Possessed (30 page)

The Steeles with Senator John F. Kennedy (1959)

With Bette Davis in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962)

With twins Cindy and Cathy Crawford in London (1966)

With Ty Hardin, Herman Cohen, Judy Geeson and Diana Dors during
Berserk
(1967)

CAIN’S NOVEL HAD TO undergo radical alteration in its journey to the screen—not only to placate the censors but also to make the role suitable for Crawford.

The book’s Mildred, after separating from her husband at age twenty-eight, becomes a woman of easy virtue, always ready for casual sex with the wrong men. As Cain wrote: “Romance wasn’t quite the word [for it], for of that emotion she felt not the slightest flicker. Whatever it was, it afforded two hours of relief, of forgetfulness.” The dominant tone of the book is one of bleakness, of economic and psychological annihilation; long passages describe Mildred’s wearying efforts to find work in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, and whole chapters detail women’s contempt for men. All this was omitted from the movie.

But the film of
Mildred Pierce,
brilliantly designed and constructed, adds elements nowhere found in the book. Where the novel is a realistic social treatment of people torn by poverty and destroyed by their own obsessions with money and status, the movie adds the framing device of a murder and its resolution, shown in flashback and narrated by the title character. At the conclusion of the picture, the malignant daughter Veda, for whom everything has been foolishly sacrificed, is revealed to have killed her boyfriend—who is also her mother’s second husband, the exploitive, shiftless, once wealthy playboy Monty Beragon (played by Zachary Scott). Mildred is left with nothing to show for her extreme sacrifices.

The book and movie share the theme of a mother’s unhealthy dependence on her daughter’s estimation. As Cain wrote: “It always came back to the same thing. She was afraid of Veda, of her snobbery, her contempt, her unbreakable spirit. And she was afraid of something that seemed always lurking under Veda’s bland, phony

toniness: a cold, cruel, coarse desire to torture her mother, to humiliate her, above everything, to hurt her.”

From first scene to last, Joan brought to life a Mildred unlike any character she had yet attempted. Appearing depressed but insistent, bereft but unyielding, she invested Mildred with impressive shadings of feelings. She knew when she read the novel that however recognizable Mildred was—however realistically presented in her time and place—she was certainly no ordinary woman.

“The character I played was a composite of the characters I’d always played,” she said, “and there were a few elements from my own personalityand character, too. In a way, I think I was getting ready for
Mildred Pierce
when I was a kid, waiting on tables and cooking. But there was not a single Crawford mannerism in my performance. I sailed into [it] with all the gusto I’d been saving for three years. The role was a delight to me, because it rescued me from what was known at MGM as the Joan Crawford formula. I had become so hidden in clothes and sets that nobody could tell whether I had talent or not.”

EVEN MAYER AND WARNER may well have doubted that Joan could portray so complex a woman—highly neurotic yet somehow sympathetic, brought to the brink of destruction by her own tenacious obsession. But Joan knew she could, and she knew how to refine a word here or a phrase there to make the point of a scene more precise. When Cain saw the movie, he sent Joan a signed first edition of his novel, inscribed “to Joan Crawford, who brought Mildred to life just as I had always hoped she would be, and who has my lifelong gratitude.” That Mildred came so fully alive on-screen was due in large part to Joan’s insistence that Curtiz exploit the power of the close-up—not only for herself, but also for other players. Ann Blyth, for one, recalled that the director was favoring Joan too much during their important two-shots. “Michael,” Joan said, “you’ve simply got to have more close-ups of Ann during our scenes together—it’s right for the character, and it’s right for Ann’s career.”

Earlier movies about maternal self-sacrifice—Claudette Colbert in
Imitation of Life,
for example, and Barbara Stanwyck in
Stella Dallas
—glowed with sentiment and a warm rush of noble uplift. But Mildred Pierce’s fate is disastrously empty, and although the film’s final shot shows her leaving police headquarters to find her dull ex-husband waiting, the audience knows that it was he who set in motion the story’s tragic downward spiral when he left Mildred and the children for a rich neighbor who subsequently abandoned him.

Joan’s portrait of Mildred Pierce was a study in understatement, moderation, control and depth—the triumph of her old adage that in the movies, less is more. When Mildred strikes Veda, the sting is reflected in her own reaction.

When Mildred begs Monty to marry her for the sake of Veda’s status, we see the collapse of a struggle for self-worth in a single sidelong glance.

Joan played a character comprehended not primarily through loud words or broad gestures, but rather by rich and subtle expression, by vocal nuance, by wide, unblinking gazes and by a restrained look of incalculable sadness. However much
Mildred Pierce
has of traditional soap opera, it is raised to a higher level of disturbing complexity by Joan’s complete mastery of her craft. Most critics dismissed the movie as just another sodden tale of derailed mother love, and praise for Joan came mostly from the trade journals. Many reviewers were unsure how to receive it—the difference from the mold of Crawford characters seemed too vast to gauge, and seldom was a title character so disconcerting. Mildred can be neither endorsed completely nor condemned entirely, and this tension made it difficult for many critics to appreciate it.

All the tortured whorls of the character’s confusion are externalized by means of Ernest Haller’s angular lighting and nightmarish shadows, by the pools of light that enshroud even as they partially illuminate. Haller’s striking cinematography colludes with Anton Grot’s disorienting sets for the interiors of the beach house and the mansion—locations that suggest decadence more than luxury. These elements of photography and setting do more than exploit some elements of contemporary
film noir:
they express the dangerous depths of depravity to which Mildred willingly exposes herself and from which she is all but unredeemed. It is she, after all, who has tried to cover for her guilty daughter by implicating Wally Fay (Jack Carson), her lover
manqué
and former business partner. This was indeed no ordinary woman.

With this character and this movie, Joan Crawford commenced what might be called a third act in her motion picture career. From 1925 to 1938, she had represented successively the raging party girl, the sensual but irrepressible working woman, the benighted or isolated victim and the society matron. From 1939 to 1943, she brought a remarkable technical complexity to a wide variety of roles in no fewer than five first-rate films
(Strange Cargo, Susan and God, A Woman’s Face, When Ladies Meet
and
Above Suspicion).
But
Mildred Pierce
took her and audiences to a new level, in which she would embrace types oftenshunned by actors eager to maintain a loving fan base. Henceforth, the women Crawford played would be tougher, more seasoned, more resourceful. This was, of course, no preseason game plan, mapped out as a program from 1945: it became a logical if accidental development she embraced when it occurred.

BEFORE THAT YEAR WAS over, Phillip Terry’s presence in Joan Crawford’s life had ended. “One day he just didn’t come home,” recalled Christina. “I don’t think much was said about it, except that he wouldn’t be back. He was just gone.” On December 17, 1945, Joan publicly confirmed their separation. Very soon after, Joan legally changed the name of young Phillip Terry Jr. to Christopher Crawford.

After ending the romance with Charles McCabe, Joan had married Phillip Terry because, as she admitted, “I was unutterably lonely. Never marry because of loneliness. I owed him an apology from the start. We just weren’t made for each other. I had never really known Phillip and now I realized that I had not really loved him, either.” As legal proceedings commenced, Joan learned that her divorce was going to impose considerable penalties, for the settlement awarded Terry a sizable share of her wealth. “I was almost destroyed financially,” she said years later. He requested no rights regarding the custody of the children.

Terry had deeply resented the attentions lavished on Joan by the Hollywood lawyer Gregson Bautzer, a notorious playboy involved with many Hollywood women. Fidelity to his several wives or mistresses was not an element in Greg Bautzer’s character, and he routinely infuriated women like Lana Turner, Dorothy Lamour, Ginger Rogers, Terry Moore and Jane Wyman by his simultaneous escapades. Over six feet tall, ruggedly handsome and powerful in both presence and career, he had known Joan since her efforts to adopt Christina, and now set up a business meeting at which he at once arranged a date. She agreed to dine with him, and at first there was no more. But soon Greg seemed to be lurking everywhere, and in due course Joan fell into bed, if not into love.

At the same time, as if on cue, Charles McCabe arrived in Los Angeles, as Joan wrote to Genie Chester on March 22, 1946. Their reunion was apparently brief and cordial, although it is impossible to know the exact nature of the Crawford-McCabe relationship by this time; in any case, Joan was sincerely happy when she learned that Charles and his wife were expecting another child.

The formal dissolution of the Terry marriage, effective April 25, 1946, may have legally required absolute and perpetual silence on Phillip’s part, for he never publicly uttered a word about Joan for the rest of his long life. He married again, had a disappointing career of no great significance and finally abandoned acting for work as a financial consultant. His last twenty years were blighted by a series of strokes and other grave illnesses, and after years of relative seclusion, he died at the age of eighty-four in 1993, reticent to the end about his years with Joan Crawford.

BY THE TIME PHILLIP TERRY left North Bristol Avenue, Joan had already begun work in script sessions and wardrobe fittings for her next Warners picture, a remake of the silent movie
Humoresque.
Based on the Fannie Hurst story about a struggling violinist chafing under the possessive patronage of a wealthy, married, self-destructive and alcoholic socialite, the screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold was completed while
Mildred Pierce
was in production; Joan got hold of a copy and pressured the front office for it to be her next role.

Jack Warner and Jerry Wald objected that the part of the highly neurotic and finally suicidal Helen Wright was not sufficiently large or attractive for Joan, but she was insistent. “There may have been scant sympathy for this dipsomaniac married woman,” she said, “but it was uncompromisingly dramatic.” More to the point, this was the sort of role suitable for a serious actress coming to terms with the fact that she was forty.