A Woman's Face
Joan Crawford, 1904-1977
Startlingly wide, white gleaming eyes, a blood red slash at the mouth, pin curled hair piled high and spilling over her shoulders like a French king, those shoulders—broad and inflexible as a steel rod, muscular and quivering, like a great perched bird. Or was that not it? A ruddy, hearty, happy blur in a barely-there brocaded slip, her laugh booming, her smile disarming, dancing until dawn at the Coconut Grove. As she comes into focus, she’s harder to see. In another view, what you notice first is not the girl in the foreground, but the half-constructed silo towering over the factory grounds behind her, she’s just clocked out, and more than the dirt on her penny loafers, the tattered shirtdress printed with a cruel pattern of girlish daisies, or her strikingly beautiful face is the god-like expression of pure embitterment carved onto it.
American actress Joan Crawford died on May 10th, 1977 of a heart attack. Over the course of her six decades on screen she became an icon of the medium, personifying the changes in attitude and style that defined the first half of the century, and helping usher in the cinematic revolution that deconstructed those very changes in the second half. Joan Crawford has a face, a voice, and a manner of personal carriage that has meant a lot to different people for different reasons over the years. But which face? Which iteration of her voice? How do we remember Joan Crawford now, as we approach the half-centennial of her death?
Born Lucille Fay LeSeuer, Crawford’s true provenance is as illusory and disputed as her screen image. A 1947 Life magazine profile of the star, heralding her return to form in middle age with the release of Possessed, remarked that “the year of miss Crawford’s birth has been variously identified as 1904, 1906, 1908, and 1909.” Though her marriage license to first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr. reads 1908, Crawford historians have largely settled on 1904 as the year, and San Antonio, Texas as the place (though Lawton, Oklahoma, where Crawford’s mother married a movie theater operator, is a contender). By all accounts, Crawford’s life before Hollywood was rough—“Dickensian” was the term she used in her 1971 memoir My Way of Life. She was abused by her step father, worked her hands to the bone in a laundry run by her mother, and was “thrown down the stairs and beaten with a broom handle” at the two boarding schools she worked through in order to attend. Crawford grew up fast and she grew up gorgeous—she was eventually discovered by MGM producer Harry Rapf after winning a dancing contest at the Jack O’Lantern Cafe in Kansas City, and shipped out to Hollywood on New Year’s Day, 1925.
Despite being signed to a notorious six month contract at MGM (Lana Turner described this contact system in her memoir Lana as a form of “trafficking,” set up for the purposes of procuring fresh young beauties for studio execs and producers—and disposing of them when they’d lost their sheen), Crawford rose to the ranks of superstardom through sheer, indignant force of will. At first, Rapf, studio head Louis B. Mayer, and wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg decided that Joan’s extravagant beauty and tenacious will were best suited for the role of body double. Crawford was consigned to shadowing Norma Shearer, Thalberg’s wife and MGM’s reigning “queen of the lot,” on the melodramatic weepies and history pictures like Lady of the Night and Pretty Ladies in which she starred. “All that time hanging around the sets,” Crawford later quipped, “watching Norma Shearer make the most of her three expressions, was a help.” Undeterred by the lack of attention from within, Crawford decided to begin fashioning her own star persona from without. Crawford won an estimated 1,000 dance contests at clubs around Hollywood like Cafe La Boheme and the newly opened Ambassador Hotel, generating an avalanche of publicity between 1925 and 1928, the year MGM finally caved and gave her the breakout lead role in Our Dancing Daughters. F. Scott Fitzgerald was the first to take note of Crawford’s star capacity for representing emergent cultural attitudes in Our Dancing Daughters, writing: “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes.”
From thereon out, Crawford marched from effervescent youth to hard middle age, from MGM to Warner Bros. and from wartime to wartime, through the depression, the baby boom, and the revolution of New Hollywood with this symbolic capacity in tact. After reviving her career in her 40s by winning the Academy Award for her performance in Mildred Pierce, Crawford entered the most electric period of her career, turning in daring, self-referential performances for a new wave of European avant-garde directors like Nicholas Ray and Otto Preminger. In films like Johnny Guitar, Sudden Fear, and Autumn Leaves, Crawford set the independence, sexuality, and fury she’d come to be known for in a new context—postwar, post-sexual prime, middle-aged womanhood, and thus, gave it radical new meaning.
The quality of work to come out of this period of feverish invention sets Joan apart from her contemporaries who also managed to push their careers past the breakdown of the studio system—Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lana Turner foremost among them. The anatomy of the actress’s craft in this period is in dire need of critical re-examination, and perhaps it would have received it by now, had it not been for Mommie Dearest. A year after her mother’s death, Crawford’s first adopted daughter, Christina, published a tell-all memoir that determined the course of her legacy more than any part she played in her life. Quickly adapted into a film and released in 1981, Mommie Dearest depicts Crawford in the last phase of her life as an unhinged megalomaniac whose diminishing sexual potency whips her into an abusive fury, indicating as it did her diminishing options as an actress. The unrelenting, almost artfully abject tawdriness of Mommie Dearest not only tanked the career of its lead, Faye Dunaway, thought until then to be untouchably talented, but forever smudged onto the collective memory of Joan Crawford a distortion, a mask of Crawford’s true face, heightened in all the places she was in her actual film roles so devastatingly subtle.
Which Joan Crawford survives in the maw of public memory? Is it the flapper-era avatar of the liberated new woman? The way she “embodied the ideal wartime spirit” in her middle-aged, mid-career, conflicted woman roles? “She sacrificed everything she had to keep her family intact,” writes Charlie Achuff of Mildred Pierce, “and she stood stronger and wiser at the end of the battle in spite of the Hell she had been through.” Or finally, is it the late career “gorgon,” with a face like a “mask of implacable rage,” in Pauline Kael’s words, immortalized in Mommie Dearest?
In her landmark survey of the classic Hollywood woman’s film, A Woman’s View, film historian Jeanine Basinger writes that Crawford's “films constituted a minihistory of attitudes toward women, as she marched from flapper to shop girl to sophisticated lady to comedienne to career woman to older woman victimized by men (who want her money or power) and finally to gargoyle.” Crawford is simultaneously so enduring and so hard to pin down as a cultural figure because unlike many of her contemporaries, who worked with their studios to craft an identifiable, commodifiable star persona (Greta Garbo the “martyr,” Bette Davis the “bitch”), Crawford’s persona reflected American womanhood through the century of its greatest transformation. Her face became a woman’s face—every woman’s face. And what Crawford reflected was not often the pleasures of marriage, the joy of motherhood, or the dignity of work. Quite often, and increasingly as she aged, it was rage. Pure, unbridled resentment of the failures of the American dream, curdling as it was passed to women.
“As the waitress-turned-restaurant tycoon” in Mildred Pierce, Basinger writes, “Crawford personifies the totally capable but truly furious American woman.” No wonder the image of Crawford that remains most salient in our culture is not only the angriest (Dunaway’s runaway mom from hell) but the most illusory—a copy of a copy of its source. Crawford’s portrayal of American womanhood, precisely because of its metamorphic elusiveness, remains definitive.