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Joan Crawford is, perhaps, one of the most (in)famous figures to have emerged from classic Hollywood. Even if you’ve never seen one of her films–and if you haven’t, you definitely should–you’re probably at least obliquely familiar with her star presence, thanks to Faye Dunaway’s grotesque, overwrought, and brilliant performance of her in the camp classic Mommie Dearest. Despite the overshadowing influence of that film, and the tell-all memoir on which it’s based, Joan Crawford was and is so much more than that, and she has proven to be perennially fascinating to biographers over the decades.
In the aptly-titled Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face, renowned Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman tackles this larger-than-life figure: the woman, the actress, the star. Though the book can be a bit superficial at times, I give Eyman a great deal of credit for his encyclopedic knowledge of Crawford’s oeuvre. As she’s shown time and again with his other biographies of Hollywood luminaries–from John Wayne to Cary Grant, John Ford to Charlie Chaplin–Eyman has a deep, rich knowledge and love of old Hollywood, its stars, and its art. He’s thus in a prime position to write about one of the brightest and most fascinating stars the Hollywood studio system ever produced.
The thing about Joan Crawford was that she was a worker; having been raised in abject poverty, she knew the value of labor and what it took to get yourself out of such conditions. For the rest of her life she would dedicate herself to making sure she didn’t become poor again. The uncertainty that marred her early years also, Eyman suggests, led to a sometimes overwhelming and smothering desire to control every aspect of her life, an emotional and mental mindset that would make her one of the workhorses of Hollywood, even as it also made her a bit of a needy nightmare to deal with.
Eyman, with his usual keen eye for psychological portraiture, also argues that the lack of love and support from Crawford’s mother–as well as her absent father–led her to constantly seek affirmation (one might even say adoration) from almost everyone in her life. This ranged from her husbands, four of them in total, to her fans. Eyman contends that it was actually her fourth husband, Alfred Steele, chairman of the Board of Pepsi, who gave her the love and security that she really wanted. After his death she didn’t marry again.
Crawford was also one of those stars who was very assiduous in cultivating and engaging with her voracious fans. She very wisely realized that her fans were the key to her success; they loved her, and she loved them in return. This was an actress who was, for better and for worse, a product of the studio system, and she knew better than most just how fickle showbusiness could be. She knew that, though one could rise up through the ranks with seeming ease, one could fall just as easily, as Crawford herself discovered when she was once labeled box office poison.
At the same time, as Eyman demonstrates again and again, Crawford had a keen understanding of her own craft, her own persona, and her screen presence. Thus, she could be quite demanding–often infuriatingly so, for some of her directors and co-stars–when it came to having things just so in order to be able to film. The thing of it is, though, that she was often right about these things, and she was highly-respected as both a workhorse and a professional
Above all, though, Crawford was a star, with that unique mix of beauty, charisma, and something intangible that lifted her into the ranks of the true Hollywood greats. Eyman often glides through her films, but he does nevertheless allow us to appreciate her output, both at her original studio of MGM–where she worked with, among others, George Cukor and where she appeared in The Women, one of her classics–and also at Warner Bros., where she would make what was arguably her great film: Mildred Pierce. Eyman’s skill lies in his ability to give us a glimpse of the magic behind the movies, of the unique way that studio politics, star power, and the machine of the dream factory combined to give us the beautiful films we still admire and argue about today.
Of course, the elephant in the room throughout the book is the allegations lodged by her daughter Christina after Crawford’s death, and I don’t think any biography of Joan Crawford couldn’t not address Mommie Dearest in one form or another. While Eynman does grapple with a bit of it in the book, for the most part he seems to come down on Joan’s side of things. His takeaway seems to be that Christina and Joan were far too much alike for comfort, but he has less success explaining why Christopher’s experience at his mother’s hands was so horrifying (among other things he recounts how Crawford would tie him to the bed because he kicked the covers off and sucked his thumb).
However, it is worth noting that Crawford, like everyone else, was a complicated woman. She was demanding and controlling and needy, and this became ever more true the older she got and the world began to become much smaller. One can’t help but admire the extent to which she worked as long as she could–even making forays into TV–though one could’ve hoped that a woman of her caliber could’ve had a better send-off to the movies than Trog.
Overall, I quite enjoyed Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face. I’ve long admired Crawford and her willingness to continue working and acting until very near the end of her life and, while I tend to think that the truth about her relationship with Christina is somewhere in the middle of the various extremes, I do think Eyman errs in dismissing her claims as he does. He’s onto something, though, when he argues that Crawford was, in many ways, the embodiment of women’s desires and fears, whether that be the terrors of motherhood in Mildred Pierce, the yearning for beauty and belonging in A Woman’s Face, or the abjection of getting old and powerless in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Crawford–like Bette Davis, with whom she had a contentious relationship, though one not nearly as acrimonious as some would have us believe–was a being from a very particular time and place, and it’s very likely we won’t see her like again. But then, given how much she sacrificed and how much she demanded, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. She was a star that burned brightly and powerfully, and for that I will always be grateful.