Possessed (47 page)

Instead of making painstaking preparations to show herself in public looking like Joan Crawford the star, she preferred to remain at home, where she welcomed the few she could trust—and she was not coiffed, made up and dressed like the star, but rather like the woman (if not the girl) next door. At last she was working with a clean slate: the flapper had faded like a watercolor exposed to the sun; romantic triangles had become warm friendships; terrified and terrifying characters onscreen were dismissed. Now there was only a calm, self-possessed lady of a certain age, content with a few confidants, a telephone and a television set.

Her life had been a battle between the fantasy of movie stardom and the intrusion of reality—mostly in the form of failed marriages, disappointing love affairs and the constant terror of losing her professional status. Her life’s work had been the maintenance of the image she herself had created—of Joan Crawford the star. This had allowed her virtually no time to discover who she was; as a result, many who knew her (and more who did not) insisted that there was no authentic person behind the artificial creation. That was not merely smug and presumptuous—it was also dead wrong.

NO OTHER STAR IN
the so-called golden age of Hollywood projected Joan’s brand of glamour: it was not seductively soft or otherworldly—it was defiant, challenging. In her photographs and in her movie roles, she demanded that we rethink what it means to be female. Dancer, actress, corporate executive—she was not to be stopped, and she was rarely out of the news. For over fifty years, her image offered much of what she herself was: an ambitious person who appealed to women who were ignored, exploited, cajoled or seduced, from the flapper era to the dawn of women’s liberation. Nurturing a lifelong desire to rise above her childhood background and to prove herself, she was often possessed by her roles as much as she grafted them onto her own character; but in an attempt to control her fame, she had often been its servant. Similarly, in her romantic life, she was a woman who desperately wanted to belong to another. But this hope she never realized, perhaps because in thatregard, too, she tried excessively to direct the relationship and to play Joan Crawford the star.

But with all her drive and all her desires fading in her last years, she realized—not too late—that she had not developed a real private life and a sense of self. “I worked too hard, and a lot of my relationships failed because of that. I was a commodity, a piece of property, and so I felt an overwhelming obligation to my career. That’s why I was an actress first, a wife second, and a mother third. I worked almost constantly, and even when I wasn’t working, there was that image thing—having to look like a star. I just went ahead like a bulldozer, and I’m afraid I was a very selfish woman.” It is, at the last, this forthright honesty that justifies admiration, not star worship. Those who saw “no one at home” behind the mask were in fact uncomfortable with her complexity.

Although she had long been possessed by image and driven by the need for fame, she finally saw reality through the prism of a quiet and sober life. She welcomed a few friends to her home without makeup, jewelry or extravagant dress; often, she opened the door in a simple, pretty housecoat, her graying hair tied with a band or casually swept back over her ears. She telephoned Sydney Guilaroff, the Hollywood stylist who had so often designed for her movies, and asked if she might send a lock of her hair for him to design a new style. “Gray?” he asked, incredulous. “Oh, Joan, you shouldn’t have done that!” He recalled that she sounded hurt by his remark, which he at once regretted; she never sent the lock of hair.

Joan’s expressive blue eyes took on new warmth and her manner a fresh patience and softness in her last years, and these changes beguiled old friends and attracted new ones. All were impressed by her good humor and her refusal to complain about the increasing debilities that taxed her energies and finally destroyed her health.

REGARDING HER RELATIONSHIPS WITH
her adopted children, Joan was astonishingly honest. “I’m aware that there were times when I didn’t payenough attention to them, and times when I was too strict,” she told journalist Roy Newquist late in her life, during a book-length series of interviews conducted over several years. “I expected them to appreciate their advantages, the things they had as children that I hadn’t had—but in Hollywood that’s hard to do. If we as adults couldn’t find any reality, how could they?” As for the final assessment of her role as mother: “I wish you’d ask my children. I loved them, and I think they loved me—but you’ll have to ask them.”

During Joan’s last years, Cathy, who was then married to Jerome LaLonde, lived in Pennsylvania with her two children, Carla and Casey. Cindy had married John Jordan and resided for a time in Iowa with her two, Joel and Jan. Both twins were eventually divorced, and both raised their children alone, devotedly and attentively. After Joan died and
Mommie Dearest
was published, the twins and their families broke off all communication with Christina—and also with Christopher, who issued shrill and bitter statements about Joan and endorsed anything Christina had to say. Cindy Crawford Jordan died at the age of sixty in 2007, a year after the death of Christopher.

Asked in 2008 to describe her life with Joan, Cathy said her mother was “just a wonderful Mom—generous, loving and nurturing, strict but kind and caring …
Mommie Dearest
was fake and fictional.” Her son, Casey LaLonde, was only five when his grandmother died, but he remembers Joan (whom the children called JoJo) preparing roast chicken luncheons for them and always giving them a little present when they departed. He remembered her as “very thin, very frail … but very pretty. She greeted us in her housecoat, and she was very relaxed. My parents went out for dinner, and she baby-sat us. It was just like anybody’s grandmother.” His sister Carla agreed: “All I can say is that she was a very loving grandmother.”

Casey and Carla had been told in advance that JoJo’s apartment was very tidy and always very clean, and they were to be very careful not to slide on her immaculate parquet floors. On one visit, when the children were still under seven years old, Cathy and Joan were chatting when they heard a slipping noise in the living room. “I’m so sorry, Mommie,” Cathy said as she rose to stop the children from sliding on the floor.

But Joan grasped her daughter’s hand. “No, it’s all right, Cathy. They’re enjoying themselves—let them slide.” And then she smiled. “I’ve mellowed.”

But there was no rapprochement with Christina. “Tina and I have nothing to say to each other,” Joan told Carl Johnes in 1976. “But I hear she’s found another man, and I hope she’s happy.”
²

On October 28, 1976, Joan signed her Last Will and Testament. She bequeathed $77,500 to each of her twin daughters, Cathy and Cindy, and $5,000 to be held in trust for each of the twins’ children, until they turned twenty-one. Bequests of $5,000 each were made to five friends; her New York secretary, Florence Walsh, received $10,000; and Betty Barker was left $35,000. In addition, shares of her estate were bequeathed to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the Wiltwyck School for Boys, the USO of New York and the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital, in California, which cared for elderly and ailing former employees of the film industry. “I’ve been on the receiving end of so many good things,” she told her secretary when she dictated these bequests. “I just have to give something in return.”

But the most quoted clause of the document turned out to be Joan’s penultimate statement: “It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son Christopher or my daughter Christina, for reasons which are well known to them.” Unfortunately, her attorneys did not advise her to leave token bequests to these two; had she done so, they might not have contested the will, claiming (against all evidence) that Joan was mentally incompetent when she drafted the document; eventually, the court awarded Christina and Christopher $27,500 each.

For all the hostilities between them, Christina’s final statement about her mother was astonishing: “I always knew that Mother loved me—that she really loved me. She may not have agreed with me, she may not have evenliked me sometimes, but she respected me and she loved me as I loved her.” With those words, Christina herself seemed once and for all to contradict her own published portrait of Joan Crawford.

IN EARLY 1976, JOAN
had purchased a hospital bed—"just because it’s more comfortable,” she said. Most evenings, she watched television shows like
The Waltons
and
Little House on the Prairie.
But that year, her weight dropped alarmingly, she was able to eat very little, and even walking to the door to greet a friend was a slow, laborious and painful process. All during that year, she rarely left her apartment, but when she could, she welcomed into it Cathy and her husband, Jerome; Mary Jane Raphael, who had been her assistant at Pepsi; Peter Rogers, who had helped to create the Blackglama Mink advertising campaign for which Joan had been photographed; Leo Jaffe, from Columbia Pictures; Stan Kamen, her agent at William Morris; and a few other friends and neighbors. Eventually, they all learned or correctly deduced that Joan was suffering from terminal cancer. When Sydney Guilaroff called back to inquire about the lock of hair, Joan’s voice sounded thin and her breathing labored. “It doesn’t matter, dear,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t matter at all. I’ll wear my hair the best way I can.”

No one can recall a whisper of complaint, even when (as they sometimes noted) her features were involuntarily contorted with pain, for which Joan took no other remedy than plain aspirin. Attempting to abide by the tenets of Christian Science, she refused to see physicians.

“Gradually, I filled my life with faith,” Joan had written a few years earlier. “It took me a very long while to stop fighting frantically and let God help, but I learned. No one goes the long road alone. God is my inexhaustible source. This I know, but sometimes I get in His way.”

The last period of Joan’s life was in fact a time of quiet interior contrition. “I wish I had been easier on people around me, especially my husbands and my kids,” she told an interviewer not long before she died. “It’s as though I was having such a god-awful time learning my part and place in life that I neverreally had the time to project myself onto other people’s positions, to find out what they were feeling. I’m afraid that through most of my life, if you took a simpatico rating on the scale of one to ten, I’d have come out zero.” But that was a severe judgment that perhaps no one could endorse.

By the end of April 1977, a month after her seventy-first birthday, she was mostly confined to bed. Carl Johnes recalled their last telephone conversation. “She sounded timorous, wavering and very weak but assured me that she was fine, even though her back troubles were still painful. Conversation was difficult. She said that she hadn’t watched any television for months, preferring to go to bed early and read her Bible.” He sent her a bouquet of spring flowers, mostly yellow rosebuds.

“There’s nothing presented to us that we cannot cope with,” Joan had written to a friend in crisis years earlier. “There is a Power much greater than any one of us, Who created us and Who continues to give us strength and courage—not only daily but hourly. Learn to depend on that. It’s the only thing one can depend on when one is in great need.”

On the morning of May 10, 1977, the housekeeper arrived and went to ask if she should prepare breakfast as usual. The bedroom was quiet, and Joan did not respond. On a small table at the bedside were her Bible and the vase of yellow roses, now in full bloom.

1
In a memoir published shortly before her death at ninety-two, Helen Hayes discussed Joan as a mother in uncomplimentary terms. But the book, written by Katherine Hatch, shows the author's awareness of
Mommie Dearest
and thus bears a sharp sense of
post hoc ergo propter hoc.

2
On February 14, 1976, Christina was married a second time, to David Koontz; they were divorced in 1982. She subsequently married Michael Brazell, and this union too was dissolved.

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotations attributed to Joan Crawford derive from these sources:

1. The Joan Crawford Papers (1932–1976), the Joan Crawford Scrapbooks (1925–1960) and Letters to Joan Crawford (1972–1976), all on deposit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

2.
Conversations with Joan Crawford,
the book-length series of interviews JC gave to Roy Newquist; see Bibliography..

3.
A Portrait of Joan,
a memoir by JC, written with Jane Kesner Ardmore; see Bibliography.

4.
My Way of Life,
a second memoir by JC, written with Audrey Davenport Inman (who is uncredited); see Bibliography.

For brevity’s sake, other sources of interviews and quotations from periodical literature are supplied only at their first citation; subsequent remarks attributed to the same source derive from the identical interview or article first noted. Sources referenced here only by the author’s last name can be found in the Bibliography.

CHAPTER ONE

2
It was January 1925
On the so-called flapper era, see Allen, 94–95; G. Stanley Hall, “Flapper Americana Novissima,”
Atlantic Monthly,
June 1922; Bruce Bliven, “Flapper Jane,”
New Republic,
September 9, 1925.

8
“She was just the little girl”
For Don Blanding’s poem, see http://www.donblanding.com, under “First Lines.”