Joan Crawford: My Feminist Hero (essay)

The Films of Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford: My Feminist Hero (essay)

Dividing the Pie on Her Own Terms

by Donna Nowak

Filmmaker and writer Mark Toscani wrote a wonderful essay about Joan Crawford called “Reflections on Joan” while fan Jonathan Denson, on a small poignant site created in teen years, explains why she is his hero. As I delve deeper and deeper into the life of the actress and her prodigious body of work, I not only marvel at her achievements and influence, but also connect deeply with the sort of grassroots feminist she embodied in life and on film (perhaps out of necessity since she had to fight and work to survive after a turbulent childhood and aborted formal education) while keeping every long eyelash, manicured nail, ankle-strapped heel, broad "a" and blessedly unpolitically-correct-fur in place. Some call her a glamorous feminist. I call her my feminist hero. There aren't piss-and-vinegar, sexy dames like that around anymore and we will perhaps never see her like again. She was a complex, enigmatic, contradictory product of her era and difficult life, but just as she devoted herself whole-heartedly to her fans (giving back where she felt she received), she doubtless inspired myriad women in the audience to want more out of life and go the mile to get it. She relied on men as her conduit in a man's world, and was often required to suffer for her ambition but she was living in an age when she was actually allowed and expected to carry and dominate a film, and she was more than up to the task. Joan Crawford was a powerhouse.

Amazingly, Crawford was sassy from the get-go, even though she was also tender and waiflike and sweet in a way that many have forgotten, if they ever knew. She was extremely vivacious and cute in her early, flapper films, a mere girl. But even in the silents, her presence was virile and charismatic. You couldn't look away from her, despite occasional bad hairstyles and grating rawness. Her energy and charm was undeniable. Unlike a number of other actresses who came to Hollywood, Crawford did not have a strong, loving family behind her, however, so in her eagerness to keep the job that kept her off the streets, she worked diligently, even while ill. Soon, when she made good, she was supporting her hardscrabble mother who many seem to fault for neglecting her daughter and favoring son Hal, but frankly mother Anna was as hapless and vulnerable as her children, horribly poor and having to scramble and work to keep body and soul together. Anna made an effort to send Joan to school, although the girl was apparently badly abused, overworked and maltreated at these establishments, particularly by a sadistic school mistress at Rockingham Academy, and victimized by snobbery on top of it. A victim herself, Anna was undereducated, promiscuous and dependent on shiftless men. The arguments Crawford heard at night between mother and men which frightened her draw comparison to sounds of violence chilling Christina in her bed way past the hour a generation later. Crawford also was supporting Hal, who she described as "chronically mean" and did not enjoy a close relationship with. He once allegedly locked her in a dark closet. Predictably the good-for-nothing family came in for the kill when Crawford reached success, but then why wouldn't they? I'd grab the life raft, too, wouldn't you?

With mother Anna and brother Hal

In a 1947 interview on The Louella Parsons Show before the release of "Daisy Kenyon" and prior to what she bills as her "next Warner Brothers picture," "Until Proven Guilty" (uh- guess she -- and we -- missed that one!), Crawford cuts to the chase about a "subject she feels deeply about." Parsons laughs and counters Joan feels deeply about everything. Crawford sounds very cute and bubbly, much like her flapper-girl personality, admitting that's true, but adding, "Louella, honestly I do want to answer the one question that so many girls write me about. [T]hey write me about the whole big subject about whether or not to become career women. Those poor little kids just starting out -- oh, golly -- I can't exaggerate how mixed up they are about it!" When asked by Parsons what mixes them up, she wryly responds, "What mixes up a woman on anything except men. I think it's a crying shame that so many girls let themselves be scared out of self-improvement and success by the same, old, sly masculine lies." Parsons wants to know which particular ones? "Oh, that threat of their's that if you become a successful career woman, you lose your femininity and therefore, they won't like you. Oh, what a lie that is." Using Louella as an example, she adds, "Nobody can be more feminine than you are and that same thing goes for any big career woman you can think of in any line like Mrs. Roosevelt or Clare Boothe Luce or Helen Hayes or Ingrid Bergman." Louella laughs and tells her to calm down. "Okay, kid me," Crawford responds sassily. "I warned you how I felt on this subject, but I do want to assure the girls that there's so much less danger in going ahead and proving themselves than there is in lingering behind while your dream boy goes ahead somewhere else to - uh - somebody else." After Parsons objects that not everyone can become a "glamour girl" like Joan, Crawford savvily responds, "Oh, yes, they can," adding that if she came from nothing and became the "assembly job" that "tags glamour," any one can do it, it being a matter of discipline and applied art. She says "to the girls just starting out" that "if you have the capacity to be a career woman, you can be a careerist and a woman, too. . . . That way your life will be always exciting."

Clearly and happily, Crawford did care about encouraging her female fans, letting them know, too, that she was listening and responding to their concerns. Evidently, given her slavish devotion to her audience, it was no pose. As one listens to her live interviews, right from the horse's mouth, it becomes apparent how much she mirrored the life-hungry, life-affirming, gutsy and ambitious women she played onscreen. She was effective in these roles, because she lived them, lived every emotion and, according to co-star James Stewart, did it spontaneously in one take ("My first impression of [her] was of glamour," he says in Charles Castle's The Raging Star. "Glamour had nothing to do with aloofness or temperament, it had to do with friendliness, tremendous vitality and hard work, ambition and constant desire to improve her work, and to get knowledgeable about things that were important to her work. . . We have both been referred to as perfectionists, but I don't know what that word means. If it means trying to keep things going by learning your craft so that you can get it done to the best of your ability and not have the acting show, then I suppose that's what it is. If it means standing up against this tremendous technical thing which you have to cope with in the movies all the time, doing things with credibility and being believable when you're surrounded by machines and cameras and technical men with lights and everything else to surmount. . . This is part of a craft that takes learning, and if you get so that it doesn't bug you, then you can understand why Joan Crawford was so good at her job.")

Crawford could do six impossible things before breakfast -- at least, you believe she'd try -- and was evidently telling her audience, women, they could do it, too. She whole-heartedly befriended her fans in a way that no star ever had (to my knowledge) or certainly would (or even could, given stalkers) today. Whether her motive was a desire for love, sense of professionalism or wanting to give back for their support, her commitment and certainly generosity was there. How many fans must have blossomed with her example, inspiration and the attention she gave to their importance? How many letters must have brightened an anonymous life? What a unique devotion and collaboration with the public. It was a mighty big thank you. (See photos [last two on page] of JC with fans here.)

In 1975 when Crawford was in her "later years," Barbara Ribakove of Photoplay reported: "[Crawford] gets blazingly angry at professionals who do not take their work seriously as she feels they should. 'When you stop being grateful, forget it. You might just as well leave the screen, because that camera picks up everything inside you. You cannot hide your attitude towards work.' Another pause. Then, all the way up from the gut: 'And when you consider those of us that cannot get a job because nobody writes for women anymore. . .and we are dying to work! Dying!'"

Adorable young Joan (with Ramon Navarro)

Young Joan and the Shopgirl Who Made Good

Beginning in the 1920's, Joan had an enormous following of women. According to Popcorn Venus by Marjorie Rosen, in a group of studies made by the Payne Fund between 1929 and 1933, she was cited repeatedly as a behavioral model by teen-age girls. "When I go to see a modern picture like Our Dancing Daughters," one high-school sixteen-year-old wrote, "I am thrilled. These modern pictures give me a feeling to imitate their ways. I believe that nothing will happen to the carefree girl like Joan Crawford." Many people are unaware of her impact on youth, clearly commensurate with a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or even more, Annette Funicello (like Annette, with a coterie of energetic, romantically canoodling “kids” as backup “pals” in Jazz Age days). She was a rabble rouser, but a rabble rouser who was sensible in “Our Dancing Daughters” and “Our Blushing Brides.” She was the role model for “young moderns.” Interestingly, the girls in her trio of “Our” films, beginning with “Dancing Daughters,” all taste the wild life: drinking champagne, tooling in fast cars with boys, and black bottoming the night away in clingy fringed dresses. "See you at dawn!" Crawford as "Dangerous Diana" calls to her liberal parents in "Our Dancing Daughters." By the 1930’s, she morphed into a working girl who toiled in factories, but wanted more. How devastating she is in "Mannequin" with the line, "Women are weak and men are strong. My mother wasted a lifetime of strength trying to prove that." In "Possessed," where she became Clark Gable's mistress and rebukes a disapproving crowd with dignity, she tells her mother, “If I were a man…you’d think it was right for me to go out and get anything I could out of life and use anything I had to get it. Why should men be so different? All they’ve got are their brains and they’re not afraid to use them. Well, neither am I!" (In that film, they also show her on a merry-go-round with yes, the brass ring - metaphor, metaphor!)

Getting off the merry-go-round of poverty

In Maria Buszek’s Pin Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, she posits that Crawford revamped her image as a homemaker and “bachelor mom” when the strong working girl she represented in the 30’s went out of fashion. It’s self-evident that Crawford, like Madonna, was a master marketer, continually reinventing herself to move with the times, but the inference that she was a mere image-maker is inaccurate. It’s not surprising that women like Madonna and Crawford who knew struggle learned to be hucksters and play top brass at their own game, but the housewife image had weight for Crawford. Even in the 20’s, she was knitting and baking and doing some of her own housework; in the 40’s she became a complete homemaker (yes, in the days of Rosie the Riveter) and clearly taught her children to be self-sufficient domestically, as Christina’s roommate attested in Fred Lawrence Guiles' Joan Crawford: The Last Word. To the end, she was known to scrub her own floors, believing in “hands and knees” elbow grease which is why her maid Mamacita (a German woman) got the job. She’d grown up doing drudge work. In 1975 Photoplay, Barbara Ribakove said, “Joan is a scrubber of kitchen counters, a picker-up of microscopic bits of lint. Everything is immaculate. To Joan, a clean home is the outward and visible form of an inner and spiritual discipline. Her daily chores around the house are things Joan has done since her childhood, things that give her satisfaction.” In later years, this was to manifest itself in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Despite Crawford's efforts and amazingly resilient spirit, repercussions from a harsh and love-deficient childhood were inevitable. There were enormous hurdles to surmount and she did it with discipline and order, maintaining schedules (which some ridicule, but frankly they strike me as reasonably sane) to keep all on track, and industrious effort.

As Jeanine Basinger reveals in The Star Machine, MGM, for one, demanded nothing less from its stable of stars. Crawford's second husband Franchot Tone describes her grueling schedule (although one suspects he wouldn't complain too loudly if such "demands" were on him, it being well-documented that he resented his wife's career eclipsing his own). Still, a star could hardly be asleep at the wheel even on few hours of sleep: "She must get her homework done, her lines learned every day. She has continuous meetings with the producer or the director or somebody else equally important each evening. She has to get up at four or four-thirty in the morning in order to get to the hairdresser and onto the set. She needs a massage at night before she can sleep for a few hours. She has to eat sparingly and exercise constantly. This goes on and on . . . and when Saturday night comes. . . other duties, other priorities arise. Conferences about the next script. . . she's a star." Other stars had it no easier, although it evidently reaped incalculable rewards, too, and Crawford thrived on it -- on industry, usefulness and challenge. She was grateful to the hand that fed her.

Youthful vulnerability and sad eyes

Crawford begins her movie career in tender teen years

Early risque cheesecake for teenage Joan

Although she did her share of cheesecake (and sports-oriented) publicity photos with other young starlets at MGM and was featured frequently in her underwear in films, Crawford was serious about being more than decorative. She hung around soundstages, absorbing sponge-like, and became extremely knowledgeable about all aspects of filmmaking. From the get-go, she endeavored to ingratiate herself with the technicians, too - remembering uncannily and diplomatically small details about their families and lives, and treating them generously financially. She anonymously set up a wing at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital so that newspapermen, extras, aging stars, gaffers and grips could get operations and treatment they otherwise couldn't afford and paid the bills for years. “She has an amazing effect upon people – an almost hypnotic power over them,” Helen Louise Walker of 1934’s Silver Screen observed, “Yet, Joan cares more than anyone I have ever known about what people think of her. She reads every word that is written about her and usually cries bitterly over it. . . . She wants approval and admiration and friendship so desperately. . . .I should hate to try to live with Joan, try to cope with her moods and her intensity. Yet, that very vitality, that electric something, that abandonment of herself to emotion, is what makes her so interesting, so personally powerful.” Elsa McKenzie, a dancer at MGM during those early years, recalls how hard Crawford worked, adding, "[A]nd once in a while, when she relaxed, you could see something in her eyes that was like -- well, like fright and loneliness mixed together."

Much is made of Crawford's “easy” or voracious sexuality, her sexual aggression, some of it perhaps natural, some possibly resulting from childhood sexual abuse (at age eleven) by stepfather Henry Cassin (“the center of my child’s world”), the latter abuse confessed to friend Lawrence Quirk in later years and which she felt completely responsible for. Like her mother, she was wildly promiscuous. But she was also prey to exploitation, particularly in those early years, as so many girls in Hollywood were. She was one of the girls MGM provided for visiting execs, the men often not kind. In her memoirs, Being and Becoming, Myrna Loy details meeting Crawford when they were both extras/chorus girls in the film, “Pretty Ladies.” "One day, Joan came into the dressing room looking very unhappy," Loy recalled. "She fell into my lap -- we were snowflakes covered with marabou that kept getting into our mouths -- and she began to cry. Joan always worried terribly. I did, too, but never showed it. Apparently, Harry Rapf, the producer who discovered her, had chased her around the desk the night before. She was having a terrible time. She had such a beautiful body that they were all after her. I didn't have quite that much trouble -- my sort of snooty attitude put them off a bit. . . . Joan and I became friends and stayed friends, which is the most that came out of my first MGM experience."

Sweet-faced - with James Murray on "Rosemarie" in 1928

Shoulder Pads and Power Suits

Crawford took necessary risks in her career and fought for challenging roles, not wanting to stagnate. When her career reached a stalemate in the late 1930's, she lobbied for an unsympathetic but meaty role in "The Women," then opted out of her contract altogether at MGM when she was being pushed out by a younger crop of stars. "It was a strange period, however you judge it," she later told author Roy Newquist in Conversations with Crawford. "They might just as well have sent all the women 'of a certain age' to Alaska and pensioned us off." She staged an amazing coupe at Warners with her Oscar for "Mildred Pierce," but this was after she actually went off salary until a worthy part came her way. She had to close up part of her house, worked in her victory garden and ostensibly became a housewife. "Mildred Pierce," my favorite Crawford film, is shown in Women's Studies classes since it's about a female entrepreneur who is "punished" (allegedly) with hardship for leaving the family, a take I don't buy (see my review of the James M. Cain novel here). It is the penultimate Joan Crawford film.

In “Mildred Pierce,” Crawford is at her most iconic -- linebacker shoulder pads, glamorous furs, expressive eyes, ankle-strap shoes, suffering and allure, outrageous rolled 40's hairstyles, stylized smoking, determination. An ordinary housewife takes the bull by the horns, jilting the philandering husband. She learns to succeed in a man's world with a combination of feminine wiles and smarts, on men's terms in some ways -- learning to fight dirty (yet remaining human). Mildred had many parallels to Crawford: she was the breadwinner ultimately betrayed, publicly and privately; desire for love remained tragically unfulfilled in spite of phenomenal success; and both had a daughter who used their money and influence liberally and then betrayed them. Crawford ate crow and although an established star, submitted to an audition to win the part and went to bat for Ann Blyth for the role of Veda, the two stars becoming friends for life.

Classic 40's look

Her face, although lovely, shows signs of strain in “Mildred,” indicative of the "Hollywood saw mill," as one reviewer put it, that continually taxed Crawford, a ravished look that befit the character. (In the late 30's and early 40's with career and marriage disintegrating, she suffered from bouts of depression and pneumonia, according to MGM files). One of my favorite moments is when Mildred returns from Mexico in her dynamic, impeccably cut suit and strappy heels. Her hair is swept fetchingly up. Smoking and crossing sleek legs, she removes a fleck of tobacco from her tongue and tells friend Ida (Eve Arden) that she learned to drink from men. The same was true of Crawford in real life, who avoided alcohol in early years because of the alcoholic scenes she'd witnessed as a child (funny how history repeats itself), yet eventually was introduced to cocktails with third husband Phil Terry and began relying increasingly on alcohol to "jack myself up to meet people," as she puts it in Conversations. ("I'm not a public person, at all. . . Vodka relaxed me, chased away the butterflies, put a certain safe distance between me and everybody else. . . .a type of fright worse than stage fright.") For me, Mildred Pierce, the role for which she won an Oscar after Hollywood assumed she was through, sums up Joan Crawford more than any other.

With Zachary Scott in "Mildred Pierce"

Ann Blyth (Veda of "Mildred Pierce") on Crawford: "I never saw her edgy or nervous. She was very kind. Very beautiful. Always exquisitely dressed. Her professionalism was stunning."

NOTE THE CIGARS!

In her "Grand Hotel" years - negotiating with the big boys

In the 1940's, Crawford shed most of her former girlishness, although it was still discernible even in later years. Mindful of critics and wanting to please her public, she was evidently criticized in neophyte days for nervous tics like hand wringing and lip biting, so she rehearsed with her hands tied. She rarely played an actual shopgirl, but onscreen and off, she was often a sexual outlaw, combatting social disfavor with dignity. Many believe feminism is about equal wages. To my mind, feminism is about sex, about the idea that a woman's body is sinful and primarily for the control and gratification of men. It's about the use of words like "whore," "tramp," "ho," "bitch," and the like used to describe women who are sexually active in the way men traditionally have been. Crawford's characters frequently "don't stand on ceremony," as Joan's cub reporter Bonnie Jordan puts in "Dance, Fools, Dance." In real life, Joan didn't either.

In spite of being fairly small and petite (yet occasionally creating a statuesque illusion), Crawford could hold her own against any man onscreen (and in some ways, off). As director Steven Spielberg put it after directing her in "Night Gallery" (his neophyte debut), "In a two shot with anyone, even Gable, your eyes fix on her." In A Portrait of Joan, her "autobiography" of sorts (written "with" Jane Kesner Ardmore), she talks about an unnamed deep love of hers from New York, who "taught me to hunt and fish, we used to go on these expeditions with a whole group of men. The first time, I'm sure, their reaction was, oh, no, not a dame tagging along! I carried my own gun and my own camera, waded through streams in the vanguard; and at noon when we'd camp, I'd help fix lunch and surprise them with all sorts of snacks packed away in my knapsack just in case they didn't catch any fish. This friend introduced me to politics, to banking, big business and public affairs." Just as she learned to drink from men, she learned to play them at their own game in business and sex. She was nonetheless reduced to tears easily and often went to directors in tears about difficulties she was having with a part. She would have inconsolable crying spells, according to first husband Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but emerge refreshed.

Ladies man/attorney Greg Bautzer, with whom Crawford had a celebrated tempestuous relationship for a number of years, in a taped interview said, "I had been in several fights with men during my lifetime. I've won some and I've lost some but no man ever put a scar on my face. I've got about four scars on my face that she put on. She should've been on a New York Yankees pitching staff. She could take a cocktail glass across a room and hit you right in the face two out of three times." (Go, Joan!) “When she was in love,” adds friend Radie Harris, “she was over-in-love and very predatory, very possessive about her men.” Of course, Bautzer, although he admits he was "stuck on her," doesn’t mention the black eye he gave her or that he climbed a rose trellis after she locked him out of the house to be with her (leading to what she termed "the most exciting sexual experience" of her life), their fights and reconciliations dramatic, disturbing (especially since men and women are not of equal size or body weight) and legion. These occasionally volatile relationships with men were a sad sign of cracks in the foundation of order and, as always with Crawford, not the whole story. Fairbanks said the only arguments they had were very civil and she admitted to being a different person with each husband. She enjoyed a number of enduring platonic male friendships including Cesar Romero, Van Johnson and William Haines. In Jane Ellen Wayne’s Crawford’s Men, an anonymously identified former real estate broker who had a one night stand with Crawford is interviewed. “She was lovely, and the night we met, I admired her gown, jewelry, and furs because she knew how to wear them.” Crawford asked him to drive her home and in the car asked all about him. “By the time we got to her house we were laughing, and she asked me to have a brandy with her,” he continued. “She teased and flirted but was very sophisticated. . . . . I don’t know many men who would turn down an opportunity with a woman, but even fewer who were almost hypnotized.” He described her as being in complete command. “I had never been with any woman like Crawford. I forgot about the dinner party, who I was, who she was, and where I was. . . From what I understand she always found out about the men she chose.” In "The Ultimate Star" documentary, a biography of her life, friend Herbert Kenwith mentions going to lunch with her and finding all three of her ex-husbands (Steele, of course, died, leaving her a widow) at her table! "She could go to a sales meeting and all the boys would clamor around her and she would shake their hands," he added, referring to her days promoting Pepsi Cola for fourth husband Al Steele, Pepsi honcho.

With Spencer Tracy

During Lux Soap radio show

Viewing the rushes with David Miller...

..on set of "Sudden Fear"

First woman to be elected to the board of Pepsi Cola

Even while amusing herself with one night stands, however, Crawford remained at heart a romantic. Director Vincent Sherman felt she was looking for the knight in shining armor. She often slept with her directors, allegedly feeling more secure if they loved her and presumably were invested in her, therefore. She was also very loyal, ensuring that crew members from early days and friends found employment. “You know, Louella, I believe a career woman has earned the right to be an idealist in love,” she tells Louella Parsons in 1947. For excerpts of her early love letters in book review, click here. A poem written between marriages in the early 40’s begins, “Where are you? My heart cries out in agony, In my extended hands, I give my heart with, All its cries – its songs –its love.” With typical distortion, she is now often portrayed as a calculator, marrying for advancement. It strikes me as odd that women, in general, would be vilified as “gold diggers” when given such scant economic clout, but clearly the situation is inaccurate with Crawford. From all accounts, she seemed genuinely interested in finding a partner who would be an equal, weighing marriage carefully after the first one failed. Furthermore, she was already an established star with all of her marriages and frequently her husbands had more or at least as much to gain in the alliance as she did; in the case of her three actor-husbands, she easily eclipsed them in terms of power. Brentwood was Crawford’s house and her husbands who lived there were living in her home, not the other way around. She was very involved with corporate sponsorship after marrying Pepsi exec Steele, campaigning internationally for the product and becoming a forerunner in product placement. The “Joan Crawford” name helped Pepsi tremendously and gave Crawford a renewed sense of worth and activity when she no longer found it in Hollywood. She was the breadwinner for husbands, studio, and children. In later years she took care of second husband Tone when he was ailing.

Shopgirls and sexual harrassment

Joan and a sea of men (what else?)

The Damned Don't Cry and the 1950's Films - Vinegar and Spice and Not Everything Nice

"The Damned Don't Cry" is perhaps my favorite Joan Crawford film of the 1950's. It's a superb film noir and crime drama, vastly underrated. Because it has so many Crawford screen personas rolled into one and because she is such a brassy dame in it, some view it as camp. But it's actually hard-hitting, fast-paced and brilliantly cast, acted and shot. The black and white cinematography alone is stunning. It's got everything and it's got Joan. For once, Crawford has supporting actors, even if they're known essentially as B-actors, who are as strong as she is, each a perfect fit for his character. Crawford as Ethel Whitehead/Lorna Hansen Forbes -- sleeping her way to the top of a crime syndicate for sheer survival -- is an aggressive, ballsy, sassy woman. She doesn't let herself get pushed to the sidelines and strides through a room as if she owns it, sleek as a racehorse. She plays hard ball with the boys -- gangsters, no less -- and tangles with men several times her size, unafraid to speak her mind, unafraid to trick the tricksters, irritated to be left out of their secret "men's club," and savvy, whatever her limitations are. She's tough, but vulnerable and sensitive. "You might invite me into the library," she tells gangster George Castleman (David Brian), to which he responds, "There's one thing I never do in the presence of women -- discuss business." "That should leave you room for plenty of other interests," Ethel retorts icily. Ethel Whitehead wants her piece of the pie and she's gonna get it. She's not content with mere survival; her ambition is to constantly improve herself. She is pure Joan Crawford.

The interesting thing about Crawford, as embodied in roles like Ethel Whitehead/Lorna Hansen Forbes (Ethel's manufactured persona), is that she had a masculine energy and assertiveness without being at all masculine. People joke about her eyebrows, which were not yet overstated in The Damned Don't Cry, but she was actually an extremely feminine woman, as most who knew her mentioned. Men held open doors for her and lit her cigarettes on film and in life. Rare were the times she was not sleekly dressed with fetching high heels ("f-me shoes," as they were called) and furs, never eschewing ruffles and elaborate hats, opera gloves and ankle bracelets. There is that fascinating duality about her face. In her early years, she was like a soft doe with baleful yet sultry eyes, and although the shape of her face was perfect and could be photographed well from any angle, her jaw line became more hollowed or sunken as she aged (like her birth father Thomas LeSueur), giving an arguably harsher look. The harsh look wasn’t the whole story, either; it softened from moment to moment and film to film, depending on the role, but it reflected, for me, the grit and determination Crawford felt as she was bucking a system that was fighting her. What would have happened if women like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis hadn't challenged that system? Both fought to hang onto the careers they had hard-earned when studios would have buried them at age 35. They were ambitious in an age when ambition in women was reviled (as if it still isn't.) In order to swim upstream, Joan Crawford played with the boys, as she had in childhood. In a taped interview, director Vincent Sherman said Joan felt men were the enemy, although clearly she loved and desired them, too. Funny, that made me like her even more. Given the status of women worldwide, how could any woman believe otherwise?

Sexual Aggressor in "The Damned Don't Cry"

Female on the Beach: Swimming Against the Tide

In the 1950’s, Crawford had a steelier edge because she played characters who were velvet bitches or who were supposed to be perceived as such (I found them smart and on the money, devious by necessity in hostile surroundings.) Roles offered at this time leaned heavily towards older woman being “punished” (in “Queen Bee,” she is actually murdered by alcoholic hubby in a fiery car crash for the crime of adultery and general uppity-ness, something which still leaves me chilled and inflamed – no pun intended). In “Autumn Leaves,” it’s pronounced to a twisted extreme, although she gives a superb, nuanced performance as typist Millicent Weatherby in a May/December romance. Degrading ads for the film, advancing masochism and abuse towards women, include one reading: “I never know what’s coming next. . . a kiss or a slap. Yet I can’t let them take him. . . the one man who needed me. . . the way I need him . . .” (That kind of need you can bypass, sister. Ask the battered wives in the morgue.) Millie is subjected to horrific abuse, including black eyes and having a typewriter thrown at her hand. But Crawford prevails, as she always does – uneasily in that film, its "happy" ending leaving me queasy and distrustful, not happy. In “Female on the Beach,” a guilty (or not-so-guilty) pleasure, she gets romantically entangled with a younger beach bum (Jeff Chandler) but -- another glitch --she's not sure if he plans murder for the honeymoon. Still, Crawford is victorious in that one after being chased up and down the beach in strappy heels and cocktail dresses; she's an unparalleled hoot. The mature Crawford's ballsiness has a new connotation, an unmasked cynicism that is refreshingly on the money. Even her disgust with youth -- the look she flashes her genuinely annoying "niece" in "Queen Bee" -- is priceless. She could say a lot with a look or an intonation. And I'm sure her post-forty female fans understood.

“Harriet Craig,” directed by Vincent Sherman, is satirically alleged to be a role tailor-made for Crawford, meant to vilify a beautiful, yet “controlling” woman who worships her orderly home at the expense of her marriage. To my mind, Harriet is wholly sympathetic, clearly far more capable of running things than hubby Walter (Wendell Corey), her power covert and manipulative by necessity. How laughable it is that she should be condemned for objecting to Walter’s all-night poker games, his natural slovenly tendencies or a job that would send him and one of his buddies to Japan for three months without her. Crawford is sexy, regal and magnificent in the role, giving it a full range of shading and authority. Interestingly, Dorothy Azner who directed Crawford in “The Bride Wore Red” adapted George Kelly’s misogynistic original play for the film version “Craig’s Wife” with Rosalind Russell. (See my review of the play here. Note you must scroll down to find it.) As Julia Lesage noted in The Hegemonic Female Fantasy, Azner infuriated author Kelly by suggesting Walter was dominated by his mother (as he appears to be) and fell in love with a woman stronger than he. Azner recalled, “Kelly rose to his six-foot height and said, ‘That is not my play. Walter Craig was a sweet guy and Mrs. Craig was an SOB.’ He left. That was the only contact I had with Kelly." Therefore, the condemnation of Crawford in this "signature" role has many layers, her own "icy" capability or authority faulted in a way that a man of authority never would be. The irony also is that women are thrown brickbats for succeeding in the very narrow domain they are forced to occupy.

Some biographers posit that during the mid-50’s, Billie Cassin began to assert herself beneath the façade of Joan Crawford. In Conversations, when speaking of the way she and Clark Gable gave each other courage, Crawford explained, "We had become people and images foreign to ourselves, and we were trying to really live the new parts.” And in a 1955 interview: “When I’m tired, Billie’s child voice, Southern accent and all, rises again in my throat.” Certainly in the 50’s films, once again facing a cross-roads in her career, she often shows signs of strain and exhaustion. Anna Raeburn noted in Legends, “[F]or the first time, there were reports of her being unpleasant to her colleagues on the set. It is easy to see how, as she knew she had peaked in terms of how she looked and what she could accomplish, so she began to increase her demands that she should be noticed, have attention paid to her, be acceded to . . .” Some claim she was "threatened" by younger actresses (another old sawhorse used to diminish women); however, she was more of a pro than that, championing up-and-coming co-stars like Geraldine Brooks, Ann Blyth, and Diane Baker but frustrated (and showing it) by those who weren't measuring up like Lucy Marlow.

Battered wife in "Autumn Leaves" (leave - no pun intended - him!)

In a 1952 interview with the uber-annoying Mary Margaret Mc Bride (she frequently prattles on about herself, is unwittingly insulting and addresses Crawford as “Joan Crawford"), Crawford’s grit leaks out beneath grandstanding befitting the Miss America pageant (“I just love people!”) Our gal, ever the marketer, even makes a plug for Lux soap, which she probably genuinely used, and reveals how she is misinterpreted by press. This is, of course, after McBride embarrasses her by saying she doesn’t like Crawford’s interviews on paper and wonders why they come out so poorly. “I know several women interviewers particularly have an idea of Joan Crawford,” Crawford explains, her voice lapsing into heavy Southern twang. “They say it’s a clothes horse idea, a show off idea and they never give me any idea for thinking or constructive thinking. As a matter of fact, they never even talk to me about anything but clothes.” (McBride would talk to her primarily about children.) Her Southern drawl surfacing repeatedly, Crawford later breaks from the long discourse on motherhood (are famous men ever questioned so obsessively on fatherhood?) to plug “Sudden Fear,” her upcoming film. She doesn’t read a lot when working on a picture, she explains, because “I’m conc