Possessed (8 page)

A team of writers worked on the story and script, which was little more than an excuse for Langdon’s goofy brand of physical, sad-sack humor and his wide-eyed obsession for a shoe magnate’s daughter—Joan, who was nothing more than window dressing in the picture. She was seen only briefly until the climactic tornado, a triumph of special effects in which Harry saves her from being whirled away forever. “Joan Crawford is a nice leading lady with little to do,” observed
Variety.

“I was just an MGM contract player and had to take whatever was thrown at me,” Joan recalled. “I was earning a weekly salary and ways had to be found to keep me busy, no matter how unsuitable and carelessly conceived the part.”
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp
was the first time Joan was loaned to another company during her time at Metro. This was a common practice in Hollywood during the days of contract players, when studio bosses realized a huge profit by allowing other producers to borrow a star—who was then paid only the fee contracted for with the home studio.

“Whatever was thrown” at her was a perfect description of the next assignment—
Paris,
released in May 1926. On paper, it seemed to have everything right: story and direction by Goulding, photography by Arnold and exotic Parisian sets courtesy of Metro’s carpentry shop and art department. In her role as a low-life dancer, Joan insisted that she “overacted like a simpleton,” but
Photoplay
hailed her performance as “exquisitely played.”

THAT SPRING OF 1926
, there were two developments in the Crawford-Cudahy affair. First, Michael’s mother summoned reporters from the
Los Angeles Times
and said once again that if her son and Miss Crawford “ever go through a ceremony, the union will promptly be annulled. My son is only eighteen years of age and I am his legal guardian, so I can say that this marriage would be annulled if he ever did decide to marry this girl.” She added, without the slightest hint of humor, that Michael would probably go to school in Englandduring the coming summer. That day, he was on the polo field, and when reporters tracked him down, he tipped his hat politely, spurred the horse and galloped away without a word.

Joan had no such easy means of escape when a journalist located her at Metro. “No, I’m not married,” she said on May 5. “It is true that Michael and I love each other and plan to be married some day, but we haven’t taken that step yet.”

The second development, a direct contradiction of her last statement, was perhaps inevitable. “Michael and I agreed to disagree,” Joan told the
Los Angeles Times
on June 7, announcing the end of their engagement (by which was meant their affair). “His mother’s objections had nothing to do with it,” she continued, “nor had any other person. We decided that we do not love each other enough to marry, that’s all. I still think Michael is very wonderful and we may go out together sometime. But as for anything serious, no.” In fact, this marked the end of the entanglement.

This was a prudent decision on Joan’s part. Six months later, still under the legal age of twenty-one, Michael Cudahy attempted to marry the actress known as Marie Astaire (real name: Esther von Brusberg). He was arrested in Santa Barbara and sent home to his mother. On July 12, 1929, he was arrested for drunk driving and causing injuries to the occupant of another vehicle.

This mishap occurred six days after his first legal marriage, to the nineteen-year-old actress Muriel Evans. That union was soon dissolved, and Michael subsequently married a dancer named Jacklyn Roth. He again revealed himself to be an unsuitable mate, and the second marriage ended in 1937. In 1941, at the age of thirty-three, Cudahy married Marjorie Conover, a former Mack Sennett bathing beauty. Three months later, he suddenly abandoned her and entered the U.S. Army. In 1945 he returned from war service to life in Hollywood, where—at the age of thirty-eight, on February 15, 1947—he died at Hollywood Hospital. The cause was “a chronic liver complaint,” according to the
New York Times,
which added: “He was known in the film colony as a playboy"—true, but poor journalism. As for the discarded wife Marjorie, a deranged Hollywood real estate salesman murdered her in 1952. Joan maycertainly have reasoned that she was well rid of this tragic, self-destructive man in 1926.

“I’M SO SORRY I
made such a dreadful mistake,” Joan wrote to a friend, referring to her next picture,
The Boob.
“You don’t have to tell me it was a terrible picture—I won’t even go to see the preview!” Her judgment was accurate: it was a dreary attempt at humor, in which she had the small role of Jane, “one of Uncle Sam’s revenue agents,” according to the intertitle card. Helping to round up a gang of escaping bootleggers, she appears very late in the picture and merely stands by, looking official. The critical consensus:
The Boob
was “a piece of junk.”

Joan’s memories mostly had to do with her director, William A. Wellman, later perhaps best known for
The Public Enemy,
the first version of
A Star Is Born
and
Nothing Sacred.
Wellman had been a hell-raising juvenile delinquent, and he never kicked the habit. In Hollywood, he was predisposed to offend actresses especially, by rudely grabbing, pinching and fondling them. “He was a horny wise-guy with little respect for women,” according to Joan. Wellman’s astonishing justification: “She had a reputation in those early days as quite a wild slut, so what did she expect?”

EIGHT FILMS WITH JOAN
Crawford went before the cameras in 1927. “I worked my ass off that year, didn’t I?” she asked rhetorically many years later. “MGM was a goddam factory!” In
Winners of the Wilderness,
set during the French and Indian Wars, Joan portrayed a general’s daughter, but she felt overwhelmed by the lavish eighteenth-century costumes. Its January release was followed two weeks later by the premiere of
The Taxi Dancer,
notable as the first time Joan received top billing. The title refers not (as commonly thought) to a prostitute but to a young woman paid to dance with paying partners at a club—the so-called ten-cents-a-dance girls who socialized with male dancers. “I was better than the picture,” she said, and most reviewers agreed: “Joan Crawford rides high over the inferior material. Here is a girl of singularbeauty and promise, and she certainly has IT"—a reference to novelist Elinor Glyn’s term for sex appeal. Joan’s wardrobe and character were simpler in
The Understanding Heart,
first shown at the end of February, in which she played a lookout for the Forest Rangers who becomes involved in a sizzling love triangle that blazes during a raging fire.
Time
magazine dismissed the picture as “so befuddled that it is incomprehensible.”

But Joan’s sense of herself and her career was much clarified by an important introduction to a key Hollywood figure that season. Gloria Swanson had long been Joan’s idol—not just as an actress, but as a model of how a star behaved. “I have decided,” Gloria had said, “that when I am a star, I will be every inch and at every moment a star. Everyone from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.” These words became virtually Joan’s motto, her design for living.

Swanson had originally wanted to be an opera singer, but she abandoned that aspiration at seventeen, when she married twenty-nine-year-old Wallace Beery—a terrible mismatch that ended after three months. After work at several other studios, Swanson began working with Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount, and together they shifted the image of the ideal American woman from Pickford and Gish—heroines of innocent romance yarns—to the new woman of the 1920s, who was provocative, sensual and sophisticated. During that decade, Swanson was the world’s most photographed woman.

Joan noted that Gloria dressed as elegantly offscreen as on—a custom enforced by Swanson’s Paramount contract, which stipulated that she must appear stylishly outfitted in public. By the time the two women met, Swanson was in fact the most copied movie star in the world—and Joan was among the copiers as soon as she could afford to be.

From her idol, she learned not only about wardrobe and manners, but also how to compensate for a poor education by immersing herself in good reading and high culture. At that time, Swanson was married to the French aristocrat Henri de la Falaise (who later married Constance Bennett). This marriage, too, was not a success, and although they did not divorce until 1930, Gloria began a notorious affair with Joseph P. Kennedy in 1927.

Crawford observed that Swanson lived for her public, her publicity and her fans. She saw that Gloria kept records of the names and addresses of all her admirers, filing their letters and copies of her replies—practices Joan religiously emulated for the rest of her life. Before long, like Gloria, Joan was very much aware of her own fame and did everything she could to maintain her image as a star, “every inch and at every moment.” Both women ultimately came to realize that fame and stardom were serious threats to a healthy private life.

“WORKING WITH LON CHANEY
[in
The Unknown
] was both traumatic and delightful,” Joan recalled. The star of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
and
The Phantom of the Opera
was a quiet, somewhat remote but generally friendly man off-camera. But during filming, no one had greater concentration, and no actor required more of himself.

The Unknown,
directed by Chaney’s friend Tod Browning, is the bizarre story of Alonso, a Spanish circus artist who performs remarkable tricks despite the fact that he is “the armless wonder.” This apparent deformity, however, is a hoax: Alonso’s arms are actually bound underneath his clothing—a ruse to hide his identity as a crook sought by the police, who are after the notorious man who has a hand with two thumbs.

The cruel ironies of the story have two levels.

Alonso is in love with his assistant, Ninon (played by Joan), who has a pathological fear of men’s arms—thus she shrinks from the embrace of the circus strongman, Malabar (Nick Kerry), who promises to wait patiently until she overcomes this disturbing phobia. Her pathological terror leads Alonso to a horrific act: he has his arms surgically amputated, confident that now he need never fear being revealed as a wanted man and secure in his conviction that Ninon will fall in love with him.

Armless forever, Alonso returns to the circus after a long recovery from the gruesome operation. He then learns that Ninon has finally conquered her obsessive fear and is blissfully married to Malabar. Mad with despair, Alonsoattempts to kill his rival by having horses tear his arms off during a dangerous act, but this fails and Alonso is himself killed.

Watching and working with Chaney, Joan became aware for the first time of the difference between, on the one hand, merely
performing
a role, by standing in front of a camera and going through memorized motions, and, on the other hand, really
acting
a role. In the final scenes of
The Unknown
(released on June 4), when Alonso realizes that his enormous sacrifice has been for nothing, Joan recalled that Chaney “was able to convey not just realism but such emotional agony that it was both shocking and fascinating.” Her role in the picture was small but difficult, for she had to find the proper means to make Ninon both phobic and sympathetic—an effect she achieved by replicating Chaney’s quiet concentration. “Joan Crawford is one of the screen’s acknowledged artists,” wrote a New York film critic. “Certainly her performance in this picture is a most impressive one.”

HER NEXT FILM
,
Twelve Miles Out,
concerns a young woman (Joan) and her aging fiancé (Edward Earle) who are kidnapped and taken out to sea by a fugitive bootlegger (John Gilbert). A rival bootlegger boards the ship, and he happens to be an old buddy of the one now in charge. A fierce rivalry for Joan ensues before both die, ending a weak romantic triangle.

John Gilbert, then madly in love with Greta Garbo, was doomed to disappointment when she summarily abandoned him. Concerned with little else than her response to him, Gilbert was indifferent to both Joan and the movie. If Joan had hoped that working with Metro’s romantic star might continue the kind of serious acting education she had enjoyed with Chaney, she was certainly disappointed.

Two more pictures followed in quick succession, produced during the summer and early autumn of 1927—both of them with her friend Billy Haines. The first was
Spring Fever
—"a waste of everyone’s time and money,” according to Joan. She was on the mark, for it was indeed an insipid comedy of manners with shallow characters and nothing at stake. “God, golf is dullon film!” she added—but director Edward Sedgwick was mad for the sport, which monopolizes the picture. Joan played a rich society girl, falling for a poor shipping clerk (Haines) who is transformed into a successful golf pro. With wealth now on both sides—
voilà!
—they are free to marry without social embarrassment. Of working with Billy, Joan had only happy memories despite the project: “He would take you in his arms in a love scene, joking so that you had to brace yourself not to laugh. What made a Haines picture was always [Billy] himself, the symbol of eternal, cocky, lovable youth.”

But their second collaboration that season was vastly superior to
Spring Fever West Point
was in fact one of the most astonishing and hilarious movies made at the end of the silent era.

Joan was cast as Betty Channing, daughter of a hotel owner; she pops into the story every now and again as the girlfriend of Brice Wayne (Haines). Made with the cooperation and technical advice of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the movie was filmed on location in New York’s Hudson Valley. On the surface, it’s about the ambivalence of wealthy playboy Brice toward the disciplined life of a West Point cadet, his mockery of its military folderol and his eventual heroics as the academy’s star football player in the big game against Navy.