Possessed (14 page)

For her, the most memorable element of
Laughing Sinners
was her costar: “I hit off a few sparks, on screen and off, with an up-and-coming young actor named Clark Gable.” Soon after, the sparks burst into flame.

AS CAMERAMEN AND DIRECTORS
came to realize, blondes photographed brilliantly against dark backgrounds, and that year, Metro’s publicists reported that audiences reacted more than favorably to women like Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard and Constance Bennett. And so the stoppers again came off the bottles of dye for Crawford’s next picture,
This Modern Age.

Joan was cast in the role of Valentine Winters. She travels from New York to Paris in search of her estranged mother, Diane (Pauline Frederick)—who is not, as presumed, a wealthy society doyenne but rather a kept woman, living in her lover’s mansion. Shocked at first, Val soon becomes part of a fast set and is courted by a dissolute young alcoholic rake named Tony (Monroe Owsley). He tries to make love to her but is rejected: “In Spain,” she says languorously, “they call that baloney.” Val learns to drink and smoke, to race around Paris in grand “driving machines” and to wear Adrian’s slinky wardrobe with easy grace. “Make virtue out of vice,” she muses dreamily. “Never take anything seriously, and always be amusing.” With that kind of talk, we know she is in for a comeuppance.

A more honorable young fellow then appears—Bob (Neil Hamilton)— but his impossibly stuffy parents cause trouble. The usual complications, conflicts and confessions occur, and Bob finally tracks down Val and whisks her away from boozy Tony—after the happy reconciliation of mother and daughter.

The movie, alas, has neither center nor focus. Was it planned as a romantic comedy and then refashioned into a morality tract? Either way,
This Modern Age
was certainly no highlight of the early Crawford years, and her performance had a rare quality of inattentiveness, as if she felt unwell in some scenes. As sherecalled years later, “There were many times when I said, ‘I was just lousy in that—I wish I could do the whole thing over!’ ”

IF JOAN WAS INDEED
tense and preoccupied during most of 1931, as she seemed to Doug and some colleagues, she certainly had reasons.

For one thing, her agent encountered difficulties in finalizing her contract renewal, and for some time she feared that she might be dropped from Metro’s roster. The parties finally came to terms, and Joan signed for three thousand dollars a week, with raises scheduled so that, by 1936, she would receive three times that amount—which made her one of the top dozen wage earners in the United States.

But her troubles were not over when the financial issues were settled. Joan’s brother, Hal, continued his louche life and irresponsible antics—very like the character Tony in
This Modern Age,
except that Hal had no money and always depended on Joan. After his divorce from Jessie, he met Joan’s lighting stand-in at Metro, a Texas firebrand named Kasha Haroldi, who aspired to stardom; after a stormy courtship, she and Hal were married on September 6 that year—an event that Joan hoped would bring some stability to her brother’s life. Hal’s behavior could bring Joan undesirable negative publicity, and Louis B. Mayer regularly reminded her that a good family image was indispensable for the studio’s stars.

A third reason for Joan’s anxiety had to do with the shifting fortunes of her marriage, which after two years showed signs of unraveling. About her career, she was single-minded, and nothing took precedence over it. But in her constant attempts to guide and control her fame, she was unwittingly becoming its servant—and sometimes its slave.

Doug, on the other hand, had many outside interests and sources of diversion, not to say of pleasure. He liked to read, paint and write, and he readily accepted invitations from friends for weekend parties or brief excursions. On such occasions, the predictable occurred. “I take no pride in admitting that I was not true to Billie,” he said years later, “and unfortunately she found out. We had married when we were very young, and I was still very curious and surrounded by temptation. There were a lot of incidents when I did not resist.”

That year, Laurence Olivier and his wife, Jill Esmond, had come from London to work in Hollywood. Doug and Larry became fast friends and frequently toured Hollywood’s most exotic nightspots. One such place was the Russian Club, where they were seen carousing with the balalaika players, clinking endless glasses of iced vodka with strangers and vowing to restore the Romanoffs to the Russian throne. One night, a vaudeville performer they had seen at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre offered them cocaine, and in a reckless moment they accepted—once only, they swore, finding it a very unpleasant and disorienting experience.

Coincidentally, the Olivier marriage was in a precarious situation, too—for reasons arising from Olivier’s ego and Jill’s fundamental ambivalence about heterosexual marriage. (Despite her expressed outrage when Olivier abandoned her for Vivien Leigh, Jill Esmond later settled down and lived happily ever after with a female companion.)

“It was a wild, wild place in those days,” Olivier said of Hollywood in 1931, where he spent long nights away from his wife and in the company of actresses like Lili Damita or Elissa Landi. “And Bob Montgomery, Doug Fairbanks and I were the wildest.” That summer, Doug told Larry that a rich and beautiful woman had fallen in love with him and had asked Doug to do the introductions. This was a practical joke: Doug knew no such woman, but he engaged a studio extra to join Larry for a drink. When the couple met, however, a genuinely fervent attraction occurred. Doug, continuing the prank, then arranged for their assignation at the home of a cooperative friend. When Doug was certain that Larry and the extra had settled in for the night, he signaled a burly stuntman he had also hired, who burst in on the couple, shouting, “What are you doing with my wife?” Olivier promptly keeled over in a faint.

Follies like this continued all that summer of 1931, while Joan was feverishly exploiting an interval from work to further decorate her home, improve her French and spend long hours with her vocal coach. Meantime, Doug and Bob Montgomery chartered a yacht for a fishing weekend near Mazatlan, Mexico, where more mischief was planned. When Larry arrived, he was greeted by grim, armed soldiers and hustled off to the local jail. Thinking they expected a bribe, Olivier tried to explain that he had no cash. After several anxious hours, Doug turned up, explained that he had invented this jolly caper with the assistance of a Mexican magistrate and spirited Larry away to catch marlin. Young Mexican ladies were never far from their yacht.

“I fought to keep my marriage going,” said Joan of this time.

I remember the time an actor who was supposedly a great friend of mine {perhaps Robert Montgomery or Laurence Olivier} kept pumping such verbal rubbish in my husband’s ear as, “I know some really cute girls over at the studio.”

This actor proceeded to get my husband drunk, and they went out on a double date. I got wind of the fact, but I wasn’t worried about the actor—I was worried about my husband. After all, the girl in question might have blackmailed him or involved us in a pretty huge scandal. I found my husband with this cutie, {and} I took him home and sobered him up. He was apologetic and grateful. I myself was terribly hurt, but by holding on and fighting, I saved our marriage—at least for a while.

The fourth and perhaps the most compelling reason for Joan’s apparent and occasional apprehension that year can be summarized in three words:
Clark Gable
and
Possessed
—the title of their third collaboration within a year, and the movie that changed their lives forever.

“HE WAS, I THINK
, a genius who really became appreciated properly only after Thalberg shook things up and convinced Louis B. that the director could be a creative asset, not just the man who kept the budget down and the picture on schedule.”

Joan was speaking of her director on
Possessed,
Clarence Brown, who by 1931 had already directed over twenty pictures (three starring Garbo) and would work on four more with Joan. “He helped me so much,” she continued, and “I think he helped all the actors in his films. He made you ‘right’ and convinced you that you
were
‘right,’ and he picked up on subtle things the producers missed entirely. At Metro, I think he was the first director to leave his stamp on a picture, and most of us recognized this, but we were afraid to say so out loud, because the producer’s ego wouldn’t stand it.”

Like many successful movies of that time,
Possessed
was based on a hit play—in this case, Edgar Selwyn’s
The Mirage
(1920) and a silent-screen version of it—but now it had the added advantage of an exquisitely crafted screenplay by Lenore Coffee. In no more than seventy-five economical minutes, the movie tells the story of Marian Martin (Joan), a poor, small-town girl working in a paper-box factory, who aspires to much more than her situation provides.

For decades before the average age of moviegoers dropped below sixteen, it was a fact proved by polls, studies, interviews and surveys that American women overwhelmingly determined which motion pictures couples and families paid to see, and therefore which were box-office hits.
Possessed
struck a powerful, responsive chord among Depression-era women of 1931, deprived of prospects and caught in frightening economic circumstances. On their neighborhood screens was Joan Crawford—sensual yet strong-willed, vulnerable but determined, and willing, as Marian says, “to use whatever men find attractive about me” to succeed.

In a way, Marian Martin
was
Joan Crawford. Her natural hair color was restored for
Possessed,
a picture that curiously but clearly parallels her own ascent from deprivation to prosperity. Like Marian, Joan “belonged” to no one: she rose by sheer force of will, and women in her audience found something important in that for them and for their lives. It wasn’t so much about greed, sexual enslavement or upper-class prostitution; it was about hope, possibility and determination—and, at the final fade-out, about redeeming love.
Possessed
is not merely a movie with a pretty face.

This entire complex reality comes together in a moment of sheer, wordless movie magic, superbly created by Clarence Brown and his cinematographer, Oliver Marsh. Trying to cross over from “the wrong side of the tracks” in her small town, Marian is delayed by a passing train. From the platform, she watches in wide-eyed wonder as the passenger cars move by, each window revealing—like a movie screen—the actions and very different lives of the people within, “on the other side” of life as Marian knows it.

First, she sees cooks preparing a fine meal in the train’s kitchen. In the next car, a waiter sets an elegant dining table. Then she watches as a uniformed maid irons a woman’s silk lingerie—and then, in the next car, a lady takes up her silk stockings while her husband shaves in a private bathroom behind translucent glass. Next, a couple in evening dress dances languidly—and so the train passes. All this is shown without dialogue, as the movie simply presents a montage of Marian’s hopes and fantasies, projected onto the lives of others who came from elsewhere and were heading to a better place of which she could only dream.
Possessed
was a motion picture made by adults, for adults and with adults.

Weary of her dead-end circumstances, Marian tells her swaggering sometime boyfriend, “You don’t own me—nobody does! My life belongs to me!” She then turns to her impoverished, careworn mother: “If I were a man, you’d think it would be right for me to go out and get anything I could out of life and use anything I had to get it. Why should men be so different? All they’ve got is their brains, and they’re not afraid to use them. Well, neither am I.”

Marian goes to New York, where in a moment of happy accident, she meets a wealthy, divorced lawyer named Mark Whitney (Gable), who vows never to risk a broken heart again in marriage. “I left school when I was twelve,” she says, apologizing for herself. But Mark transforms naive, unpolished Marian into a sleek, bejeweled Manhattan sophisticate, setting her up as his mistress in high style and creating for her a false identity as “the widowed Mrs. Moreland.” But she is more than his mistress: they are completely devoted to each other, and after three years they are still committed to their passionate relationship.

But things change. Bravely and unselfishly, Marian quits her life with Mark when she learns that she would be a liability to his political aspirations. Trying to save his feelings, she pretends that she has been nothing but a heartless adventuress after all: “Inside, I’m still exactly what I was when you met me—a factory girl, smelling of sweat and glue—common! That’s what I am
—common
—and I like it.”

Before filming began on September 21, Joan asked to meet with Lenore Coffee. Joan had read the screenplay and recognized that, whether Lenore knew it or not, Marian’s story was Joan’s, and she wanted to elaborate the fine points for the writer’s benefit. In this regard, it is crucial to recall that Joan Crawford never pretended to be anything but a small-town girl, uneducated, rough and untutored, whose good fortunes were handed to her by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “They gave me everything I had,” she said more than once. “I came from nothing, but Hollywood took me from nothing and gave me everything good that I’ve learned and that I have. And I will always be grateful for that. I could have done nothing on my own.”

WITH MARIAN GONE FROM
Mark’s life, he turns to politics. But trouble emerges in the form of Mark’s rivals, eager to sabotage his career as potential governor by spreading the scandal of his earlier private life with the notorious Mrs. Moreland. Marian, who now considers herself a doomed outcast in any case, saves the day. In a torrential rainstorm, she makes her way to a massive rally for Mark and, when he is challenged about “Mrs. Moreland,” she interrupts his accusers and rises to address the crowd: “I am ‘Mrs. Moreland.’ I was in his life once, but I’m not any more. He belongs to all of you who are here tonight … Was he a murderer, a thief or a liar? No, worse—he loved a woman and she loved him—but now Mark Whitney belongs to you. Keep him!”