Possessed (20 page)

The professional situation remained grim with
Love on the Run,
yet another futile attempt at screwball comedy—her fourth in that genre, her third picture with Franchot and her seventh with Clark. By now, Gable had begun a romance with his bride-to-be, Carole Lombard, and Mayer thought it both prudent and bold to cast Gable and Tone once again as rivals for Joan’s affections.

The picture makes use of just about every convention established since
It Happened One Night:
the runaway bride, the pursuing reporter and the highspeed chases. But the end result was vacuous and unamusing. Joan played socialite Sally Parker, pursued by two newspaper reporters (Gable and Tone). The trio races across Europe, fleeing from spies and trying to discover who loves whom, but no one cared, and yawns occurred where laughs were expected. Perhaps most regrettable about the failure of
Love on the Run
is the fact that by this time Joan had honed her comedic timing and knew how to play a scene with deadpan gravity. Full of surprise and vitality, her irrepressible performance was not enough to save the picture, for unfortunately, publicity at the time of the movie’s release was overwhelmed by the news of Irving Thalberg’s sudden death from a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven.

When Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford were divorced early that year, Irving and Norma Shearer Thalberg assumed a kind of unofficial aristocratic primacy among the Hollywood elite. After her husband’s death, Norma at first became merely eccentric—a reaction, most people said, to being widowed with two young children. She went into virtual seclusion for a year, and then she emerged almost a new person, tearing through a series of love affairs that included entanglements with Howard Hughes, James Stewart, George Raft and teenager Mickey Rooney. At the age of forty, in 1942, she completed her last motion picture, married a young ski instructor and retired from Hollywood.

With age, Norma—as she had so long feared—became more and more emotionally unbalanced, insisting that people remember her as she once was and preferring to be addressed as Mrs. Thalberg. Hospitalized after several breakdowns, she attempted suicide at least once and spent the last years of her life mostly demented and bedridden. Norma Shearer died in 1983, at the age of eighty-one; as she had requested, she was buried beside Irving G. Thalberg.

AT THE END OF 1936
, Joan’s accountants reported that her pretax income was $302,307—a sum that made her one of only fifteen Americans who took inmore than three hundred thousand dollars that year. She then began filming her scenes in a verbose and lackluster comedy called
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney,
which had been undertaken with high hopes for its success: after all, it had long runs on the stage in London and New York and was a successful Norma Shearer movie in 1929. But Frederick Lonsdale’s story of a jewel thief masquerading as a society matron was overwhelmed by huge sets and by wearisome injections of meaningfully moralistic dialogue; not even the skills of debonair costar William Powell could alleviate the tedium.

Making her task even more difficult, Joan miscarried three weeks into filming, at Christmastime—the second or third such incident since her marriage to Franchot. Typically, she blamed herself and her subsequent depression for the failure of the film. “I was having personal problems,” she said, “and I let them get in my way. I wanted so to have Franchot’s children.”

Thus the new year began bleakly, the atmosphere at Bristol Avenue often perilous because of Franchot’s dark moods, aggravated by heavy drinking. “I grieved over my losses, and Franchot grieved over his career.” Tenaciously, Joan continued to fight for better roles and for her marriage, which was delicately poised between her fragile hopes and his frank resentments.

1
Garbo was receiving nine thousand dollars a week and Norma Shearer six rhousand, but Crawford was way ahead of Gable, whose salary was twenty-five hundred.

2
Genie Chester, the daughter of the chairman of General Foods, had polio as a child and was afflicted with severe lameness throughout her life. She had been Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s best friend and became a lifelong friend and confidante to Joan, too.

3
Joseph L. Mankiewicz produced seven Crawford vehicles for MGM: The Gorgeous Hussy, Love on the Run, The Bride Wore Red, Mannequin, The Shining Hour, Strange Cargo and Reunion in France. In addition, he wrote two: Forsaking All Others and I Live My Life.

4
Clark Gable and Charles Laughton were also nominated as best actor for that film; all three lost to Victor McLaglen’s performance in The Informer.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Joan, Julie, Susan—and God
| 1937–1940 |

T
HE LAST OF MRS. CHEYNEY
was released two weeks after filming concluded, in February 1937. By this time, Joan’s name on theater marquees was sufficient to attract crowds, and the picture increased MGM’s fortunes once again. Her portrayal of a sophisticated jewel thief—a study in cool poise and comic understatement—was very like that of Marlene Dietrich, who played a similar role in the recently released comedy
Desire.

According to the market research, women made up the majority of Joan’s audience, and when couples or families went to see a Crawford movie, women brought them to the box office. These studies were commissioned by distributors, who quickly reported the results to the studio. Metro knew, therefore, that they had to present their glamorous, fashionably dressed leading lady in as many stunning outfits as could be included in the movie’s running time. (That explains the sudden insertions of fashion-show sequences into
Our Blushing Brides, Mannequin
and
The Women
.)

Life
took note of all this and more when, in the March 1 issue, its editors proclaimed Joan “the first queen of the movies, [and her] special public is predominantly female, predominantly low-brow.” The six-page feature story was titled “Joan Crawford: Mrs. Tone at Home.” Accompanied by no fewer than twenty-nine photos, the article accurately noted that she was born on March 23, 1906.

From early June through late October, Joan appeared in two demanding and complicated movies, made back-to-back and almost without interruption—
The Bride Wore Red
and
Mannequin.
These were ambitious productions, the first directed by the formidable Dorothy Arzner (who had completed
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
after the sudden death of Richard Boleslawski) and the second by Frank Borzage (who returned to direct two of Joan’s later features). Franchot costarred in
The Bride Wore Red
and was then busy in non-Crawford pictures.

“We were so busy we never had time [for each other],” Joan said later. When they worked together, she recalled that she “tried very hard to give him more scenes, to build his ego. It just didn’t work. It was no wonder that he gradually broke away [and] tried to assert himself,” which he did not only through work but also by pursuing a series of love affairs. “One afternoon I dropped by his dressing room to surprise him—and I did.” As for Franchot, his comments about Joan to reporters were complimentary, but always accompanied by a vaguely insolent subtext:

She must get her homework done, her lines learned every day. She has continuous meetings with the producer or the director or somebody else equally important each evening. She has to get up at four-thirty in the morning in order to get to the hairdresser and on to the set. She needs a massage at night before she can sleep for a few hours. She has to eat sparingly and exercise constantly. This goes on and on, and when Saturday night comes, there are other professional duties and priorities—conferences about the next script, talks about dancing lessons, discussions about yoga, tennis and swimming lessons. After all, she’s a star.

Those last three words summarized perfectly the essence of Joan Crawford. “My insecurities made me carry things a little too far—for my ownpersonal comfort and the comfort of the people around me,” she said late in life. “I played the star Joan Crawford, not the woman Joan Crawford, to the hilt.” Ths is not hard to understand. She labored ceaselessly to eradicate every trace of Lucille Le Sueur, to become the new creature she much preferred and to assume thoroughly the identity of Joan Crawford.

She had been the girl next door in her early years—the girl everybody forgets in real life—and she bought the movie-star image because it seemed to her the ultimate deliverance from her own past. Hence she was always a movie star, even if she went out shopping. A trip to the grocery store (not a frequent chore) was an event precisely because she could be certain of being recognized. And she believed with almost religious fervor that people wanted to see Joan Crawford the star, not the uninteresting and unattractive person she believed herself to be. For Joan, this was neither affectation nor hypocrisy, but rather her conviction that “a star owed the public a continuation of the image that made her a star in the first place.” As a star, she never represented the girl next door.

“I felt that I photographed better than I actually looked, so I tried desperately to make sure my make-up and wardrobe lived up to the image on screen.” Her audience felt that she represented something like the fulfillment of their dreams and fantasies; the Cinderella tale, after all, never dies—it conforms to an archetypal hope for rescue from a wretched existence. “People liked to read about the way I dressed when I went out. I realized that Mayer was right: I was obliged to be glamorous. If people wanted to see Joan Crawford the star, they were going to see Joan Crawford the star—not a character actress in blue jeans.”

In an important way, Joan was very much a transition figure in the history of stardom. Fairbanks and Chaplin, Pickford and Garbo, Novarro and Valentino all lived at a great distance from the public. Dwelling in their fairytale castles high up in the Hills of Beverly, they consorted mostly with other Hollywood gods and goddesses, living beyond all mortal contact, or at least with as little contact as possible. They were intermediaries between the real and the imaginary.

Without intending to do so, Joan Crawford effectively changed the notion of stardom. By appearing in public often, by drawing close to her fans, by inviting people to see her in person as they did on-screen, she simultaneously affirmed the glamorous, remote dignity of the star and expressed the fact that it was a reality. Her private life, on the other hand, was hers, and she knew the difference. Impressively generous toward strangers and friends and perpetually demanding of her colleagues, Joan was a jumble of contradictions: regal yet crude, warm but chilly, erotic and puritanical, imposing and vulnerable, ethical and unscrupulous, munificent and egocentric.

She was indeed a woman possessed by a desire to rise above her background and by the need to belong to someone deeply and permanently. But in pursuing the first ambition, she failed in the second. “I’ve been protected by studio men most of my life, so in some ways, I’m a goddamn image, not a person. I felt an overwhelming obligation to my career, and so I was an actress first and a wife second. I worked almost constantly, and even when I wasn’t working, there was that image thing of looking like a star, conducting myself like a star. I just went ahead like a bulldozer. I’m afraid I was a very selfish woman.” It is this kind of fundamental honesty that makes the story of her life both compelling and cautionary.

THE BRIDE WORE RED,
produced that summer of 1937, was based on a play called
The Girl from Trieste,
by Ferenc Molnar. Set in a fanciful Tyrol where dirndls are seen ineptly alongside Adrian’s fantastic creations, the movie was obviously made for the sake of the eponymous bugle-beaded gown. Otherwise, the picture was only a spin on the Cinderella tale, once more featuring Joan’s agonized emotions and two attractive gentlemen—again, Robert Young and Franchot Tone.

Flaunting a coy sense of indecisiveness and draped in everything from jungle sarongs to proletarian chic to Paris-Hollywood high fashion, Joan the star had been presented to audiences as one who attracted at least two suitors in every story—hence the perpetual triangle.

This was virtually a constant motif in the films of Joan Crawford. She was juggled between John Gilbert and Ernest Torrence in
Twelve Miles Out,
Neil Hamilton and Clark Gable in
Laughing Sinners,
Neil Hamilton and Monroe Owsley in
This Modern Age,
Nils Asther and Robert Montgomery in
Letty Lynton,
Gary Cooper and Robert Young in
Today We Live,
Clark Gable and Franchot Tone in
Dancing Lady,
Edward Arnold and Franchot Tone in
Sadie McKee,
Otto Kruger and Clark Gable in
Chained,
Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable in
Forsaking All Others,
Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone in
No More Ladies,
Brian Aherne and Fred Keating in
I Live My Life,
Melvyn Douglas and Franchot Tone in
The Gorgeous Hussy,
Clark Gable and Franchot Tone in
Love on the Run,
Robert Montgomery and William Powell in
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
and Robert Young and Franchot Tone in
The Bride Wore Red.

Audiences and critics recognized this Crawford tradition, which had become, as she said, “formula stuff” although the familiar structure was not yet exhausted. Yet to come were Alan Curtis and Spencer Tracy in
Mannequin,
Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas in
The Shining Hour
and Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews in
Daisy Kenyon.