Possessed (41 page)

For one awkward scene, Crawford and Lange (as Joan’s secretary) were standing near a door as Joan finished a speech and left the room.

“Would you mind letting me close the door after you go out of it?” asked Lange as they rehearsed.

“No, you can’t,” was Joan’s reply. “It’s
my
line. It’s
my
exit.
I
close the door.”

“But I don’t know what to do with my hands,” replied Hope Lange.

“Why not
find
something to do with your hands?” Joan said with scarcely concealed condescension.

Moments later, she elaborated her impatience for the benefit of a visiting reporter. “These young people spend so much time trying to think themselves into their roles that there’s nothing one can play to, nothing one can react against. They’re so wishy-washy.”

Diane Baker understood Joan most accurately and compassionately. “She had just lost Alfred Steele, and there were moments when she was having a very difficult time. I saw that she was very vulnerable and that she was just about holding it all together. I saw her several times, sitting by herself before a take and crying her eyes out. I brought her a box of tissue and gave her a sign that indicated, ‘You’re going to be fine!’ and that meant a lot to her.” For the rest of her few days at Fox, Joan took Diane under her wing as a protégée—and later, asked her to costar in two more Crawford pictures.

“The movie was supposed to showcase a whole bunch of up-and-coming

Fox actors,” Joan remembered. “The youngsters did all right, but I sort of walked off with the film. Perhaps it was the part, but I think it was a matter of experience, knowing how to make the most of every scene I had.” But the truth was otherwise. Joan did not “walk off” with the film: indeed, she seemed awkward and uncomfortable for most of her screen time. That was at least partly the fault of a screenplay that left her role vague and undefined and her character capricious (as when she has a sudden “conversion” and becomes a darling at the last moment).

But she had not lost her ability or her insistence on making things right for the sake of the production. In one scene, she was to take a phone call from her lover, calling to cancel a date. But when she received the pages of Edith Sommer’s dialogue the day before filming, Joan felt the sequence would play badly. At eleven o’clock that night, she rang Jerry Wald: “This scene doesn’t seem right to me,” she said.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s flat—it’s one-dimensional.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I think so.”

Joan redrafted the scene, politely asked Sommer’s reaction (which was most enthusiastic) and the Crawford version became one of the picture’s best sequences. Complimented by her costar Brian Aherne, Joan dismissed the praise: “Oh, Edie did the writing,” she said.

But her increased consumption of vodka during production did not help, as she admitted: “After Alfred died, I was really alone, and the vodka controlled me. It dulled the morning, the afternoon and the night.” When a writer from
Life
asked why she drove herself so relentlessly—returning to work in a movie just six weeks after Steele’s death—she was forthright: “I don’t kid myself. I do it to keep from being lonely.” But her anxieties, her haughty attitude with the neophytes and her insistence on special treatment caused problems—even with Jean Negulesco, who had returned to direct a second Crawford picture. This time, however, his experience was thornier than it had been during
Humoresque.
“It’s difficult to get what you want out of her, becauseshe has such definite ideas,” he said at the time. The result, by the end of her work on
The Best of Everything,
was a deeper disconnection from her colleagues, hence a greater loneliness.

For much of the next year, Joan was the international public relations ambassador for Pepsi-Cola, a job in which she logged more than 125,000 miles worldwide and never canceled a meeting or missed a travel connection. The company’s employees and executives all over Europe, the Middle East and Africa were astonished at her energy, and they reported to the New York office that her visits improved company morale as well as business.

DURING THE 1950S, JOAN
had kept in touch with Clark Gable, with whom she then had a solid platonic friendship. Congratulations and presents were exchanged when she married in May 1955, and two months later, when he took his fifth wife, actress Kay Williams. Then, in the autumn of 1960, while he was working with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift in the Nevada desert—appearing in John Huston’s film of Arthur Miller’s
The Misfits
—Clark learned that he was going to be a father for the first time. The movie wrapped on November 4, and Clark immediately returned to Los Angeles to be with his pregnant wife. Twelve days later, he dropped dead from a heart attack; he was fifty-nine years old. Joan went at once to offer help and sympathy to Kay, with whom she maintained a close friendship forever after.

A REPORTER FROM
REDBOOK
magazine interviewed Joan that year and then tracked down Christina. The result, published in June 1960, was “The Revolt of Joan Crawford’s Daughter,” which told the public about the long and painful history of relations between the two women—due mostly, the author implied, to the overbearing manipulation of the mother. With that, Joan shifted into high gear and decided to put together some kind of memoir, if not a full-scale autobiography. With the help of a writer named Jane Kesner Ardmore, she began sifting through her correspondence files and scrapbooks. In the summerof 1962, Doubleday published
A Portrait of Joan
—a book remarkable for its brevity, its profusion of factual errors (names, dates and events are incorrectly stated on many pages) and most of all for its sanitized summary of her life. It was, nevertheless, respectfully reviewed, and, thanks to the undiminished number of her fans, the book sold well.

But Joan’s financial status remained uneven and, except for her Pepsi-Cola salary, unpredictable. A year after Alfred’s death, and after complicated financial investigations, a sum of $607,128 was found in liquid assets. But taxes took $126,000, and Joan rightly claimed $100,000 that she had loaned Alfred in 1957. The balance of more than $380,000 was held in escrow by Pepsi-Cola by virtue of a corporate lawsuit that challenged the legality of Alfred’s stock options. Hence the entire estate was and remained fundamentally devoid of assets. (This did not, however, prevent Alfred’s second wife and their son from making claims of $28,000 in unpaid “allowances.”) In 1961 the estate was declared insolvent and therefore unable to meet its bills and back taxes—an action Joan’s attorneys initiated when it was clear that her income was far exceeded by expenses and the high cost of living at 2 East Seventieth Street.

But financial help for Joan was on the way. First, she was paid fifty thousand dollars for a few days of work on a desperately hysterical picture called
The Caretakers,
in which she portrayed Lucretia Terry, head nurse at a mental hospital. Resentful of new methods introduced by a young doctor (played by Robert Stack), she insists that only the use of “intelligent force” can enable nurses to protect themselves against violent psychotics. This she demonstrates as she leads a judo class, which gave Joan the opportunity to demonstrate that, at fifty-six, she could still wear leotards handsomely and not cause observers to run for shock therapy. The movie, marinated in early 1960s psychobabble, reduced Joan’s role to little more than nine minutes of screen time—hence her character has but one dimension in a picture whose message was clear: young is good, old is bad.

After completing this job in June 1962, Joan assumed a role that virtually defined the last stage of her career.

During the first half of 1961, Robert Aldrich had been successively in

Mexico, Morocco and Rome, filming a sand-and-sandal epic with the titillating title
Sodom and Gomorrah.
His secretary, on the lookout for prospective Aldrich productions, sent him a copy of a recently published novel by Henry Farrell called
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane
?
⁵
This was the gothic tale of two sisters—quintessential Hollywood monsters who grew up living together in a decaying Hollywood mansion and cherishing an undying hatred for one another. Crammed with the usual elements of the suspense-horror genre—family secrets, resentments, deception, torture and madness—the novel was violent enough for Aldrich’s taste, although he realized that some things would have to be toned down for the movies.

“I sent the novel to Joan Crawford,” recalled Aldrich, who had maintained good relations with Joan after their reconciliation on the set of
Autumn Leaves.
“For several years, she had urged me to find a suitable story to team her with Bette Davis.” Joan’s prompt and enthusiastic response to Aldrich in the autumn of 1961 enabled him to arrange financing, but on a modest scale.

“I was lonely,” Joan said toward the end of her life, “worse than lonely, bored out of my skull, and I needed the money. Alfred had left me with nothing. Less than nothing.”

“I offered each actress a percentage of the picture plus some salary,” Aldrich continued. “Joan accepted, but Bette’s agents held out for more than I could pay.” Joan accepted a salary of thirty thousand dollars plus 15 percent of the net profits, while Bette took a higher salary and a lower share of the income—and, in the end, received much less than Joan’s $1,400,000.

Although they were not well acquainted, Joan’s eagerness to work with Davis is easy to understand. “Kate Hepburn and Bette Davis top my list of those I admire,” she said years later, “because they’re so vastly talented and strong-willed and indestructible. Bette can be such a bitch, but she’s so dedicated and honest.” And whether they acknowledged the facts or not, thewomen had similar backgrounds. Both had fathers who deserted the families, and both wanted a father figure who could be a lover; “they were sisters under the skin,” as Vincent Sherman said, although he felt that “Bette was seeking a father-figure she could emasculate, while Joan was still a romantic, waiting for Prince Charming to arrive in a white convertible.” He could have added other parallels: Joan and Bette each had four husbands and lost one in death; they both supported their mothers and a sibling (Joan’s brother, Bette’s sister); both adopted children; and both had daughters who later wrote books claiming they had fearsome childhood years.

From the start, Joan wanted to play the quieter, more sympathetic role of wheelchair-bound Blanche Hudson, dependent on her increasingly deranged sister, Jane, who taunts and then tortures her—until Blanche is finally forced, at death’s door, to reveal surprising secrets of their past. Additionally, Joan recognized that the more flamboyant role of Baby Jane Hudson was perfect for Davis. Joan turned fifty-six in 1962, and Bette was fifty-four but looked much older. Both women had spent years under bright studio lights and both were smokers, but Bette’s skin had aged badly; in addition, the grotesque clown-white makeup she designed for the role finally turned her into an ancient fiend. Joan, on the other hand, abandoned her glamour makeup, donned a matron’s wig and looked like a sad and weary invalid who years earlier must have been a great beauty.

Budgeted for a tight, six-week production schedule,
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
began filming in Los Angeles on July 23, 1962. With the discipline of two expert and tireless leading ladies, it was completed on September 12. “It was made on such a low budget,” Joan recalled, “that we had to shoot it quickly and improvise interiors and even exteriors. I felt as though we were filming a newsreel, not a movie.” Less than two months later, the picture was released and became one of the biggest commercial hits of the decade. “I can hardly believe I’ve been making pictures for close to forty years,” Joan wrote to a friend. “I still love it. Not many people can say that about a job they’ve had for that long, right?”

During filming and throughout the promotion of the picture, Aldrichand his partners had no objection to the grindings of an ugly rumor mill. Stories were deliberately circulated—and readily believed—that Crawford and Davis were mortal enemies, locked in a constant battle of wills for supremacy on the set and superiority over each other. According to the gossips, whose accounts were later vastly inflated in books, the actresses came to blows several times and had to be separated like prize-fighters who were landing punches and causing each other wounds, stitches and scars. This made for newsworthy publicity, but it bore no resemblance to the truth. It was painful enough for Joan to act scenes in which Bette served meals of cooked canary and dead rat.

In fact, the entire production, as taxing as it was, began and ended well. As Aldrich recalled, “Bette and Joan voluntarily came in to the studio and devoted a Sunday to rehearsing physically difficult scenes to prevent our running over schedule.”

Also in the cast was a lumbering twenty-four-year-old actor named Victor Buono, who had worked in television for three years and was now cast in his first feature, as a repellent opportunist. As Aldrich recalled, Joan knew the picture was very important for Buono’s career. Hence, although she had concluded her scenes for the day and was ready to leave the studio, she got back into her full makeup and costume for the reverse angles of Buono’s encounter with Joan as Blanche. “Even though she wasn’t being photographed,” Aldrich recalled, “she felt he mightn’t have the experience to react and speak lines to a roll of blankets on a hospital bed.” At the end of that day, Buono’s scenes looked perfect, and later he told everyone how grateful he was to Joan Crawford for her extra efforts on his behalf.

She also took a wheelchair home and practiced with it. “I had to learn how to get myself in and out of bed, from and into the wheelchair. I learned from a young paraplegic who taught me how to hoist my body into the bed first and then lift each leg, and how to fall out of the chair—straight forward, and then roll over.” Her homework paid off in the performance—a portrait of fear, resentment and guilt, especially effective in the final moments when she lies dying at the ocean, a tragic female on the beach, whispering the truth at last to her mad sister.