Possessed (27 page)

BUT JOAN’S NEW AGENT, Lew Wasserman, had not been idle. Two days after she left MGM, in a development she had not expected when she went to see Mayer, Joan went on the payroll of Warner Bros. She was to receive a total of five hundred thousand dollars for three pictures, payable over six years at $1,667 per week—the equivalent of twenty-two thousand dollars weekly in 2010 valuation.

She was also granted approval of screenplays and directors for all her forthcoming Warners productions. Most important to her was the concomitant prerogative of contributing to (if not actually controlling) every aspect of production, from script development through art direction and photography to the final editing. As producers and directors were to learn, they ignored her questions and suggestions at their peril, for by this time Joan Crawford knew more about the crafts of moviemaking than many studio personnel.

Still, the prolonged period of professional idleness continued: there was no project at Warners for fourteen months after she signed the contract. But Joan continued with her duties as a star, welcoming to her home the portrait photographer John Engstead, who was preparing a photo-essay for
Harper’s Bazaar.
“She came up from working in her garage,” Engstead recalled, “her face flushed and with very little makeup.”

“Excuse my appearance,” Joan said, smiling and breathless. “I’ve been ironing. It’s impossible to get help, so I do my own housework.” Engstead felt this was not a complaint but an explanation. Moments later, in a change of wardrobe and freshly made up, she patiently stood for a two-hour session while Engstead painstakingly took his photographs.

Finally, in August 1944, Joan worked for one day on
Hollywood Canteen,
the studio’s all-star movie salute to the troops, in which she appeared with the actor and soldier Dane Clark in a ninety-second cameo. “You look like Joan

Crawford!” he tells her on a crowded dance floor. “My husband says the same thing,” she replies with a smile before whispering in his ear, “Don’t look now, but I
am
Joan Crawford.”

The movie title was the name of the club where, during World War II, American and Allied military men and women could, without paying any fee, socialize, eat, drink and dance while on leave or before they were shipped overseas. John Garfield and Bette Davis came up with the idea for the place, and soon Joan joined them and other stars as volunteers. She worked at the Canteen one or two nights a week, serving food, dancing with boys in uniform, autographing postcards for them to send and recording songs for the troops abroad. Like all the actors in
Hollywood Canteen,
Joan contributed her time and appearance without payment.

Some people described this period of professional inactivity as the most serene time of her life, but Joan was not among them: she found it “most difficult—frankly, I was bored, because the actress is half of this woman, and the actress had no outlet.” Eventually, she informed Wasserman that she was taking herself off salary at Warners and would not accept her regular weekly paychecks.

“What does she mean—
off salary
?” grumbled Jack Warner when he heard this news. “Nobody’s ever asked to be taken off salary! She must
want
something!”

She wanted a good picture, Joan told Warner. “Since I wasn’t making one, I didn’t feel justified in taking the salary.” Soon afterward, one of Warner’s producers gave her the screenplay for a domestic comedy called
Never Say Goodbye,
to be directed by Edmund Goulding. She read the script, which concerned a separated couple’s resourceful young daughter who contrives to prevent their divorce. Joan promptly pronounced the project unsuitable for any sensible actress. The picture was finally made with Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, but without Goulding, who was also cool to the screenplay.

After Joan had rejected several more treatments and screenplays, she was summoned to a brief meeting by Henry Blanke, a producer at the studio. “I’ll tell you something, Joan,” he said quietly. “It’s hard to find a role for youbecause you keep turning things down. My advice to you is to get a good property and do it. To be honest, no one is waiting for you, and many people have the idea that you’re difficult to work with.”

The only drama in Joan’s life that year took place on December 29. As she was finishing supper with Phillip and the children, they heard the sounds of someone lurking and mumbling outside the house. Rebecca Kullberg, the natural mother of the child who had lived briefly with Joan in 1941, resided in nearby West Los Angeles. That evening, after reading about Joan’s adoption of another baby boy, Kullberg—in a state of mental confusion—went to Bristol Avenue to retrieve what she thought was her own kidnapped child (who had, in fact, by this time been adopted by a loving family). She burst into the house and wandered madly about, demanding the immediate return of her son. Joan was frantic to protect the children; Phillip Terry called the police; and Mrs. Kullberg was forcibly removed. Later, after making continued threats to Joan and to the original baby broker, the poor woman was committed to a psychiatric institution. By a strange irony, Joan had just begun work on a film that was oddly appropriate to this absurd and violent domestic melodrama.

JAMES M. CAIN’S SPECIAL brand of hardboiled novel had been enormously successful since the 1930s, and two of them—
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and
Double Indemnity
—had already been filmed.
¹
Cain published his novel
Mildred Pierce
in 1941, and Warner Bros. quickly purchased the movie rights and commissioned a treatment and then several drafts of a screenplay. At once, the Hollywood censors were strongly dissuasive: “The story contains so many sordid and repellent elements,” wrote Joseph Breen, from the Office of the Motion Picture Production Code, “that we feel the finished picture would notonly be highly questionable but would meet with a great deal of difficulty on its release"—by which he meant, “Drop it!”

But a thirty-three-year-old producer named Jerry Wald went ahead, turning the script over to various writers until finally one of them, Ranald MacDougall, handed in a version suitable for filming. Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz, director of a wide variety of movie genres (and a recent Oscar winner for
Casablanca),
signed on in October while the search continued for the right leading lady.

Joan had read the book and told Lew Wasserman that if there was to be a movie of it, this Mildred Pierce was a woman she completely understood. Mildred knew poverty and deprivation, as had Joan. Mildred was ashamed of her early life and family background, as was Joan. Mildred chose men unwisely, and she was prepared to be a slave in order to realize her ambitions. Most of all, she was neurotically and masochistically committed to lavishing every good thing on her daughter and granting her every wish. In the process, Mildred transforms herself from a poor, weary housewife into a wealthy restaurant tycoon—but in the process, she loses two husbands, two daughters and her business.

Because he had heard exaggerated rumors of Crawford’s demands at Metro, Curtiz was hesitant when Wald mentioned her name. But when Joan went so far as to say she would submit to a screen test in order to prove her mettle—something an established star was never asked to do—Curtiz had no choice but to direct the test. To his astonishment, he then had to agree that they had found their Mildred. Joan (who wanted to play the role even before reading a screenplay) was the first major player signed for the movie, in October. Jack Carson was engaged shortly thereafter, and Zachary Scott, Eve Arden and Ann Blyth signed contracts in early December 1944.
²

Location filming and process shots were produced that same month, butthere was still nothing remotely resembling a completed script. No fewer than ten writers worked feverishly on as many lengthy treatments and scripts, but there was no “final draft” when shooting began. The screenplay is credited to Ranald MacDougall, who certainly had a major hand in the writing, along with Louise Randall Pierson (one of the many writers not credited).
³
The final product is a masterpiece of improvisation—indeed, a surprising amount of dialogue was extemporized on the set. The picture was scheduled to wrap in February 1945, but it took until May—and fresh pages of script were delivered almost every day during production.
Mildred Pierce
was held back for release until the autumn of 1945, after the end of the war.

THE DIRECTOR WAS NOT
an easy man. On Joan’s first day of filming, Curtiz greeted her by clutching her shoulders and shouting, for everyone to hear, “These damn pads of yours—they are awful! Off with the shoulder pads!” With that, he tore the dress from neck to hemline, only to see that she was wearing no shoulder pads. “Mr. Curtiz,” Joan protested, “there
are
no pads—I bought this dress off the rack at Sears yesterday for two dollars and ninety-eight cents!”

She fled in tears from the set to her dressing room, pursued by the assistant director, Frank Heath, who warned that this was Curtiz’s usual way of reducing to subservience every actor in his movies. The director had recently terrorized the usually unflappable Rosalind Russell on the set of the comedy
Roughly Speaking.
Russell’s costar had been Jack Carson, who also had the important role of Wally Fay in
Mildred Pierce;
no pushover he, Carson supported Heath’s description of Curtiz. Joan went back to work.

“When I started the tests for
Mildred Pierce,”
Curtiz said in his heavy

Middle European accent at the end of production, “I heard my star was very deefeecult. So I say, okay, Crawford, Curtiz will be more deefeecult. She took it like a trouper. We have now finished the picture and I see she is one swell actress. We get along fine on the picture. I luff her.” With that, Joan stepped forward with a splendidly wrapped gift box for him. Inside was an oversized pair of shoulder pads.

She worked closely and agreeably with her makeup and wardrobe team, selecting simple daytime dresses, designing the upswept contemporary coiffures and picking the appropriate accessories. Gone were the absurdly lengthened eyelashes: only the patrician forehead and the high line of her eyebrow suggested strength.

With her colleagues, Joan was all business; and to some—like sixteen-year-old Ann Blyth—she was actually protective. Warner and Curtiz had not wanted Ann for the role, but Joan was adamant when she saw the girl’s test. Her confidence was justified, for the result was Ann’s chillingly effective portrayal of the spoiled, cruelly self-centered Veda. “The Joan Crawford I knew,” recalled Ann Blyth decades later, “was dedicated and kind. She fought for me to have the part of Veda, and she told the director when she thought I ought to have more close-ups. Nobody I ever worked with enjoyed being a star more than she, but because she was so beautiful, I think people forgot she could act. There was a very deep core of vulnerability in Joan that she usually kept hidden. I saw it, as did others. She was a generous and caring friend to me throughout her life.”

From the story conferences on
Mildred Pierce
that began in August 1944 through the final editing almost a year later, Joan had never been so totally involved in a production—nor so worn out by its demands. “The hours are from 5.00
a.m.
till 7.30
p.m.,”
she wrote to a friend that winter. “Then there is the bath—makeup off—dinner—hair to dress and dry—study—to bed, if I’m lucky, by eleven! But it’s worth it, as I believe we have a good picture.”

With her mother and brother (1922)

Broadway chorus girl (1924)
(Neil Maciejewski/legendaryjoancrawford.com)

Harry Rapf bestows the new name (1925)