forgetting her own sickness now that she was taking care of me.” Those were memorable incidents, but there were problems. “On
Trog,
her drinking was worse than during
Berserk.
She had a huge frosted glass marked Pepsi-Cola, but inside was hundred-proof vodka. I had to reprimand her a few times.”
JOAN RETURNED TO NEW YORK
during the autumn of 1969 and almost immediately traveled to Universal Studios in Los Angeles, to appear in a premiere segment of a Rod Serling television series called
Night Gallery.
With Barry Sullivan (her costar in
Queen Bee)
and a twenty-two-year-old novice director named Steven Spielberg, she worked for a few days on a half-hour episode called “Eyes.” Joan played a wealthy and blind New Yorker who bribes a doctor to find someone desperate enough to give up his healthy eyes to her—even though her sight will be restored for only a day at the most. The operation is performed and the bandages removed. Alas, no sooner does she look up at her splendid chandelier than everything goes black—it is the evening of the great Northeast power failure of 1965, and though her sight is now restored, she can see nothing for the duration of the blackout. When the sun rises next morning, she sees it—and then loses her sight forever. Reaching out blindly, she falls through a terrace door to her death.
“Eyes” was the first of Steven Spielberg’s noteworthy professional achievements and the last of Joan Crawford’s.
3
Ironically, her large, pellucid and radiantly expressive aqua-blue eyes had never been photographed to full effect until that year—not in
Ice Follies of 1939
nor in
Torch Song, Johnny Guitar, The Best of Everything
or
Berserk.
Because of advances in film stock and careful color correction in the lab, it was only in
Trog
and
Night Gallery
that audiences saw at last an aspect of her beauty that had so long impressed those who knew her in person.
Her schedule for 1970 included a twenty-four-city tour in America and a ten-day sojourn in Brazil, all for Pepsi (whose corporate name had been changed to PepsiCo in 1965, when the soft drink company merged with Frito-Lay), and quick trips to Los Angeles for appearances in two television dramas. That year alone, she logged 345,000 miles of travel, “and at every pause, I fell flat on my face.”
On February 2, at the Golden Globes award ceremony in Los Angeles, Joan received the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. DeMille Award “for her outstanding contributions to the motion picture industry.” And in April, she accepted an invitation to Stephens College, where she had lived for a short time in the fall of 1922. The citation recognized Joan’s achievements “as an actress, businesswoman, homemaker, mother and philanthropist.” Her brief remarks concluded with a tearful smile: “My kids will never believe this,” she told the audience at the convocation, “because I never graduated from this fine school—I was a dropout!”
In addition to her travel schedule, Joan made time to dictate random thoughts that were augmented, edited and reshaped by Audrey Davenport Inman into a book called
My Way of Life,
published by Simon & Schuster in 1971 and intended for her audience of fans. “Charm is a touch of magic. Try to make it a part of
your
way of life.” So concludes the book, described by the publicity notice as a compendium of advice from Joan on “how to get more out of your life, your work, your play, your clothes, your looks, your home, your marriage.” She offered diet tips (“nibble on raw vegetables and dill pickles”), advice on wardrobe (wear bright colors) and fragrances (try Lauder’s Youth Dew and Lanvin’s Spanish Geranium), recipes (meat loaf, cole slaw) and hints on “how to create an exciting and comfortable home.”
My Way of Life
was not a controversial book, but American womensnapped it up in great numbers—especially when Joan was present. “Every time she appears at a department store,” said Dan Green, the publisher’s director of promotion, “she gets 3,000 to 7,000 people, and we sell a minimum of 500 books right there.”
As she publicized the book, her relations with Christina became ever more strained, often because of Joan’s drinking. By this time, Christina’s two-year marriage to Harvey Medlinsky had ended in divorce, and Joan learned that her daughter was jotting notes and going through old correspondence with a view to one day writing an autobiography. When she asked about it, her daughter said nothing, and there, for the present, the topic ended. Except for exchanges of infrequent letters and greeting cards, Christina’s last communication with her mother was a telephone conversation at Christmas 1971. Soon after that, she moved from New York to Los Angeles, where she planned on pursuing a movie career. Like her aspirations to act onstage, that goal was abandoned, after a total of three small television roles.
1
In this regard, it would have been interesting to see Joan Crawford as Mrs. Robinson in
The Graduate,
which was produced when she was sixty-one. Thirty-five-year-old Anne Bancroft memorably created the role, playing a woman who is forty-something.
2
Berserk is very often referred to as Berserk! (even on the home videocassette box)—but the film’s title design contains no such punctuation.
3
From January 1970 to September 1972, Joan acted in at least three television dramas; her last performance in any medium was a beleguered asthmatic terrorized by ESP fanatics, on an episode of The Sixth Sense broadcast in September 1972.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fade-Out
| 1971–1977 |
J
AMES BACON, WHO
interviewed Christina on the day she performed in the
Dr. Kildare
television series, had known Joan and her children since 1950. For many years, he had covered the movie business for the Associated Press, the
Hollywood Reporter
and the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
and he wrote three books about his experiences in Hollywood. Bacon was known never to minimize or dilute a good story, even at the risk of alienating friends. A frequent visitor to the Crawford household in Brentwood, he saw the “strict discipline [Joan] imposed on her children at home. Joan didn’t spoil her children, like most Hollywood mothers did, but she was a loving and kind mother. I know that for a fact.” A few people disputed that assessment, but one person’s idea of discipline is another’s notion of indulgence.
1
Christina’s book,
Mommie Dearest,
was published nineteen months after Joan’s death, and at once, many who had known mommie and her little girl took sides. Myrna Loy had toured in Neil Simon’s play
Barefoot in the Park,
which reached Chicago in 1965. “We didn’t have any problems until Christina Crawford [joined the cast],” Myrna wrote in her autobiography. At first, she was delighted to welcome her old friend’s daughter. But then things went bad. “I’ve never known anyone like her—ever,” she added. “Her stubbornness was really unbelievable. She would not do a single thing anyone asked her to do … and she completely disregarded her blocking [i.e., her assigned positions onstage]. She was going to do it all her way, and it was self-defeating and sad, because the girl had potential.” Eventually, the playwright arrived to see the production, and after a conference with the director, Christina was dismissed.
Except for confidences entrusted to a few friends, Joan’s public statements were both protective and complimentary: “My daughter Christina is a very fine actress,” she typically replied in answer to questions about her daughter’s career.
“Christina wanted to be Joan Crawford,” according to Myrna. “I think that’s the basis of the book she wrote afterward, and of everything else. I saw what her mind created, the fantasy world she lived in. She envied her mother, grew to hate her, and finally wanted to destroy her.”
Costume designer Nolan Miller, who also knew the Crawfords, added that Christina “had her own axe to grind. She did get punished a lot, but she was a very strong-willed child. I used to see Joan tell her to do something, and she flatly refused. As a result, they locked horns early. All that frustration came out in the book
[Mommie Dearest].
At the end of Joan’s life, she and Christina weren’t speaking.”
“Mommie Dearest
was not an accurate portrait of who Joan Crawford was as a person,” said the film historian Jeanine Basinger, who also knew Crawford. “How many people do you know about whom you can say, ‘This is a person I can count on one hundred percent'? If she was your friend, she was there.”
Apart from the tale of the wire dress hangers in Christina’s book—the incident that perhaps determined Joan Crawford’s image for countless people forever after
—Mommie Dearest
often evoked shock without due cause.
At Christmas, for example, fans, friends, colleagues and total strangers flooded the Crawford house with literally hundreds of presents for the children. Joan gave them some of the packages, kept back others for their birthday parties and other appropriate occasions and—explaining to her own children exactly what she was doing—donated many of the parcels to children in orphanages and hospitals.