Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (32 page)

The role of the blind pianist in
Torch Song
was played by British actor Michael Wilding, who had recently been signed to M-G-M on the strength of his marriage to the studio's hottest commodity, Elizabeth Taylor. Joan, at forty-nine, was not taken with Elizabeth, age twenty. "Princess Brat" was how she referred to her costar's wife, and one afternoon, when Elizabeth drove up to the outdoor filming in her pink Cadillac convertible, leaving a twister of dust in her wake, Joan suggested to Michael Wilding that he put a harness on his young wife. When Elizabeth persisted in visiting her husband on the indoor set during filming, Joan had a security guard put at the soundstage door barring Taylor from entering.

Elizabeth, for all her youth, managed to pitch a few
bon mots
at the older star. "Michael is making his first and last picture with Joan Crawford," she told one reporter, while another learned how fortunate her husband was to be playing a blind man in his first American role. "That way he doesn't have to look at Joan Crawford throughout the entire movie," said Liz.

In years to come Joan would get the opportunity to retaliate against Taylor, but that season she had a more provocative newcomer to challenge—Marilyn Monroe.

Joan and Marilyn

"Monroe was like Crawford. She
had an affinity for the camera.
There's a lot of her type around
today. They're not actresses—
but creatures of the camera." '

—JOE MANKIEWICZ

"There's nothing wrong with my
tits but
I
don't go around
throwing them in people's faces."

—JOAN CRAWFORD ON
MARILYN MONROE

In 1953 Joan was once again voted Favorite Actress by
Photoplay
and Marilyn Monroe was named Fastest Rising Star. At the awards dinner the two stars clashed, and while the press reported that this intergalactic confrontation was their first meeting, the aging movie queen and the blond starlet had been introduced before, under private circumstances.

Author Fred Guiles claimed the two met in 1947 in a church—Saint Victor's in Los Angeles—when Monroe was making
Ladies of
the
Chorus.
Attorney Greg Bautzer said that Crawford was with him when they first met Marilyn at the home of Joseph Schenck—an old-time producer and patron of aspiring starlets (including Joan in her younger, hungrier days). Bautzer's story was that Crawford was with him when they spotted the provocative young starlet, dressed in a tight tan skirt and white angora sweater, standing in line at Schenck's buffet table. Taking the initiative, Joan approached Marilyn and said sincerely, "You're very pretty, my dear, but you don't know shit about clothes."

During that evening, Joan also extended an invitation to the struggling actress to dine at her Brentwood home. Marilyn, a longtime fan of Crawford, said she was thrilled to accept the invitation. She was also eager to meet Joan's adopted children. But on the chosen night, when she arrived at Crawford's home, there wasn't sight or sound of the Crawford children. Furthermore, Joan never served dinner. She served a drink to Marilyn, replenished her own, then, without much ado, brought the girl upstairs, "to see what a real star's wardrobe looked like."

Marilyn reportedly "gasped" when she saw Joan's dressing room, "which was bigger than most people's living room." The walls were stacked with shelves and plastic color-coded boxes containing shoes, gloves, hats, and handbags, while underneath hundreds of dresses, coats, and evening gowns were hanging on multiple racks. A special room nearby held her furs, including minks and sables, some seventy in number. "Try one on," Crawford told the impressed starlet, who reached for a skimpy white-fox stole.

In her bedroom, Crawford presented Marilyn with a box. Inside was an expensive brand-new black cocktail dress, in Monroe's size. "Take off your things and try it on," said Joan. "If it's not OK, I'll send it back tomorrow."

"Oh!" the breathily excited Marilyn whispered, then slipping out of her clothes, the nubile young beauty sent the semi-intoxicated Joan into a state of cold sobriety. Underneath her street dress, Marilyn wasn't wearing a stitch of underwear.

"Oh!" said Joan, her eyes widening and her temperature rising, as she began to experience the full impact of seeing the naked, exquisitely formed body of America's future sex symbol.

It has been said that what transpired between Crawford and Monroe that night was more than a mere fashion show. Some also believed that Joan's intentions were strictly philanthropic. "Joan was very generous to newcomers," said Vincent Sherman, "although I remember when we were at Columbia there was a girl who was always hanging around her. We often wondered about her."

Mother had "lesbian proclivities," said daughter Christina, revealing how, when Joan was drinking, she sometimes wanted to sleep with the children's nurse.

Actress Louise Brooks also decreed that Crawford was "one of those girls who went back and forth"; while director Joe Mankiewicz said he thought that Monroe was attracted to her own sex.

"I often wondered about Marilyn," said publicist Harry Mines. "But Joan? We were very close friends. I never saw it, and I doubt it seriously. She liked men too much."

Author Fred Guiles claimed that "at another brunch, and with the hostess slightly drunk," Crawford made a sexual pass at Marilyn and the friendship ended. "Marilyn, who saw nothing wrong with lesbianism, recoiled more from shock than offense," said Guiles. Supposedly Joan's grudge began then, and it grew in proportion to Monroe's growing popularity, eventually exploding publicly on the night of the
Photoplay
dinner.

Among the other stars gathered for the awards dinner in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel that evening were John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Susan Hayward, Doris Day, Lana Turner, and Lex Barker. Arriving late, making "a grand entrance, wearing a chiffon gown of muted grays and blue, with real diamonds in her hair, was Joan Crawford." Seated at her table were Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Rock Hudson, and his date, Mamie Van Doren. "In no time at all I realized that Crawford was on the way to becoming blind drunk," said Van Doren. "Every so often she'd knock back a slug of her drink and look around the room malevolently."

"Whole goddamn place is full of newcomers if you ask me. Right, Rocko?" said Joan to Rock Hudson, "with whom she tried to flirt, but it only made her look like she had indigestion," said Mamie (who confessed in her memoirs that
she
made it with Rock, later that night, on the kitchen floor of her parents' home in the Valley).

Fixing her eyes on Mamie, Joan spat out, "Pretty new faces with nothing going on behind them. Pretty few fuckin' real stars here."

Meanwhile, on the front dais, Twentieth-Century Fox boss Darryl Zanuck sat with an empty seat beside him, reserved for the Fastest Rising Star—Marilyn Monroe, who was still at the studio, being sewn into a gold-lame dress by designer William Travilla. ("To be thin enough for the dress, she went on two high colonies," the designer confided.)

Finally wriggling in two hours late, wearing the skin-tight gold-lame gown ("It was just the kind of dress I'd hoped my studio would make for me," said Mamie wistfully), Marilyn swayed sinuously down the long room to her place on the dais, while gasps and wolf calls filled the air.

"It was like a burlesque show," said a horrified Joan Crawford to Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas. "The audience yelled and shouted, and Jerry Lewis got up on the table and whistled. But those of us in the industry just shuddered."

Marilyn was a cheap joke who flaunted sex in people's faces, Joan went on to say in the lengthy wire-press interview. "Kids don't like her ... and don't forget the women. They're the ones who piek out the movie entertainment for the family, underneath it all they like to know all actresses are ladies."

Crawford's comment on Monroe made every newspaper across the United States. It was also picked up by the radio and TV news reporters, the foreign press, and the important weekly news magazines. The dispute went on for days as the pros and cons from the media added more fodder to the fire. Crawford was accused of being jealous of the younger, sexier Monroe. Others applauded Joan as a brave and responsible arbiter of Hollywood's morals. "Her loyalty to Hollywood goes above and beyond the call of duty," said Edith Gwynn. "She was following the normal middle-age trend to conservatism," said Bob Thomas, who believed that Joan enjoyed the controversy and the wide publicity her criticism generated.

Marilyn, who cried all night after the attack from Crawford, was reportedly "so embarrassed that she did not go outside her apartment for a fortnight." Yet, like most celebrities in times of contention, the distressed sex symbol did manage to drag her beautiful body to the phone, to talk to Louella Parsons, who was also willing to open her vitally important column so Marilyn could express her agony.

"At first all I could think of was 'Why should she select me to blast?'" Marilyn whispered. "She's a great star. I'm just starting. The thing that hit me the hardest is that it came from her. Along with Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, Miss Crawford was one of my favorite actresses. I've always admired her for being such a wonderful mother—for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who, better than I, knows what it means to care for homeless little ones?"

Gunfight at the Not-Ok Corral

"I'll never know why Joan
Crawford didn't keep her real
name. Joan Crawford was a
Lucille LeSueur; she certainly
was never a Joan Crawford. You
could believe that a Lucille
LeSueur would strap her
adopted children to the bedpost,
but a Joan Crawford would have
to be sitting in the solarium
sipping Pepsi with Cesar
Romero."

—MERCEDES McCAMBRIDGE,
THE QUALITY
OF
MERCY

P
utting Marilyn Monroe on hold, as soon as Crawford finished
Torch Song
she went over to Republic Studios to make her first talking western,
Johnny Guitar.
Her director was Nicholas Ray. Married to Gloria Grahame, he met Joan when she and Grahame made
Sudden Fear.
Not long after, Ray and Joan were an item (and Grahame, no slouch in the allure department, began to date her stepson, Tony Ray, whom she later married).

Crawford and Nick Ray were scheduled to make a film called
Lisbon
at Paramount. But the script of
Lisbon
had "no balls," said Joan, and when Ray landed a deal at Republic Studios for
Johnny Guitar,
he induced Crawford to play the main role.

Johnny Guitar
was not the usual shoot-'em-up western, but an existential, allegorical Trucolor parable, with two women as the leads. Joan would play Vienna, the ambitious owner of a saloon who, in pursuit of urban commerce, wanted the railroad to come to town. Her opposition, Emma Small, a bitter, sexually repressed cattle-owner, was against the railroad, and against Joan, whom she tried to lynch.

Crawford had two actresses in mind to play Emma. "She wanted Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis," said Nick Ray. "I agreed with her. Either one would have been fine. Except Herbert Yates, the boss at Republic, was a cheap son of a bitch. He was famous for making cheap pictures. The only way he got Crawford to come to Republic was because he made
The Quiet Man
the year before. That won the Oscar and made a lot of money, although John Ford had to sue Yates to get his profits. When I told him Joan's suggestion of using Stanwyck or Bette Davis in the second lead, Yates said no, the budget wouldn't pay for two stars. I had to go with someone lesser-known, thereby cheaper. When I told Joan that, she said, 'Well, you better get someone who can hold her own with me, or the picture won't work."

Ray got actress Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar in 1950 for her portrayal of Sadie Burke, the sharp, tough assistant to the redneck politician in
All the King's Men.
The talented McCambridge said she had a certain edge over Joan Crawford when they first met. She had recently married Fletcher Markle, an orchestra leader. He was a very attractive man, who had received a pair of gold cuff links from Joan shortly before eloping with McCambridge. "He had picked me. So there, Miss Crawford, so there," said Mercedes to herself with a smirk when she met Crawford for wardrobe tests on
Johnny Guitar.

Joan was smirking too, when she gave supporting player McCambridge the shabby side of the wardrobe test slate. While she was outfitted in expensive gabardine jodhpurs and silken shirts, Crawford decided that Mercedes would wear "nothing but a heavy black, slightly modified nun's habit, throughout the whole film."

In makeup, Joan also insisted that Mercedes' hair be dyed jet-black, to contrast with her own warm russet-brown ("Also a dye job," said McCambridge), and during a break in the color tests, when Mercedes sat down, the star stood by her side, then, after bestowing a truly sensational Joan Crawford smile, slipped out of one of her shoes, lifted her bare foot, and placed it firmly up against McCambridge's stomach. Looking like "a flamingo in a splint," with one foot on the floor and the other in her costar's navel, Crawford instructed McCambridge to examine her "funny little feet." They had grown from a perfect model size, 4½, when she was sixteen, she said, to a huge 5½, from
"all
that dancing in
all
those films."

"Good heavens!" Mercedes cried, yet to learn that Crawford's feet were actually size seven in leather boots, which would soon dance a tarantella on her head and spirit.

When she arrived on location in Sedona, Arizona, with thirty pieces of luggage and twenty-nine cases of vodka, Joan became fast friends with most of the men in the company, and none of the women. On the first day of shooting, during a scene with her costar, Sterling Hayden, Crawford spied his wife watching from the sidelines. "She ordered my husband to take me off the set," said Mrs. Hayden. "Sterling refused, saying: 'If she leaves, I leave too.'"

Describing himself as "not too bright ... but a decent enough guy," Hayden confessed he was an actor only for the money, which enabled him to indulge in his first love, ships and the sea. On the set, he did not endear himself to Joan Crawford when, comparing her with Bette Davis, the lead of his last film,
The Star,
he said, "Listen. I'll say my lines and kiss any actress my paycheck says to kiss; whether I like 'em or not."

"I've never seen a woman who
was more like a man. Looks like
one, acts like one, and
sometimes makes me feel I'm not."

—A COWBOY IN
JOHNNY GUITAR

Joined by her son, Christopher, Crawford wrote home to columnist Hedda Hopper that she and the boy were thriving outdoors and that they had become "real tough cowboys." Shooting in a place called Oak Creek Canyon, with the red dust blowing into their eyes and teeth, and the sand biting into their flesh, Mercedes McCambridge said, "Everybody looked like Margo in
Lost Horizon
... everybody but Joan."

Crawford never got on a horse except for her close-ups, and those scenes took hours to light. "When you are as big a star as Joan Crawford was in those days," said Mercedes, "you don't allow anybody to photograph you outside. Not in harsh light, and only in long, long, long shots. If you are a cameraman and you think you are going to get any closer than the length of a football field to take pictures of Miss Crawford, in anything but elaborately diffused interior light, you had better get out of show business, and a few of them had to."

In her memoirs, Joan referred to the unnamed McCambridge as a friend of Sterling Hayden's and "a rabble rouser." She of course did her gracious best to be charming. "I was always friendly," she said. "I asked her to my dressing-room for tea."

"She told me she never wanted me in the role," said McCambridge. "She wanted Claire Trevor, and then she threw me out of her dressing-room."

On the set, when the crew applauded Mercedes McCambridge in a difficult outdoor scene, Crawford watched from a nearby hillside, and the trouble intensified. "I tried to be friends with Miss Crawford," said Mercedes. "Five times I went to her dressing-room and five times she ordered me out."

"Joan was drinking a lot and she liked to fight," said Nick Ray (who lost an eye in a barroom brawl in Madrid ten years later). Describing the star as "very attractive, with a basic decency," Ray said he was personally involved with her during the making of the picture. "That only added to the problems, because McCambridge and the others didn't like it."

"He spent his evenings with her, and left orders not to be disturbed," an assistant told the Los Angeles
Mirror.
One evening an important message arrived for Ray. The assistant approached Crawford's cabin and "overheard a wild argument between the two." The door opened suddenly and Ray stalked out. The assistant came face to face with a raging Crawford. "The next day the assistant director was off the picture."

When a reporter for the Arizona
Republic
wrote about the erratic behavior of Crawford on the set, she retaliated by having a letter signed by the crew and printed in the rival newspaper, the Phoenix
Gazette.
The letter was a loving epistle. "If there is a more cooperative, charming, talented, understanding, generous, unspoiled, thoughtful, approachable person in the motion-picture business, we have not yet met him or her," it read.

When news of the fracas reached columnist Erskine Johnson in Hollywood, he called Mrs. Sterling Hayden, who said that Crawford had abused Mercedes McCambridge so badly "that the poor kid had to be hospitalized." McCambridge, when asked about her hospital stay, said she was suffering from "Crawforditis."

After reading Erskine Johnson's story, Joan called the columnist at home.

"Is this Erskine Johnson?" she asked.

"Yes it is."

"This is Joan Crawford," said the star. "And you're a shit."

Joan then called columnist Harrison Carroll, with a quote on McCambridge. "I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw a battleship," she said. That same night, when director Nick Ray refused to take sides in the dispute, Joan threw him out of her cabin. At midnight, roaring drunk, she went to the movie company's wardrobe truck, gathered up McCambridge's costumes, then, screaming "They stink!" scattered them along the Arizona highway.

"I now know what it takes to
become a movie star, and I want
none of it."

—MERCEDES McCAMBRIDGE,
FOUR WEEKS LATER

In Arizona, the final scene with bad woman Emma Small, in which she crashes through a wooden railing and falls to her death two hundred feet into a canyon, was filmed. "I really don't remember whether Joan's gun killed me or whether I just fell off a balcony," said McCambridge. In California a week later, the reaction shots, of Joan, set against a canvas sky and a scenic backdrop, were done at the Republic ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Accompanied by her retinue of ten, including one director, two assistant directors, script man, secretary costumer, wardrobe lady makeup man, hairdresser, and a propman who carried sweat spray and spirits-of ammonia ampules (to make her cry, because "Noble leading ladies like Miss Crawford don't kill people easily even bad guys like me," said McCambridge).

In Los Angeles, Crawford received some bad news.
Torch Song,
her big musical, had been edited and scored but without Joan's vocalizing. Her singing voice had been dubbed by India Adams, "in a voice so husky it could pull a dog sled." On the night of the Hollywood premiere, Joan showed up and spoke in the lobby with guests Marlene Dietrich and Butch Romero. At the postpremiere party at Chasen's, with the photographers present, she spied Mercedes McCambridge across the room and rushed over to embrace her. When asked about the feud, McCambridge shrugged and said, "Some days it's on, some days it's off. I guess this is one of the off days."

Torch Song
flopped, as did
Johnny Guitar,
released the following May in 1954. Reviewing Joan's Trucolor Freudian western, Bosley Crowther of the New York
Times
said, "No more femininity comes from her than from the rugged Van Heflin in
Shane.
For the lady as usual, is as sexless as the lions on the Public Library steps, and as sharp and romantically forbidden as a package of unwrapped razor blades."

"Miss Crawford went thataway" another critic observed. "She screeches nastily and Mr. Hayden gallumphs around morosely. Let's put it down as a fiasco."

"It
was
a mistake," said Crawford. "During the filming I never knew what in the hell the script was about. It was full of metaphor and double meaning, which in terms of entertainment means that the audience is going to be bored out of their skulls." ("Don't talk to
me
about any of that 'New Wave' or 'existential' crap," said Bette Davis, agreeing with her rival. "If a story doesn't have a beginning, a middle, and an end, then it just
ain't
a story.")

"Johnny Guitar
was a hit in France," said Nicholas Ray. It was given a dubbed soundtrack ("in which the cowboys call each other 'Monsieur' "). Francois Truffaut, calling Ray "an auteur in the best sense of the word" but the film itself "phony ... a hallucinatory Western," said he was captivated by the image of Crawford in a white dress, playing the piano in the cavernous saloon, "with a candlestick and a pistol beside her." The film was made to order for the star, just "as
Rancho Notorious
was made by Fritz Lang for Marlene Dietrich," Truffaut wrote; but of Crawford's patriarchal, rigid beauty he noted: "She has become unreal, a phantom of herself. Whiteness has invaded her eyes, muscles have taken over her face, a will of iron behind a face of steel. She is a phenomenon. She is becoming more manly as she grows older. Her clipped, tense acting, pushed almost to paroxysm by Ray, is in itself a strange and fascinating spectacle."