Possessed (9 page)

Billy and Joan had enormous fun making this movie. He flirted with the cadets who were cast as extras, while she led one or two boys astray by inviting them off campus for a bit of canoodling. The two actors’ skylarking, practically under the noses of the academy’s top brass, was exploited in the story’s sassy tone and content. But the actual theme of
West Point
became (with the tacit approval of director Edward Sedgwick) that of a highly eroticized friendship between Brice and his buddy Tex McNeill—a pale, lovesick, androgynous lad, acted to fey perfection by nineteen-year-old William Bakewell.

West Point
moves along its surprising course, presenting Brice and Tex as a loving couple: indeed, Brice is far more interested in Tex than he is in Betty, and Tex is oh so grateful that Brice “has fixed it so that we can be … er, ummm … roommates,” as the intertitle reads. At several points, Tex swoons, faints, sobs and chokes up with sentiment over Brice, who responds with muchfluttering of his long, fake eyelashes. “We’ll take our time doing things,” Brice tells Tex with a wink.

Tex’s big scene occurs when, confronting classmates, he defends Brice’s antics. Later, when Brice visits Tex in the hospital following an accident, the two men hold hands during the entire sequence, gazing dreamily into one another’s eyes. Otherwise, Brice displays similar undisguised adoration only when he stares at the American flag. With the change of gender, in other words,
West Point
is a classic Metro love story.

But how could this picture have been released in its final edited form during the tenure of Louis B. Mayer, who was regularly giving Billy Haines hell about his life with Jimmy Shields? How could
West Point
get past Mayer, who was constantly trumpeting Metro as one big, happy family while the studio turned out films that were supposedly good for everyone?

For one thing, Mayer was much preoccupied that year with Greta Garbo’s initial contributions to the studio’s fortunes; for another, Billy was very big box office—his name is alone above the title here—and audiences, blissfully ignorant of the actor’s private life, named him the most popular movie star of the year. Mayer knew the value of a dollar.

Acting together in the first twenty minutes of the picture, Billy and Joan affected good comic chemistry—and then her character conveniently disappears, so that the two men can enjoy all the romance of the story. She returns, at the finale, only to be kissed and to accept a marriage proposal, which is patently absurd. “Joan Crawford is quite charming as the girl who, for some unexplained reason, finally learns to love Brice Wayne,” wrote the senior critic of the
New York Times,
who may have guessed what was going on. The picture, Joan rightly recalled, was “a throwaway for me.” But she loved working with her best friend, who had “great naturalness and charm and an overwhelming sense of humor.”

A minor accident occurred during production, and the studio publicists cannily turned the news story into a free advertisement for the picture. On August 29, a driver was delivering Joan and Billy to the military academy from their rooms at the nearby Thayer Hotel. A large truck sideswiped their car,forcing them off the road and causing Joan to sustain bruises to her knees and forehead; Billy was only shaken. Back at the hotel, they rested for a few hours and then Joan tapped at Billy’s door. “The show must go on!” she called cheerfully. “Why?” asked Billy, who suggested that they repair to the hotel bar.

WEST POINT
WRAPPED TWO
days later, and the company returned by a long, scenic train route to Los Angeles. When they arrived, on September 5, news of Marcus Loew’s death in New York had just come over the wires, and rumors swirled about the future of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but business continued as usual.

A week later, Warner Bros. announced that on October 6 there would be a screening in New York of
The Jazz Singer,
the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized images, dialogue and sound effects. A nationwide release was to follow in February.

It’s a common misconception that every studio at once scrambled to make the transformation from silent to sound movies. But that is not accurate. For one thing, there were two rival sound systems. Warner’s Vitaphone process required a painstaking technical link between the theater’s motion picture projector and the machine used to play the recordings accompanying the movie. On the other hand, there was a superior, direct sound-on-film process developed by Fox Studios, but it needed an expensive new type of projector. Of major importance was cost: it was estimated in 1927 that the addition of sound at least doubled a film’s budget. There was also the issue of expensive new movie-theater equipment. Under orders from Loew’s board of directors, therefore, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer temporized, for the New York executives believed that sound was just a fad that would fade.

From 1927 to 1930, the studios, which had limited equipment and few technical wizards, had to make hard decisions about which films to produce as talkies and which to make as silents. There was also the problem of the international market, a dilemma that confronted studios worldwide. Intertitles could be inexpensively made in any language, but foreign-language soundversions required an entirely separate film to be made: after each scene was photographed, it had to be repeated. (Subtitles were developed later.) While Mayer awaited further instructions from New York, production had to continue; in fact, Joan appeared in nine more silent movies until her first talkie was released nearly two years later. By then, Joan Crawford legally (but not professionally) had another name.

ON OCTOBER 17, PAUL BERN
escorted Joan to the West Coast premiere of John van Druten’s play
Young Woodley,
first produced in London, later on Broadway and now at the Belasco Theatre on South Hill Street in Los Angeles. Writing many years later, Metro’s former publicist Katherine Albert recalled that Paul Bern “began the awakening of Joan’s mind. He taught her things she had not known existed—the beauty of words on paper, the feeling for musical harmony, the appreciation of form and color on canvas.” As Joan said, “He recognized something in me that other men did not care to see—that I had a brain.”

The title role in the play that evening—of a sensitive schoolboy who imagines himself in love with an older woman—was assumed by the seventeen-year-old son and namesake of the popular movie star Douglas Fairbanks. Renowned for his athletic performances in pictures like
The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood
and
The Black Pirate,
the senior Fairbanks was also a cofounder of United Artists, which he had formed with Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford, who became the second Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks. The first, young Douglas’s mother, was Anna Beth Sully, daughter of a once wealthy but now impoverished industrialist. Years later, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. described his mother as a woman of “passionate possessiveness. She longed for—but seldom got—the kind of smothering devotion that she lavished on her own loved ones.” With his famous father, on the other hand, “there was no great warmth, nor did he seem to know or care much about my professional progress. My parents divorced when I was ten, and my mother took me along when she went to London and Paris, where I had the occasional tutor—but lessons were haphazard; my education was virtually nonexistent.”

With the cachet provided by his father’s name, however, young Douglas—tall, handsome, polished—found that all sorts of doors readily opened to admit him. In London, he enjoyed the company of aristocrats, statesmen and even some members of the royal family, and in Paris, he met the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Chevalier and Cole Porter.

As a teenager, Douglas easily made friends everywhere, and famous women tapped at his door, even without invitations. By the time he was playing the title role in
Young Woodley,
he had lost both his naïveté and his innocence. He had appeared in silent films from an early age, “but I was lazy and never quite reached my capabilities.” However severe that critical self-assessment, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. certainly had a varied, busy and productive ninety years. (From 1923 to 1933, for example, he appeared in no fewer than forty-five motion pictures.)

Paul Bern took Joan backstage to meet the cast after the performance that October evening. She had met the young leading man before: he was a friend of Michael Cudahy, and they had been introduced at several of the Cocoanut Grove’s Friday dance competitions—which, as Douglas recalled, were often won by Joan and Mike. The day after their backstage meeting, she wrote Douglas a note detailing the fine points of her admiration for his performance—and because she included her address and telephone number, he rang and she invited him to her house for tea. “She was a few years older than I, but that was fine with me—and quite in accordance with my continuing preference for older women.”

During their first visit together (as he recalled), Douglas “hammed it up, trying to appear an intellectual artist, and she played the part of an overwhelmingly impressed country girl who saw glamour in her future. After an awkward but pleasant hour, I got up to leave. I asked if I might have a photograph of her in exchange for one she had requested that I bring of myself. She produced a large 11-by-l4 portrait, inscribed ‘To Douglas—May this be the start of a beautiful friendship, Joan.’ ”

On December 9, Douglas marked his eighteenth birthday; by that time,he and twenty-one-year-old Joan had already embarked on a passionate affair that was, on his side, “neither serious nor exclusive.” In that aspect of the program lay the seeds of future trouble. Still, his initial impression was of “a vital, energetic, very pretty young girl, quite unlike anyone I had known before. Her looks were not classic, but despite an irregularity of detail, her features projected an overall illusion of considerable beauty, [and] her figure was beautiful. It was fine-trained by years of dancing and a continuing devotion to keeping fit. I started off entranced by her.”

For the first time, Joan thought she had met a man she could marry, but without parental permission Douglas was stymied, and the couple presumed they would have to wait until he was twenty-one. “She built up a fairy-tale prince in her imagination,” Douglas added, “and I played up to it for all it was worth. I postured too much, made outlandish statements and read classical poetry aloud. If she had been even a little bit more sophisticated, she would have seen right through to the affected, infatuated young ass that I was, [but] I began to wear her like a flower in my button-hole.”

Very many people, then and later, presumed that Joan Crawford saw Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a ticket to the upper realms of Hollywood society. But such a judgment is not merely cynical: it fails to recognize that Joan already had far greater fame and that Douglas, notwithstanding his many minor movie roles, was nothing like a star. In fact, it was he who stood to benefit from their association, as he acknowledged years later. “To be honest, in her own way, she taught
me
a great deal and pushed me to a fuller height as my own self and away from the person hiding his shyness behind such affectations as imitating Barrymore and pretending to an unreal aestheticism.”

As for matters monetary, she could not have had any such ulterior intention, for the senior Fairbanks did not support his son but instead had set up a delayed and modest trust fund for him—"and so I was not the rich young heir everyone imagined,” as Douglas admitted. More to the point, her income far exceeded his for the entire time of their relationship and marriage. For all that, the magnetism between Douglas and Joan was immediate, intense and multileveled. As they both said years later, the relationshipwas based on the kind of passionate physical chemistry typical of youthful ardor.

At her suggestion, he called her Billie (the name used by only a few of her oldest or closest friends), and he was her “Dodo,” a riff on his being the second Douglas. She absorbed everything he had to say about art and literature, and about Paris, London and New York. It would be unreasonable to imagine that seventeen-year-old Douglas had the depth of understanding only maturity can bestow—but his enthusiasm was contagious. Very soon Joan said that she, too, wanted to travel to the great cities of the world and to compensate, however she might, for her background, her poor education and her ignorance of cosmopolitan society. “She always harbored an inferiority complex,” Douglas added, “and she used it as a whip to spur herself onward and upward.”

Joan’s appreciation of him naturally flattered his boyish ego, but there were other reasons for him to feel attracted to her. “She really always saw the best in people, and she was ready to take people as they were. And I admired her for her brave attitude toward life. She told me about her awful childhood, but she described it matter-of-factly, without pity. I had never known anyone with that kind of background. You just had to admire what she overcame, and what she was accomplishing at that time.”

Douglas Sr. and Mary Pickford invited the young couple to Pickfair—the vast Pickford-Fairbanks mansion in Beverly Hills to which all of Hollywood society wanted an invitation. At first, there was “a warm reception,” as the young man recalled, “and Mary did all she could to make the clearly shaky young girl feel at home.” But when it became clear that this was a serious affair, the elder Fairbanks was not enthusiastic—"but he was gentleman enough not to show it.” On the other hand, when Anna Beth met Joan a few weeks later, she was “condescending” and described Joan to her family and friends as “my son’s current chorus-girl fling.”

“The most important contribution that Billie made to my evolving character,” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. continued, “was her insistence that I break away from home and Mother. The greatest gift Billie gave me (far better than anything I ever did for her) was the encouragement to be courageous. She made no bones about telling me that I’d ‘never be a real, responsible, grown-up man’ as long as I let myself be controlled by Mother.” Joan was on the mark, for Anna Beth Sully Fairbanks still handled all her son’s financial affairs, took his salary, and then parceled out an allowance to him—until Mike Levee (Joan’s and Doug’s new agent) took over the management of their respective financial affairs.