Scott Eyman delves into Hollywood history with new book Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face

Crawford on the set of Mildred Pierce. // Courtesy Alan Rode Collection

When I was a kid, you said your prayers thanking God that Joan Crawford was not your mom.

Because of the 1981 biopic Mommie Dearest, children my age and younger all thought she was a rage-filled monster who would beat you simply because she didn’t like wire hangers. Blue Öyster Cult’s creepy 1981 rocker “Joan Crawford” ironically was the nail in the coffin. It ends with Joan menacing her daughter from the grave.

Because of this eye-rollingly awful depiction of the star (by Faye Dunaway), it’s easy to forget that she was a massively popular star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the 1930s with movies like Grand Hotel (1932) and that she won an Oscar for her work in Michael Curtiz’s engrossing thriller Mildred Pierce (1945).

Crawford had some of her choicest roles later in her career. We’d all like to forget the unintentionally funny Trog (1970), but she ably holds her own against an eccentric Bette Davis by playing it straight in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and her turn in the 1969 pilot to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery anchors an assured TV directing debut from 22-year-old Steven Spielberg.

Because Crawford, whose birth name was Lucille Fay LeSueur, was synonymous with Tinseltown glamour, it’s surprising to learn that she spent her high school years here in Cowtown. She’s honored with a star on our Walk of Fame on 18th Street along with such Kansas City alumni as Walt Disney, Ginger Rogers, and Robert Altman. In addition, Mildred’s Food + Drink gets its name from Mildred Pierce.

Crawford’s parenting is also harder to judge. Her older children Christina (the author of Mommie Dearest) and Christopher, have been consistent in their accounts of abuse, but her younger children Cathy and Cindy have recalled their mother warmly, and Joan had several vocal defenders, including her first husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Historian Scott Eyman observes, “.500 is a great average for baseball, but not so good for children.” His new book, Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face, hits bookstore shelves this week and captures her quirks and her complexities and explains how her modest roots in Kansas City contributed to her stardom and her later challenges.

Eyman talked with The Pitch in a recent Zoom conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

The Pitch: Part of the reason I was excited about your book is that I kind of rediscovered her. As a kid, I saw Mommy Dearest and it was decades before I ever actually got to see what she did. 

Well, only if you took it seriously.

It is an awful movie.

It’s not just an awful movie. The honest thing about that movie is it’s actually a very faithful adaptation of the book. And the book got fairly decent reviews, but the movie was universally slammed because it exposed the fault lines in the book that people didn’t want to notice, and also its absurdity.

In your coverage, you pointed out that she could not have come home to do some of the things she’s depicted as doing in the film. Some of the witnesses you recount in your own book say that she could not have done some of the things that she’s depicted as doing in Christina Crawford’s memoir. 

Right, exactly. She adopted four children, and the relationship between Crawford and two of the adopted children had broken down years before she died. She really wasn’t in contact with either of them for 4 or 5 years. Christina had the motivation to do what she did in her own mind.

We all know parents who don’t even do that well (laughs). I decided basically to be equitable to both sides of the childhood debate. I give Christina and Christopher their voice, and I also let the twins respond to Christina and Christopher, you know, jump ball.

Crawford costume test on Mildred Pierce. // Courtesy Alan Rode Collection

One of the things I noticed from reading your book is that you pointed out she had an accessibility that, say, other movie stars at the time didn’t have. 

There were a fair number of movie stars of that generation and later who came from the lower middle class or the upper poor. I think probably because it motivated them because they didn’t have any training or a general push towards that line of work, because the only push Crawford would’ve gotten as a child would be to work in a laundry. She might as well have dreamt about being an architect or the Queen of France.

They were at least as likely as becoming a movie star.

But she could go to the movies and dream, and she had very strong willpower, and she also had a certain amount of luck. Nothing happens just by main force. You’ve got to have a door or two open at the right time, and she never blew an opportunity. That’s also part of the equation.

She started out in silent films in 1925, and she was very indistinct at first. She doesn’t look like Joan Crawford. Her hairstyle is not flattering. Her eyes are badly made up so you can’t appreciate the beauty of her eyes, which was one of her primary attributes, frankly. She’s heavier than she got to be. She’s probably at least 15 pounds heavier. MGM hasn’t found the look for her, and she hasn’t either.

Once she started to get a little traction, they figured out what she had to offer. She’s quite beautiful. So they asked her to lose some weight, which brought out her cheekbones and emphasized her eyes. And then they started constructing stories that melded with her individual story. You know, lower-class girls trying to make it through effort, chorus girl stories, for instance, which is what she was.

She was a chorus girl for the Shubert Brothers in New York City for a year, making 35 or 40 bucks a week, plus extra for matinees. Um, but it was a living. That’s where she met Barbara Stanwyck, who was working for Ziegfeld at the same time. She paid attention to what was going around her. She was a vacuum cleaner for watching other actors work and seeing what they did, what it looked like on the stage as opposed to what it looked like on film, because it’s two different things, especially in close-ups. You may not see anything standing 10 feet away from the actor. But when you look at it on film, everything’s there, but they’re acting for the lens; They’re not acting for onlookers around them.

So she learned how to modify her performance for the camera to get her dramatic points across. She worked with good people. She always said Lon Chaney (The Phantom of the Opera) taught her how to act, basically. She only made one film with him (The Unknown,1927); it took 5 weeks to make, but that 5 weeks changed her life because he was not about publicity. He was not about being famous, he was not about making as much money as fast as he could.

Acting was his church, and he did it eminently seriously, and he approached it like it was a heart attack about to happen, and the only way to fend off the heart attack was to give a great performance. She understood that what he did was concentrate. Nothing else mattered, not the argument you had with your spouse, not your argument with Louis B. Mayer or Irving Thalberg. All that had to be cast aside once you stepped in front of the camera. That’s where Crawford got her work ethic, basically.

In the later chapters is she emerges as a consistent professional.

Always, always. You had to be. That was what the studio system inculcated in you. They didn’t care what you did at all. They didn’t care if you were an alcoholic; they didn’t care if you liked little girls. That wasn’t their business. What they cared about was that you were ready to get in front of the camera at 8:30 in the morning, and you were there until 5:30 or six o’clock at night. And then they might ask you to sit around and watch your rushes from the day before. So, you didn’t get home till eight o’clock. So, in other words, you didn’t really have a life during the week except the studio.

You had a life on the weekends, maybe, if you didn’t have to go out and do publicity things or do interviews and stuff like that. It was serious. That inculcated a sense of duty with the performers and, and the directors and the cameramen and all those creative people. Maybe not the writers, because writers, well, you know how writers are.(laughs)

Yes. Guilty.

Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. The worst. Absolutely the worst (laughs).

A lot of her formative experience was in Missouri.

As I said, she was born in Texas. We don’t know where exactly. God knows we tried to find out. We canvassed many numbers. We canvassed 8 or 10 cities around San Antonio. No birth certificate, but we do know that in the 1910 census, she’s listed as being born in 1905, so we’ll go with that as her birth date, because the studio said she was born in 1908. But almost every actress of that era and possibly later eras knocked a couple years off their age. You know, it was just what they did.

Irene Dunne knocked off 8, I think.

In Kansas City, she worked a lot when she was going to junior and high school, she was cleaning up a lot of houses and stuff. 

She was actually bartering her labor for a smattering of education. Because her work schedule was so intensive that it’s not like she was in school 8 hours a day. She wasn’t in school 8 hours a day. She had only one semester of college.

At Stephens, which is in Columbia, Missouri.

She basically couldn’t hack it. She didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, because she hadn’t had enough of the preliminaries of high school to go to college, basically. So she was very open about her lack of education and very sensitive about it, and she worked on it really hard. When she died, the inventory of her estate, she had all these volumes of Shakespeare, and she had all these high-end all this high-end classical literature, you know, and that was her way of making up for all the lost time because she didn’t have any of the niceties that people who got a decent public education because she had to work for a living.

It’s very Cinderella-ish, really.

The fact that she did have to kind of scramble around and make up for a sort of lost youth kind of explains a lot. 

It does. It explains a great deal. It explains her hunger for success, or avidity for success, really. I think she squeezed the absolute most she could get out of her gift. First, she had to grow the gift and believe it was there, and then she had to learn how to access the gift. And I don’t know any other actress of her generation, with the possible exception of Barbara Stanwyck, who got more out of it, who got more out of their gift than Crawford did.

Her biological father bailed on her.

I think he bailed on her before she was born and just after she was born, but she didn’t know him. She never met him, until she was at MGM, and then he came hovering around, and then he went away and died. She didn’t like her mother very much because—this is a supposition on my part—her mother supported her mother and her brother, but she didn’t want them around her. She didn’t want to spend time with them. They weren’t really a part of her life. The check arrived every month, so that they wouldn’t be on the street, but she wasn’t going to make them part of her life.

Her stepfather, Henry Cassin, was the only relative she had any sort of closeness with.

There were some uncles, too, who came and went while all this was going on. But the one stepfather who died. The marriage broke up, and he died. He was the only male figure that ever showed her any consideration or any affection or any attention, really.

You know, even though she’s a cute kid. You look at pictures of her as a child, and she’s a good-looking child. She always thought she was unattractive and had stringy hair, but she was real hard on herself.

Your book also reevaluates one of her flops, Rain (1932), which I saw at a friend’s coffeehouse.

I think it’s a better movie than its reputation indicates. As a matter of fact, the Museum of Modern Art is showcasing a new restoration of Rain in January. I’m going to introduce it in New York City, which makes me happy because I never saw it until I was doing the book. I could see it’s a little rough at the beginning, but it certainly gathers momentum as it goes, and it ends very strongly. It might have been simply that she had, at this point, 5 years of greatness. Boom, boom, boom.

And I think maybe it was just time for her to have a designated flop, and they chose Rain. You know?

Of course, I love Mildred Pierce, and there are a couple of coffee shops here in town called “Mildred’s” after her. 

Oh, Crawford would love that. That’s a wonderful movie. It deserved its success then, and it deserves its success now. And she’s perfect in it. I don’t think anybody else could have played that part as well as she did.

Author Scott Eyman

And what do you think gives Crawford and the story so much power?

In a funny sort of way, Mildred Pierce’s story melds with her depressive worldview. A lot of actresses wanted to come out smelling like a rose at the end of the picture because they wanted to be triumphant. Crawford wasn’t afraid to play that reality, and neither was Stanwyck. It’s like the Old Testament, and (Mildred) doesn’t deserve that.

I also wanted to bring up Stephens College again because she later went back there.

The group interview that she did at Stephens, where they were asking her questions. This is in 1970. She went back for a couple of days, which I’m sure she didn’t regard as the great success story of her life, because after all, she left after a semester. She says that she was in over her head, very, very blatantly, but she did go back, and I think she had a good time, and she did this wonderful interview that I found at UCLA. a long Q&A, probably 25 pages. She emphasizes the negative. You gotta accentuate the negative. She talks about how she didn’t feel at home, like the girls didn’t accept her, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And when you look at her picture in the yearbook, she’s actually quite attractive. Some of the stuff that was published in the local newspapers mentioned that she’s going to this party and that party and she’s dancing constantly and very popular. I think she was mentally insecure for good reason.

You could see why, given her background and where she’s going. And she’s going to school with all these girls who were probably on the honor roll from high school. They’re nailing stuff, and she’s having terrible trouble because she’s working probably 30 hours a week on the side. She tended to emphasize the negative about her childhood whenever she was asked, and I think it was sincere. I don’t think she was trying to get people to feel sorry for her. I think she thought her childhood and adolescence were something she had to escape from.

I’ve actually read the Michael Korda book that you quoted in your own, where she’s quoted as saying it was important with your kids to always clean their shoestrings. 

Who does that? (laughs) Although if you can’t afford 20 cents or 40 cents or whatever shoestrings cost in 1920 or 1918 to buy shoestrings, then it all makes sense. But that’s the only way it makes sense.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane is one of her best performances, and she played it totally straight. 

She’s playing it very naturally. There’s no diva behavior going on. There are no gorgeously lit close-ups. It’s shot in a very drab, neo-real style. It’s a very naturalistic performance, whereas Bette Davis, she’s like Norma Desmond’s second cousin. The difference is that Norma Desmond still has money, and she still lives very elegantly, whereas the two sisters in Baby Jane are desperately waiting for their Social Security check (laughs).

Davis is the one who’s really taking all the risks. It’s kind of cartoonish, and if it doesn’t work, it’s just going to be a disaster, but the part has to be played over the top. She’s a lunatic.

Whereas Crawford’s a counterpoint throughout the picture. She just wants to get out of the wheelchair or go somewhere or do something. 

But she can’t, because she’s a prisoner in the room. But it’s basically Bette Davis, this movie. They have to be two different universes, because one is living in a fantasy world and the other is living in the real world. I see (Crawford’s) performance in Baby Jane as a return to the MGM stuff of the early ’30s, where there’s a very naturalistic performance in naturalistic settings with a naturalistic story, something the audience could easily relate to.

In Baby Jane, the audience relates to her more than they do to Baby Jane. But we’re looking at Baby Jane with a sense of the Hindenburg disaster.

So basically, Crawford is the passenger in the Hindenburg. 

She’s the passenger, and Davis is the Hindenburg. Exactly.

It was great to discover what Crawford could do, because now I’m so happy there’s more to her than wire hangers. 

So am I. That wasn’t my motivation. Joan Crawford didn’t mean anything to me until comparatively late in my life. When Mommie Dearest came out, I had seen Grand Hotel and Mildred Pierce, and that’s all. So it wasn’t like I was a novitiate in the church of Joan. I was into Jane Fonda at that point in my life, for obvious reasons.

But as I went along and I saw more and more movies, I really began to develop an appreciation for her, especially the late 20s and early 30s stuff at MGM, which nobody looks at particularly. They go to Mildred Pierce. They go to Grand Hotel, and they leapfrog to Mildred Pierce, you know, and then Baby Jane.

That’s the progression. But the stuff she did in the early ’30s, uh, and some of the other stuff at Warner Brothers is really strong work.

When I saw her in Rain, I couldn’t stop l looking into he eyes. Your book notes that it took her a long time to achieve that look. 

Well, she took a while to find her look, like I said. Her early stuff at MGM, she doesn’t look like Joan Crawford. It really doesn’t. She doesn’t find her look until 1927, ’28. And then it’s a skyrocket. It’s a skyrocket. They had to figure out how to accentuate her sensuality because she’s not a classic beauty. She’s a woman you could imagine seeing on the street. She had a short waist. She had broad shoulders. She had good legs, but that’s what (designer) Adrian’s for. That’s why Adrian was the right man for her, because he accentuated her best features, and he showed off that face. Her face is her fortune, not her body. Her face is spectacular.

Meryl Streep is well into her 70s and is still getting plum roles. Crawford got good roles later in her career, but she had to wait for them. There was a long gap between her gigs with Robert Aldrich and Steven Spielberg.

Yeah, but it’s a different world now. There was movies, and there was television, and television was black and white and downmarket. Now you’ve got all these streaming venues, where if someone doesn’t get hired for a movie, Netflix or Amazon will be happy to use them in some piece of crap, and sometimes they get lucky and the script is pretty good, but a lot of the time it’s like looking at The Damned Don’t Cry.

That’s what tripped up the Stanwycks and the Crawfords, because there was no second tier beneath movies, except television, and it was black-and-white, and the picture was fuzzy, and the writing was from hunger most of the time. There wasn’t a lot of good TV being done unless it was Paddy Chayefsky, and Paddy Chayefsky wasn’t writing for Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck on many of the items.