Possessed (15 page)

Trying to hide her sobs, she dashes out into the rain, toward the city train station—thus closing the story’s circular structure. Mark races to join her, and as the rain drenches them, he embraces her protectively: “I don’t care what they do to me back there,” he says. “If I win, it’ll be with you. And if I lose, it’ll still be with you.” So ends
Possessed,
a far more emotionally appealing and visually convincing story than a summary can convey. “Miss Crawford addsanother excellent performance to her list,” according to one major critic. “It’s the best work she has done since
Paid”
noted another.

Remarkably often it has been claimed that Joan Crawford’s popularity and stardom in the 1930s were based on her repeated assumption of roles as a poor shop-girl who rises to “make good” in a man’s world. That view is more than a simplification—it is downright inaccurate. Twenty-five Crawford films were released during the 1930s, but she portrayed a store clerk in only two
(Our Blushing Brides
and
The Women).
Her career was defined by the creation of a far greater diversity of characters than is commonly asserted.

In
Possessed
—completed in twenty-six days and released on November 21, 1931—Joan Crawford is not a shop-girl but an exhausted factory worker. (There are extant photos from a sequence filmed but eventually deleted, in which Marian is shown working in the paper-box plant—perspiring, insignificant and dwarfed by machines, steam and industrial equipment.) And she does not “make good,” unless by “good” is meant luxury and material security. The final appeal to the audience’s better instincts (and their contentment) is provided by an ending in which enduring achievement is bestowed through love and sacrifice. The false “Mrs. Moreland” finally no longer exists, and Marian Martin regains an authentic life by doing good, not by having goods. It helps that the love of her life realizes this and is willing to make equivalent sacrifices.

Joan’s performance derived not only from her deep understanding of Marian Martin, but from a careful composition of thoughtful reactions and restrained actions, nothing delivered with obvious calculation. Marian’s anger became credible, her vulnerability touching, her passion provocative. With
Possessed,
Joan took her place in public esteem as an actress who made complex adult emotions real.

There can be no doubt that her altered relationship with her costar helped, especially in their love scenes. Indeed, during the preparation of the picture, in early September, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable began an affair that endured, intermittently but immutable devotion, for thirty years.

Both Crawford and Gable came from humble backgrounds. Both had lost a parent. Both had been day laborers at an early age, and both were profoundlyinsecure, presenting to the world the camouflage of a tough edge, the better not to be hurt. But there was a difference. At Metro, Joan trusted Louis B. Mayer, whereas Clark was always suspicious that a boss or a rival might suddenly replace or displace him.

Crawford and Gable contracted and dissolved their respective marriages, and they each endured the public’s fickleness and occasional indifference. Through the vacillations of time, experience and maturing, they found a level of quiet confidence in their mutual support. “Our relationship was private, between us,” Joan said. “It was a glorious affair, and it went on longer than anybody knows. It was sublime, probably more exciting because we felt like kids who’d gotten into the cookie jar while Uncle Louie [Mayer] was in the other room.”

“Joan was an outlet for Clark,” recalled Metro publicist James Merrick, who knew both stars for many years. “He could talk about all his problems, and she listened and offered the right comments and usually the right advice. Outside of Carole [Lombard, Gable’s wife from 1939 to her death in 1942], she was the only person who really got through to him. A lot of us thought they would marry, and I think they came close a couple of times, but … it wouldn’t have worked [because] she was stronger than he was, and Clark knew he had an image to protect.”

But there was another element in the relationship that helps to understand both the longevity and the status of their affair. “We were both peasants by nature,” Joan said, “not well educated, and so frightened and insecure that we felt sort of safe and home again when we could get together.” Both of them, as she admitted, “loused up marriages, and we had images to protect.” In addition there was a so-called morals clause added to standard studio contracts—a stipulation requiring actors to display virtually blameless behavior in their private lives, at the risk of finding themselves unemployed. Divorce and remarriage were one thing, but an openly conducted affair was quite another.

As Joan said, “We both felt that sooner or later, probably sooner, the public would say, ‘To hell with them,’ and we’d sink right back into oblivion … [but] we gave each other courage and taught one another how to laugh.” There wasalso the matter of Gable’s promiscuity—"with more [women] than the studio wanted to admit,” as Joan said. But she endured his peccadilloes as he did hers. Douglas chose to ignore the intrigue, for he had embarked on his own freewheeling lifestyle. “I was faithful in my fashion,” he said years later, admitting that he was not, “and I took pains to be as circumspect as I knew how.”

AN IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT
IN her career occurred in the autumn of 1931, when a group of devoted admirers organized the Joan Crawford Fan Club, formed under the tireless leadership of Marian L. Dommer. With military efficiency, the adoring Miss Dommer edited a Joan Crawford newsletter, charged annual dues of fifty cents for membership in the Club and spent $250 a year of her own money to keep the group functioning. (One of the charter members was an unknown fifteen-year-old named Charles Johnson, later famous as the movie star Van Johnson.)

“We have members in all sections of this country,” Miss Dommer wrote in her replies to inquiries about membership,

as well as in many distant parts of the world—England, Ireland, Australia, Scotland, South Africa and even Java included. Miss Crawford takes a keen interest in all of our activities. Not only does she send personally autographed pictures to all of our members, but she writes a long letter to the members for each edition of our club publications—and she also answers your questions about her in “Joan’s Question Box,” a regular feature of the magazine … which also includes club news, gossip and the latest news of Hollywood, New York and London, the entertainment centers of the world. We do have a regular editorial staff… and we cordially invite anyone to submit articles to our magazine. Among our contributors to each edition are Jerry Asher and Katherine Albert, two of Miss Crawford’s best friends, both professional writers …

Membership entitles you to a personally autographed picture of Miss Crawford, a membership card, membership list, six issues of
The Crawford News,
which is published every other month, and all other club privileges. The dues are fifty cents a year for domestic members and seventy-five cents, or three shillings, for foreign members.

The Joan Crawford Fan Club endured for over twenty-five years.

THE YEAR 1932 BEGAN
with a flurry of activity. Thalberg had the idea to gather as many of his major players as possible into one lavish and expensive movie. The studio owned the rights to a play called
Grand Hotel,
which had ended its Broadway run in December, and by January a film of it was rushed into production with a cast featuring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford.

Grand Hotel
is one of the most famous movies of its time, but perhaps only because of its cast. The picture is neither tightly paced nor credible; in fact it is, as a major critic observed that year, “dull to the point of complete enervation.” It might well have benefited from the excision of forty-five minutes, but its bloated grandeur and vast sets provided spectacle, and
Grand Hotel
won the best picture Oscar (but no other award, which is noteworthy).

Part of the problem was supposed to have been its major attraction—Garbo, who very nearly destroyed the picture with her overacting. Her performance as a maddeningly self-absorbed ballerina was delivered without nuance or recognizable feeling, and at every moment she fell back on tired, silent-screen, over-the-top gestures. As always, Garbo was remote and demanding at work, insisting that her love scenes with John Barrymore be filmed with only the director and cinematographer present—a requirement, of course, that gave everyone the impression that she and the scene were terribly important. There was no doubt that the camera adored her face, but that does not necessarily make for a great actress, and in
Grand Hotel,
Garbo proved that she was, as critic George Jean Nathan wrote that year, “one of the drollest acting frauds ever press-agented into Hollywood eminence.”

Garbo’s unintentional parody of a highly strung artist was in sharp contrast to Joan’s entirely unaffected performance; indeed, Joan was the only other female star in the movie. She created a portrait of a stenographer willing to remain after hours for more than the usual tasks, a pretty young woman who finally learns the value of elementary human kindness and offers it unselfishly. As for Barrymore, Joan recalled that the actor’s tragic alcoholism made him “unstable, and he couldn’t care less about the picture. I was in awe of him, but he was cross and sometimes unkind.” During these early years of her career, Joan learned the value of good relations with both actors and crew, and to that end she was invariably prompt. She also began the habit of offering presents to the crew at the end of filming—a gesture no one interpreted cynically at the time.

WHILE JOAN WAS COMPLETING
her scenes in
Grand Hotel
in January and early February, she also attended preproduction meetings for her next assignment,
Letty Lynton,
“which was even more of a smash for me, personally. It was a hell of a story and script and had a character I could really come to grips with. If there is ever a Joan Crawford retrospective, I hope they show this one.” Her enthusiasm, if not the quality of the final production, was justified, and those who knew her that year acknowledged the intensity of her efforts and the quality of the result. Robert Montgomery, assigned to his third film with Joan, recalled that he “felt sorry for her at times, because she really worked much, much too hard. She was intensely concerned with making something important of herself.”
Letty Lynton,
loosely based on a brilliantly crafted novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, contains one of Joan’s most deeply felt performances.

Before production began, Joan and Doug made a quick trip to New York, for she had heard rave reviews about Sydney Guilaroff, a twenty-five-year-old hairstylist who was working at a Manhattan salon and who was consulted by a number of film stars. “I studied her beautiful face with her fantastic bone structure,” he recalled shortly before his death in 1997, “and I gave her a sleek and smooth hairdo, brushed back behind her ears.” Joan was delighted with the result and returned the next day with a photographer. She wanted precisely this look for her character in
Letty Lynton.

Over the next two years, Joan frequently traveled by train from California to New York so that Guilaroff could design styles for each upcoming picture. With a photographer standing by each time to document the hairdo, Joan returned to Metro with instructions. “Finally,” recalled Guilaroff, “Louis B. Mayer complained about Joan always leaving Hollywood before she started a film, and he asked her why she insisted on me. The next thing I knew, I was aboard the Sunset Limited and headed for MGM and a new life.” Thus began the career of the most famous coiffeur in the history of Hollywood. From 1934 to 1990, he worked on more than four hundred pictures, designing hairstyles (and often makeup) for almost every woman at Metro and many men, too. Sydney Guilaroff insisted that he owed his career to the recommendation and loyalty of Joan Crawford.

LIKE THE NOVEL BY
Marie Belloc Lowndes, the film
Letty Lynton
was inspired by the case of Madeleine Smith, a young woman in nineteenth-century Scotland. She was accused of poisoning her lover but was finally freed when a jury returned a verdict of “Not Proven,” a judgment peculiar to Scottish law. The Belloc Lowndes novel fictionalized the true-crime history and turned the matter of a rather straightforward crime of passion into something more complex and psychologically acute than any of its later dramatizations, of which there were several. The novelist also created, as she wrote, “accessory characters … far more profoundly affected in their lives than even the chief actors in the drama.”

The production began oddly. Clarence Brown, who had directed Joan so sensitively in
Possessed,
at first encouraged the makeup team to give Joan an appearance that all but duplicated Garbo. In the early scenes filmed that February, Joan bore an astonishing resemblance to the Swedish actress, and Joan even began to recite her lines in deep tones, with long pauses. “I’m going into seclusion,” she announces with marmoreal remoteness, just as Garbo had twice said, “I want to be alone,” in
Grand Hotel.
But after four days of filming two brief sequences, Joan reverted to more natural rhythms, created her own Letty, and the specter of Garbo vanished.

As the title character, she portrays a wealthy and bored socialite, first seenin Montevideo, Uruguay, the final stop in her yearlong cruise with an elderly female companion. Letty is very much bored with her oily, manipulative lover, Emile Renaud (Nils Asther), whom she waves off with the airy dismissal “I never kiss anyone before one o’clock in the afternoon.” En route to New York, she meets the handsome and wealthy Hale Darrow (Robert Montgomery), who is far more appealing and acceptable than his predecessor. Everything seems well ordered for the two wealthy young people—until the first (now jilted) boyfriend blackmails Letty by threatening to publish her love letters to him unless she returns to his bed.
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