Joan Crawford: Channeling the Spirit of Norma Desmond

This is my entry in the MGM Blogathon hosted by Silver Scenes. Click here for more great posts about the Hollywood Golden Age's most golden studio.

Joan

First, let me state unequivocally that I am 100% on Team Joan. There will be no hating, no snarkiness and certainly no wire hangers found here. Second, in my eyes, Norma Desmond was a woman who spoke the truth (but wrapped, I admit, in a slightly  - shall we say unusual - package). And yes, I know Norma worked at Paramount, but stay with me on this.

Joan before the MGM star transformation. Looking a bit like Bonnie Parker.
Clearly some work needed to be done.

The 1920s saw a hunger and desire for anyone to achieve the American Dream. Dusting off an uncomfortable past and inventing a new, shiny, more desirable one  seemed possible. Just ask Jay Gatsby.

When you're a starlet you have to pose for
all kinds of silly publicity pictures.

Joan Crawford's story has a Gatsby-esque quality. Born Lucille LeSueur into a poor and broken Texas family, she  worked her way up from dancing in a traveling show, to Broadway chorus girl (using the name Billie Cassin) to MGM starlet with a determination that more than matched her beauty or talent. And it was at MGM that Lucille was given a chance to reinvent herself, obliterate her past and live the American Dream.

"Our Dancing Daughters" showcased Joan as the perfect flapper.

Something about the $75 a week starlet told the MGM publicity machine that Lucille had potential. Her look was being transformed (alleged massive dental work among other things) and she learned how to walk, talk and act through lessons in all manner of self-presentation. But that name! The studio didn't like it (sounded like sewer) and decided to let the public rename her. In a bold stunt, Movie Weekly magazine selected the name of Joan Crawford. From then on, the studio/public created person by the name of Joan Crawford moved front and center and Lucille LeSueur was buried in the past.

"Grand Hotel" proved she could hold her own with the best of them.

Slogging her way through silents and embodying the image of a flapper (F. Scott Fitzgerald called her "the best example of the flapper") and really coming into her own with sound, Joan Crawford became MGM's biggest money maker. It was said that it was Norma Shearer who got the big productions (she was, after all, as Crawford wryly noted, sleeping with the boss), Garbo who supplied the art, and Joan Crawford who made the money to pay for both. Like all great stars, it was the public who made her one. Her 1930s glamorous shop girl films sold like wild fire. And then suddenly they didn't. By 1938, she, along with Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo, was labeled "box office poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners Association of America. 

With frequent co-star and occasional
lover Clark Gable in "Strange Cargo."

But Joan was nothing if not resilient. Starting with 1939's "The Women" and followed by "Strange Cargo," she proved she was not quite out of the game. However, after 18 years, she and MGM, the place she professionally grew up in, parted company in 1943. Was she bitter? She says "no", although that feeling might have been realized in hindsight. Studio head Louis B. Mayer is not always considered to be a beloved figure, but according to Joan in a 1965 interview with John Kobal, "To me L.B. Mayer was my father: my father confessor; the best friend I ever had." While Joan went on to some victories (notably her Oscar for "Mildred Pierce" at Warner Brothers), she also suffered the indignities of an aging woman in a world that worships female youth.

We should listen to Norma

So here's the Norma Desmond connection. She might as well have been speaking of Joan when she said "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Like Joan, she embraced the life and persona of a movie star and was always grateful for all of those wonderful people out there in the dark. But, as George Carlin said, "the reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it." The demons that clipped at the heels of Lucille LeSueur, no matter how fast she ran, never really went away. While the public's tastes and movies changed, Joan Crawford could not. Reality always rears its ugly head, even in Hollywood. Added to personal drama, Joan committed the unforgiveable sins of aging and remaining big while everything around her got small.

Joan in the Adrian designed "Letty Lynton"
dress that took American by storm

While many stars rebelled against the studio system, Joan Crawford embraced it. She never appeared in public unkempt and never less than every inch a star. She always, always gave us glamour and famously said "if you want to see the girl next door, go next door." She loved her public and her job. "I have nothing but gratitude for this fine, great industry that I love and worship. It has given me everything that I have in life."

This is what a movie star looks like

Joan Crawford Movie Star, your public really appreciates that.

Book Review: Martin Turnbull's "The Heart of the Lion": The Room Where it (Really) Happened

Hey movie lover - haven't you often heard behind the scenes conversations in your head? You know, the ones between Clark Gable and Carole Lombard? Or Garbo and Gilbert? Or maybe, just maybe, Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer? Or better  yet, all those mop up men at the Harlow home discussing how to handle Paul Bern's death while he lay there cold as a cucumber? Well, imagine no more, because author Martin Turnbull takes you to all of those rooms where it all really happened (the rooms we really care about) in "The Heart of the Lion," his new novel about the MGM Boy Wonder, Irving Thalberg.

Anyone who is anyone makes an appearance in Turnbull's fictional telling of Thalberg's final years. Lillian Gish nurses a sidecar* at a Hollywood party, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. complains about Mary Pickford, foreshadowing the end of a fairy tale union, and Garbo is a sly minx who never has her head in the clouds. But the central stars of this tale are Louis B. Mayer, the crude but knowing head of the great studio, John Gilbert, the fading silent star who was one half of an unlikely friendship, and Norma Shearer, the determined star whose gentle love and patience brought great happiness to her boss, who also happened to be her husband.

The wedding. Irving's mom wasn't too happy, but Norma got her man

"The Heart of the Lion," covers the years 1925 though 1936, the year of Thalberg's death at age 37. A frail and sickly child, raised in fear by an over-protective and over-bearing mother, Thalberg's health was always precarious. The fact that he was not expected to live past the age of 30 was drummed into him as a child. Turnbull presents a young man who, believing himself to be living on borrowed time, feels compelled to achieve, achieve, and achieve. And achieve he did. You can almost hear the tick tick tick of time running out in Turnbull's prose, as Thalberg tries valiantly to grab the most life has to offer while all the while knowing that the shadow of death lurked nearby.

Turnbull paints a vivid picture of Hollywood in the 20s and 30s, the time when silent stars were gods, sound and the Great Depression shattered their west coast Mount Olympus and the subsequent rebuilding of MGM into a new kingdom that boasted more stars than there were in heaven. The sad demise of John Gilbert, Thalberg's great friend, is handled as a fate inevitable as it is heartbreaking. On the other hand, Joan Crawford is a brassy hoot and Harlow is a sassy charmer. It's great to spend time with them. However, the most important moments are reserved for those between Thalberg and Mayer, his feckless father figure who threw him over for son-in-law David O. Selznick, and Norma Shearer. The imagined scenes between Thalberg and Norma are beautifully done, with their intimate conversation at Carole Lombard's Mayfair Ball bringing a tear to my eye.

Oh yes she did! Norma (pictured here with David Niven, Merle Oberon
and Thalberg) did a Jezebel and wore red to
Carole Lombard's white-gown-only-please Mayfair Ball

For the record, this is a fictional biography, a novel, but the research is impeccable. Trust me: I consider myself a great repository of useless Hollywood history and detail and a few times I thought - aha! I spy a mistake! - only to find out I was wrong and Martin Turnbull was right. 

Irving and Norma: Happy

Thalberg's name never once appeared on screen as a film's producer, but as MGM's Head of Production from 1925 until his death, his was the unseen hand that built a dreamland that endures in the heart of every classic movie lover to this day. Leo the Lion might have been the face and the roar of the great studio, but Thalberg was its beating heart, a heart that was filled with love for the movies and one that was taken from the world much too soon.

You can purchase "The Heart of the Lion," as well as Turbull's Garden of Allah novels Here

*Since Lillian Gish is downing a sidecar at a prohibition era Hollywood party, she might just have been sipping it primly from a teacup, don't you think?

Sidecar Cocktail recipe

1.5 oz Dudognon Cognac
1 oz Cointreau
.5 oz Lemon juice
Lemon twist

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass, garnishing with the twist.

MGM Blogathon: Crawford + Adrian = Unforgettable Film Fashion

This is my entry in the MGM Blogathon, hosted by silver Scenes. Click HERE for more, more, more about the greatest studio of Hollywood's greatest age. 

Hear me roar!

With more stars than the heavens, MGM supported their stars with the crème de la crème of directors, writers, set and costume designers. In a town built upon dreams, it was the Dream Factory supreme.

Gilbert Adrian: How shall I make Garbo, Crawford,
Shearer and Harlow look like goddesses?

One of Hollywood’s greatest costume designers, Gilbert Adrian (1903 - 1959) made his home at MGM for over 200 films. There he was able to give full expression to his vision of the glamorous, the spectacular and the divine. With one of his greatest collaborators, Greta Garbo, he created a world of exotic and elegant mystery with a foreign flair. Garbo proved to be the greatest mannequin for his vision of European glamour.

Garbo as Adrian's vision of Mata Hari. Definitely NOT the girl next door

Garbo in Romance: Adrian's height of European glamour

So, who would have guessed that the sophisticated Adrian would find another great muse in the star who personified the working class aspirations of American women? Someone said that Fred Astaire gave Ginger Rogers class and she gave him sex appeal. While Adrian’s collaboration with Joan Crawford elevated her into the stratosphere of world class elegance, she gave him a subject with whom he could segue from the remote and exotic to the  deceptively ordinary, a look with which 1930s depression audiences could more easily identify. The rarefied world of Garbo was done, replaced by the working girl’s trials and tribulations.

 

Sadie McKee - Crawford works it

Sadie McKee again: just your average girl next door

No More Ladies - Every accessory, down to the sheepdog, counts

Of course, the common touch of Crawford was as much an illusion as the mystery of Garbo. Throughout the entire decade of the 1930s Adrian and Crawford showed that American style - Hollywood style - was where it was at and the world followed their lead.

Dancing Lady

Forsaking All Others - my favorite Adrian creation for Joan

Probably their greatest creation is from a film that is impossible to view today. Letty Lynton (1932) featured Joan in a ruffled white organdy gown that grabbed the imagination of American women. The story goes that Macy's, that mothership of class aspiration, copied the iconic dress and sold over 500,000. The dress was featured in Macy's Cinema Shop, which featured replicas of dresses worn by Hollywood stars. 

Hello, Macy's? If I buy this dress will I look like Joan Crawford?

Joan as Letty. Will we ever be able to see a decent
version of Adrian's gorgeous creations?

Another side of Letty Lynton.... presumably the hot and passionate side.

The modern woman wraps herself in aluminum foil

Unfortunately, this film was almost immediately tangled in a copyright dispute and still remains unavailable. There are some crummy snippets of a bootleg version on YouTube, but it hurts the eyes.

As Hollywood transitioned from silence to sound and the world transitioned from the excesses of the 1920s to the hard realities of the Great Depression, Adrian, Crawford and MGM adapted and prospered. Together, in the darkest of times, each played their part to keep the dream and fantasy of Hollywood alive.