Possessed (6 page)

3. It must be euphonious, pleasing and yet have strength.

4. It must be a name easy to remember and quick to impress.

5. It must not infringe upon nor imitate the name of any other artiste.

Then followed a “biography” of Lucille Le Sueur that made her sound like a Vanderbilt:

1. She is eighteen years old, was born in Texas and is of remote French and English ancestry.

2. She is five feet, five inches tall [sic], weighs one hundred and twenty-five pounds, has dark brown hair and large blue eyes and a fair complexion.
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3. She was educated in private schools, including St. Agnes Academy at Kansas City, Mo., and followed this education with a diploma from St. Stephen’s College at Columbia, Mo.

4. Tiring of the social life of a debutante, she left home to become an actress.

During that spring and summer, while contestants were scratching their heads and sharpening their pencils, Lucille continued to sit, stand, kneel, leap and otherwise pose for stock photos. “Lots of newcomers to films undoubtedly think that posing for [calendar, art and fashion] photos is a waste of time,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be. I have made a careful study of every single still picture that was ever shot of me. I wanted these stills to teach me what not to do on the screen. I scrutinized the grin on my face, my hair-do, my posture, my makeup, the size of my feet.”

In June, Metro at last put her in a picture in which she had a part and was a character, not merely a double. The production was
Pretty Ladies,
starring the famous, bankable and talented ZaSu Pitts, the star of the epic
Greed
and an actress equally adept at tragedy and comedy. Playing “Bobbie,” a Follies showgirl in a story about the New York theatre world, Lucille brought real sparkle to her few scenes, despite their silliness. In one sequence, for example, she sat on a block of fake studio “ice” with another showgirl, played by Myrna Loy. Lucille’s eyes said everything and made her intertitle lines almost unnecessary—as, for example, when she compared her boyfriends to vegetables: “When they’re not rotten, they’re fresh!”
Pretty Ladies
was the only movie in which Lucille Le Sueur received screen credit under her real name.

Everyone seemed to have the impression that Lucille was a lighthearted, blithe and unruffled personality, recalled Myrna. “Joan always worried terribly. She was the opposite of carefree—she was care-filled, I suppose you would say.” She was particularly upset during the filming of
Pretty Ladies
because, as Loy clearly remembered, “she was having trouble fighting off the executives at MGM. Some of them were very powerful, and they were grabbing her and touching her, and she didn’t know what to do.” This was a common studio activity in the days when
sexual harassment
was an unknown term and men thought they had a right to anything they demanded. Lucille hated this sort of behavior, Myrna continued, “but she was afraid because of the power they held over her career. She and I became friends and stayed friends, which is the most that came out of my first MGM experience.”

Lucille’s contract was up for renewal during production of
Pretty Ladies,
and Metro raised her pay to one hundred dollars a week, which provided security until the end of the year. She saw this renewal, and the publicity generated by the contest, as signs of the studio’s genuine interest in her, and she was not off the mark. Executives offered, and she quickly accepted, lessons in ballroom dancing and waltzing, tutorials in the details of period costumes and manners—and elocution, for there were rumors that sound movies were on the way.

IN FACT, THERE WERE
so many change-of-name contests afoot in 1925 that, as Adele Whitely Fletcher recalled, the other judges in this case were otherwise engaged and simply did not show up for the final tally and decision. “When they did not appear, I, as editor, chose Joan Crawford as the winning name. Lucille Le Sueur hated that name, until it turned into pay-dirt with the relentless effort and incredible self-discipline she put behind it.” Joan admitted as much throughout her lifetime: “I hated that name in the beginning. It sounded like ‘crawfish.’ But it brought me good luck.”

The new name, which made front-page news in American daily papers, was announced to a waiting nation in September 1925, and on the twenty-fifth of that month, Metro drafted a check for five hundred dollars to Mrs. Louise Artisdale, of 149 Dartmouth Street, Rochester, New York. She was not the only one to propose the name Joan Crawford, but her entry bore the earliest postmark.
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For many people, then and later, the simple fact of this contest made it seem as if America was in the midst of a very innocent, fun-loving time—but of course it was not. During the week that Metro arranged for Lucille Le Sueur to change her name legally, the Sears, Roebuck mail order department was doing a very brisk business, selling the popular Thompson submachine gun for $175 to any American with ready money. Tens of thousands of these weapons were shipped through the U.S. mail that autumn. The advertisement stated that people would feel safer owning this kind of protection; Sears did not add that the easy availability of these weapons was a boon to murderers, bank robbers, deranged lovers and ordinary lunatics.

And so Lucille had a new name—but her old interests remained. On October 11, while she was completing her next assignment—billed for the first time as Joan Crawford—she was featured in a story printed by the
Chicago Tribune:
“The Montmartre on Wednesday evening played host to several genial picture folk. A Charleston contest, featuring Lucille Le Sueur, known now as Joan Crawford, brought them all up on their feet, as Lucille did some new [steps] wonderfully.”

The daytime work was in a picture called
Old Clothes,
in which Joan, costarring with the child actor Jackie Coogan, played a poor young woman who achieves good fortune. Columnist Louella O. Parsons, writing in syndication on November 10 (the day after the picture was released), called attentionto Joan as “very attractive, [and] she shows promise.” Joan followed this with a brief role as a member of the Ruritanian court, in
The Only Thing.
Years later, she referred to its “compounded stupidity,” and just weeks after its November 22 release, it vanished into oblivion.

But an episode during that time was never forgotten. One evening at a club dance, she was introduced to a young man with whom she dominated the floor for several hours. “Startlingly handsome” was her description of her dance partner, “tall, dark, gallant and graceful. My happiness and unhappiness hinged totally on him.” He was Michael Cudahy, related to the heirs of the meatpacking business that bore the family name—and he was seventeen years old.

Michael may have been a smooth dancer, but it seemed to have been his only talent. Joan quickly recognized that although he was gentle, he was also weak, undisciplined, utterly without ambition—and a confirmed alcoholic at the age of seventeen. For him, work meant nothing, for he aspired to the life of a playboy. Thanks to a monthly allowance of fifteen hundred dollars and free use of the huge family estate, he had no need of employment in order to live luxuriously. But for Joan, work was the most important thing in life.

For almost two years beginning that autumn, they dated, went out dancing, quarreled and reconciled, went out dancing some more, then quarreled and reconciled again, in an endless cycle of highly neurotic interdependence. “He was the reckless scion of the F. Scott Fitzgerald era,” Joan wrote later, “just as I was the flapper of the John Held, Jr., cartoons.” The living was wild and dangerous, and theirs was, according to Joan, “a tumultuous romance that could have ruined my life.”

What was the reason for her attraction to this deeply disturbed man, and why was she so slow to end their relationship?

For one thing, as she admitted, she had grown weary of her grimy room at the Washington Hotel, and she was only too glad to have opportunities to stay elsewhere. Cudahy could afford to keep hotel suites here and there for impromptu romantic assignations—and he had a home large enough for privacy with an overnight guest.

First impressions are sometimes slow to yield to correction, and Joan saw in Cudahy a striking socialite, well mannered (even, it seems, when intoxicated), a member of a crowd of privileged young things with an apparently endless source of money for frivolities. She had known Good Time Charlies (as they were called) in Kansas City—boys good for a dance, a laugh and a drink—but they were unsophisticated working lads. Stage Door Johnnies in Detroit and New York were always at the ready—but she quickly tired of their absorption with themselves. But Michael Cudahy came from a different, fascinating world of privilege and luxury; in addition, there was evidently a potent sexual chemistry between them.

But Michael was a lost soul. That she did not immediately regard him as downright pathetic shows that she may well have taken him more seriously than he wanted to be taken, and that she saw good qualities and talents, however hidden. He also may have awakened something protective and nurturing in her—and it did not hurt that he was extravagantly rich. But the romance, such as it was, had a dead end, and it took the best part of two years for her to realize that he either could not or would not change—that he firmly denied his alcoholism and was likely to be destroyed by it. Cudahy was an accident waiting to happen.

His family seemed like the bizarre cast of a weird melodrama. Michael lived with his sisters, his mother and a squad of servants in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where every window was locked tightly and every drapery was drawn against the infiltration of the merest speck of light. Michael’s mother, like a Dickensian madwoman, had not left her house since his birth.

Joan always maintained that Mrs. Cudahy actually liked and appreciated her “because I was the one person who could keep Michael off the bottle,” but this was a losing battle, for alcoholics have their methods. Contrary to her impression of Mrs. Cudahy’s benevolence, every time this eccentric matron spoke to the press, which was alarmingly often, she referred to Joan only with contempt: an actress—most of all one with so doubtful a background and no social pedigree—was entirely unacceptable as a potential daughter-in-law. For those reasons, Mrs. Cudahy insisted that she would quickly effect an annulment of any marriage the couple might presume to contract. For the present, there was no talk of a wedding—just plans for dining and dancing, fun at parties and weekends at the beach whenever Joan had no Saturday calls at the studio. It all seemed like an endless carousel of amusement, music and high living. But as Joan wrote to Daddy Wood at Stephens, sometimes she grew weary—she felt that this romance was hopeless and that she and Michael were on a treadmill, going nowhere.

IN NOVEMBER, THANKS TO
recommendations from cameraman Jack Arnold and studio publicist Pete Smith, Joan was assigned a major role in
Sally, Irene and Mary,
the story of three New York chorus girls caught up in a series of whirlwind romances that come to a bad end—especially for Irene (Joan), who is killed in an auto accident. “I loved it,” she said. “It gave me a character I could lose myself in, a chance to work with two fine actresses, Constance Bennett and Sally O’Neill, and a very good director, Edmund Goulding. He taught me a lot, and so did Jack Arnold. That picture told me I was doing the right thing, that I just might last.”

Goulding had good advice for Joan: “Don’t exhaust the audience by overacting.” To tone her down and enable her to locate inner resources for an emotion (instead of conveying them by outsize gestures and expressions), Goulding taught her an exercise she never forgot. Between takes, she stepped aside, slipped off her shoes, stood as motionless as possible and tried to feel what strength she could muster even in her immobility.

In addition to Goulding’s counsel and Arnold’s continuing unofficial tutelage about the best camera angles and lighting for each of Joan’s scenes, others involved in
Sally, Irene and Mary
were significant for her.

At that time, Joan went out in public as if she demanded to be seen: her nails were painted blood-red; her hair was bobbed, lacquered and parted in the middle; her makeup was exaggerated; her clothes, on the borderline of frank vulgarity, almost shouted for attention; and she danced everywhere, sometimes all night. Indeed, she seemed to do anything that brought her attention.

Pete Smith, head of Metro’s publicity, was assigned to look after Joan. He suggested that she change some things about her appearance, which she readily did. Another publicist tracked her social life, her presence at this restaurant or that nightclub and her winning streaks at Charleston contests, alerting newspapers and fan magazines every time she was out on the town. From the time
Sally, Irene and Mary
was released in early December 1925, Joan Crawford was becoming a national figure—an energetic, fun-loving flapper with just a patina of naughtiness but no scandal.

Perhaps because his family objected, Cudahy thought all this was great fun—but only when it included him. When Joan was photographed with other men, he was inclined to throw things, even though he knew he was not her only dancing partner or her sole lover. “I forgot how to say no,” she said years later about her spirited youth.

In addition to Goulding, another helpful colleague was the actress who played the movie’s Sally—Constance Bennett, a woman of singular elegance and beauty. Whereas Joan depended on the advice of costume designers, Constance neither liked nor needed them: with her exquisite sense of style, she took care of wardrobe on her own. Whereas Joan knew the value of publicity and always courted the press and the public, Constance was entirely indifferent to reporters and held the masses almost in contempt. From her, Joan learned what not to do and what she could profitably emulate.