#14 Golden Age of Hollywood Series
Here’s an infuriating fact—in 2020, most people know Joan Crawford only as Mommie Dearest—a badly aging insane woman with thick eyebrows who beats her adopted daughter.
No line Crawford ever uttered in her movies will be as famous as Faye Dunaway as Joan screaming, “No wire hangers ever!”
The film Mommie Dearest was based on a memoir written by Joan’s daughter, and though the accuracy of both has been widely questioned, it is indisputable that Joan and Christina did not get along, and that Joan was not a particularly good mother.
It’s also indisputable that Joan was a driven and increasingly haunted woman. She had pulled herself out of a childhood of grinding poverty and never felt worthy of her success. She forbade wire hangers because her mother worked in a dry cleaner’s, and Joan did not like to be reminded of her past.
Joan gave her life to her career—like many big stars, she had a string of failed marriages and strained relationships with her children. Her work was all she had, and when age took its toll on her career, she never recovered.
But all that comes later.
Today let’s talk about Joan in 1931. She was young and beautiful, and right on the heels of Garbo and Norma Shearer as one of the MGM Queens. She was all glamour and potential.
(Strangely enough, Crawford actually starred in two unrelated films both called Possessed, one in 1931 for MGM and one much later in 1947 when she’d moved over to Warner Brothers.)
Joan had top billing in 1931’s Possessed, over Clark Gable, her up and coming co-star.
She plays Marian Martin, a poor but ambitious girl who ditches her job at the paper mill to find adventure and a rich man in New York. She finds all that and love too with Gable’s Mark Whitney. She transforms herself into a sophisticated kept woman. But Mark does not want to marry, and thus Marian has to suffer the myriad indignities that come with being a mistress and not a wife in 1931.
It is no exaggeration to say that I adore this movie. It’s the first movie we’ve covered that you absolutely must watch if you want to appreciate Old Hollywood. Young Joan is the ultimate Hollywood Glamour Girl and Young Clark doesn’t yet have his trademark mustache. It’s got an ending that’ll make you melt, and plenty of hot backstage gossip.
For when the director said cut, Crawford and Gable weren’t turning down the heat. They’d made two previous pictures together, and the sparks were obvious to all. In Possessed, those sparks burst into flame.
Though both married at the time, Crawford and Gable began a lusty affair.
Crawford and Gable would maintain their on-again, off-again affair for years, and though it eventually ended, they made eight movies together and remained lifelong friends.
Some thought they would eventually marry, but from all accounts they never considered it. Joan was too headstrong and ambitious and felt it would never work. Gable was a tightwad and didn’t want the expense of a divorce.
Some say that Joan wasn’t a great actress, that she got by first on beauty and later on a willingness to take any role, no matter how pathetic.
This is a disservice to Joan Craword. You can count on one hand the number of actors and actresses who have had more successful careers than Joan Crawford.
You don’t survive in Hollywood for forty-five years without talent. You don’t make ninety-two films, with thirty of those films coming after age forty in a time and business when women were washed up when they could no longer play the young love interest.
Garbo hung it up at thirty-six. Shearer at forty.
But Joan Crawford was just getting started.
Want more? Click here for an index of all posts in this series, as well as source notes and suggested reading.
