Possessed (25 page)

Cukor’s fourth picture with Joan left him with a lifetime of respect for her talents: “She played a disfigured monster of a woman who would not flinch from killing a child, and she did not soften it a bit” until the story developed to the proper point. Cukor was also impressed with her technique. “In the days before zoom lenses and advanced electronics, cameras often had to be mounted on great cumbersome cranes, maneuvered by as many as twelve men, and close-ups might well require all this to be pushed from extreme long shots to within a few inches of an actor’s face. Many found it difficult to overcome some understandable nervousness as this juggernaut ground closer and closer. Not Joan Crawford.” Nor were the critics unmoved:
The Hollywood Reporter,
for one, called Joan’s work “the greatest acting of her career—she is superb.”

Cukor was right to stress the significance of Joan’s close-up shots, which became an ever more crucial element in the power of her films. The close-up was entirely an American innovation—a camera technique eliminating thedistance between actor and audience and so rendering unnecessary the theatrical reliance on gestures and mime. A stage actor (as André Malraux observed) is a little head in a huge hall; a movie actor is a huge head in a little hall. As Joan realized more fully after her Fairbanks father-in-law first mentioned it, the subtlest facial expression—a mere trembling of the lips, fluttering of eyelashes or raising of the brow—became visible and eloquent. She had no need to exaggerate her expressions: the close-up could communicate what she felt.

A Woman’s Face
might well be regarded as the third picture in a trilogy of transformations. From the tested Julie of
Strange Cargo
to the chastened Susan in
Susan and God
and on through the transformation of Anna Holm, Joan drew on the crises in her own life to present three women. This was certainly not a conscious intention on her part—nor were the films planned as a trilogy—but an actress cannot leave herself at home when she steps onto a soundstage. It was
this
Joan Crawford at
this
time of her life, with
these
experiences and this complex of psychological states that enabled her to draw on deep feelings within herself. In childhood, she knew feelings of abandonment and rejection; early in her career, she felt inferior and unacceptable. The Fairbanks clan had always regarded her as unworthy, and Franchot was a living reminder of the vacuity of her intellectual life and the poverty of her education. The McCabe affair was emotionally fulfilling, but it was doomed to impermanence. Only in refining her talent could she discover any reason to keep fighting for self-respect. That was the one thing she could depend on.

There was another element in this transformation, tentative and inconstant though it certainly was. Perhaps without deliberation but with conscious goodwill, she saw unwanted babies as small mirrors of her early self—children who needed to be “saved” from a childhood like hers.

IN EARLY APRIL, SHORTLY
after production ended, Joan had a call from a baby broker she had contacted during her 1939 search. One of a booming network of such women, Alice Hough lived in Los Angeles and had heard “through a friend” of Miss Crawford’s desire to have a family. Would she beinterested in adopting another baby, due to be delivered by a local mother in early June?

Joan did not delay. On June 3, 1941, a boy was born, named Marcus Gary Kullberg. Alice Hough worked fast, and ten days later, Joan collected the illegitimate child at Hough’s “fine, palatial residence,” as Kullberg saw for himself years later, after researching his ancestry and early childhood. “It was evident Hough was handsomely rewarded for her craft.” Joan returned to Brentwood at once with the baby.

But in October, after months of news stories had appeared about Joan’s second adoption, Kullberg’s mother (as he wrote) “started to feel guilty about giving up her child and decided to pursue my return.” A single news release giving his exact birth date, followed by some basic private detective work, led the mother to her baby’s new residence. “She wrote letters to Alice Hough and Joan Crawford, demanding my return, threatening suit and negative publicity. I was returned to the Kullberg home in November of 1941.”

So it happened that, for five months, Joan had an infant son she had named Christopher Crawford, and then he was gone. “She adored you,” wrote Betty Barker, Joan’s secretary, years later, “and she was broken-hearted when she had to return you to your natural mother. I remember that she wanted to fight the case, but her lawyers convinced her that she couldn’t win. When she lost you, all of us were afraid to mention your name to her for years, as it was a tender subject with her. She would have loved to have known what happened to you.
³

DURING THAT SUMMER WITH
Christina, Christopher and often Charles McCabe, Joan performed in one of her least known and most unfortunately neglected movies.
When Ladies Meet
was based on another successful play by Rachel Crothers. Joan read a first draft of the script and petitioned successfullyfor the role of Mary Howard, a novelist who attempts to resolve her romantic difficulties through her fiction and the plot of her novel through a resolution of her romantic life. Her costars were Greer Garson, Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall, and filming began at the end of June and was completed by mid-August. The screenplay finalized by S. K. Lauren and Anita Loos wisely preserved most of the play’s sharp dialogue.

The ladies who meet in this shrewd and trenchant tale are the wife of a publisher and the writer who hopes to replace her in his affections. Characters race about, trying to discover who loves whom and why, and the mood is alternately amusing and deadly earnest. At the conclusion, the novelist realizes what a fool she has been, and for the first time the publisher’s wife knows that she must rethink her marriage.

When Ladies Meet
is the sort of picture that perhaps could not be made many decades later: it is essentially dialogue—briskly comic repartee alternating with wise observations about marriage and the sexes. The venerable tradition of weekend visits to country houses; the concern for moral values in the tangle of romance; the notion of expediency and pride, of fidelity and its opposite—all this is handled in long verbal exchanges, without physical humor, pratfalls, car chases, slapstick or exploding bombs.

During the first half of the twentieth century (and before the ascendancy of Lillian Hellman), Rachel Crothers was the most famous and popular female playwright in America. Her works, which she also directed, appeared at the rate of one a year from 1906 to 1937, and they never failed to find appreciative audiences and adoring critics on Broadway and on tour.
When Ladies Meet
is a classic of high comedy—a genre the author mastered over many years.

High comedy exploits local color and scenery (in this case, expensive and elegant Manhattan penthouses and beautiful country cottages), and it outfits the characters in glamorous finery in order to deal with social pretenses. Represented also in the works of Wilde, Coward, Behrman and Barry, high comedy exploits the traditions of mistaken identities and the revelations of double lives—elements as old as ancient Greek theatre.
When Ladies Meet
uses the refinements of class, education and wit to mock society itself; and in the besttradition of high comedy, it reveals something truthful yet suspect in human nature, something grubby underneath the glamour. This notion is perfectly encapsulated in Joan’s acute performance, as her Mary Howard moves from emotional certainty to something like maturity.

All this succeeds as sparkling entertainment, thanks in no small part to the skill of Robert Z. Leonard, who had directed
Dancing Lady
and was working on his 135th picture. Very much an ensemble piece,
When Ladies Meet
remains a rare kind of grown-up comedy. It contains an enormous amount of common sense combined with smooth moviemaking craftsmanship, perfectly timed and subtle performances and a rare knowledge of and faith in human nature. Like
Susan and God,
the original Crothers play won coveted prizes; as a movie,
When Ladies Meet
retains a wise and mature humor that only the most cynical can reject.

NOTHING REMOTELY SIMILAR
can be said of Joan’s next picture, which she undertook voluntarily—even insistently—just after America entered World War II in December. On January 16, 1942, Clark Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, was returning to Los Angeles from a bond-selling tour, exploiting her celebrity on behalf of the war effort. She and her mother were among the passengers in a small aircraft that crashed in Nevada, killing everyone on board. Carole Lombard was thirty-three.

Joan at once contacted Gable; almost wild with grief, he raced to her home, where she provided a refuge from the press. It must be counted to her credit that Joan then approached Louis B. Mayer and asked if he would permit her to assume the role planned for Carole in a film at Columbia Studios. Mayer disliked the idea of loaning out one of his major stars, but Joan’s next script was not yet ready, and he stood to make a profit of more than $250,000 on the deal.

Produced from late February to mid-April,
They All Kissed the Bride
reveals why Columbia was, at the time, considered a grade-B studio. Prepared as a screwball comedy just right for Lombard, it was made on the cheap for Crawford, who played a hard-edged business tycoon who at last succumbs to love. The sets were minimized and cheaply dressed due to the imposition of wartime construction costs, and there was no time to revise a script loaded with a tedious series of episodic, predictable and alarmingly unfunny sequences.

Strange Cargo, Susan and God
and
A Woman’s Face
had convinced Joan that she had an important and ongoing place in movies. Unaccountably, she had a low regard for
When Ladies Meet,
but nothing could have prepared her for the disappointment of
They All Kissed the Bride.
Nevertheless, she turned over her entire salary for the picture ($112,500) to the American Red Cross, which had braved the wintry elements to recover the remains of Carole and her mother. When she learned that her manager had withheld his 10 percent fee and sent on the balance to the Red Cross, she made up the sum and promptly dismissed him.

JOAN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH
Charles McCabe came to an end that spring. She had found herself too deeply attached to settle for the permanent role of the other woman in a real-life remake of
Back Street,
and when it was clear that they could never have a life together, she had to end the affair. Perhaps contrary to her expectations, she was at once unutterably depressed. She had lost the second adopted baby, and now McCabe’s departure left her feeling lonely and useless.

In May, Joan asked the press agent Harry Mines to dine at North Bristol. He asked if he could bring along a friend—a man she had met once, very briefly, when he appeared in a silent bit in
Mannequin.
The extra guest’s name was Phillip Terry. Unmarried, temperate and fond of children, he was a tall, handsome, bespectacled actor with considerable technical training but no notable credits.

Born Frederick Kormann, in San Francisco, he had graduated from Stanford University and then studied drama in England before MGM signed him as a contract player and gave him a new name. After his first visit to Joan’s home, he was invited often and on his own. He and Joan dined quietly, read scriptsand talked about the challenges and rewards of raising children. Phillip’s presence, she recalled, was “comfortable and comforting. I wasn’t alone. Someone was content just to be with the baby and me. The men who’d attracted me before were passionate, volatile [Fairbanks, Tone, Gable]. The man in New York [McCabe] was a dynamo, but I couldn’t have him—and now here was his antithesis, an easy-going, unpretentious man who seemed to adore me, who was calm and absolutely uncomplicated.”

Because he maintained an absolute, discreet silence for the rest of his life about his time with Joan Crawford, it is impossible to assess the nature of Phillip’s attraction to Joan or the depth of his love for her. He certainly saw her as an exciting, vibrant, influential and talented actress, and her company was never boring. She was also an exceedingly sensual woman, and there was no reason for him to ignore her advances. And advance she did—quickly. Joan considered Phillip primarily as a father for Christina and the children she hoped to adopt in times to come.

On July 21, six weeks after their first evening together, they were married. Admonishing Joan that she was “walking into the sunset with some unknown actor,” Mayer huffed and puffed but could not blow down her plan for a domestic life with a man she deemed perfect for the role of doting father. For the present, she got her wish: he was the gentlest of paternal figures, tending to Christina and hoping for work.

The wedding took place during the production of what turned out to be Joan’s penultimate movie under her Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract; in fact, the picture was one of the reasons the agreement was soon dissolved.
Reunion in France
was the story of a successful French modiste (Joan), highly placed in the millinery business when Hitler marches into Paris. Learning that her lover (Philip Dorn) is collaborating with Nazi officers, she transfers her affections to a downed American pilot working with the Royal Air Force (John Wayne), and she is soon impoverished. But she then discovers that her Frenchman is actually working in the Resistance, and they are happily reunited while the American politely resumes his flying exploits. Thus ends the wartime love triangle.

“It’s too bad the Nazis do not really know France,” says the hero triumphantly at the fadeout. More to the point, it was too bad Metro did not really know France. The movie reduces the anguish of the Nazi occupation of France to a traditional romance, and on almost every level of cinematic storytelling it can only be regarded as an outline of how not to make a movie and how to miscast an intelligent and popular star.