Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford

by Donald Spoto

who had known mommie and her little girl took sides. Myrna Loy had toured in Neil Simon’s play Barefoot in the Park, which reached Chicago in 1965. “We didn’t have any problems until Christina Crawford [joined the cast],” Myrna wrote in her autobiography. At first, she was delighted to welcome her old friend’s daughter. But then things went bad. “I’ve never known anyone like her—ever,” she added. “Her stubbornness was really unbelievable. She would not do a single thing anyone asked her to do … and she completely disregarded her blocking [i.e., her assigned positions onstage]. She was going to do it all her way, and it was self-defeating and sad, because the girl had potential.” Eventually, the playwright arrived to see the production, and after a conference with the director, Christina was dismissed. Except for

“Christina wanted to be Joan Crawford,” according to Myrna. “I think that’s the basis of the book she wrote afterward, and of everything else. I saw what her mind created, the fantasy world she lived in. She envied her

mother, grew to hate her, and finally wanted to destroy her.” Costume

“Mommie Dearest was not an accurate portrait of who Joan Crawford was as a person,” said the film historian Jeanine Basinger, who also knew Crawford. “How many people do you know about whom you can say, ‘This is a person I can count on one hundred percent'? If she was your friend, she was there.” Apart from the tale of the wire dress hangers in Christina’s book—the incident that perhaps determined Joan Crawford’s image for countless people forever after—Mommie Dearest often evoked shock without due cause.

At Christmas, for example, fans, friends, colleagues and total strangers flooded the Crawford house with literally hundreds of presents for the children. Joan gave them some of the packages, kept back others for their birthday parties and other appropriate occasions and—explaining to her own children exactly what she was

doing—donated many of the parcels to children in orphanages and hospitals. Christina described this annual holiday tradition a la Crawford as a fair example of her mother’s monstrous cruelty. But this method of distributing the presents seems, after all, a thoughtful response to outrageous excess and a way of preventing ...

Thus began a friendship deep and true, uncomplicated by romantic love. Neither a fawning devotee nor a scheming opportunist, Carl remained, during the last years of Joan’s life, one of the few she could count on for help, companionship and even advice. As usual for Joan in her friendships with gaymen, she rejoiced that Carl was living happily with a man, and he frequently returned home with a present she had given him. Later, he recalled this as “one of the most rewarding friendships” of his life. That spring

Billy and his lifelong partner, Jimmy Shields, always stayed in contact with Joan by phone and letter—not only when there was important news, but also to exchange recipes, tidbits of gossip or items of industry business. That year, he was trying to recover from a cancer surgery: “More than anything,” Billy wrote to Joan at Christmas 1972, “I am grateful for the long years of a deep and holy friendship.” She replied, adding her hopes for his speedy recovery and assuring him of prayers that the new year would be one of good health for him and Jimmy.

deep and enduring—a short list would have to include George himself; Haines and Shields; Anita Loos, who had written a quartet of important Crawford movies; Nate and Frances Spingold; John Springer; Dore Freeman, a young man for whom Joan had found a job at Metro and who became a lifelong confidant; Genie Chester, whom she had met in New York decades earlier … their names were legion. “She never

Friends

“In fact, I think that one of her many talents was the one for friendship—perhaps it was her greatest. Once she made the decision to enter into a real friendshipwith another person, she became devoted to that person forever. She worked at it, and she understood the importance of it.” ON APRIL 8, 1973, Joan was interviewed

The day after Christmas, Joan had a call from Jimmy Shields: Billy Haines had succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy-three. She was confined with bronchitis that week and could not attend the funeral in California, but she telephoned Jimmy every day for almost a month, which comforted him enormously; they reminisced, laughed and wept together. Three months later, Jimmy wrote a note—"It’s no good without Billy"—and took an overdose of sleeping pills. With those two deaths, as Joan said, she lost “the happiest married couple I ever knew.” Joan

That was a pity, as former directors like Vincent Sherman and Charles Walters insisted. “She was very lonely in the last years,” said Walters, “and a lot of people deprived themselves of her vibrant company. They were the losers. She could certainly be difficult and demanding, but the rewards of her friendship were incalculable.” Much of the first

When her old friend Rosalind Russell was honored at a reception at the Rainbow Room that September, Joan gladly attended; they had never lost contact since their first meeting and collaboration in 1934. The party was a noisy, crowded affair, but the two old friends managed to steal a few moments together. Russell, cheerful and valiant, was very ill with rheumatoid arthritis, and she was suffering the side effects of frequent cortisone injections. She did not tell anyone that she had also recently received a diagnosis of cancer. The press took pictures all evening, and over the next several days Joan was not the only one horrified at the newspaper photos: it seemed as if editors had gleefully selected the most unflattering shots of the two stars. “If that’s the way I look,” said Joan, “they’ve seen the last of me.” With extremely rare exceptions, she kept her word: for the next three years, Joan was virtually a recluse. In her

them. Why had she given it up? “I really don’t think I knew who I was any more,” she told Carl, “and I wanted to find out.” She spent the rest of her life finding out, and the discovery bore dividends. Instead of perpetually assuming other identities through her work, the real Joan Crawford emerged from the shadows—generous to friends in every way possible, lavish to charities and never a burden to anyone, even when she was mortally ill. When she learned, for example, that her former Los Angeles assistant, Betty Barker, was bringing a few relatives and friends to Manhattan for their first visit, Joan paid their airfare, bought them theater tickets and paid for all their meals for sixteen days. There were many such displays of generosity.

Her life had been a battle between the fantasy of movie stardom and the intrusion of reality—mostly in the form of failed marriages, disappointing love affairs and the constant terror of losing her professional status. Her life’s work had been the maintenance of the image she herself had created—of Joan Crawford the star. This had allowed her virtually no time to discover who she was; as a result, many who knew her (and more who did not) insisted that there was no authentic person behind the artificial creation. That was not merely smug and presumptuous—it was also dead wrong. NO OTHER STAR IN the so-called golden age of

she demanded that we rethink what it means to be female. Dancer, actress, corporate executive—she was not to be stopped, and she was rarely out of the news. For over fifty years, her image offered much of what she herself was: an ambitious person who appealed to women who were ignored, exploited, cajoled or seduced, from the flapper era to the dawn of women’s liberation. Nurturing a lifelong desire to rise above her childhood background and to prove herself, she was often possessed by her roles as much as she grafted them onto her own character; but in an attempt to control her fame, she had often been its servant. Similarly, in her romantic life, she was a woman who desperately wanted to belong to another. But this hope she never realized, perhaps because in thatregard, too, she tried excessively to direct the relationship and to play Joan Crawford the star. But with all her drive and all her desires fading in her

last years, she realized—not too late—that she had not developed a real private life and a sense of self. “I worked too hard, and a lot of my relationships failed because of that. I was a commodity, a piece of property, and so I felt an overwhelming obligation to my career. That’s why I was an actress first, a wife second, and a mother third. I worked almost constantly, and even when I wasn’t working, there was that image thing—having to look like a star. I just went ahead like a bulldozer, and I’m afraid I was a very selfish woman.” It is, at the last, this

forthright honesty that justifies admiration, not star worship. Those who saw “no one at home” behind the mask were in fact uncomf...

During Joan’s last years, Cathy, who was then married to Jerome LaLonde, lived in Pennsylvania with her two children, Carla and Casey. Cindy had married John Jordan and resided for a time in Iowa with her two, Joel and Jan. Both twins were eventually divorced, and both raised their children alone, devotedly and attentively. After Joan died and Mommie Dearest was published, the twins and their families broke off all communication with Christina—and also with Christopher, who issued shrill and bitter statements about Joan and endorsed anything Christina had to say. Cindy Crawford Jordan died at the age of sixty in 2007, a year after the death of Christopher. Asked in 2008 to describe her life with Joan, Cathy said her mother was “just a wonderful Mom—generous, loving and nurturing, strict but kind and caring … Mommie Dearest was

LaLonde, was only five when his grandmother died, but he remembers Joan (whom the children called JoJo) preparing roast chicken luncheons for them and always giving them a little present when they departed. He remembered her as “very thin, very frail … but very pretty. She greeted us in her housecoat, and she was very relaxed. My parents went out for dinner, and she baby-sat us. It was just like anybody’s grandmother.” His sister Carla agreed: “All I can say is that she was a very loving grandmother.” Casey and Carla

statement about her mother was astonishing: “I always knew that Mother loved me—that she really loved me. She may not have agreed with me, she may not have evenliked me sometimes, but she respected me and she loved me as I loved her.” With those words, Christina herself seemed once and for all to contradict her own published portrait of Joan Crawford. IN EARLY 1976,

“Gradually, I filled my life with faith,” Joan had written a few years earlier. “It took me a very long while to stop fighting frantically and let God help, but I learned. No one goes the long road alone. God is my inexhaustible source. This I know, but sometimes I get in His way.” The

Johnes recalled their last telephone conversation. “She sounded timorous, wavering and very weak but assured me that she was fine, even though her back troubles were still painful. Conversation was difficult. She said that she hadn’t watched any television for months, preferring to go to bed early and read her Bible.” He sent her a bouquet of spring flowers, mostly yellow rosebuds. “There’s nothing presented to us that we cannot cope with,” Joan had written to a friend in crisis years earlier. “There is a Power much greater than any one of us, Who created us and Who continues to give us strength and courage—not only daily but hourly. Learn to depend on that. It’s the only thing one can depend on when one is in great need.” On the morning of May 10, 1977, the housekeeper arrived and went to ask if she should prepare breakfast as usual. The bedroom was quiet, and Joan did not respond. On a small table at the bedside were her Bible and the vase of yellow roses, now in full bloom. 1