Possessed (24 page)

Hence (as the production histories stated) Joan’s “inabilities to rehearse, her absences due to depressions and illnesses … and her general anxieties” during the first months of 1940, while filming
Susan and God,
were due to the fact that she had unwisely brought the baby home with a nursemaid. This, of course, was a dangerous course of action, for the child could summarily beremoved by court action, as Joan was informed by Gregson Bautzer, a Los Angeles lawyer to whom she turned for counsel.

A solution was found, although it was not easy to finesse. “I left California with the baby, so that I could adopt her legally elsewhere,” Joan later explained. The plan was for her to go to Las Vegas, for Nevada permitted a single person to adopt. First, however, she took the baby to New York during the winter, where friends were solicitous and sympathetic—among them, Helen Hayes and her family, who lived north of Manhattan in a quaint town on the Hudson River.

But there was another reason for her journey to New York—to spend time with a man who had come into her life and had brought her great happiness. The relationship explains her long trips to the East Coast, her subsequent long holidays in Northern California and her concomitant periods of absence from work; she was officially granted no fewer than three prolonged leaves of absence from Metro between the spring of 1939 and the winter of 1942.

Charles McCabe was a wealthy New York businessman whose serious romance with Joan was conducted on both coasts for several years. A public figure, married and with a family, he had to conduct the affair with the utmost discretion, and Joan was completely cooperative. Briefly, it seemed to her as if they would one day marry, but his professional life, religious background and social position restrained him from raising the topic of divorce with his wife, a woman highly placed in New York society and charitable circles. Even when the affair ended, after three years, Joan maintained her silence, referring to McCabe only obliquely in her published memoir,
A Portrait of Joan.
Describing him as “a marvelously mature man, one of the best people I’ve ever known,” she found McCabe not only an appealing and steady companion but also a man who offered the kind of paternal and protective affection she always sought.

And so she had to settle for a relationship she called “long and lovely.” He taught her to hunt and fish, and she went on these sporting trips with a group of McCabe’s male friends who had his absolute confidence. “I carried my own gun and my own camera,” she remembered. “I waded through streams in thevanguard; and at noon when we camped, I helped fix lunch and surprised them with snacks packed away in my knapsack, just in case they didn’t catch any fish. [He] introduced me to politics, to banking, big business and public affairs.”

Because she “carried her own camera,” Joan documented many episodes during this love affair, and she kept the filmed record until her death. Several hours long and covering three years, the film was discovered many years later by her family and was first publicly shown on December 5, 2008, at a Joan Crawford festival at the University of California, Los Angeles. The color footage shows a woman happy and relaxed, enjoying her private life with her lover and (by 1942) two babies. Holding the camera, McCabe focused on Joan strolling in the woods, paddling a canoe, reclining on the grass and taking a sunbath. When she held the camera, she took pictures of a pleasant, smiling man, utterly lacking glamour or movie-star good looks.

But she was ultimately disappointed. “This rewarding experience I wouldn’t have missed, but his marital situation could not be altered. In his position, he could not afford the publicity of being associated with
any
woman. I understood. Why risk hurting him? What I’d fought for all my life, this career, this name, made it impossible to be anonymous [forever].” The end of the affair cut deeply. According to her oldest adopted daughter, Joan was always “very sentimental about him. She loved [him]; I knew that by the way she looked when she told me. But she said he was married and would never be able to get a divorce from his wife. She had tears in her eyes when she got to that part of the story.”

JOAN’S SILENCE ABOUT THE
baby girl she wanted to adopt was broken when she first spoke publicly, on May 23, 1940, in a news release she carefully prepared. “Her transcontinental journeys were for the purpose of adopting a baby,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported. She did not reply when asked the name of the New York orphanage at which she claimed to have obtained Christina—the name on which she had settled for the baby girl. Although biographers have categorically insisted that Joan returned with the child to Los Angeles at onceand celebrated her first birthday there with a lavish party in June, the truth is that Joan and Christina remained in New York (a fact confirmed also by Christina). “Miss Crawford was reluctant to disclose any details,” according to the same newspaper report. “She and the baby will remain in New York for a few more days.”

The days extended to another eight months, until January 1941. The time was spent with Charles McCabe—in suites at Manhattan hotels, at Pennsylvania resorts and (when his wife was absent) at his country home in Connecticut. Mother and daughter then traveled to Los Angeles via Nevada, where the adoption papers were finalized, thanks to Bautzer’s expert strategy, which also facilitated the recognition of the Nevada adoption in the State of California. When mother and child finally arrived home in Brentwood, Christina was nineteen months old; a properly furnished nursery, designed by Billy Haines, awaited her.

Of her early years, Christina wrote, “Mother and I were absolutely inseparable. She took me with her wherever she went. I slept in her dressing rooms and on the studio sound stages. I traveled in the car with her from the time I was only a few months old. She saved every bit of hair cut from my head, every tooth from my mouth. All were carefully sealed in envelopes and labeled in her generous handwriting. There were gifts for which she wrote little notes—'to my beautiful infant—I love you, my darling, beautiful child.’ ”

Christina also appreciated the source of Joan’s generosity and loving-kindness. She was aware that her mother showered her “with the pent-up outpouring of love and affection that had been stifled in her for so many years … I wanted for nothing: toys, clothes and baby jewelry. She was constantly holding me and looking at me … [and] whenever she didn’t take me to the studio, she would rush home in time to feed me and give me my bath. She would sing lullabies to me and rock me to sleep … My adoring, indulgent mother couldn’t resist giving me anything I asked from her. In return, she had my total devotion.”

AFTER INTERVIEWING DOZENS OF
women for the role of nursemaid and nanny, Joan finally settled on two—one of whom moved into the house so that Christina would always have a caregiver when her mother worked late hours or had to travel for location shooting or had evening social engagements away from home. The helpers arrived none too soon, for on January 23, 1941, Joan began work on a difficult and demanding picture in which she rendered one of the most exquisitely realized performances of her career.

Joan had seen Ingrid Bergman in the Swedish film
En kvinnas ansikte (A Woman’s Face),
directed by Gustaf Molander in 1938. The movie had been released in America in the fall of 1939, precisely when Ingrid arrived in the United States under contract to Selznick and appeared in her first Hollywood movie—a remake of her 1936 Swedish film,
Intermezzo.
“I adore Ingrid and once wrote her a fan letter,” said Joan. In fact, the letter was about
A Woman’s Face,
which she not only admired but which had deeply moved her and planted the seeds of an idea.

The two actresses met at Selznick’s party for the premiere of
Intermezzo,
where Joan was able to turn the conversation to
A Woman’s Face.
She wanted to know if Ingrid would be offended if Joan were to ask Mayer (Selznick’s father-in-law) to secure the rights for Joan to appear in an American remake of the picture. She knew this might seem impertinent, but there were so few good roles for an actress. Ingrid laughed and dismissed the idea of “offense,” saying that, after all, they were there to celebrate a Hollywood remake of a Swedish film for
her
—so why not a Hollywood remake of a Swedish film for
Joan
?

In addition to the fact that the story and the role were enormously compelling, there were other immediate reasons for Joan’s attraction to this project. For one thing, Mayer was assigning a significant number of the new and interesting roles to newcomers, among them foreigners like Hedy Lamarr, who turned twenty-six in 1940, and Lana Turner, just nineteen. Greer Garson was two years older than Joan, but Mayer believed that audiences would love Garson’s English-rose beauty, her accent and her rare combination of whimsy, charm and moral authority; he was right. And Judy Garland, eighteen, was quickly ascending to stardom after
The Wizard of Oz.
In other words, an entirely new breed of actress was receiving Leo the Lion’s share of attention in Culver City.

Another reason for Joan’s settling on
A Woman’s Face
was—her
face.
She was entering a period of mature, almost statuesque beauty, but she was also afraid of being considered too old to be cast as a leading lady. In 1941 she would turn thirty-five, and well-founded rumors were circulating that both Garbo (thirty-six) and Shearer (thirty-nine) intended to quit the business permanently—primarily over disputes about the quality of their assignments, but also because they knew that leading roles were scarce for “aging women” (which meant actresses past their midthirties).

And so Joan approached her boss. “Poor Mr. Mayer,” Joan wrote later, remembering the meeting at which she begged him to make
A Woman’s Face
for her. “He had borne with me as the bitch in
The Women,
the bleak-looking woman in
Strange Cargo,
the mother of a subdeb in
Susan and God,
[and] now he balked at me playing a scarred woman who hated the world.” But George Cukor rose to her defense and agreed to direct the picture, and while Joan was away from California with Christina, Donald Ogden Stewart completed the screenplay. Ready on her return, the production proceeded smoothly and was completed in two months, at the end of March.
¹

Beginning at a murder trial and continuing in a series of flashbacks, the story moves backward and forward, telling of Anna Holm, a woman with hideous facial scars, the result of a fire set by her drunken father when she was a child. Alienated and embittered, she has grown up shunned, mocked and rejected, and her hatred and contempt for people has turned her to a life of crime. While working as the ringleader of a gang of blackmailers, she meets and falls in love with a handsome, unscrupulous aristocrat (played by Conrad Veidt), who is fearful of losing a vast inheritance to a young nephew.

Anna submits to a dozen painful operations, from which, thanks to a brilliant and caring surgeon (Melvyn Douglas), she emerges a beautiful woman, free of scars and apparently ready for a normal life. She is also secretly attractedto the surgeon, but he is married to a scheming, shallow and unfaithful shrew (OsaMassen).

Now that Anna has been rendered physically whole and attractive, what of her inner life, her character? The test of her real recovery comes when the aristocrat, exploiting her emotional vulnerability, coerces Anna into going along with his plan to murder his nephew, thus securing his wealth and, he promises, their future together. But when she goes in disguise as nanny to the boy, she realizes she is not only incapable of murder but also loves the child and his family. When the villain arrives and the murder plot is set in motion, Anna saves the boy and indirectly causes the death of the aristocrat. At the trial that links the story’s episodes, Anna has been accused of murder; she is, however, acquitted, and the ending implies that she and the surgeon will begin a new life together.

Makeup artist Jack Dawn created a repellent scar that took hours to apply each day—"from eye to mouth on the right side of my face,” as Joan recalled, “a hideous mass of seared tissue” that was clearly seen for the first forty-seven minutes of the picture. Metro, afraid that too many people would wrongly regard
A Woman’s Face
as a horror picture, released no photos or even hints of the character’s disfigurement. Cukor’s direction was, as usual, expert, and Robert Planck’s atmospheric cinematography consisted of shifting pools of key lights and arresting shadows.

Joan delivered a performance of quiet, often chilling intensity. Before the surgery, her Anna is a cauldron of astringent contempt, a woman eager for love yet fearful of trusting anyone; afterward, the character gradually warms and deepens—an acting achievement even more remarkable in light of the discontinuous filming of sequences.

It is difficult to understand why MGM did not put Joan forward for an Oscar nomination that year.
²
Her portrayal was a masterpiece of psychological realism. She revealed the emotional terrorist lurking in Anna’s soul alongside a poignant helplessness. Both victim and victimizer, the scarred woman becomes only gradually a candidate for the human race, and this duality struck audiences as something they could understand in a woman to whom they could relate. She was neither angel nor demon—she was a human being, and Joan neither erased the toughness nor exaggerated Anna’s tragic sense of isolation. Joan expressed the conflict raging for ascendancy within Anna and within herself. In the latter case, it was the conflict between the demands of stardom and the desire for a contented private life with husband and children.

“I have nothing but the best to say for
A Woman’s Face,”
she told an interviewer many years later. “It was a splendid script, and George [Cukor] let me run with it. I finally shocked both the critics and the public into realizing the fact that I really was at heart a dramatic actress. Great thanks to Melvyn Douglas [costarring with Joan for the third time]; I think he is one of the least appreciated actors the screen has ever used. His sense of underplay, subordination, whatever you call it, was always flawless. I say a prayer for Mr. Cukor every time I think of what
A Woman’s Face
did for my career. It fortified me with a measure of self-confidence I’d never had.”