The high price of stardom

Joan CRAWFORD was the definitive Hollywood star, with her large expressive eyes, bold sculpted features, perfect posture and seemingly eternal glamour. Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1908 -- possibly earlier -- she embodied rags-to-riches stardom more vividly than anyone else and sustained her career for more than 45 years. Her mother was a stern, overworked laundress, soon deserted by her husband, but Crawford had a loving stepfather, a small-town theater impresario who encouraged her love of dancing before he too disappeared after his businesses failed.

Crawford strove mightily to improve herself, and by middle age she had a regal bearing, but underneath the elegant coiffures, dazzling jewelry and tasteful gowns there was an earthy broad who liked her vodka straight and had a hearty sense of humor, especially about herself.

Mercurial in temperament, she could move from supreme self-confidence to gnawing insecurity without warning. There was about her a sense that her success had come at a price immeasurably high, and what she had endured in getting to the top had to be worse than anyone could know. She was fiercely loyal to her friends and fans and inspired the same loyalty in them. If she trusted someone she would meet him at her door in a simple cotton dress and shoes, her short hair combed straight back, still damp from a shower and makeup so light as not to hide her famous freckles. She knew she was a knockout with such a natural look even at 60.

Charlotte Chandler has long sought out the movie world’s legends and displayed a knack of getting them to open up to her with a candor that is always amazing. She eschews analyses and opinion, letting her subjects and their friends, relatives and colleagues speak for themselves. She avoids taking on the role of film critic, including only brief synopses of their movies. This approach works (previous subjects include Billy Wilder and Ingrid Bergman) because of her compelling thoroughness, and “Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography” is indispensable for future considerations of Crawford and her career.

Chandler has never tackled a subject without eliciting the cooperation of those significant in their lives. In this instance, this includes extensive interviews with Crawford herself, and also Crawford’s first husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and one of her best directors -- and lover -- Vincent Sherman, who offered illuminating insights along with enduring affection and respect.

Discovered in the chorus line of a 1924 Broadway revue by MGM producer Harry Rapf, Crawford began at MGM in 1925. Her favorite of her films -- and most fans would concur with these choices -- were “Grand Hotel” (1932), “The Women” (1939) and “Mildred Pierce” (1945), the last of which brought her an Oscar. Although she played a variety of heroines, Crawford personified the shopgirl who through luck and pluck could win happiness and riches, and it’s not too much to say that her effect upon her fans was profound.

At the studio she discovered a glorious escape from a youth of poverty and humiliation. As passionate as their romance had been, Fairbanks in retrospect concluded that it was in acting that Crawford was most alive, and Crawford in turn, while stressing that she never stopped loving either Fairbanks or her second husband, Franchot Tone (indeed, she looked after Tone in his final illness), admitted that she loved her career more.

Even so, she continued to crave a Hollywood ending in her own life, and having suffered a miscarriage during her marriage to Tone, she adopted the first of four children in 1939. Crawford at length tells Chandler how badly she wanted to give her children all the things she never had. In return, it would seem, that she expected perfection and absolute obedience and seem genuinely puzzled that the older two, Christina and Christopher, rebelled.

Cathy Crawford LaLonde, while acknowledging Crawford’s strictness, speaks to Chandler only of love for her mother; it may be significant that Cathy and her sister Cindy are eight years younger than Christina. A year after Crawford’s death in 1977, Christina published the devastating “Mommie Dearest,” depicting Crawford as a deranged, shockingly abusive parent. If Christina was seeking revenge she got it in spades, destroying her mother’s reputation; today younger generations are likely to know Crawford principally by the 1981 film of “Mommie Dearest,” an airless, inept movie but featuring a galvanic performance by Faye Dunaway -- ironically, the young screen actress Crawford admired most.

Among others Chandler interviewed, Myrna Loy, one of Crawford’s oldest friends, trashes Christina and her book, as does her “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” costar Bette Davis, who would get the same treatment from her own daughter while she was still alive. Christina displayed little understanding and compassion in regard to Crawford, but her book cannot be easily dismissed. “Mommie Dearest” called attention to child abuse in an unprecedented manner and for better or worse launched the warts-and-all celebrity biography that is de rigueur to this day. Such stalwarts as Irene Dunne and silent star Carmel Myers, who appeared in a number of Crawford’s earliest films, confided to this writer that they had witnessed Crawford meting out cruel punishment to Christopher, and Fred MacMurray, that most reticent of Hollywood veterans, once blurted out, “She had no business having those children! She was a terrible mother!”

With her career winding down, Crawford seemed to find happiness at last as the wife of Pepsi-Cola Chairman Alfred Steele, her fourth husband, whom she married in 1955. (The book has little to say about actor Phillip Terry, her third.) Steele, she says, had a positive effect on her children, Christopher especially, but Steele died, seriously overextended financially, of a heart attack in 1959. Her career revived by the success of “Baby Jane,” Crawford paid off Steele’s debts and soldiered on with her career until 1972. But horrified by some unflattering pictures taken of her at a 1974 party, Joan Crawford became a recluse, explaining to Chandler that she was determined to preserve her glamorous movie star image. She lived only three more years. “She died like a lady,” declared Betty Barker, her vivacious friend and secretary of over 40 years.

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Kevin Thomas reviews movies for The Times.