Possessed (36 page)

4
A petty crook from the time of his adolescence, Christopher severed all relations with Joan when he was seventeen. In exchange for his endorsement of Christina’s book, he received a financial consideration from her.

5
The song “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan"—one of Joan’s favorites—was, at her request, employed for the fifth time in one of her pictures. In Goodbye, My Fancy, it is ironic in light of the emasculation of the play.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Carrying a Torch Song
| 1952–1955 |

A
MONG PEOPLE WHO
acted in movies, it is difficult to name anyone who worked more diligently than Joan Crawford. Had it been an option, she might have become a first-rate director: she knew the technical aspects of all the filmmaking crafts, and she was not shy about telling colleagues what she liked and did not. But there was only a very small number of women behind the camera in Joan’s time—Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino among the few—and the old boys’ club of male directors would have made it excruciatingly difficult for a major female star to join their select group.

Joan had known when it was time for her to depart from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Just so, at the end of 1951, she knew she had to leave Warner Bros. and strike out on her own, for her last five pictures had none of the success of
Mildred Pierce, Humoresque, Possessed
or
Daisy Kenyon.
“Warners was putting me in mediocre things,” she wrote to a friend. “I suddenly got into a rut and then asked for my release.” As the saying goes in Hollywood, you are only as valuable as your last picture, and her recent quartet had not been good for her. So it was that Joan expressed her desire to be free of studio obligations and join the growing list of freelance movie stars.

As early as 1951, Joan contacted an independent producer named Joseph Kaufman. Kaufmann had coproduced or produced nine pictures of no renown, but he was ready for a step upward, and Joan was about to give it to him—in exchange for executive producer status. She had read a recently published novel by Edna Sherry called
Sudden Fear,
a dark, romantic thriller with surprising twists and turns. As she described it for Kaufman, it could be wonderfully cinematic—much of it silent, she said, with brisk action and a contemporary music score.

From the start, Joan thought of
Sudden Fear
as her film, and with good reason. Joan had engaged as screenwriter the expert Lenore Coffee, who had written the dialogue for the 1931
Possessed.
Joan hired David Miller, a journeyman director she trusted. Joan suggested the composer Elmer Bernstein as the right one to create a modern, percussive score. Joan arranged for saucy Gloria Grahame to play the role of a tawdry accomplice to murder. Joan insisted on Charles Lang, a master of black-and-white cinematography, who had been nominated eight times for an Oscar in that field. And just before filming began (and after some initial doubts), Joan cast Jack Palance as her leading man. He had taken over Marlon Brando’s role in the Broadway production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
and followed that with an impressive performance in Elia Kazan’s film
Panic in the Streets.
Joan was not keen on Palance’s style and his defense of Stanislavsky’s so-called Method acting, but she liked his sexy-sinister look and his insinuating tone of voice.

Joan and her cast and crew were ready for location filming in San Francisco in January 1952, and they all scented the aroma of success. “It’s wonderful to be casting myself instead of accepting someone else’s idea of who I should play,” Joan told a reporter from
Time
—but she revealed nothing of the story. In fact, a curtain of silence descended around
Sudden Fear
all during production, and Edna Sherry’s agent and publisher were persuaded to delay the paperback reprint until after the movie was released. Crawford and Kaufman had come up with a budget of $720,000 for the picture—a sum possible only because Joan agreed to forgo a salary and instead took 40 percent of the picture’s profits. Within a year of its release, her accounts were enriched by more than a million dollars.

Sudden Fear
not only proved Joan right when she insisted she could carry out a producer’s duties, it also provided her with a positive version of the badly written role she had played in
This Woman Is Dangerous,
and it justified her insistence that she could find a successful project at this difficult time of her life. As the wealthy and successful playwright Myra Hudson, Joan played a woman who has everything except a husband—until she finds an unlikely candidate in the person of an actor named Lester Blaine (Palance), whom she has fired from the cast of her new play because he did not seem sufficiently romantic to her. She marries him for love, only to discover that he has married her for money—for which he is willing to commit murder with the help of his girlfriend Irene Neves (Grahame).

The picture, independently produced under the Kaufman banner and released by RKO in the summer of 1952, was successful in every way—at the box office, with critics and at Oscar time, when it gathered four nominations. Joan offered a moving, restrained yet powerful performance, completely controlled yet not at all calculated, despite scenes in which she had to express Myra’s intense passion for her husband and then her equally intense terror of him. From her portrait of a woman falling unexpectedly in love, to her agonizing discovery of his betrayal, to her steely resolution to rid herself of her self-appointed killers—this was acting of a high caliber, confident but not smug, and entirely worthy of the Oscar and Golden Globe nominations Joan received.
¹

Cast relations during production were less than cordial. After several days in San Francisco, Jack Palance refused to reply to Joan’s greeting each morning, and this caused a chilly lack of communication between the two stars. Asked why he was so unfriendly to his leading lady, Palance replied that he thought she was insincere. He disapproved of Joan’s assistants and said that he regarded her as an aloof movie queen who treated colleagues condescendingly,as if they were servants. But he seems to have been remarkably disingenuous. As it happened, he was carrying on an affair with Gloria Grahame during production; she disliked Joan and tried to throw her off whenever possible—hence Palance took Grahame’s side. Hollywood history provides a host of such petty animosities and coy tricks. (Years later, Grahame thought better of her behavior toward Joan: she told Herbert Kenwith that Joan had quietly guided much of her performance in
Sudden Fear.)

“It was one of the most harrowing experiences I’ve ever had,” Joan said of the filming. “I had played a trapped character before, but never like this—I went through nine solid days of hysteria, and the closet scene alone took two-and-a-half days to complete, with one baby spotlight focused on me.” She was referring to the long sequence in which Myra sets her plot in motion—all of it filmed without dialogue, like a perfectly composed silent movie-within-a-movie. “Eddie [Edwin Allen, her makeup man] just handed me the lipstick, Elva [Martien, the wardrobe assistant] straightened my hem, so deftly I wasn’t aware. While lights are being adjusted, there is usually kidding and lighthearted banter on a movie set, but this time Sylvia [Lamarr, her lighting stand-in] stood mutely in my place until we were ready to shoot; and the electrical crew changed lenses quickly to move in for a close-up or out for a medium shot while the mood was sustained. No one asked these people for silence—we all knew it was just right for the job.” Indeed, everything was right about
Sudden Fear,
a hypnotic thriller that over time lost none of its power or appeal.

DESPITE HER ENTHUSIASM FOR
it, nothing was right about Joan’s next picture
—Torch Song,
for which she returned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after a decade’s absence. “It was like a homecoming,” she said. “I loved doing that film. It gave me a chance to dance again. All the right elements were there. It was a field day for an actress, particularly one who’d reached a certain age. They don’t write pictures like this anymore, do they?” To which one can only reply that no, they don’t write pictures like this anymore, and we are all grateful. Joan always spoke fondly and highly of
Torch Song,
a picture that even her most ardent fans have rightly judged as a complete failure in every regard.

At the outset, things seemed auspicious. In March 1953 she received a screenplay from Benjamin Thau, Metro’s casting director. Based on the story “Why Should I Cry?” the script was about a tyrannical song-and-dance performer who alienates everyone around her until she is suddenly transformed by the love of a blind pianist. As the great writer Ben Hecht said in a different context, this was a lot of hooey. But this was also Hollywood. Metro owned the rights to the story and had failed to realize it as a movie with Lana Turner, Ann Sheridan or Cyd Charisse. Because it was widely known that Miss Crawford was on the lookout for new properties, “Why Should I Cry?” was submitted for her consideration. Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, she thought it was brilliant, precisely the sort of project she needed. Negotiations were handled quickly, and the star was to receive $125,000 in eighty-three weekly installments, to lighten the tax burden.

And so, in May, after a lavish Welcome Home celebration at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Culver City, Joan arrived to begin work on a movie for which she was totally unequipped in every regard and that had to be completed in twenty-four days—so crowded was Metro’s shooting schedule that year. Charles Walters, a director with choreographic experience, was engaged at Joan’s request after she saw his film
Lili,
and a supporting cast was hurriedly assembled. But Walters found Joan extremely nervous and insecure about doing a musical for the first time in twenty years—since
Dancing Lady.

Becoming more anxious by the day, Joan had a quick facelift and then had the wardrobe department fit her with a so-called torpedo or bullet brassiere, which thrust her breasts threateningly upward and forward. Popularized by stars like Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe, who were much younger than Crawford, this garment had a pointed, conelike shape, to which sweaters and knit dresses clung, exaggerating whatever nature had provided.

Joan had been photographed in color before 1953, in the final scenes of both
The Hollywood Revue of 1929
and
The Ice Follies of 1939.
But the requirements of Technicolor—combined with a wide-screen process and the excessively lavishproduction values of MGM in the early 1950s—required meticulous attention to the colors applied to sets, makeup and costumes, and the careful examination of color correction in the lab. No such care attended the preparations, filming or editing of
Torch Song.

John Michael Hayes had delivered a first draft screenplay that might have worked if he and the studio had had more time for rewrites. But Hayes rushed off to work for Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote four memorable scripts
(Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry
and
The Man Who Knew Too
Much). With Metro’s clock ticking, the studio assigned the rewrite to—of all people—none other than Jan Lustig, best known for the failed
Reunion in France.
Disaster was therefore in the cards from day one.

To make everything worse, Joan was given complete freedom, without guidance or supervision, to develop her own makeup (heavy and garish), her own costumes (hilariously overdecorated) and her own hair color (tangerine). The result was quite simply one of the most dreadful motion pictures in history—it could have been a textbook guide for creating the ultimate drag show, except that
Torch Song
seemed to have neither wit nor purpose. Some critics, like the anonymous reviewer of
Time,
sympathized with her: “By reducing a performer of Joan’s experience and hard-won skills to the cheesecake class, the picture cheats her of the human qualities she has developed.” If she recognized this, she never admitted it.

Joan had turned forty-seven that March, and although she had maintained a lithe and disciplined body, she required long hours of dance lessons and longer hours of exhausting exercise for the rigors of
Torch Song.
This left her with no time for singing lessons and vocal coaching, and so she agreed that India Adams would record her songs for the movie.

Her relations with other cast members duplicated the chilly tone that had prevailed during the filming of
Sudden Fear,
except that now Joan was frightened of losing control over her own performance and letting her male costar walk off with the picture. Hence she was all but downright rude to Michael Wilding. At the time, he was married to Elizabeth Taylor, twenty years his junior, who was also working at Metro and liked to visit her husband at work.

But Joan put a stop to that, insisting that Elizabeth be barred from the set—perhaps also because Taylor required no elaborate foundation garments and no heavy makeup: at twenty-one, she was at her most radiantly beautiful, even without a whisper of rouge or eyeliner. By contrast, nothing about Crawford was right, in or out of
Torch Song
that year. She looked hard, almost grotesque; her eyebrows and lips were colored without restraint and seemed to elongate her thin face; and she comported herself off-camera just like her character onscreen, seeming unhappy with the world and ready to lash out at everyone. In the movie, she had the role of Jenny Stewart, a bitter, hostile, lonely star who abuses everyone who comes close to her; Joan’s conduct on the set was not much different.

The role of Jenny, in other words, was a portrait of Joan herself, and she seemed to be aware of this when she said late in life, “One of the scary things is the effects a really heavy or demanding role will have on your personal life. During
The Women,
I’m afraid I was as much of a bitch offscreen as I was on. Elizabeth Taylor said that she actually became Martha [in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woof?]
in private life, with rather disastrous consequences. I can understand that. I always wondered how Charlton Heston acted offscreen while he was playing Moses.”