Possessed (7 page)

Born in 1904 into a wealthy family of actors, Constance was raised in an atmosphere of fine breeding and high style. Her father was the eminent stage and screen actor Richard Bennett, and her two sisters, Joan and Barbara, also became actresses; of the three, Joan Bennett had the longest and most notable career.

Despite her background and breeding, Constance was a hot-headed rebel who did not gladly suffer fools (or most people). An arbiter of impeccable fashion and the quintessential Hollywood hostess, Constance had everything Joan admired and secretly envied, and her wealth, innate good taste and good humor made her one of the most popular women in Hollywood, notwithstanding her notorious temper. She lived in a twenty-room mansionin Holmby Hills (a rarefied section between Beverly Hills and Brentwood), where her guests were among the most famous, the wealthiest and the most powerful people in America.

With everything Hollywood marketed and envied and a gift for both comedy and drama, Constance never really developed an interest in perfecting her talent. At her peak, in 1932, she was Hollywood’s highest paid star, with a weekly salary of thirty thousand dollars—equal to $475,000 a week in 2010 valuation—and she remained in the business only to make that kind of money. Openly contemptuous of studios and moguls, she did not care if she worked or not, and finally she withdrew from the screen, turned to the theatre, went out on road tours and developed a nightclub act. An unpredictable nature and the pursuit of a wild private life hindered her career for many years, but after a series of bad marriages, she settled down with a husband she adored, and her life became both serious and—to the astonishment of many who knew her—dedicated to the welfare of others.

That year, Joan learned from Constance a great deal about wardrobe, accessories, makeup and the fine points of being a polite hostess. The two women were never close friends after
Sally, Irene and Mary,
but Joan recognized quality and was unafraid to put questions to Constance, who was amused by the down-to-earth qualities of her costar. She regarded Joan as a midwestern ragtag who could benefit from some polishing, but years later she spoke of her with touching affection and deep admiration.

In her public image, Constance Bennett was the living embodiment of an elusive quality called glamour—a term worth exploring, for very much of Joan Crawford’s career was characterized by glamour, glamorous scenes and glamorous photographs.

IN ITS ORIGINAL ENGLISH
usage in the eighteenth century,
glamour
meant magic or enchantment—specifically, a deceptive, bewitching and dangerous beauty or charm. Linked to the spells of witches and sorcerers, glamour indicated a mysteriously exciting or alluring physical attractiveness, artificiallycontrived for the purpose of bringing someone “under the glamour,” or making them effectively spellbound—that is, bound by a spell. The implication was frankly negative. By the time of Tennyson, “casting the glamour over someone” meant bewitching them by an illusion—causing a kind of haze to fall over someone’s sight, so that things are seen in a form different from their reality. A glamorous person, therefore, was not a reality but an illusion, created in order to possess or control the beholder, to manipulate others into forbidden or dangerous actions.

Glamour, then, came to mean a form of falsification—but falsification to achieve a particular purpose: in Hollywood terms, to celebrate a star, or to sell a film. No one is glamorous by nature, and glamour today involves a complicated process of idealization. In Hollywood, there was an enormous effort by technical means to create glamorous, spellbinding personalities, men as well as women. Makeup experts founded schools and systems by which hues and tints were created not only for the consistent representation of a character in a story, but also for separate glamour shots that had nothing to do with a particular movie.

And so photographers set up, arranged and rearranged their lights, retouchers retouched, lighting experts created shadows to glorify the subject and to diminish any of nature’s little mistakes. The tricks and effects were innumerable and were often minor works of genius, and the portraits were so painstakingly set up, taken and altered that the end result seemed like something from another world, or at least another sphere of reality. Did any glamour portrait of any star ever really resemble someone you might encounter at the market?

In real life, Constance Bennett was certainly a memorably beautiful woman, but photographs rendered her unimaginably,
impossibly
beautiful. She was not, of course, the only one to bewitch: there were many such women in Hollywood—and men, too. In every case, artifice added to, complemented and sometimes triumphed over nature. That is because Hollywood is, after all, about artifice and unreality. As Ingrid Bergman said, “Everything in Hollywood is fake—the teeth are fake, the clothes are fake, the look is fake—everything!” She then told the story of a movie actor who goes into a studio commissary for lunch and asks the waiter for a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. The man is told there is coffee, but the restaurant is out of pie. “Well, then, fake it!” the actor replies. “This is Hollywood, after all—anything is possible!”

WHILE JOAN WAS OBSERVING
and learning from Constance Bennett, she made a lifelong friendship with another player in the cast of
Sally, Irene and Mary.
William Haines was twenty-five, tall and handsome. After appearing in nineteen films in three years, he had become one of the most popular actors in America. “He gave me great advice,” she recalled, “and he escorted me to wonderful places.” The most critical counsel provided by Billy (as friends called him) was to urge that Joan engage her own publicist, to supplement what Pete Smith was doing at Metro. Before she could insist that she couldn’t afford to pay for that kind of service, Billy paid the publicist’s fee and put him on Joan’s case.

Joan Crawford and Billy Haines were seen everywhere—at fine restaurants and (thanks to his fame and connections) at the best Hollywood parties. After Joan, no one was more delighted about this relationship than Louis B. Mayer, who otherwise thought of William Haines as his biggest headache. Haines was not only exclusively homosexual, he was—horrors!—quite unapologetic about it and very comfortable in his true nature. He was no crusader, but he made no secret of the fact that he shared his life and home with his partner, Jimmy Shields, and he never pretended to carry on a romance with any woman.

Decades later, it is difficult for many people to imagine that there was a time in Hollywood—indeed, in all of America—when no man or woman could be openly gay, and when most homosexuals had to lead lives of secrecy and dread, or contracted absurd, often tragic marriages. Nor was it proper for people to openly befriend homosexuals—that was considered as reprehensible as associating with people of color or criminals. Some things just were not done. To her credit, Joan Crawford never shared any of the prejudices of her time or her profession, and a friend was a friend, gay or not. “Billy and Jimmy had the most beautiful relationship I’ve ever known,” Joan said. “It was the best marriage I ever saw in Hollywood.”

As their friendship blossomed, Joan was cast in several more films with Billy—perhaps on direct orders from Mayer himself, who hatched the idea that it would solve the Haines problem and bring enormous favorable publicity to the studio if the two friends married. When Pete Smith’s assistant, Howard Strickling, presented the notion to Joan and Billy, their reaction was a loud burst of laughter. The friendship continued unalloyed, but Billy’s troubles at Metro were only beginning.

As for Mayer, he had another matter to attend to. He had hired a Swedish actress named Greta Garbo, who had arrived in September, ten days before she turned twenty. At first, he and his producers hadn’t the remotest idea how to use her. In December, just after the release of
Sally, Irene and Mary,
she was at work in
Torrent.
After that, in less than sixteen years (until the autumn of 1941), Garbo appeared in a total of twenty-five films for Metro; during the same period, Joan was seen in fifty-four. But by 1927, Garbo was paid $5,000 a week, and four years later, her fee was $250,000 per picture. Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford were fighting for good roles, but Garbo had the largest bank account—and with it, she purchased huge parcels of Beverly Hills real estate that still belonged to her when she died.

The press and the public were convinced that behind the enigmatic Garbo mask was a woman of exotic and erotic mystery. They were wrong. In reality, she was a humorless soul, unformed, without a solid sense of identity or any intellectual curiosity, solitary to the point of being antisocial and in fact quite dull. A completely self-absorbed woman with no real interest in anyone else, she became one of the most famous neurotics of the twentieth century but was mistakenly perceived to be something of a goddess.

“She wanted to be profound,” said the writer Peter Viertel, son of Garbo’s friend and collaborator Salka Viertel, “but she never realized the way you do it is by getting on with life.” Unlike Joan, Garbo could not be approached for a chat by coworkers on the Metro lot: she was regarded with an awe that was almost unimaginable—an attitude she encouraged by her remoteness. For all that, her power and income were immense. Such was the power of glamour alone, disconnected from a life of substance.

Constance Bennett and Greta Garbo were never Crawford’s rivals. Except for three films, Bennett’s work was at studios other than Metro. As for Garbo, she was the distant foreigner, cast in very different roles from Crawford, who was always recognizably American, solid and quite the opposite of elusive or mystical. But Joan was “a bundle of insecurities,” as she said, and her vulnerability led her to always regard every actress as a potential rival. In the decades to come, her fear of losing what she strove so hard to achieve—her creation of Joan Crawford and her dismissal of the embarrassing Lucille Le Sueur—sometimes led to ungenerous behavior she deeply regretted.

1
Also in 1925, Joan worked as an uncredited extra in Proud Flesh, A Slave of Fashion, The Merry Widow, The Circle and The Midshipman. That year, she appeared in a total of ten pictures.

2
Her height was five feet three inches until very late in life, and after 1925, she rarely weighed over one hundred fifteen pounds. Her natural hair color was red, modified for each picture according to the necessity of the role, the wardrobe and the genre of the movie. Her large blue eyes were her best feature. Often, there were special makeup requirements because of her freckles, which were highlighted by the Southern California sunshine and studio arc lights.

3
Among many other names considered or listed as runners-up: Diana Gray, Joan Gray, Ann Morgan, Peggy Shaw and Joan Arden.

CHAPTER THREE
Enter the Prince
| 1926–1929|

I
N 1926 JOAN CARRIED ON
her life with her usual high-voltage energy, learning what she could, dancing several evenings each week and campaigning for roles at Metro. Thanks to Billy Haines and her publicity team, Joan was named a WAMPAS Baby Star—not that she was a baby, but rather a “little star” quickly growing up, according to the judgment of the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers. (Among the others named that year were Mary Astor, Fay Wray, Janet Gaynor and Dolores Del Rio.)

Joan’s salary was raised to $250 per week ($3,000 a week in 2010) beginning in January, and this enabled her to quit the Washington Hotel. She took a short-term lease on a house on Courtney Avenue, above Hollywood Boulevard, and Billy Haines (who had a genius for interior design) offered to help furnish and decorate it. Built in 1924, the house had been briefly occupied by another Metro employee who had quit the business. But Joan soon realized her mistake: the house spread over more than ten thousand square feet—far too much room for a working girl living alone, as Billy pointed out. She decided to occupy only four rooms while she looked for a smaller place closer to Culver City.

Despite his quixotic attempt to marry her off to Billy, Mayer had considerable respect for Joan throughout her long tenure at the studio. Contrary to the attitude and behavior of many stars toward their bosses, she enjoyed a genial and trusting rapport with the man she regarded not only as her employer but also as the owner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—which, of course, he was not.

“He was a fine man, and I admired him. I regarded him as my protector, like Daddy Cassin and Daddy Wood. Mr. Mayer was very important in my life, and I felt he watched over my career.” But Norma Shearer had a more powerful protector in Thalberg, whom she married in 1927, thus securing virtually any role that suited her fancy. To her credit, Joan spoke kindly of Norma: “Professionally, she was good—a little aloof, but not bad, considering she was royalty, the queen of the lot.”

Joan’s roles in twenty-seven silent films between 1925 and 1929 provided a solid and valuable apprenticeship for the sixty feature talkies that followed from 1929 to 1970. When sound arrived, it was clear that she had an expressive voice free of regional inflections, and while she appreciated superbly crafted dialogue, she learned that less is more—that glances, gestures and images should be the primary means of telling a story, and that talking pictures should not be (as Alfred Hitchcock memorably said) mere pictures of people talking. From directors of her silent films like Edmund Goulding, Eddie Cline and Jack Conway, Joan learned how to minimize actions and reactions, playing subtly rather than grandly. And from dancing, she knew how to use her arms and legs fluidly and gracefully, without sudden shifts or awkward poses.

IMPRESSED WITH HER PERFORMANCE
in
Sally, Irene and Mary,
the comedian Harry Langdon paid Mayer handsomely to borrow Joan for a role in his independent picture
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,
made early in 1926. Not as enduringly famous as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, Langdon wore clown-white makeup that exaggerated his wide gaze, affecting a preadolescent meekness at the ripe age of forty-two. That year, he was in the midst ofa busy if somewhat confused career that was eventually ruined by an enormous ego unsuspected by those who saw only his mild on-screen character.