Starring Joan Crawford: The Films, the Fantasy, and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon

By Samuel Garza Bernstein

Joan Crawford: the name has an enduring fascination. Forty-five years after her death, Crawford remains a familiar icon in pop culture and the entertainment world. Certainly the camp bathos of Mommie Dearest has played a part in her continued relevance. But it is ultimately her work and career themselves that account for her remarkable longevity in the culture. From her first film in 1925, to her rise to stardom in 1928, and on to the hit films she appeared in through the 1960s, she continually molded and remolded herself, crafting an indelible image and ensuring her place in the American pantheon.

STARRING JOAN CRAWFORD is a rollicking exploration of the powerful women Joan Crawford vividly brought to life in her films—and the lasting, ever-evolving impact she has had on popular culture.Having carved out a revolutionary path through the entertainment industry while relying on men as little as possible—whether her studio bosses or her many husbands—she created a gallery of strong, assertive women who outsmarted men and refused to conform to gender expectations. In movies like Mildred Pierce, The Damned Don't Cry, Johnny Guitar, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, among many others, she played to win, becoming a lodestar to LGBT audiences, a model of feminist self-determination for women, and an unforgettable icon for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781493074464

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

When I move to New York City at the age of seventeen to go to drama school, I learn that a woman married to a distant relative I’ve never met, have never even heard of, is the personal secretary of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and he is working on a memoir. They need extra office help. Am I interested?

I am interested, though I confess, as much as I may be a freak for all things classic Hollywood, I don’t know exactly who he is. A silent movie star, right? Married to Mary Pickford. Maybe he had something to do with the William Desmond Taylor story I’m reading about! Silent film careers destroyed! Bisexuality! Murder! My imagination runs wild before I remember reading somewhere that Fairbanks died relatively young, and if he were still alive, wouldn’t he be like a hundred and ten years old? Junior. I’m thinking of Senior. I’ve forgotten there were two of them. Wait a minute . . .

Wasn’t Joan Crawford married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr.?

I work for Fairbanks for about a year. Part of my job is sorting through files of old correspondence to help him recall timelines. Reading letters from famous people is not work to me and I am fascinated. He and Katharine Hepburn correspond often over the years, addressing one another as Pete in all their letters. Dear Pete . . . Love, Pete. And in cards and letters from Joan Crawford, she always signs her name Billie. I know that was her childhood nickname.

Later I learn that even Fairbanks has forgotten whether he calls her that because of the nickname or because Billie is her character name in Our Modern Maidens, the movie they do together in 1929 around the time they are married. A portrait of the very young, very beautiful couple, with Crawford in an elaborate wedding dress, is often assumed to be their real-life wedding portrait but it is a publicity still from the film. This is the kind of blurring of fantasy and reality that I live for.

Fairbanks’s and Crawford’s correspondence in the files doesn’t date back to the time of their marriage from 1929–1934 but it does span multiple decades before her death. I love the great-lady graciousness of her letters and admire the care with which she describes her pleasure at receiving a card or flowers from him, making sure to mention how vivid the red of the roses is or the way his own joyfulness makes her feel joyful in return.

I’m not sure, but I think I first encountered Joan Crawford in a coffee table book about Hollywood’s golden age when I was something of a gender-curious fantasist of about eight or nine years old. I do clearly remember reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of her, which is constantly quoted, but usually without the last part.

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the dramatic flapper. The girl you see at the smartest nightclubs—gowned to the apex of sophistication—toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression—dancing deliciously—laughing a great deal with wide, hurt eyes. It takes girls of actual talent to get away with this in real life. When they do perfect the thing, they have a lot of fun with it.

Well! The whole thing is fabulous. When quoting him, most people tend to end it with wide, hurt eyes, leaving out anything to do with talent or fun. But for me, as a child, the bit about gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression is what hooks me. It fits right in with the most dramatic if not masochistic elements of my favorite books, the novels of Jacqueline Susann. Then an older friend who shares my enthusiasm for show business suggests I might enjoy reading a book of Pauline Kael’s collected reviews because, you know, kids love Pauline Kael.

She includes short reviews for films being shown in revival houses, which is why Crawford comes up. It informs my own thinking for years when Kael writes of Crawford in Grand Hotel, There is a startlingly sexy minx named Joan Crawford, who bears only a slight resemblance to the later zombie of that name. Reviewing Flamingo Road, made sixteen years after Grand Hotel, Kael calls Crawford the screen’s supreme masochist. Her snark sticks with me. As I grow up, I always remember I’m supposed to be dismissive of Crawford. (That I am a child whose idea about what is cool is defined by a middle-aged writer in New York who doesn’t get out much except to see movies strikes me today as bizarre, hilarious, and inevitable.)

Fitzgerald, Kael, and then the gorgon version of Crawford in daughter Christina Crawford’s memoir—these disparate images meld into an idea of Joan Crawford as a kind of villain or at best an anti-hero. I imagine she is the woman everyone loves to hate. Ostensibly this is the woman she has always been. But once I meet Fairbanks, it is hard to imagine him married to a woman like that. Maybe there’s more to her than I think.

I’m working late one night at his wonderful old apartment on Park Avenue when Fairbanks offers a drink and we sit for a chat, sipping scotch. It feels very grown up and impossibly sophisticated. I very carefully ask what Joan Crawford was like, knowing it is really none of my business but unable to keep my curiosity at bay. His eyes twinkle as he talks about how she was so wonderfully full of life, not like the portrait painted in Mommie Dearest at all. His mood momentarily turns dark when mentioning the book, outraged that his former wife cannot defend herself against her daughter’s allegations. As he describes Billie, he regains his charm and tenderness, calling her quite gay, intelligent, and fantastically hard working. He encourages me to see some of her early films, saying that while the old movies are full of silliness and are very much of their time, in some ways the girl on the screen back then was still there in the woman he stayed in touch with for the rest of her life. I assure him I will see whatever I can at the earliest opportunity. I keep track of upcoming revival house schedules, and finally Our Dancing Daughters arrives. It is not the movie she stars in with Fairbanks, Our Modern Maidens, which is not to be confused with the third in that similarly titled trio of hits, Our Blushing Brides. Our Dancing Daughters is her monster hit of 1928, the one that subsequently puts her name above the title.

Right from the opening frames of the film when all we see is her feet as she dances frenetically in front of a mirror, Crawford is unabashedly, thrillingly alive, capturing everything we imagine is a blast about the Roaring Twenties. She is a revelation, this joyful jazz baby who paradoxically combines wholesomeness and hedonism. This is the girl audiences fall in love with. M-G-M is inundated with fan mail and requests for signed photographs. When circumstances contrive to make Crawford’s character feel anything that might seem like bitterness, she responds with a radiant smile and a gallant surge of energy. She is open, vulnerable, and somehow both entirely new yet comfortably reassuring.

You understand how she becomes world famous. You see the irrepressible girl Douglas Fairbanks Jr. marries. You see a million reasons to remember this woman that have nothing to do with how some people think of her today as a sort of high camp drag queen—an image heavily influenced by her dramatic flourishes of the 1950s and by both the book and the film Mommie Dearest. It is 1928 but she seems surprisingly modern even when I’m watching the movie all these decades later—and she’s empowered, but not by her parents or a love interest. She empowers herself, taking charge of her own destiny happily, not with the force or anger that comes later in some of the performances we remember most vividly where she is a woman in a world full of men who underestimate her at their own peril. In the beginning she is wide-eyed and charming about her desire to be treated as an equal. You can immediately imagine her all over TikTok with hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram and her own line of wellness products.

That joyful jazz baby is part of the Joan Crawford I want to explore now both because it is what makes the audience love her at the beginning of her public life and because it contains the seeds of something very much of our own moment: an individualism that was not widely embraced a century ago by most of the public but is now the norm. We live in a time when we give more importance to our own feelings and beliefs than we do to commonality of purpose. Joan Crawford was all over that from the start.

And she was a feminist.

If she were in her early twenties today, though, rising in popularity, and interviewers asked her about her feminism, it is possible she would deny it just as millions of young women do today, seeing feminism as something angry or old-fashioned or unnecessary (though with recent court decisions, young women may be having a rethink). In the early 1960s as The Feminine Mystique is gaining ground, Crawford dismisses any woman unhappy with the roles society expects of her as being unskilled in the art of getting what she wants through feminine wiles: women shouldn’t try to get ahead by acting like men. She says this in interviews and in her memoirs as, contrary to her own advice, she acts exactly like men are expected to act, taking charge of her life and career in ways that contradict traditional ideas of what a woman should be and how she should behave. And many of the films she is best remembered for are the ones where she plays women who think conformity is a waste of time. Her appearance is almost always hyper-feminine, her actions, not so much.

Be afraid of nothing, Crawford advises young women who want to go into the business, You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise, you will be destroyed. But on the other hand, Women’s Lib? Poor little things. They always look so unhappy. Have you noticed how bitter their faces are? I think it is worth quoting her at length on the subject, from Roy Newquist’s Conversations with Joan.

I don’t think Women’s Lib came on very attractively. The leaders not only weren’t feminine, they looked as though they’d parked their semis outside when they came in to go on TV. Men didn’t like them, naturally, and a lot of women didn’t associate and didn’t want to. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a housewife, but I wonder how many housewives wanted to be told they were leading useless lives and working as unpaid slaves. Later on, they toned down a bit and issues like—oh, equal pay for equal work began to mean something. But at first—well, the wrong people led the parade. As far as the film industry is concerned. Women’s Lib is a laugh. The strong parts are still being written for men. . . . Are any more women producing, directing, editing, or whatever, than in my day? I’m not anti-feminist, but I’m inclined to agree with Adela Rogers St. John, when she said that Women’s Lib is a lot of hogwash, that women have always had their rights, but they were too dumb to use them.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of feminism. Not exactly wrong in terms of female representation in the industry either. Still.

Her own assumptions about herself, and ours about her and about her cultural impact over the course of an entire century, have gone largely unexamined in the many excellent books that have been written about her life. Biography is about the person. I’m interested in our reactions to that person and in the often-surprising ways those reactions still resonate. Most of Joan Crawford’s movies are honest—sometimes blisteringly so—about the double standards constraining women and the painfully mixed messages that complicate their lives. Occasionally her characters buy into the social programming, but mostly they don’t except for clothes and makeup. They fight their battles exquisitely gowned (at least by the end of the picture if it is a rags-to-riches story) with eyelashes that defy gravity and capes, furs, and jewels that dazzle—yet invariably the core issues of her stories explore why women cannot operate in the world in the same way that men do, why they cannot go out and get what they want without risking ostracism, and why their sexual desires should be hidden or at least somehow disguised. In her 1938 film opposite Spencer Tracy Mannequin, she quips, Women are weak, and men are strong. My mother wasted a lifetime of strength trying to prove that.

That line is simple yet devastating—wryly questioning the social order in a personal, human way. Screenwriter Lawrence Hazard writes it for a character while the audience experiences it as a representation Crawford’s essential iconoclastic being even as she goes on to profess a deep desire for domesticity.

These conflicts and contradictions are a large part of what makes Crawford relevant now not just because they help define her but because they can help us define ourselves. Her struggles with gender roles, class, and cultural elitism are the same struggles many of us grapple with right now. Our nomenclature is different as are modern standards for beauty, wealth, and intelligence, but the search for identity and fulfillment is largely the same.

And we still live in a world where women get wildly competing messages from society and pop culture. Spend ten minutes online and you get the gist. Young girls are told they should be sexual but innocent; smart but stupid; ambitious but meek. Skinny girls with perfect noses congratulate themselves for eschewing body shaming and embracing body positivity while going to any length to maintain their perfect looks. They cheer at the idea of living loud and proud like Lizzo but trade advice on how to score prescriptions for Ozempic. We congratulate Adele for how comfortable she is in her plump curves then marvel at how she loses all that weight and looks fantastic—if a lot like every other blonde celebrity. When she is bigger, Adele tells Self magazine, I feel so comfortable in my own skin. I really like how I look; I like who I am. Then she loses one hundred pounds over two years and talks to Oprah, saying she did it because my body has been objectified my entire career. I don’t believe these wild swings in our points of view are evidence of some sort of insincerity or hypocrisy. Both are true for most of us: we want to celebrate or at least normalize imperfection, and we also want to be perfect. It is the heart of the struggle personified in America Ferrera’s brilliant monologue in Barbie. The one that snaps all of the Barbies out of their patriarchal trance.

If Joan were a rising star now without the edicts of a studio team demanding every star keep their controversial opinions to themselves, would she choose to keep quiet about her feelings regarding debates of the day, or would she get herself into trouble the way every young star seems to sooner or later like Demi Lovato on her Instagram in 2021: Finding it extremely hard to order froyo from @thebiggchillofficial when you have to walk past tons of sugar free cookies/other diet foods before you get to the counter, then tweeting about being triggered by a shop offering sugar-free ice cream, accusing them of buying into dangerous female body perfection stereotypes. This while Lovato assiduously diets and works with a trainer so she can wear a clinging, off-the-shoulder dress to the Grammys. After triggering a public backlash about her own insensitivity to people with food sensitivities, Lovato posts, It wasn’t clear to me that it was for specific health needs, and so I didn’t know that. If there is a sign that [says] ‘celiac’ [or] ‘vegan,’ I would’ve understood. That would’ve been clear messaging to me. Diabetes doesn’t come up.

And I love that for her. For all of us. I love the inherent contradictions of showbiz sincerity where make-believe can become real and vice versa. Every new enthusiasm is the only way to live. Trying on and discarding various public personas and fads is part of the gig. And Crawford does it all the time.

Joan Crawford hasn’t eaten bread or cake for eight years, grumbles Hedda Hopper. A little starch would do her good.

But earlier, in a Los Angeles Times piece headlined Filmdom Falls for Diets Again, Joan Crawford says she doesn’t diet anymore. Black coffee for breakfast, salad or soup for lunch, steak or lamb chops for dinner. But goodness, that’s not strenuous! (I’m confused. Is she or isn’t she dieting?)

In her 1971 self-help guide My Way of Life, she remembers living on crackers and mustard and black coffee to get thinner legs, then elsewhere in her book she advises sensible diet and exercise, no fads, while then marveling at how raw nibbles, bouillon, and dill pickles stop the hunger pangs—so you can last longer without eating—then boasting how she unknowingly used self-hypnosis as a starlet to train herself to hate the foods that would make her fat, and you can do that too. These are mixed messages that add up to at least one clear message: you must suffer to be in show business. You must suffer to be a woman.

(My Way of Life is essential reading. As Jule Miller muses in Vanity Fair in 2017, Long before Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, Joan Crawford was offering the world her own movie-star advice about health, food, fashion, travel, relationships, and more. Some may have called her extravagant lifestyle tips out of touch—and yes, she did recount how she once cured a common cold by flying to Jamaica. She also made a case for why 37 pieces of luggage were absolutely necessary for a trip to London.)

Joan Crawford makes her first movie in 1925, and depending on how you categorize what is or isn’t a film and what does or doesn’t qualify as a film appearance, she makes eighty-odd more before shooting her last picture in 1970 and playing her last major role on television in 1972. Five years later she dies at the age of sixty-nine or possibly seventy-something. Crawford does not scrupulously hold to an entirely accurate birth year. I offer no shade. As it happens, a Google search will reveal my own age is fluid.

The 1920s to the 1970s. All of it so long ago. So perhaps anything to do with Joan Crawford must be about history—about mostly forgotten old movies, impossibly glamorous images of gods and goddesses, and fashion that makes little sense to us now in an era when the Gowns by credit is woefully underutilized. Any exploration of Crawford’s cultural impact will inevitably be steeped in nostalgia and regret, maybe a dash of bitterness about how tiny and diminished the stars of today seem in relation to the golden stars of yesteryear, or conversely, a brittle, condescending stroll through rumored sexual scandals and biographical inconsistencies.

Not so fast.

Joan Crawford remains a cultural force to people who have never seen one of her films but recognize her as a kind of essential American archetype. She lingers in pop culture in way that is both obvious and subtle, directly and indirectly informing our ideas about success, femininity, and self. Her path illustrates how confused and deranged we can be about the whole idea of female power.

And then there is the monster under the bed. Or the one in the closet, freaking out over wire hangers. Whatever position one takes on the truth of her daughter’s allegations of child abuse, pro, con, or indifferent, Mommie Dearest is an integral part of why Crawford remains part of the cultural landscape. The impact of Christina Crawford’s multi-million-selling book and the subsequent film featuring Faye Dunaway’s hypnotic, Kabuki-like performance is, fairly or not, an enduring, inevitable piece of the Crawford legacy. Is there something about her that can make her daughter’s allegations feel bizarrely satisfying? Is it partly just schadenfreude or does it also confirm something a lot of people seem to want to believe about Joan Crawford? What some want to believe about all powerful women? They are manipulative. They are liars. They are monsters. Lock her up.

She pops up everywhere.

Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan is mesmerizing in its dazzling spectacle of two Oscar-winning actresses playing two Oscar-winning actresses playing two fictitious actresses. Perhaps in twenty years we will have two future Oscar-winning actresses playing Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon playing Joan Crawford and Bette Davis playing Blanche and Baby Jane Hudson. A meta-movie lover’s feast. Or a challenge on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, where Crawford is often parodied, most recently in Joan: A Rusical on the 2023 cycle of All-Stars where seven contestants impersonate seven different versions of Joan.

In 2022 her work in Johnny Guitar is reevaluated with breathless enthusiasm by Richard Brody while a Vanity Fair article in 2021 explores whether Crawford’s ghost haunted the set of Mommie Dearest, and, sadly, much like an episode of Paranormal Investigators, the results are surprisingly inconclusive. Her Oscar for Mildred Pierce fetches $426,000 at auction in 2012. An Adrian gown from Letty Lynton in 1932 that some costume historians believe is one of the most important dress designs in fashion history is the inspiration for the last look in Chanel’s Spring 2017 Couture show.

Crawford racks up over one hundred film and television credits after 1977 even though she is dead from documentaries using archival footage to a 1990 fantasy sequence on the HBO comedy Dream On to footage used from Humoresque in Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. All this and, incredibly, a writer’s credit for inspiring a comedy short in 2012. In addition to citing her as source material for a number of earlier projects, in 2020 during the Covid lock-down Charles Busch plays Crawford in a virtual reading of the Mommie Dearest screenplay to benefit the Trevor Project. In 2004 John Epperson as Lypsinka premieres The Passion of the Crawford: A Tribute to Joan Crawford. Writer Paul Rudnick routinely posts about Lindsay Graham using photographs of Crawford in her sixties as the Senator. Crawford maintains a huge popularity in the meme and fridge-magnet sweepstakes, with most referencing Mommie Dearest, like one where she laughs uproariously with Judy Garland and Jane Wyman with the caption, "And then I told Christina, you can only keep one present!"

There’s never a pop hit about Crawford that charts as high as Bette Davis Eyes, but in 1981 Blue Öyster Cult releases Joan Crawford Has Risen from the Grave and in 1990 Sonic Youth releases Mildred Pierce!

In 2016 podcaster Karina Longworth launches a six-part series Six Degrees of Joan Crawford on You Must Remember This.

Truly dedicated web-content creators like Stephanie Jones of Joan Crawford Best and Bryan Johnson of The Concluding Chapter of Crawford have become archivists and scholars.

Currently some forty Joan-centered Facebook groups flourish with thousands of members, most devoted to her films and posting glamorous photos while some focus on vociferously defending her skills as a mother, providing evidence they believe proves that Christina Crawford’s allegations are false. There’s even one page that links to a site urging visitors to sign a petition to the New York attorney general asking that charges be filed pursuant to State Statute § 210.15 Perjury in the first degree.

This for a woman who started making movies in 1925 and reached her highest ranking (number one) in the Quigley top-ten poll of actors’ box office power in 1930. Other than film buffs, the general public remembers few other leading ladies who started their careers as early as 1925. Garbo has a few memes, echoes of I want to be alone that rarely feature her name or likeness. As another point of reference, the top female star in 1925, the year of Joan Crawford’s film debut, was Norma Talmadge. I mean no offense to Miss Talmadge (or her lovely sister Constance) when I observe that Ryan Murphy is not likely to develop a television series about the ups and downs in the Talmadge sisters’ relationship, as fascinating as that would be to someone like me. It is also reasonably safe to assume that no legion of fans is petitioning anyone to take legal action posthumously on Talmadge’s behalf for any reason. She has no memes or catchphrases, and worse still, she will never be parodied by a Ru-girl on Snatch Game.

Yet Joan Crawford lives on. Because of Mommie Dearest? Because of her enormous body of work? Both. But I don’t own a black robe. Not even a black caftan. Which is to say Joan Crawford is not on trial here. Not for her mothering skills or lack thereof; not over whether she was pretentious or aspirational; not for whether she was just a movie star rather than a movie star and a gifted actress. Not on trial. But if she were on trial, I’m certain she would give a fantastic performance—voice at first soft with a hint of tremolo, building to an embittered growl at the injustices she suffers, then, shoulders back, finishing with a hard tone of disdain, belittling her accusers. Everyone in the courtroom watches in thrall as the deceptively short Crawford wills herself into a ten-foot-tall force of nature. Eyes flashing, she opens and closes the case with the panache that comes from decades of experience and an uncommon and underappreciated sense of self-awareness.

While researching this book I sifted through reams of press coverage over her five decades in the public eye. It is incredible how many years the same writers cover her. Philip K. Scheuer at the Los Angeles Times writes about Crawford in 1929 in Our Modern Maidens all the way through to 1964 and Strait-Jacket. Edwin Schallert is also at the Times for forty years. The often bilious and misogynistic (but sometimes very funny) pronouncements of Bosley Crowther at the New York Times start in 1940 with "If ever a woman needed a beating—but good—that woman is the Susan Trexel of Joan Crawford in Susan and God." (It’s hard to imagine anyone publicly advocating wife beating today—hard—but unfortunately not impossible.) Crowther continues writing about Crawford year after year. Almost twenty years after Susan and God he doles out some rare praise, calling her acting suave trouping in The Best of Everything. Then in The Caretakers, in 1963, The only thing missing is a slinky exit by Miss Crawford, twirling her chiffons and muttering, ‘Curses!’ and in his last review, 1964, "Joan Crawford has picked some lemons, some very sour lemons, in her day, but nigh the worst of the lot is Strait-Jacket." Twenty-four years covering her. Louella Parsons covers her for almost forty years, Hedda Hopper for thirty. Seventy-two of her eighty-odd movies are top-ten box office hits at one point or other. Twenty-four of them hit number one.

In a lot of the musings of these writers on Crawford, and the writing of many other reporters, as well as in remembrances of family, friends, and foes alike, a weird sense of righteous judgment pops up again and again. Her supporters don’t just like her, they love her, and with what feels like a deep, genuine sincerity. In their telling she is generous, caring, empathetic, and brilliantly talented. They cite her vast charitable endeavors, many unpublicized in their time, such as paying for dozens of medical procedures and hospital stays for strangers