Possessed (19 page)

WITH FOUR LUCRATIVE PICTURES
behind her
(Dancing Lady, Sadie McKee, Chained
and
Forsaking All Others),
Joan was in a good position to renegotiate her contract with Metro; her agent easily arranged this at Christmas 1934. Her three-year deal guaranteed her seventy-five hundred dollars weekly for the first year, eighty-five hundred dollars weekly for the second and ninety-five hundred dollars weekly by 1937 (the equivalent of $142,500 a week in 2010). If she completed more than nine films between January 1, 1935, and December 31, 1937 (which she did not), she was to receive a bonus of fifty thousand dollars—which Mayer paid her in any case, in appreciation of her intense and dedicated professionalism.

AT HOME, JOAN BEGAN
to host formal dinner parties, with every element invariably supervised by Franchot: the right wines for each course, the proper table service and the best background music, provided by a harpist, pianist or string trio. “He contributed greatly to my cultural and intellectual development,” she said in 1951, “and I don’t mind admitting it one bit. Franchot helped me cultivate a strong liking for literature, art and opera. When I was going through that stage, I had as many people of culture and taste [to my home] as I could possibly manage.”

Thus continued what Doug Fairbanks had called Joan’s lifelong commitment to self-improvement. But for all her consorting with “people of culture and taste,” she never forgot—and was usually more comfortable with—the average, unknown, behind-the-scenes workers who crossed her path. Joan befriended film crews and technicians as she did executives, remembering their birthdays, asking about their families, paying hospital and doctor bills for the indigent and providing financial assistance to help families who were ill or had fallen on hard times—as so many did in the 1930s. These generous acts were done quietly, and anyone who publicized her generosity was soundly chastised.

Some people, then and later, called Joan’s benevolence nothing but grandstanding or enlightened self-interest: the recipients of her kindness, ran this argument, were people who would remember her, support her, benefit her,be grateful to her—most of all, they would
like
her. That may indeed have been part of the mix of motives; as Thomas More famously said in the sixteenth century, “Only God is love straight through.” But Joan was very much aware of her own good fortune, and she felt compelled to help others when she could. In the last years of her life, such actions became a pronounced and constant habit.

These random deeds could be criticized as exaggerated or even the invention of publicists were there not one compelling piece of evidence to the contrary. In 1934 Joan contacted Dr. William Branch, a member of the surgical team that performed her dental and facial operations of 1928, for which there were follow-up procedures in 1932 and 1933. Joan asked Branch to help her devise a unique program by which she would underwrite the hospital expenses for destitute patients who had once worked in any capacity in the movie business. These people were to receive all necessary care at the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where she endowed several rooms and a surgical suite. All the bills were sent to her and she paid them quickly and privately, without referring them to her business manager.

The arrangement was made on condition that her name not be used, and that she receive no credit or publicity for her charity in any way; years later, when this bequest was discovered and Joan was openly praised, she feigned ignorance of the entire matter. “In the two years after 1937, more than 390 major surgeries were completed,” according to a confidential hospital report made in 1939. “Joan Crawford paid the bills, she never knew the people for whom she was paying, and she didn’t care.”

ALTHOUGH
FORSAKING ALL OTHERS
was a major hit for the studio, Joan had no illusions: she rightly saw that it was a bundle of clichés, however glossily assembled. In fact, the films in which she was cast from 1934 through 1938 were invariably tedious, notwithstanding their visual appeal and Joan’s performances. The unfortunate downward spiral continued full throttle with
No More Ladies.

Frank Capra’s
It Happened One Night,
released early in 1934, had established screwball comedy as the most successful form of escapist entertainment at the height of the Great Depression. Audiences loved to see the rich satirized and the poor elevated, and they loved romantic endings. Capra’s movie provided all this and more, and when Oscar time came, awards were handed out to him (best director), to Claudette Colbert (best actress), to Clark Gable (best actor) and to Robert Riskin (for best screenplay).
It Happened One Night
was also named best picture of the year, and at once it seemed as if every studio in town was racing to produce screwball comedies. But this genre was not Metro’s forte, as
No More Ladies
revealed.

The script was based on A. E. Thomas’s mildly successful 1934 Broadway play about a society lady who tries to reform her unfaithful husband by making him jealous. The first drafts of the screenplay, hurriedly submitted in early 1935, were so flat and unamusing that the project was handed over to a platoon of screenwriters for rewrites and polishing. The best of these was done by Rachel Crothers, a highly successful Broadway playwright with a keen gift for character and for pointed and witty dialogue. Her script was then turned over to others for a redraft. When the redoubtable Miss Crothers saw the finished film, she complained to MGM and to the press that her work had been butchered beyond recognition and demanded that her name be removed from the screen credits.

Despite the fact that Joan should have felt comfortable working for the fifth time with Montgomery and the fourth with Tone, she was uneasy from the start about the silliness of the script for
No More Ladies.
She also felt that her performance lacked the whimsy that is the first requirement of a screwball character. Then director Edward H. Griffith came down with pneumonia, and George Cukor was engaged to complete the picture, which he did at the end of April.

Cukor already had major credits for directing Katharine Hepburn in both
A Bill of Divorcement
and
Little Women
and for guiding an all-star Metro cast in
Dinner at Eight.
But at first Joan was having none of him. “I could be a headstrong bitch,” she admitted some years later. “I didn’t let Cukor help me, and I interpreted the part wrong. It was another of my personal mistakes.” The truth is that ultimately she did indeed allow Cukor to help her—insofar as the script permitted him to help—and she repeatedly sought his tutelage after he got her through the difficult final scenes. Still, she was found wanting by the critics: “not a distinguished performance,” wrote one when the movie was rushed into distribution that June;
Time
added that she had “the appeal of cold turkey.”

Despite her anxieties during the production, Joan was notably helpful to a young actress named Gail Patrick, to whom she gave expert advice on makeup, wardrobe and especially on the right way to pose for glamour photographs. “There was a time when I’d have been grateful if anyone had helped me,” she said. “Newcomers to films sometimes think that it’s a waste of time to pose for publicity photos. But I’ve made a careful study of every single still picture that was ever shot of me. I wanted these stills to teach me what not to do on the screen. I scrutinized the grin on my face, my hair, my posture, my make-up—everything. I learned—so can others.” Gail Patrick did, and felt forever in Joan’s debt.

No More Ladies
is almost unwatchable, full of stock characters (a wealthy drunk and a crusty but benevolent grandmother) and a cast that variously wanders about in tuxedos or in impossibly chic gowns designed by Adrian. That year, Joan was fitted with a new set of false eyelashes so outrageously long and thick that they cast deep shadows on her face and gave the cameramen headaches. Some wise cosmetician eventually trimmed the lashes, probably after complaints from leading men with scratched faces.

JOAN SAW TROUBLE BREWING
again when she was handed the script of her next assignment. Based on a short story with the off-putting title “Claustrophobia,” it was planned as another screwball comedy but turned out to be an arid, airless account of a society girl who tries to land a handsome archaeologist for a husband. At first Joan had asked Mayer to cast Franchot as her leading man, firmly believing that he would raise the quality of the picture and that together they could make the romantic comedy credible. But Franchotwas already cast in Gable’s next picture
—Mutiny on the Bounty,
which began filming in early May.

Instead, the role of the archaeologist went to Brian Aherne—a tall, handsome British leading man with substantial credits on Broadway and in Hollywood. Titled
I Live My Life,
it began filming in early June and was completed in mid-July. “It was formula stuff,” said Joan, dismissing the picture; the critics agreed.

Her freedom from this chore happened none too soon for Joan, who had heard disturbing rumors about an offscreen romance elsewhere. After his seafaring epic with Gable, Franchot had been loaned to Warners as Bette Davis’s costar in
Dangerous.
On their first meeting, Davis was smitten with her new leading man, and very quickly a real-life skirmish was set in motion, without the tone of screwball comedy. Joan was on the scene as soon as word of this affair reached her: she disengaged Franchot from Davis’s arms and took him back home, convinced that only matrimony could tame his wanderlust.

Thus it happened that, for the first time, Joan put her private life front and center. With Mayer’s good wishes, she took an unofficial leave from Metro, and in late September she whisked Franchot off to New York. There, he was happily reunited with his friends at the Group Theatre, the couple attended Broadway premieres, and Joan made her radio debut in an adaptation of
Paid.
The New York press, alerted by their Hollywood colleagues, was certain that marriage was in the air, and Joan and Franchot were trailed day and night—from restaurant to theater, from cocktail lounge to nightclub. On the morning of October 11, they were able to slip away unobserved to New Jersey, where they were quietly married without a single flashbulb in their faces. A week later, they were back in Hollywood—not for Joan’s sake, but on account of Franchot’s summons from Metro to appear in something called
Exclusive Story.

For six months, the bride energetically played house—redecorating, repainting, expanding and rearranging rooms at Bristol Avenue and even joining workmen in the most demanding and laborious tasks. There was no immediate film project that she felt was right, but she was receiving thousands of admiring letters every week. Always grateful to her devotees andconvinced that she would have no career without them, Joan invited a team of local fans to her home on Saturday afternoons and, assembly-line fashion, they addressed and stamped envelopes while she signed photos and wrote grateful replies to her many admirers. Sixteen-year-old Betty Barker, one of her most loyal fans, became a kind of factotum in Joan’s household and, years later, was her full-time Hollywood-based secretary.

While Joan was so occupied, the groom rushed through his roles in four forgettable movies, and by late spring 1936 he was more than ever disenchanted with Hollywood—a sentiment only briefly dissipated when he was nominated by the Academy as best actor for
Mutiny on the Bounty
.
⁴

“Togetherness” could have been Joan’s motto for her new marriage as she threw herself into a range of activities with Franchot’s encouragement and collaboration. They took voice lessons with an opera coach; they recorded duets; they performed one-act plays for friends in a little theater they added to the property; they engaged a physical education trainer for daily workouts; they read aloud to one another—and, as she recalled, “I became a pretty good polo player in order to get over my fear of horses.”

Pride of place was given to high culture, as Joan continued to host dinner parties honoring visiting dignitaries, orchestra conductors, musicians, poets and statesmen; in a way, she was taking a page from Constance Bennett and embellishing it. Olivia de Havilland, then at the beginning of a long and distinguished acting career, recalled an evening at the Tones. “Joan Crawford welcomed me and was most encouraging, and she treated me without a trace of condescension or patronizing. She really made me feel like a colleague, and not a neophyte. A few days later, I received a package in the mail. It was a gift from her—a copy of the recently published book by Stanislavksi [An
Actor Prepares
], which she said she was studying and thought that I would find interesting.”

Years later, Joan admitted that the master plan during her marriage to Franchot Tone was impossibly idealistic, but at the time she allowed herself to be convinced that together they would be mutually dedicated to a life of shared achievement on-screen and onstage. To this end, she got Metro to cast him in her next project, hoping that his obvious talent would encourage producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz to enlarge Franchot’s role once filming began. That never happened.

The picture, made in the spring of 1936, was the ill-fated historical drama
The Gorgeous Hussy,
set during the ascendancy and presidency of Andrew Jackson in the nineteenth century. “I had read the criticisms of me and my movies,” Joan recalled later, “and they were discerning. They said that Crawford needs a new deal, and they asked if I was doomed to explore forever the emotional misfortunes of the super-sexed modern young woman. And so, to break away from the pattern, I wanted to do
The Gorgeous Hussy.
Selznick laughed at me. ‘You can’t do a costume picture. You’re too modern.’ But I begged and begged and begged, and so they let me do it. I was totally miscast.”

Nor was she much helped by the screenplay, which turned a potentially interesting political drama into nothing but another fashion show for Joan (wearing period gowns a la Adrian) as she glides from set to set and man to man—Robert Taylor, Melvyn Douglas and Franchot Tone, whose role remained without color or weight. For better and for worse, it was Joan’s picture—she was the title character, Peggy O’Neal Eaton, who was based on a controversial historical lady who made herself important in the lives of great men. But with Hollywood’s censors on the prowl, all references to Peggy’s bold sexuality had to be erased—and so it remained unclear just why her life was so controversial. Joan never again appeared in a historical costume drama.