Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford

by Donald Spoto

Because she saw them as little versions of her earlier self, discipline was a way of negating that person. With goodwill, she adopted children in order to save them from a childhood like her own. But she so resented that childhood that she tried to erase its signs and symbols. The discipline, in other words, was a way of preventing her own children from becoming distorted versions and repetitions of Joan Crawford. But the forms of thediscipline were not, it seems almost certainly, the hideously

cruel versions set forth in Mommie Dearest. Joan

“Joan never complained about her difficult children,” recalled Myrna Loy, who knew the entire family over many decades. “Christina and Christopher made me glad I didn’t have children.” Elva Martien, frequently Joan’s movie costumer, was also familiar with the Crawford household; she insisted that Joan “loved those children and was really a devoted mother. She felt that her kids, when they grew up and went off on their own, might not be able to afford a grand Hollywood lifestyle. She wanted them to be able to go out and face the real world, and that’s what she tried to prepare them for.” Director Herbert Kenwith knew Joan over many years and often visited the house. “Joan demanded perfection and could be rigid with her children,” he recalled, “but the things Christina alleged just never happened.” And Cindy Crawford offered firsthand testimony: “Mommy was a disciplinarian because she wanted us to grow up independently—self-reliant and with good goals. We

had to make our beds and wash our dishes. She wasn’t the kind of person Christina wrote about. She was very caring and loving.” WHATEVER THE EXTENT OF Joan’s discipline with Christina and Christopher, her tactics had changed by the time the twins were out of infancy. Cathy and Cindy Crawford always insisted that they had a loving home life without any of the harsh treatment Christina described. “I think Christina was jealous,” said Cindy Crawford years later. “She wanted to be the one person she couldn’t be—Mother. But our mother was very good to us—I think she was good to all four of us, really. She cared for us. We grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong.” “My mother was a very warm person,” added Cathy, speaking for both twins. “She was always there when we needed her. She was a working mother, but she always had time for us, and as far as Mommie Dearest is concerned, it’s a great work of fiction. Christina must have been in another household. She says Joan was rotten, but I say she was a good person. She was tough on us, sure—you’d get a swat once in a while, but there were none of those physical beatings. Christina committed matricide on Mother’s image.” After working as the first editor of Mommie Dearest, Judy Feiffer felt that “Christina had, in a way, tried to be Joan.”

add that when Christina realized that effort was futile, she killed Joan off—in her book. The twins recalled that indeed Joan was “strict—she believed in discipline,” as Cathy recalled, but she insisted that they were “the luckiest [children] in the world—I wouldn’t have chosen any other mother, because I had the best one anyone could ever have. She gave me backbone, courage and wonderful memories to last all through my life.” According to Betty Barker, who worked for Joan for forty years, Joan was “never out of control. I never saw her do ...

“I had heard so many stories about her,” Sherman recalled, “and I thought she’d be very demanding, overpowering and overwhelming. But Joan was very much down to earth, very simple, unpretentious and very smart about filmmaking.” “She phoned me almost every day to discuss some story point,” Sherman remembered, “or she would come to the studio to talk about her wardrobe. I found her excellent to work with—intelligent, perceptive, and she presented her thoughts in a way that was never high-handed. I had never worked with an actor who knew so much about filmmaking. She could have been imperious, but she never was. She always asked rather than told, and she listened. She appreciated being part of the process of working on the script, even though she had that power [in her contract].” He recalled daily script conferences, at which Joan was present along with Sherman, Wald and writers Harold Medford and Jerome Weidman—meetings to which she came prepared with detailed notes, questions and valuable ideas. When filming began, the director had more reasons to praise his leading lady. On the set, she at

There is something quietly revolutionary about The Damned Don’t Cry, which implies that women have virtually a constitutional right to walk out on a depressing home and a husband who is a poor provider. The censors were still powerfully active in Hollywood in 1950, when the final release print was submitted for approval, but they apparently blinked, for The Damned Don’t Cry insisted that a housewife was not doomed to live out her fate at home, no matter how grim the circumstances. Joan never liked this noteworthy picture—"a big mistake” was her description of it—and the critics were not even remotely well inclined toward it. This is difficult to understand, for her achievement here was complex, with a subtle but rich emotional range, and the finished film, provocative and uncompromising, offers one of her strongest performances. If Mildred Pierce defines Crawford in the 1940s, the same is true of The Damned Don’t Cry in the 1950s.

Harriet’s arrogance causes her to destroy everything of real value, and finally her perfect home becomes an isolating tomb. Joan may have seen it as a cautionary tale, a warning against some of her most ingrained and potentially destructive habits. If she could not show her less attractive side in real life, she certainly did so by her choice of material and by her deliberate shaping of it before and during production. In making her final revisions to the screenplay, Joan made certain that some specifically autobiographical elements were inserted: “I’ve come a long way since working in that

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.

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

on her own, for her last five pictures had none of the success of Mildred Pierce, Humoresque, Possessed or Daisy Kenyon. “Warners was putting me in mediocre things,” she wrote to a friend. “I suddenly got into a rut and then asked

From the start, Joan thought of Sudden Fear as her film, and with good reason. Joan had engaged as screenwriter

The picture, independently produced under the Kaufman banner and released by RKO in the summer of 1952, was successful in every way—at the box office, with critics and at Oscar time, when it gathered four nominations. Joan offered a moving, restrained yet powerful performance, completely controlled yet not at all calculated, despite scenes in which she had to express Myra’s

Joan received.1 Cast relations during production were less than cordial. After several days in San Francisco, Jack Palance refused to reply to Joan’s greeting each morning, and this caused a chilly lack of communication between the two stars. Asked why he was so unfriendly to his leading lady, Palance replied that he thought she was insincere. He disapproved of Joan’s assistants and said that he regarded her as an aloof movie queen who treated colleagues condescendingly,as if they were servants. But he seems to have been remarkably disingenuous. As it happened, he was carrying on an affair with Gloria Grahame during production; she disliked Joan and tried to throw her off whenever possible—hence Palance took Grahame’s side. Hollywood history provides a host of such petty animosities and coy tricks. (Years later, Grahame thought better of her behavior toward Joan: she told Herbert Kenwith that Joan had quietly guided much of her performance in Sudden Fear.) “It was one of the

No one asked these people for silence—we all knew it was just right for the job.” Indeed, everything was right about Sudden Fear, a hypnotic thriller that over time lost none of its power or appeal.

In Sudden Fear, she portrayed a woman terrorized by a husband with murder on his mind. In Torch Song, she portrayed a bitter, lonely and hostile star who used and mistreated others. Joan may have assumed this role precisely because it was an accurate portrait of herself—of the woman she could acknowledge and deal with only through role-playing, the woman she could present to the world and then discard, as if by a kind of magic. But by choosing the roles and then living them out in an increasingly distant existence, sealed off from emotional connections to others, Joan was allowing herself no other frame of reference for real life. The characters partly became her.

Soon Christopher was living there year-round, too. “My brother and Iboth lived at the Chadwick School and didn’t go home very often,” according to Christina. “We didn’t get into the trouble that usually followed one of those weekends at home, so it wasn’t such a bad trade-off.” Cathy and Cindy came to the same school in 1955, and they had happy memories of their time there, of Joan’s regular visits to them all and of holidays in Brentwood. Living

This complicated and essentially tragic confusion of realms was aggravated by her growing dependence on alcohol, which made her more and more reclusive and prevented any kind of healthy self-awareness. Alone in the dark, she counted on her private stores of vodka to offer an escape from loneliness. But the more she drank, the more ill she felt the following morning and the more time was required to put her right. And the more ill she felt, the more dyspeptically she behaved with directors, cast and crew. This sad cycle deepened and darkened, and for a time there seemed no escape. JUST BEFORE STARTING

It is not true (as some have claimed) that she was offered only negative or downright repellent characters: on the contrary, there were discussions about her playing more sympathetic roles, which eventually went to Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Booth, Susan Hayward and Deborah Kerr. But at least twice, Joan sabotaged her own best interests when she insisted on her choice of cameraman and wardrobe designer. In fact, she chose off-putting, difficult or negative characters like Lynn Markham in Female on the Beach because—intentionally or not—she wanted to present an aspect of herself that audiences would reject. There was more to Joan Crawford, she seemed to say, and not all of her was admirable or worthy of imitation. Only this kind of dark motivation,

hurried to Los Angeles to appear in Robert Aldrich’s film of Autumn Leaves, which was produced from late August through November 1955. At first glance, this seemed to be just another soap opera

Because the performances by Crawford and Robertson were pitched so perfectly—because the hysterics were kept to a minimum and the menace neatly tuned—Autumn Leaves turned out better than it might have in other hands. Perhaps because Alfred Steele had recently dispersed the clouds of her own real-life loneliness, Joan knew how to portray a woman existing in a gray haze of solitude. Her transformation by love never seems incredible, her rapture is poignant and her heartache credibly rendered without exaggerated facial reactions. She was more than competently accompanied by Cliff

Film critics were in her corner. As one wrote, Autumn Leaves was best seen as “a mature study of loneliness and mental distress, and the strength of Miss Crawford’s performance is that it is natural and controlled. A lesser actress would bring more than a touch of ham to such a juicy role.”

She took Christina to an exercise class with drama coach Claudia Frank. They went backstage to visit Margaret Sullavan, who was appearing in Janus, and they audited classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “If you ever decide to make this your life,” Joan told Christina, “I want you to know it won’t be easy. It has to be your own choice, and I’ll never push you. But if you do it, I want you to do it well.” Joan urged her daughter to study drama formally at a university, but after a year, Christina abandoned her studies at Carnegie Tech and took a small apartment in Manhattan. Joan expressed her “displeasure” at this turn of events, “but once she’d made those decisions, my attitude was that if she wanted to tackle the adult world, more power to her.” Thus began a long period of estrangement

matched the emotional distance between mother and son. At the same time, Joan explained the very different rapport she had with Cathy and Cindy: “Unlike Christina and Christopher, the twins don’t resent my life.” “I want

just lovely. I am glad you had the loving care of {producer} Jerry Wald, {cinematographer} Bill Mellor, {publicists} Perry Lieber and Don Prince, and {screenwriter} Philip Dunne. I am sure you will have great success, and nobody wishes it for you more than your Mommie. But Christina’s acting ambitions were never fulfilled: “I continued to get a few acting jobs in Hollywood, but without much success. Finally, I just gave up … I disappeared. My life was in a shambles … my personal stability turned out to be mere quicksand, and for a while all I could do was try to put myself back together.” Later, she tried writing.

THAT SPRING OF 1956, Joan was fitted for costumes for her third and final picture for Columbia—this one to be made in England and directed by David Miller, who had done so well on Sudden Fear. “This was my last really top picture,” she later said, discussing The Story of Esther Costello, which was filmed from August to December. The press, noting her twenty-eight pieces of luggage, forty-eight costumes, a trunk full of furs and her millionaire husband, duly covered her arrival in England. Based on a 1953 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, Esther’s story was alternately

It did not in life, either. The previous year, Christopher had run away from a school he had chosen in Arizona. Now, at fifteen, his troubles with the law worsened. On May 10, he ran away from the home of Dr. Earl Loomis, a Long Island psychiatrist with whose family he had agreed to live. The following day, Christopher was charged with malicious mischief after “borrowing” a car and speeding recklessly through the town of Greenport, breaking store windows and streetlights

rifle and wounding a teenage pedestrian before police tracked him down. At Joan and Alfred’s request, a judge then ordered that Christopher be sent to a school for delinquent and disturbed adolescents. At seventeen, he was arrested for car theft and was sentenced to a correctional institution. By the age of nineteen, he was working as a lifeguard in Florida, where he married a waitress, fathered three children—and (in his own words) “had no idea” where the family was after he obtained a hasty divorce. He then married a second time and returned to Long Island. He never held down any job for very long, and his second wife worked as an office clerk to support him and their daughter. Christopher Crawford died at the age of sixty-three, on September 22, 2006. “My son was one of the few problems inthis world that I couldn’t solve,” Joan said. “Alfred started out thinking I had been too strict a disciplinarian with him, but he ended up thinking I hadn’t been half strict enough.” In August

mother wanted what I could do for her, but I don’t think she ever really wanted to be part of my life. I know everyone thought it was the other way around, but I honestly tried.” THE LOSSES

But her increased consumption of vodka during production did not help, as she admitted: “After Alfred died, I was really alone, and the vodka controlled me. It dulled the morning, the afternoon and the night.” When a writer from Life asked why she drove herself so relentlessly—returning to work in a movie just six weeks after Steele’s death—she was forthright: “I don’t kid myself. I do it to keep from being lonely.” But her anxieties, her

her insistence on special treatment caused problems—even with Jean Negulesco, who had returned to direct a second Crawford picture. This time, however, his experience was thornier than it had been during Humoresque. “It’s difficult to get what you want out of her, becauseshe has such definite ideas,” he said at the time. The result, by the end of her work on The Best of Everything, was a deeper disconnection from her colleagues, hence a greater loneliness. For much

Misfits—Clark learned that he was going to be a father for the first time. The movie wrapped on November 4, and Clark immediately returned to Los Angeles to be with his pregnant wife. Twelve days later, he dropped dead from a heart attack; he was fifty-nine years old. Joan went at once to offer help and sympathy to Kay, with whom she maintained a close friendship forever after.

seeking a father-figure she could emasculate, while Joan was still a romantic, waiting for Prince Charming to arrive in a white convertible.” He could have added other parallels: Joan and Bette each had four husbands and lost one in death; they both supported their mothers and a sibling (Joan’s brother, Bette’s sister); both adopted children; and both had daughters who later wrote books claiming they had fearsome childhood years. From the start,

During filming and throughout the promotion of the picture, Aldrichand his partners had no objection to the grindings of an ugly rumor mill. Stories were deliberately circulated—and readily believed—that Crawford and Davis were mortal enemies, locked in a constant battle of wills for supremacy on the set and superiority over each other. According to the gossips, whose accounts were later vastly inflated in books, the actresses came to blows several times and had to be separated like prize-fighters who were landing punches and causing each other wounds, stitches and scars. This made for newsworthy publicity, but it bore no resemblance to the truth. It was painful enough for Joan to act scenes in which Bette served meals of cooked canary and dead rat.

In fact, the entire production, as taxing as it was, began and ended well. As Aldrich recalled, “Bette and Joan voluntarily came in to the studio and devoted a Sunday to rehearsing physically difficult scenes to prevent our running over schedule.” Also in the cast was a lumbering twenty-four-year-old actor named Victor Buono, who had worked in television for three years and was now cast in his first feature, as a repellent opportunist. As Aldrich recalled, Joan knew the picture was very important for Buono’s career. Hence, although she had concluded her scenes for the day and was ready to leave the studio, she got back into her full makeup and costume for the reverse angles of Buono’s encounter with Joan as Blanche. “Even though she wasn’t being photographed,” Aldrich recalled, “she felt he mightn’t have the experience to react and speak lines to a roll of blankets on a hospital bed.” At the end of that day, Buono’s scenes looked perfect, and later he told everyone how grateful he was to Joan Crawford for her extra efforts on his behalf. She also

NEVER, ACCORDING TO ANY reliable account, did either Joan or Bette claim there was trouble between them, and writers who protested otherwise have no firsthand sources. On the contrary, as Joan wrote to a friend on August 25, “Bette Davis is a joy to work with—very professional and completely dedicated to her work. She and I get to the studio every morning, a half-hour before our calls, just longing to get in front of that camera. She is really a dear human being, with a divine sense of humor.” Years later, little had changed in her memory of that movie: “We didn’t feud the way the publicity people wanted us to. We weren’t friends—we have different temperaments and worked together for only a few weeks—but she is a fascinating actress. We got along, and when the picture was finished, I went back to New York and Bette went back to Connecticut. Our paths didn’tcross again. I really can’t say anything against Bette. Everyone involved with Baby Jane was so professional and so dedicated that what could have turned out to have been a tired, forgettable little low-budget picture turned out to be a good one.” Bette Davis was adamant about the situation. “Will it be disappointing

“I want to make it on my own,” Christina told journalist James Bacon later that day. “I seldom see my mother, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love her or respect her—I do, tremendously.” Asked if the reports of family feuds were accurate, Christina emphatically denied them: “We have had crises, as all daughters do with their mothers—but mine have been complicated because I

have decided to make it in my mother’s own profession. But there is no feud. I have great love and admiration for my mother, both as a mother and as a great talent. I hope I can achieve even a fraction of what she has in this business.” Christina

I was not the least bit lonely {because} I visited Mother nearly every other day, basking in our mutual homecoming and enjoying every minute of it. I had a new apartment to settle, a new life to manage, letters to write, and my mother’s love. I spent many evenings at Mother’s apartment. For the first time, I felt really comfortable with her. She seemed to feel the same and went out of her way to plan fun things for us to do together. I was almost automatically included in her social events, met the majority of her New York friends and business associates

spent quiet evenings with her just watching television and talking. There were still some days when she was in a bad mood and she drank quite a bit, but her fits of anger were never directed at me. Christina wrote

Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn (to name only two of Joan’s generation) were actresses with admirable skills and keen intelligence, but sometimes they could be seen acting, and just as often their performances were diminished by a convenient and easily recognized set of tics and mannerisms. But Joan Crawford was rare among her peers. She very infrequently made a false move in any scene in any picture: virtually everything she did on-screen was right for the moment—she was her technique. Colleagues may have found her increasingly difficult, even imperious—but no one ever turned down the chance to work in one of her pictures. She behaved like a star, but she was a great deal more. With the passing of decades and the unfortunate image created by Mommie Dearest, it became unfashionable to suggest that Joan Crawford was, in simple fact, one of the few truly great actresses in the history of American film.

She was not disappointed at this outcome. The production had become unlike anything Joan had known—more violently repellent, with more of the “horrendous and evil things” (butchered limbs, for example) that she so hated in an Aldrich movie. In addition, the script had been all but abandoned in favor of wholesale improvisation, and this offended her professional sensibility. Adding to her displeasure was the prospect of continuing to work with Bette Davis, who was a “silent” producer on Charlotte and who had behaved, during its Louisiana filming, as if it were her picture. Hence, although Joan certainly had physical ailments, she was also weary of the entire distasteful production;

Thus she agreed to a trio of pictures that were to be her last, and they could not have been lessfortunate choices: William Castle’s I Saw What You Did, produced in early 1965; and Berserk and Trog, filmed in England in 1967 and 1969 2 Later, she virtually disowned these movies and refused to discuss them with interviewers; her contempt for them was widely shared by audiences. In the Castle production, Joan

tape in each empty room and walked around as if she was playing scenes, to sense the way a room was going to work. She enjoyed being neat, clean and tidy, even to the point of covering all her chairs and sofas with plastic.” He also remembered that Joan was “a terribly generous person. She never failed to send a thank-you note, or to call when you were ill.” When

Michael Gough, cast in the role of Joan’s business manager and sometime lover, located some of her loneliness in the fact that Joan said she felt cast aside in America—relegated to the dustbin in her senior years. “She

A few weeks later, Christina required emergency surgery in New York, where she was working under contract to CBS, playing a twenty-four-year-old housewife on the daily afternoon soap opera The Secret Storm. Her sudden illness caused a major problem for the network—how to provide an immediate replacement for a twenty-nine-year-old actress on short notice. Joan, then sixty-two, leaped to the rescue, and in two days, she taped four brief appearances, to be broadcast that October. “I didn’t want them to give the role to someone else,” she told a reporter. On the telephone to Christina, she said, “I’ll never be as good as you in the role, but I’ll keep the spot warm for you.” From her hospital bed, Christina expressed her gratitude: she thought it was “fantastic that she would care that much.” But the

Obviously unwell for most of that summer, Joan was nevertheless alert to the problems of others. Favored with a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur for transport to and from the studio and location shooting, she learned that a crew member had a dental emergency. Joan sent her car and driver to collect the man and deliver him to a

clinic, and then she instructed the chauffeur to proceed to a restaurant famous for its chicken soup, which she had delivered to the patient’s home. This was revealed only when the crew member reported it to producer Herman Cohen. “She was always doing this kind of thing during Berserk and Trog” Cohen recalled. “She was very close to the crew and knew them all by their first names.” Cohen also recalled that Joan gave Christina a check for five thousand dollars and told her to spend it on a holiday. “I was right there at the time it happened,” he added. “She was giving her daughter a big dinner party at Les Ambassadeurs [a restaurant club in Mayfair]. None of this is covered in Mommie Dearest, because Christina doesn’t mention the nice things Joan always did.” One chilly day on

hour, she was back on the set, “forgetting her own sickness now that she was taking care of me.” Those were memorable incidents, but there were problems. “On Trog, her drinking was worse than during Berserk. She had a huge frosted glass marked Pepsi-Cola, but inside was hundred-proof vodka. I had to reprimand her a few times.”

JAMES BACON, WHO interviewed Christina on the day she performed in the Dr. Kildare television series, had known Joan and her children since 1950. For many years, he had covered the movie business for the Associated Press, the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and he wrote three books about his experiences in Hollywood. Bacon was known never to minimize or dilute a good story, even at the risk of alienating friends. A frequent visitor to the Crawford household in Brentwood, he saw the “strict discipline [Joan] imposed on her children at home. Joan didn’t spoil her children, like most Hollywood mothers did, but she was a loving and kind mother. I know that for a fact.” A few people disputed that assessment, but one person’s idea of discipline is another’s notion of indulgence.