Crawford, Joan (1904?-1977)

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From her 1930s heyday as a leading MGM box-office draw, to her 1962 performance in the horror classic and cult favorite Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Joan Crawford incarnated, in the words of Henry Fonda, "a star in every sense of the word." The MGM style of star packaging emphasized glamour, and Crawford achieved her luminous appearance through an extensive wardrobe and fastidious presentations of her gleaming, trademark lips, arched eyebrows, sculpted cheek and jaw bones, and perfectly coiffured hair. Crawford herself famously said, "I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door."

Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1904, Crawford embarked on a dancing career when only a teenager. She worked cabarets and travelling musical shows until her discovery in the Broadway revue The Passing Show of 1924. It would not be long before an MGM executive noted her exuberant energy and athletic skill. Exported to Hollywood on a $75.00/week contract, Lucille changed her name as part of a movie magazine promotion that urged fans to "Name Her and Win $1,000." This early link between her professional life and fan magazines presaged a union that would repeatedly shape her long movie star tenure. Throughout five decades, she appeared in magazine advertisements endorsing cosmetics, food products, and cigarettes. She dutifully answered fan letters and once fired a publicity manager who turned away admirers at her dressing room door. Her first marriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., turned into a publicity spectacle. It was a reported feud between Crawford and co-star Bette Davis that was used to generate interest in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? A conflation of Crawford's roles and fan magazine publicity with her personal life formed both the public view of her and her own sense of identity.

Crawford garnered her first film role in 1925 and made over 20 silent pictures before 1929, the year of her first hit Untamed. Her early career coincided with Hollywood's investment in the production and cultivation of stars as bankable assets. One of the industry's earliest successes, Crawford mutated her star persona over the decades to retain currency. Her first image was as a "flapper," a 1920s free-spirited woman who danced all night in speakeasies and jazz clubs. In the 1928 movie Our Dancing Daughters, Crawford's quintessential flapper whips off her party dress and dances the Charleston in her slip. Her date asks, "You want to take all of life, don't you?" Crawford's character replies, "Yes—all! I want to hold out my hands and catch at it." Crawford's own dance-till-dawn escapades frequently provided fodder for the gossip columns.

In the wake of the Depression Crawford transformed into a 1930s "shopgirl"—a willful, hard-working woman determined to overcome adversity, usually on the arm of a wealthy, handsome man played by the likes of Clark Gable or second husband, Franchot Tone. With this new character type, song-and-dance movies gave way to melodramatic fare, in which she uttered lines like this one from the 1930s movie Paid: "You're going to pay for everything I'm losing in life." To encourage fan identification with Crawford's "shopgirl" image, MGM promoted Crawford's own hard-luck background, highlighting her travails as a clerk at a department store in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1930, she was voted most popular at the box office. Inherent to this genre was a literal rags-to-riches metamorphosis. Possessed, produced in 1931, begins with Crawford working a factory floor in worn clothing and charts her rise in status through increasingly extravagant costume changes. This particular formulateamed her with haute couture designer Adrian, and together they sparked fashion trends. In Paid, Crawford dons a huge, black fur-collared coat that, by virtue of her appearance in it, turned into a bestselling item in clothing stores along fifth Avenue in New York. The most famous instance occurred in 1932 with the Letty Lynton dress, reportedly the most frequently copied film-gown in American movies. Featuring enormous, ruffled sleeves and layers of white organdy, the Letty Lynton dress-craze confirmed Hollywood's place as showcase for fashion. The Letty Lynton phenomenon also marked the debut of Crawford's clothes-horse image. The importance of how Crawford looked in a movie soon eclipsed the significance of how she acted.

Crawford's popularity diminished in the 1940s as younger actresses claimed the best MGM parts. She responded by retooling herself into a matriarchal, self-sacrificing businesswoman, her strength symbolized by shoulder pads and dramatically tailored suits. To brook this transition, Crawford departed glamour-factory MGM in 1943 and signed with the crime picture studio, Warner Brothers. The role of the driven self-made restaurateur in the 1945 film noir, Mildred Pierce, earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. At the end of this period, she began portraying desperate, emotionally disturbed women like the lover-turned-stalker Possessed (1947), and the neat-freak homemaker whose obsession turns to madness in the title role of Harriet Craig (1950). Movie culture in the 1950s expressed anxiety over dominant, self-sufficient female roles, popular in World War II and immediate post-War America, by straight-jacketing Crawford—literally—in Straight Jacket, produced by "B" horror film king William Castle in 1964. The 1960s limited her to cheap horror films—I Saw What You Did, Beserk, Trog —and traded on her now severe, lined face and its striking contrast with her trim, dancer's figure. Crawford's late career also ushered in the Hollywood use of product placement. As an official representative of Pepsi-Cola—her fourth and last husband, Howard Steele, was a Pepsi executive—Crawford featured displays of Pepsi-Cola signs and merchandise in several of her last films. For example, while probing a series of ghoulish murders at a circus owned by Crawford in a scene from Beserk (1968), investigators pause under a "Come Alive! With Pepsi" banner.

In Mommie Dearest, a movie based on an expose written by Crawford's adopted daughter and featuring Faye Dunaway, Crawford is depicted as a bizarrely cruel disciplinarian. The movie not only made a horrific joke of Crawford, but it also maligned Dunaway's acting ability. Portions of the movie became staple skits on late-night television shows like the satiric Saturday Night Live. The 1980s and 1990s, however, turned her into a favorite icon of gays and lesbians with Internet websites celebrating her masculine performances in, for example, Johnny Guitar (1954). In this movie she plays a gun-belted, top-booted saloon keep whose show-down is against another mannish-looking woman.

Considine, Shaun. Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud. New York, E.P.Dutton, 1989.

Gledhill, Christine, editor. Stardom: Industry of Desire. New York, Routledge, 1991.

Thomas, Bob. Joan Crawford: A Biography. New York, Simon &Schuster, 1978.

Walker, Alexander. Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Star. London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd., 1983.

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