Possessed (35 page)

Joan agonized when she made changes like these to the script, and they indicate not only that she clearly saw the correspondences between the character and herself, but also that in a way she was expressing a kind of regret.

Movies were her reality, and at this point in her life they were more than ever a means of making things right, of providing a cyclorama against which her past, with all its messy jumble, could be explored, its less attractive elements examined and corrected, if not dismissed.
The Damned Don’t Cry
and
Harriet Craig
were quintessentially Joan Crawford projects, and somehow, secretly, she made them confessional pieces. She knew that audiences would have to listen very carefully indeed to hear the force of the subtexts.

The title of Kelly’s play entered twentieth-century American English soon after its 1925 Broadway premiere—hence
Craig’s wife
meant a woman maniacally devoted to maintaining an ideal household without consideration for relationships. “In many ways, Joan was herself the embodiment of Harriet Craig,” according to Sherman, “in her obsessive attitude toward her home; her distrust of men and her desire to control; and her power of manipulation.”

“The big house at 426 [North Bristol Avenue] is a kind of symbol to Miss Crawford,” wrote a journalist who visited Joan in 1950. “She adores it and shines it personally. Few servants can keep up with her, and she changes them almost as often as she changes her bed linen.” And at the studio, a retinue of retainers was in attendance: her secretary, hair stylist, makeup artist, wardrobe supervisor and lighting stand-in. With the perfect house and a platoon of people to look after it and her, she was Harriet Craig the actress.

At first, Sherman refused to direct the picture—and tried to dissuade Joan from acting in it, too, insisting that it was hopelessly dated, impossibly negative and perhaps too revelatory of its star. By way of reply, Joan insisted that there was no other property ready for her, and she needed the income. “But
Harriet Craig
turned out to be an enjoyable and rewarding experience,” Sherman added, “and I was glad to have been so wrong. Joan’s performance was wonderful. I had thought I knew everything, but I didn’t.”

Which was exactly Joan’s judgment when they came to film a scene she considered false and dishonest. “Somehow, I couldn’t follow his direction,” she recalled. “I lost my temper, and in front of the entire crew, I cried, ‘I just don’t know what you want me to do! And I don’t think you know, either!’ ”

“Do it your way, then,” muttered Sherman.

She did it her way—and then she summoned the entire crew, more than seventy-five people. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “a little while ago, you heard me blow my top at Mr. Sherman, in front of all of you. I would like to apologize. I was wrong. He was right.”

In assessing Joan’s performance, it must be acknowledged that the play and the movie seem severely dated—hence the title character now seems simply grotesque, without a shred of nuance in her steely exterior. That said, the leading lady in this case may be admired for having faithfully rendered a chilling one-note performance. Harriet Craig is a destructive shrew, a monster to her fingertips, and so she will ever be.

When the picture was finished, in late spring 1950, Sherman and Crawford made the long drive from Los Angeles to Canada’s Lake Louise for a private holiday. Hedda Sherman accepted her husband’s excuse that this was a business trip for work on their next project at Warners. But there was a gap until that began, and friends and colleagues soon began to notice Joan’s excessive drinking. She turned forty-five in 1951, anxious because she had no immediate job and aware that her affair with Vincent Sherman was doomed, like those with Charles McCabe and Greg Bautzer.

WITH HER ROLES IN
The Damned Don’t Cry
and
Harriet Craig,
Joan began playing mostly unsympathetic characters. It would perhaps be going too far to suggest that she
consciously
chose to play these women precisely because they were aspects of herself—that the roles were Greek masks behind which she hid and through which she conveyed something of her true self. But such a statement may not be going too far: it may be a more or less accurate understanding of a woman who never appeared in public, as she said, unless she looked like Joan Crawford the movie star.

She was never a woman who revealed herself easily. Family, friends, lovers, husbands and colleagues, no matter what the extent of their admiration or intimacy with her, always felt that she withheld something—that there wassomething restrained in her personality, even when her temper or passion was most evident. Part of the explanation for this fundamental reticence lies in her resentment of her past, of the child and young woman she was—the poor girl from the hardscrabble background, the uneducated daughter of a laundress. She had tried so hard to erase that aspect of herself, and so the commoner she hoped to obliterate had been partly replaced by the aristocrat, which in America meant the movie star, the pop royal. Whereas Clark Gable was called the King of the Movies and John Wayne bore the title of the Duke, Joan Crawford was the quintessential Movie Queen, and so critics and journalists designated her for fifty years.

This complex of ideas suggests another reason for her cool cultivation of the movie-star image. Joan did not like herself, and so she always longed to escape into a role that was both release and relief. Actors, after all, only do professionally what all of us do now and then: we hide behind masks, and for a variety of reasons, we pretend. This is not always sheer hypocrisy—it is self-preservation, and even sometimes a matter of respect for the feelings of others. Joan was first and foremost an actress, and she regarded all potential roles from the obvious vantage point of her craft. How much of a character existed first in herself? With how much could she identify? With every new role, she asked those questions of herself.

IN THE WINTER OF 1949,
Joan had seen Madeleine Carroll in Fay Kanin’s play
Goodbye, My Fancy,
which ran on Broadway for over a year. After her return to Los Angeles, she asked Jack Warner to purchase the film rights, and by January 1951, a screenplay was ready, as were Crawford and Sherman.

Goodbye, My Fancy
is a literate political comedy about a character named Agatha Reed, a crusading Washington politician who returns to her New England alma mater to receive an honorary degree. There, she discovers that the professor she had admired, loved and almost married is now the college president—a widower and still the love of her life. But her beloved old school is now run by a board of trustees afraid of her ideas: she is, for example, againstwar and in favor of open, critical thinking. Also on hand is a photographer from
Life
magazine who had loved and lost Agatha and now sees his second chance.
Goodbye, My Fancy
was therefore another romantic triangle well suited for Crawford—and it also had a liberal social conscience.

Joan’s leading men were Frank Lovejoy as the photographer and (in his fourth outing with her), Robert Young as the college president. She asked that the role of Agatha’s private secretary and confidante be given to Eve Arden (Mildred Pierce’s faithful friend, Ida). With these talents in place, everyone was optimistic about the production. But as filming commenced, studio executives were under considerable pressure from both the Motion Picture Production Code and certain government agencies to change the single element central to Fay Kanin’s play.

On Broadway,
Goodbye, My Fancy
had been openly critical of war as a means of settling international disputes. But by the time it was ready to be a movie, the United States was involved in a “police action” that was in fact the Korean War. In 1951, there was no getting around it: the script by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts had to support or at least not question America’s military might. Hence the critical theme of Agatha Reed’s antiwar stance had to be cut, and she is merely in favor of some kind of vague academic freedom. This completely bled the life from Kanin’s play (and reduced to meaninglessness the university’s hysteria over the campus screening of Agatha’s unnamed and undescribed documentary film).
“Goodbye, My Fancy
could have been a much more interesting picture,” Joan wrote to an interviewer, “but unfortunately the political angle was cut out, and that took the guts right out of it. It got dulled down.”
⁵

A ho-hum reaction greeted the movie when it was released in May 1951. Almost alone in offering a positive review,
Variety
appreciated Joan’s “excellent light touch” after several heavily dramatic roles. But as usual, her ownestimation was frank: she said that she had miscalculated when she thought that
Goodbye, My Fancy
would be a good property for her, and she admitted that either Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell “could have done this sort of sophisticated political comedy better than I did.” But given the attenuation of the play when it reached the screen, it may have been impossible for any actress to supply the pungency and substance that had been removed from the text.

Tensions between the star and her director accumulated during the final weeks of filming, especially over Joan’s rude treatment of twenty-year-old Janice Rule, cast as Robert Young’s daughter. “For some reason, perhaps Janice’s youth, Joan took a dislike to her,” recalled Sherman, “and whenever I spent an extra moment talking with Janice, Joan became suspicious and jealous, which made it difficult for me and for Janice.”

Joan’s unpleasant attitude may well have had to do with the fact that she now felt threatened by younger actresses, but this she could not recognize at the time. “I felt that she was unprofessional in her attitude,” Joan said of Janice, “and that she regarded movie work as something less than slumming. One day, I told her so. ‘Miss Rule,’ I said, ‘you’d better enjoy making films when you can—I doubt that you’ll be with us long.’ “ But a decade later, Joan saw Janice in another picture called
The Subterraneans
and she was, as she said, “absolutely rapt over the performance of an actress who dances brilliantly and who has a flair for drama and for comedy. The girl was Janice Rule, and I can only add superlatives. Miss Rule: my apologies—I think you’re going to be with us a long, long time!”

AT THE END OF March,
shortly after the movie was completed, the telephone rang late one night at the home of Vincent and Hedda Sherman. He recognized Joan’s slurred voice when she whispered, “Goodbye, Vincent.” Alarmed, he raced to Brentwood, where he found her incoherent, a bottle of sleeping pills nearby. While Joan’s cook prepared a pot of coffee, he dragged her from bed and forced her to walk about until she was more alert. “I begged her tobe sensible and to understand that I cared about her, but I could never leave Hedda or my children. I also reminded her that I had told her this when we first met. It was almost five in the morning when I got back home.” Soon after, Vincent Sherman gently ended the nearly two-year-long affair when he went off to direct Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in
Lone Star.

“AT THE MOMENT WHEN
I needed a blockbuster,” Joan recalled, “my next picture could easily have been my swan song. It was the type of improbable corn that had gone out with Adrian’s shoulder pads.”

She was speaking about
This Woman Is Dangerous,
based on an original story submitted to the studio, which starred Joan as Beth Austin, an ex-con who became the brains behind a gang of thieves and confidence men. “Now don’t hurt anyone,” she says with maternal solicitude as she passes out the guns. To make matters more complicated, Beth is losing her eyesight. A brilliant surgeon (played by Dennis Morgan) saves her vision and wins her heart, but not before improbable crimes and medical miracles intervene. This may be the only movie in history to feature a character who is a world-renowned eye surgeon so dedicated to healing that he rushes from the city to farm country to operate on a boy kicked by a horse. Not even David Brian, Joan’s occasional real-life lover, could do much as her scowling crook of a boyfriend. By all accounts, the not terrifically talented Brian was, offscreen, an expert ballroom dancer and a poet. Perhaps he missed his true calling.

The main problem with this picture was not the tired premise of a bad woman going good: it was the poorly constructed script and an absentminded director named Felix Feist, who seemed to have no idea what to do with the actors from sequence to sequence. For one of the very few times in her career, Joan appeared as if she had sleepwalked her way through the picture, unsure just which scene was which.

“I must have been awfully hungry,” Joan said later. “The kids were in school, the house had a mortgage. And so I did this awful picture that had a shoddy story, a cliché script and no direction to speak of. The thing justblundered along. I suppose I could have made it better, but it was one of those times when I was so disgusted with everything that I just shrugged and went along with it. It was the worst picture I ever made.”

She was not exaggerating. Howard Thompson, a movie critic for the
New York Times
for over forty years, was known for his pithy, one-line reviews. Of
This Woman Is Dangerous,
he wrote simply, “This picture is trash.”

1
Joan did not appear in No Sad Songs for Me, which was released in 1950 with Margaret Sullavan in the leading role.

2
In 1991, the twins finally located and met their father.

3
Much of the story is set during a New York winter. Preminger had the soundstage kept at a cool temperature so that the actors’ breath would realistically be seen in wintry air and they could more comfortably wear heavy clothing for long scenes that were set outdoors. This was Joan’s preference in any case: a chilly temperature on the set prevented her makeup from running.