Possessed (37 page)

Like very many politicians, salesmen, teachers and preachers, Joan had to be “on"—she had to be aware of her image and of what was expected of her. Charles Walters recalled that Joan insisted on being seen by the fans who crowded around her dressing bungalow each day, and when she departed from Metro and headed for home every Friday evening, she ordered that the interior lights of the studio limousine be switched on, so that she could be seen inside the car, waving warmly at her admirers. This, after all, was the way of royals when they traveled in closed carriages outside their palaces.

Joan was pursuing a new way of life that almost became disastrous: she was now living full-time, Monday through Friday, in her elaborate studio dressing room, which was contained within one of the soundstages. “This is a pattern I’ve followed ever since
[Torch Song
] when making a picture,” she said later. The reason she gave for this new way of living was that she had been, upto this point, “bringing my worries home, and it was better to leave the twins to their busy days at school.”
²

By living at the studio, “when we stopped shooting, I could see the rushes, go back to my dressing room, talk over the next day’s scenes with [the director] and the cast. We ate peanut butter sandwiches, had a drink and talked. After the others leave, I’m locked in that dressing room at night with my script, getting ready for the next day. Sometimes I go over to the empty set and walk it, rehearsing.”

But this extreme degree of dedication had obvious perils, for a kind of possession mania was overtaking Joan Crawford.

In
Sudden Fear,
she portrayed a woman terrorized by a husband with murder on his mind. In
Torch Song,
she portrayed a bitter, lonely and hostile star who used and mistreated others. Joan may have assumed this role precisely because it was an accurate portrait of herself—of the woman she could acknowledge and deal with only through role-playing, the woman she could present to the world and then discard, as if by a kind of magic. But by choosing the roles and then living them out in an increasingly distant existence, sealed off from emotional connections to others, Joan was allowing herself no other frame of reference for real life. The characters partly became her.

That summer of 1953, after
Torch Song
was completed, she sent Christina back to the Chadwick School after a two-week holiday at home. “It was a miserable time,” according to Joan. “Christina teased her young brother unmercifully, and they both began picking on the twins. I felt the best solution was to send Christina back to school early.” With no classes in session and the dormitories closed for the summer holiday, Christina lived with Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick and was paid a monthly salary for helping with chores. The money was in fact provided by Joan herself, who considered it “excellent training for her to earn money by doing housework.”

Soon Christopher was living there year-round, too. “My brother and Iboth lived at the Chadwick School and didn’t go home very often,” according to Christina. “We didn’t get into the trouble that usually followed one of those weekends at home, so it wasn’t such a bad trade-off.” Cathy and Cindy came to the same school in 1955, and they had happy memories of their time there, of Joan’s regular visits to them all and of holidays in Brentwood.

Living the roles she was playing and socializing only with the cast and crew, Joan in effect
became
the characters in her films. Her dedication to her work, in other words, possessed her to the exclusion of recognizable reality. This helps to explain why she refused to go out in public unless, as she said, she looked like Joan Crawford the movie star: no other character existed.

This complicated and essentially tragic confusion of realms was aggravated by her growing dependence on alcohol, which made her more and more reclusive and prevented any kind of healthy self-awareness. Alone in the dark, she counted on her private stores of vodka to offer an escape from loneliness. But the more she drank, the more ill she felt the following morning and the more time was required to put her right. And the more ill she felt, the more dyspeptically she behaved with directors, cast and crew. This sad cycle deepened and darkened, and for a time there seemed no escape.

JUST BEFORE STARTING HER
next picture, Joan made her television debut in a half-hour filmed drama called “Because I Love Him,” a story that slipped on its own soap-opera suds. Over the next twenty years, she was seen in no fewer than seventeen productions.
³

Her subsequent feature,
Johnny Guitar,
pleased no one except European New Wave filmmakers. “I should have had my head examined for doing it,” Joan grumbled, adding that there was “no excuse for a picture being thisbad or for me, for making it.” But just as she had overrated
Torch Song,
Joan underrated
Johnny Guitar,
which has many merits, despite a trouble-plagued production, a cast of generally ornery actors and a script that taxed everyone in the production company. Filming began in October 1953 and was completed at the end of December.

As location filming proceeded in Arizona, Joan decided to bring ten-year-old Christopher along for several weeks. Aware that life was often awkward and uncongenial for him in an all-female household, she offered the boy a holiday riding ponies and horses with authentic cowboys at ranches near the movie sites. According to Christina, her brother enjoyed himself enormously and was befriended by sixteen-year-old Tony Ray, the director’s son. This was a rare happy interlude during Christopher’s years with Joan, for the boy managed to be in trouble from an early age. He had the habit of running away from home, and several times he was found living on the Santa Monica pier or camping out with older friends. Unfortunately, the more he misbehaved, and the more she tried to pressure him into good deportment, the more rebellious he became.

Nicholas Ray set out to direct an unorthodox Western, and he certainly succeeded. Many scenes were photographed in the Arizona desert, and the picture bluntly presented gender reversals, as gritty women (Joan and the formidable actress Mercedes McCambridge) tough it out with gentler male characters (Sterling Hayden, Ben Cooper and Scott Brady). Ray was a fascinatingly perverse filmmaker, and with
Johnny Guitar
he continued a career-long preference for long dialogue scenes, infrequent action sequences and monologues like operatic arias—not the stuff of American Western movies, even though Republic Pictures, the home of that genre, financed the movie.

The screenplay, by Philip Yordan and Ben Maddow (based on a novel written for Crawford by Roy Chanslor), was a pretext for a tale of frustrated sexual relationships, all of which—because of censorship—had to be implied rather than explored. Joan played the role of Vienna, who owns a gambling casino on the outskirts of a nameless town and supports the arrival of a new railroad line. But she runs into trouble with local ranchers, who are unaccountably subservient to a hard-hitting, hot-headed gunslinger named Emma (McCambridge)—a woman with a keen hostility to men.

Vienna, who has no such hang-ups and has distributed her favors liberally, is pleased but nervous when her former lover returns—a transformed outlaw named Johnny Logan, who has hung up his holster, taken up music and now calls himself Johnny Guitar (Hayden). Like all the men in the movie, he is, let it be noted, very much an ancillary character in a story that might have been about a pair of female boxers; but in that case, of course,
Johnny Guitar
would not have its perverse charms. All sorts of romantic and business complications ensue before Vienna kills the villainous Emma and gets to kiss her gentle Johnny Guitar at the fadeout.

Some of the movie’s defenders have reached perhaps too high in their efforts to praise the picture: it has been analyzed almost beyond recognition as an expressionist allegory, a commentary on the political witch hunts of its day or an elegy for rural America. But like all academic exercises, these strained explanations are unnecessary and may even deflect attention from the movie’s real merits.
Johnny Guitar
may perhaps best be appreciated as an adult Western, noteworthy for presenting characters who declaim and reflect more than they converse—hence the arbitrary dramatic structure and the arrangement of monologues as virtually operatic arias, dialogues as duets and, at the right moments, trios, quartets and quintets.

Joan’s low estimation of the picture may have been based on two unfortunate facts. First, very little was asked of her in the role of Vienna: any actress who could brandish a pistol and scowl darkly could have played the role, and this time her contract did not allow her to demand script revisions.

The second troubling aspect was even more critical. “On
Johnny Guitar,
“ Joan recalled, “we had in the cast an actress who hadn’t worked in ten years, an excellent actress but a rabble-rouser. She was perfectly cast as such in the picture, but she played her part offstage as well. Her delight was to create friction. The picture became a nightmare. She would finish a scene, walk to the phone on the set and call one of the columnists to report my ‘incivilities.’ “ Joan never mentioned the name of the actress, but there was only one other woman in the cast—Mercedes McCambridge.

Joan was inaccurate in describing McCambridge as one “who hadn’t worked in ten years,” for McCambridge, in the previous four years, had appeared inno fewer than five features and five television dramas. But she was in life what she was in the picture—a rowdy, deeply disturbed and highly strung woman who had become an untamable alcoholic. Joan was jealous of McCambridge’s more flamboyant role and annoyed that Ray favored this difficult actress with the picture’s few close-ups—especially during a bizarre scene in which Emma sets fire to Vienna’s saloon and, with an expression of psychotic glee, watches it collapse in flames.

“Unfortunately,” recalled cast member Ben Cooper, “McCambridge’s alcoholism affected her behavior and created problems for all of us.” Joan reacted poorly to these antics, which she considered shockingly unprofessional. Late one evening, she tore McCambridge’s costumes to shreds and had them strewn over the Arizona highway—which was also not very professional conduct. “As a human being, Miss Crawford is a very great actress,” said Nicholas Ray with undisguised sarcasm.

Everyone on the production was fairly miserable, and the finished film displeased critics and baffled audiences. But a half century after the picture’s release, the National Film Preservation Board voted to add
Johnny Guitar
to the United States Film Registry, judging it “culturally, historically, or esthetically important.” Whether it deserves that sort of encomium may be endlessly debated, but there is no doubt that
Johnny Guitar
extended the wild frontiers of the Western genre to include unusually well-bred cowboys with obvious psychosexual peculiarities.

As for Joan’s career, at this point she must be credited with doing what she promised—something completely different, whenever she could. Recently, she had portrayed a gun moll, a member of Congress, a wealthy playwright and an embittered theatrical performer. To these she had now added the role of gun-totin’ Western saloonkeeper. The only thing lacking, it may have seemed, was for Joan Crawford to play a monster from outer space.

THAT AUTUMN OF 1954, Joan continued to live in even greater isolation during the filming of Joseph Pevney’s melodrama
Female on the Beach,
produced at

Universal Studios. “The only thing wrong with it was lack of credibility,” she said—but that absence destroyed the story of a wealthy widow (Joan) stricken with love for a handsome young gigolo (Jeff Chandler) who may or may not have killed the previous occupant of Joan’s beach house. Decades later, audiences often howl with laughter when the murderer is finally revealed to be the real estate agent who wanted the gigolo all to herself and who literally made a killing at her job.

But there was a great deal more wrong with the movie than a mere lack of credibility. The dialogue, for example, was a succession of terrible lines, as Joan had to say meaningless things like “The past is buried under a lot of dead years.” The real problem, however, was her performance, a self-contained parody of previous Joan Crawford roles. Curiously, and with her own approval, she was photographed hard after being made up hard; she spoke hard; and she plodded her way through the turgid melodramatics as if she, too, found them incredible.

There seems to have been a complex of reasons for this nearly somnolent and surprisingly confused performance. For one thing, Joan had recently extricated herself from a brief liaison with Milton Rackmil, president of Universal. For another, she briefly resumed an earlier affair with costar Jeff Chandler, the studio’s most popular star, who was married and the father of two young children. Neither of these entanglements could be called fulfilling romances.

Still another cause of confusion was the present state of her career—without a home studio or a clear way to her professional future. It is not true (as some have claimed) that she was offered only negative or downright repellent characters: on the contrary, there were discussions about her playing more sympathetic roles, which eventually went to Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Booth, Susan Hayward and Deborah Kerr. But at least twice, Joan sabotaged her own best interests when she insisted on her choice of cameraman and wardrobe designer. In fact, she chose off-putting, difficult or negative characters like Lynn Markham in
Female on the Beach
because—intentionally or not—she wanted to present an aspect of herself that audiences would reject.

There was more to Joan Crawford, she seemed to say, and not all of her was admirable or worthy of imitation.

Only this kind of dark motivation, her desire to continue a series of virtually penitential performances, can explain her almost frantic eagerness to purchase the rights to
The Queen Bee,
a novel by Edna Lee, with whom she corresponded directly. The character of Eva Phillips was, as the novelist wrote to Joan on September 12, 1954, a woman of “calculating, greedy destructive-ness” whose ruthless manipulation destroys everyone who comes into her orbit. Eva Phillips made
Torch Song
‘s Jenny Stewart seem like Florence Nightingale.