“Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face” Brings a Star’s Genius to Light

Once Crawford slipped into her style, she never slipped out of it—not publicly. “Never in the thousands of times in our association, was she ever less than perfectly dressed, in full makeup,” a publicist at M-G-M recalled. “She was never casual, not even if it was for an audience of only 20 fans. She had an image of herself and she lived up to it.” (Moreover, Eyman notes that the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, “allowed Crawford to keep the clothes from her movies so she could look like a star at all times, and on the studio’s dime.”) Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., (whom she married in 1929 and divorced in 1933), said, “She was the hardest worker I ever saw. Her only excess I can remember was an excess of ambition. She was completely absorbed with her career and with work.”

Eyman’s thesis is that Crawford’s drive for stardom “was about finding and receiving the attention and love she had always hungered for and never had.” That reads like an M-G-M logline. For Crawford, the business of stardom, the art of performance, and the craving for self-transformation were inseparable. This art didn’t come naturally; it took years of on-the-job self-cultivation and is inextricable from the story of the formation and development of the real-life fiction that is Crawford. That’s how she became the most profoundly movie-made actor of all movie stars. For instance, her exertions extended to publicity photos; she often spent a whole day changing costumes, hairdos, and makeup for the photographer George Hurrell, who said that “she used this opportunity to try to present a new image that might possibly work for her whole screen personality.”

With her relentless quest for visual self-awareness, Crawford became an expert in cinematography. The actor Raymond Massey, one of her co-stars in “Possessed” (1947) said, “She was the best technician I ever met. Could match close-ups and long shots flawlessly. Knew everything about lighting, camera lenses, and dressed for the camera, and not the other actors.” The director Vincent Sherman, who made three movies with her in the nineteen-fifties, concurred. “She was a collaborator in working to achieve a total effect. She was the kind of person that you could talk to about the way you wanted to shoot the thing, the background, the cutting. She was conscious of everything that went on set,” he said. Crawford was obsessed with controlling her filmic appearance, recalling, “I religiously looked at my dailies every night. And I studied myself.”

Crawford worked hard at acting, too—at conveying emotion, which she did in a distinctively modern way, by actually feeling it. Never having done anything onstage but dance, she didn’t understand the art of pretending. Fairbanks again: “She could not believe that Lynn Fontanne might feel physically dreadful yet be able to perform high comedy with supreme and subtle wit. Nor could she believe that a great actress like Helen Hayes could consciously reduce audiences to uncontrollable tears while she thought about having a juicy steak sandwich after the performance.” The result was both straightforward and complex. Her speech, lacking theatrical craft, is direct, stark, and unmannered, and the finely honed artifice of her physical bearing is the basis for the immediacy and spontaneity of the emotions she unleashes. In effect, Crawford stumbled on a Method of her own making, later explaining, “I remember every one of my important roles the way I remember a part of my life, because at the time I did them, I was the role and it was my life for 14 hours a day.”

Eyman emphasizes that M-G-M was the most star-centric of all studios—and also the most top-down, executive-managed one. Directors there were under tight control, and Crawford had little regard for most of them, though she did hold one in particular esteem: George Cukor, with whom she made three films—most notably, “The Women” (1939), in which she had an indelibly vicious supporting role as a department-store sales clerk who seduces a rich married man. In that prime studio era, actors, directors, screenwriters, and even composers of scores were under long-term contract (generally, seven years), and technicians (such as cinematographers, set designers, and hairdressers) were permanent, salaried employees; as a result, each studio’s style, set from above, was baked into its movies. Crawford’s early starring roles tended toward tough women, whether laborers or dancers or playgirls, whose sexual allure is a source of power. Still, M-G-M’s notion of raciness was tamer than in other studios—and once the bowdlerizing Hays Code was put into full effect, in the mid-thirties, the studio shifted, as Eyman says, to “middle-class domestic fantasy,” which meshed poorly with Crawford’s image and her personality. Even her better films at the studio (such as Dorothy Arzner’s “The Bride Wore Red,” a trio of films directed by Frank Borzage that includes “Mannequin,” and her last one with Cukor, “A Woman’s Face,” from which Eyman’s book gets its title) were cramped by sentimentality. Her popularity declined; many in the business thought her career was over.

In 1943, Crawford asked to be released from her contract and quickly signed with Warner Bros., a brassier joint, whose roster of films emphasized hardboiled and populist dramas. The first movie in which she was cast there, “Mildred Pierce”—shot in 1944, released in 1945—won her an Oscar for Best Actress. Entering her forties, Crawford was back and bigger than ever. What’s more, she had found her artistic voice, but, unfortunately, she didn’t quite know this and wasn’t especially happy about it. When she went to Warner Bros., her style changed, hardened, and not just because of the studio: by the time she got there, she’d recently endured a breakup with a man she loved, the newspaper publisher Charles McCabe, because he was married and wouldn’t divorce his wife. She was in her third marriage, and it, too, was failing; she’d adopted children (Christina, born in 1939, and Christopher, born in 1942; later, the twins Cathy and Cindy, born in 1947), which brought additional pressure. The Second World War made for an ambient tension; her career change was stressful. She had loved the corporate protection that M-G-M offered: her responsibility was to show up on time and do her work, and it indeed took up just about all her time.