Possessed (23 page)

But sadly, box-office receipts merely balanced the movie’s budget, and for decades the picture was virtually ignored. Seventy years later, a perceptive Crawford fan Web site reevaluated it: “A rich experience, both cinematically and thematically,
Strange Cargo
is one of the all-time great films. It deserves greater exposure and recognition as a classic film treasure.” Created in the tradition of Jerome K. Jerome’s early twentieth-century short story and play
The Passing of the Third Floor Back
(and perhaps with Borzage’s awareness of the 1935 English film of it),
Strange Cargo
remains one of Joan’s most audacious and exceptional accomplishments.

THE FILM WAS COMPLETED
with notable alacrity at the end of December, and Joan at once felt vaguely ill. The symptoms were diffuse and therefore difficult to diagnose and treat: general muscular aches and pains, recurring bouts of low-grade fever, coughs and colds. She celebrated Christmas with friends as usual and, although living alone with one or two servants, she sumptuously decorated the house in order to welcome guests during the holidays. But during the first three months of 1940, she was never completely well for more than a day or two. Dr. Branch, who regularly looked after her, recommended as much rest as possible—not a realistic prescription for this patient. Several months passed before her mysterious ailment—very likely due to simple exhaustion—vanished and she felt restored to full health.

Her normal round of activities continued without much interruption. She made several trips to New York, to see plays and to pursue, she hoped, a serious new romantic affair; she dined with Franchot, to assure him of her friendship after the divorce; and she visited Doug and his new wife, the wealthy heiress and divorcee Mary Lee Eppling Hartford. She also read plays old and new, seeking just the right property for Metro to buy—and her list of choices fell not on musicals or frothy comedies but on works of substance. She particularly noted Rachel Crothers’s successful 1937 play,
Susan and God,
a serious comedy in which Gertrude Lawrence had starred and which Joan and Franchot had seen during its long run. Perhaps it was no surprise that this work captured her interest:
Strange Cargo
had explicitly treated the theme of the indwelling divine presence in all people, and the Crothers play satirized shallow religious pretense in the person of a wealthy, scatterbrained woman who mistakes fad for faith.

For many years, the tale has been told that Joan took the play to Mayer, who told her that it had already been purchased for Norma Shearer, then being fitted for costumes. Then (so the story continues) Joan took a call from Mayer in late January: Norma had reneged and withdrawn from the picture, explaining that she did not want to play a woman old enough to have a teenage daughter (Shearer was thirty-eight). That development supposedly opened the door for Joan to assume the role she coveted.

But this account is a pleasant fiction that no documentation can support. Norma Shearer had, of course, happily played the mother of a preteen in
The Women,
and a year later, audiences would readily have accepted her as the mother of a teenager without presuming that this meant Norma was aging. The truth is that Norma had read the play and the revised screenplay, and she could not quite fathom (or did not find agreeable) the satire on phony religious sentiment.

SUSAN AND GOD
REFLECTS
indirectly on the nature of an authentic religious conviction—that is, the play affirms faith as mystery and, primarily, a matter of goodwill to others. Rachel Crothers, one of the most important and respected of American playwrights, had seen twenty-eight of her plays staged since 1907, and in
Susan and God
she treated by satiric inversion the oversimplification and dilution of real faith. In the title, Susan’s name precedes God’s, just as Susan’s selfish needs and fashionable self-image blind her to love for others. Religion, for her, is nothing more than a pleasant way of thinking nice things about oneself, of managing the private lives of her friends and driving them almost to madness with her constant prattle. Religion, for Susan and her like, is, in other words, only a pleasant social diversion in which she can still luxuriate in her privileged, upper-class life, all but discounting the demands of her marriage, the needs of her daughter and any claims others might make on her effort, attention or kindness.

Absolutely certain of her own rightness, Susan consorts with a frivolous English aristocrat who has founded the “movement,” and she blithely neglects the love of her husband and daughter. Susan’s religion, then, is “thrilling and fun,” as she announces—and it consists of little more than social-climbing self-righteousness and the singing of feel-good songs mistaken for hymns. But finally, and to her surprise, she discovers that the journey of true faith happens within, and not from public exhibition and contact with polite society.

Susan and God
is a play that retains its fierce and timely relevance many decades later, for it punctures every pretense represented by empty, sanctimonious cant. This probably explains why the play has been so seldom performed after revivals in the 1950s, and why the movie of it—remarkably faithful to the theatrical text in every regard—is usually ignored. Critics who wanted to keep their jobs did not defy the injunction against commentary on matters religious except for simple news reporting about this or that personality—in other words, it would have been inadvisable to endorse wholesale the satire so persuasively written by Rachel Crothers. And it is common knowledge that audiences do not want questions raised about comfortable presumptions or facile religious emotions. Better to stay with something “thrilling and fun.”

At the same time, the play is nothing like a tract: it is a particular kind of social satire, a high comedy in which the leading actress must be willing to appear monumentally foolish just before a moment of blinding epiphany brings about the beginning of a real conversion. She sees the errors of her ways and the hurt she has caused on the unhappy faces of her family and in the misery she has brought to her friends.

No wonder, then, that Susan’s final words in both the play and the movie are so moving: as she tells her husband, “I don’t think God is something out there. I think He’s here, in us. And I don’t believe He helps one bit until we dig and dig and dig to get the rottenness out of us … Oh, dear God, don’t let me fall down again.” And with those words, quietly uttered as she yields to her husband’s embrace, the curtain falls on the now truly repentant Susan, who is perhaps at the edge of an authentic new beginning. The recurring theme of
Strange Cargo
had been the indwelling divine presence: “You are the temple of God,” as Cambreau reminds his companions when he opens the Scriptures and reads from Saint Paul. Rachel Crothers is concerned, in however different a dramatic style, with nothing less.

Joan’s acting was a triumph of improvisation, a virtuoso succession of mockeries, capricious gestures, witty intonations and credible dynamics: she understood Susan keenly and made her restlessly alive. Cukor noted her mysterious anxiety about the role right from the start of production in March, when Joan had an unusually difficult time conforming the role to herself. “Big trouble at first,” she admitted. “I simply didn’t understand how a woman couldgive up her husband and her total lifestyle and everything she’d lived for to become a religious nut. I went to George Cukor a little hysterical, [unable to] understand who the hell I was playing and why. In fifteen minutes, George straightened me out. It was a very difficult part, and I owe a lot to [her leading man] Fredric March, who played foil to me very generously.”

Chirping gaily until the finale, Joan brilliantly communicated the identity of flighty, insouciant Susan, oblivious to others and fundamentally hypocritical. When a maid brings her breakfast, for example, she demands “quiet time” for prayer before she can accept her coffee and hot muffin. She reclines dramatically on a chaise, crosses her hands over her chest and closes her eyes devoutly, dismissing the maid as she insists she must take her day’s instructions from God. But as soon as she is alone, Susan reaches for the muffin, jumps up and starts the day with empty, evangelistic fervor. Evidently God tells Susan to hop to it—to go for the muffin, and never mind the quiet time.

Joan’s understanding of Susan’s arch moralism and her concomitant fear of being abandoned made the movie’s final moment of epiphany credibly affecting. In this regard,
Time,
one of the few periodicals to take the movie seriously, defended the script’s lengthy conversations precisely because “it has more to say.”

As for Joan: “She found all the comedy in the silly, empty-headed woman who finally, funnily rose to emotional maturity,” recalled Cukor. “Whatever she did, Joan did wholeheartedly.”

1
It has been claimed for many years that Sydney Guilaroff, a confirmed bachelor to his death at ninety, was the first single parent to adopt a child, in 1938. That was true, but the adoption was legalized elsewhere, outside the Golden State.

CHAPTER EIGHT
A Trilogy of Transformations
| 1941–1942 |

J
OAN KNEW THAT
Susan and God
advanced many of the serious themes of
Strange Cargo;
she also recognized that the two pictures had suited her state of mind. With reporters, fans or strangers, she never discussed religion or the spiritual life: she had neither the vocabulary nor the temperament for such topics, nor could she abide anything like pious proselytism. Nor did husbands or lovers ever quote her on the topic. But in letters to friends who were in emotional crisis or suffering because of illness or the deaths of loved ones, she was frank in her belief in a spiritual life and in divine providence. And late in life, she was quite forthright: “I believe in God, but I don’t think He cares a hell of a lot about whether a person is a Catholic, Protestant, Jew or Muslim, as long as that person has a record rolled up that includes more good marks than bad ones. I think Roz Russell is the best example of a practicing believer. Her Catholicism is very strong, but she doesn’t impose it on others. I think faith is wonderful, but when you try to impose it on others, it’s irritating and boring. Have faith, but don’t become a hooker about it is all I can say.”

There is no doubt that at least from the end of 1939 and throughout 1940, Joan Crawford was indeed enduring a kind of interior crisis of her own. She certainly would not have called it that, but the words adequately describe her state of mind and heart.

What were the causes of this crisis, manifested in vague physical complaints and constant disaffection? Why, no fewer than four times between January and April 1940, did she telephone to the studio or arrive on the set complaining that she was “sick … unable to rehearse … unable to make a test … and depressed"? These phrases appear frequently on Metro’s call sheets and production notes that season, and they were unprecedented in her career.

There were several reasons for this unusual state of affairs, but primary among them was Joan’s longing for children. Her friendship with Margaret Sullavan had revived that desire, hitherto frustrated by miscarriages and Fran-chot’s indifference to fatherhood (“I don’t think he especially wanted a child,” she said). She knew the legal obstacles were formidable, but recently she had spent time talking over the matter with Gloria Swanson, at a party given by Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward. “I was amazed,” said Swanson, “when I heard that I was Joan Crawford’s idol, the woman she wanted to be like. I could not quite imagine a person feeling that way about another person.”

At that time, Swanson’s career was in sharp decline. Her opulent life was no longer envied, it was resented, and she was out of work and idling in Hollywood. She was about to begin work on a picture that turned out to be her last for a decade, until the temporary comeback in
Sunset Boulevard.
But Gloria had two children and, like Sullavan, she told Joan that motherhood provided great fulfillment in her life. When Gloria mentioned that she had been single when she adopted a son—three months after her divorce from her second husband in 1922—Joan at once resolved on a bold course of action toward the same goal.

But the issue had become more difficult by 1940. Mayer had been correct when he warned of obstacles in the way of realizing the goal of adoptive parenthood. As Joan soon learned, an unmarried man or woman could legally adopt children in only a dozen American states—but such an adoption would not necessarily be recognized in California. Perhaps thinking of her own benighted childhood, and perhaps thinking, too, of the danger of becoming Susan Trexel—living for herself only and without reference to the needs of a child—Joan began to investigate adoption agencies across the country.

Stymied by negative responses for almost a year—but no less determined—she eventually took a route pursued by many wealthy and celebrated people in Hollywood and across the country. With the utmost discretion and acting through private intermediaries, she contacted illegal baby brokers—most of them women who bought (or just as often kidnapped) unwanted or neglected infants and then sold them at a huge profit. Among the most notorious of these flesh peddlers were Bessie Bernard and Georgia Tann. They worked independently, both of them making handsome livings from unwed mothers and from people desperate to provide unwanted children with loving homes and willing to hand over large sums for the privilege. Bernard and Tann were helpful to Joan at different times over the course of eight years. Both were eventually stopped by the law, but the proliferation of baby brokers continued.

BETWEEN SPRING 1939 AND
June 1940, Joan, sometimes accompanied by someone posing as the potential baby buyer, traveled to New York, New Jersey and—where the trade was most brisk—Miami. “I was told originally of five pregnant girls, their backgrounds and their problems.” The story of the fourth moved her, and the mother was right there in Los Angeles. Joan paid for her medical expenses during pregnancy and for the baby’s delivery, on June 11, 1939, in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. But the course of love did not proceed smoothly, for California law still would not permit a single woman to adopt a child. This had only rarely been permitted, after the papers had been cleared in another state.