Was Hollywood legend Joan Crawford really a megalomaniac monster?

BIOGRAPHY
Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face
Scott Eyman
Simon & Schuster, $49.99

Of the many films associated with Joan Crawford, one was a feature she never even starred in: a stag movie (that’s vintage-speak for “porn film”).

The story went that the Academy Award-winner once appeared in a salacious film reel before her career took off. Different accounts report the silent movie as entitled The Casting Couch and The Plumber, with claims even made MGM paid off the owner to bury the tape. The tantalising rumour has long bedevilled Crawford biographers, some of whom have insisted it did exist thanks to a brief mention made in the star’s own FBI file. (That file is another story.)

Scott Eyman, a veteran historian of Hollywood’s Golden Age, challenges this and other suspect stories about the star in his new riveting biography Joan Crawford. In the decades since her death, Crawford’s image – much like other stars of the old studio system – has been cheapened by lurid charges, from child abuse to diva feuds, adulterating the once sanitised image she projected to audiences in her heyday.

Born Lucille Fay LeSueur, the actress was born in either 1905 or 1906 – she would never confirm which year – in San Antonio, Texas. Her father walked out on his family after Crawford’s birth, making for a difficult childhood marked by a “a series of brutal episodes”, poverty and an enduring obsession for cleanliness. Still, the hard years fostered self-sufficiency and resilience, traits would see the young girl go far – and later painfully instil in her own children.

Dance proved both a natural talent and an escape route, so after absconding home for a dance show in Texas, she soon landed a coveted chorus role on Broadway. The appearance would help her land an MGM contract while still a teenager. After some unmemorable appearances, her big break came in 1928 with Our Dancing Daughters, a performance that caused a sensation thanks to her unbridled sexuality and electric dancing on celluloid. Stardom would quickly be assured thanks to 1932’s Grand Hotel, where the ingénue comfortably faced off against Hollywood titans Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, and even survived the dreaded transition to sound.

Romances with Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Clark Gable would parallel her meteoric rise at MGM, where she became their premiere starlet. Her performances also shifted from lively flapper numbers to compelling renderings of working women leveraging grit and ambition to push back against their odds. “Crawford would portray women with a full roster of insecurities perpetually driven toward survival, motivated by inner need,” Eyman writes.

But the dreaded label of “box office poison” would come for Crawford in her 40s, forcing the actress to end her contract and take a gamble at rival Warner Brothers. There, she doggedly pursued Mildred Pierce, a role that embodied her own industrious and unrelenting personality – and later, complicated relationship to a daughter – to win her an Oscar.

Like any actress over 50, roles of substance would then prove increasingly elusive, with exceptions made for Johnny Guitar and Sudden Fear. Then came What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. The macabre psychological horror paired Crawford with Bette Davis, another former icon facing irrelevancy. Despite much conjecture, Eyman firmly tempers the popular narrative about the pair staging combat on the film set. “The only real professional problem arose from the fact that the two stars had different ways of working,” he writes.

Baby Jane is only one example where our love of off-screen drama and salacious mistruths have occluded the prowess and electricity of this Golden Age star. Another is the apparent stag film – similarly exploited as a storyline in the Ryan Murphy series Feud. For Eyman, the tape remains an “urban legend”. Other fictions that form Crawford’s monstrous modern image are also moderated here, including the tyrannical parenting style documented in her adopted daughter’s memoir, Mommie Dearest. (Later made into a camp spectacle in the eponymous film.)

Some extreme parenting measures may have been taken – including tying son Christopher to the bed, Eyman concedes – but routinely beating the children or running “night raids” (drunkenly pruning rose bushes at midnight) don’t square up. (Nor do Christina’s allegations her adopted parent was a lesbian.) Mother and daughter would maintain a “gradually accelerating psychological duel between parent and child … a war of temperament and, ultimately, attrition,” with Christina seemingly victorious thanks to her damning memoir.

Joan Crawford rightly reminds us that Crawford was at once a truly gifted star and a flawed human, a more deserving figure to remember than the caricature of Mommie Dearest and grotesquery of Baby Jane. The biography, with both verve and sobriety, reveals how the actress became the star “Joan Crawford” and stayed the course as her. That figure was less a monster or megalomaniac and more a woman of many faults and foibles, long driven to outrun her past – and always survive.

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