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Chapter Twelve VICTIM Joan's next script was originally entitled The Victim and was based on the life of gangster's moll Virginia Hill, who had been involved with such famous criminals as Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, and Bugsy Siegel. The director, Vincent Sherman, was concerned that, at forty-six, Joan was too old to play a young girl at the beginning of the picture, but he thought it would work if she played a woman just a couple of years younger than she actually was. He felt that women in middle age still had ambitions and romantic dreams and that Joan's own romanticism and desperation as she herself approached fifty would imbue her performance with added authenticity. Sherman had a somewhat chunky build and was not exactly handsome, but he was masculine and attractive in a rough-hewn way. He had already had an affair with Bette Davis when Joan put the moves on him as they watched a screening of Humoresque; Joan had suggested that watching the movie might help him decide which of the hairstyles she wore in it would work for the new film. Undergoing a rough patch in his marriage, Sherman responded to Joan's advances when he had dinner in her home one night and the two wound up having sex in the shower. Confronted by his wife, Hedda, he confessed everything. "I suppose it's too much to ask of any man that he turn down a chance to sleep with Joan Crawford," his very understanding wife replied. When Hedda got to meet Joan at a party at the latter's house, she found to her surprise that she rather liked the actress. As she told her husband, "She's gracious and considerate, and if you can see beneath the Hollywood crap, you can detect a woman who refused to become a loser, who pulled herself up from nothing and made something of her life." It's ironic that so many people whom Joan never harmed felt it necessary to attack her after her death, but this woman, with the most legitimate possible grievance against Joan, actually felt sympathetic toward her. According to Sherman, Joan was convinced Hedda didn't really love him and wanted him to divorce her and marry Joan. In other words, Joan was playing Daisy Kenyon. Whether she was actually in love with the director or was just pretending out of some other motive is open to debate. In any case, in due time the picture was finished and its title was changed to the more dynamic The Damned Don't Cry (I950). The story of The Damned Don't Cry unfolds in flashbacks, as police investigate the background of a supposed heiress who has gone missing at a scene of violence. "Lorna Hansen Forbes" is actually Ethel Whitehead (Joan), who left her husband and small town after the accidental death of her young son. Determined to get something out of life, she befriends an accountant named Martin (Kent Smith), whom she encourages to take a job in the outfit run by mobster George Castleman (David Brian). Martin is afraid he'll lose his self-respect. "Don't tell me about self-respect!" Ethel snaps at him. "That's what you tell yourself you got when you got nothing else!" Ethel eventually becomes the well-heeled and glamorously attired girlfriend of Castleman himself, and all goes well until Castleman suspects one of his subordinates, Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran), of plotting against him. Castleman gives Ethel a new identity and sends her to Prenta in order to get close to him and find out the truth. Ethel becomes a little too close to Prenta, and a shootout ensues, after which Ethel makes her way back to her childhood home. Castleman arrives to kill Ethel, but is shot dead by loyal Martin before Castleman can do more than wound his errant lover. Joan looks properly plain and battered in the early "poverty" scenes, and the rest of the time is as glamorous as ever. Unimpressed movie critic Bosley Crowther labeled her acting "artificial," and while there's some truth to that assessment, it doesn't tell the whole story. Her performance has bite and commands attention, and she plays with passion - but, as Crowther noted, not with any particular subtlety or nuance. In other words, Joan is snappy but all surface. However, she does have her moments: she's very compelling in the brutal climax when Brian tosses Ethel around as she desperately tries to dodge his blows and get away. And throughout the movie she puts on the kind of performance that she knew her fans expected. But by no stretch of the imagination is any of it "bad" acting. Of the supporting cast, Brian as Castleman and Richard Egan as her husband come off best. Stronger than usual in his portrayal of a jealous mobster desperate to defend his turf and wipe out his enemies, Brian demonstrates a heretofore unrealized versatility. Whether engaging in sexy banter or telling each other off, Joan and Brian always worked well together. The Damned Don't Cry was Richard Egan's first movie, and he would go on to enjoy a long and varied career as a character actor. Joan tried to get her lover-director Vincent Sherman jealous by taking long walks with Egan, and with Steve Cochran. The Damned Don't Cry is no masterpiece - Joan herself never cared for it - but it's much better than Joan's later "gun moll" movie This Woman Is Dangerous. Thanks to Vincent Sherman, the film generates some tension and suspense, especially in its confrontational moments, and it's never dull. Some of the dialogue is amusing, such as when Joan listens to the different positions that a job counselor has to offer and asks, "Isn't there something better?" To which the counselor replies, "Well, there's the Republican Presidential nomination." The picture works in a lightweight way as a study of a woman in over her head, like many films of its type a cautionary tale. The movie ends with a conversation between two cops; one of them wonders if Ethel Whitehead will make another attempt to get out of her miserable environment. The other cop looks at the near-shanty Ethel grew up in and says, "Wouldn't you?" Then again, The Damned Don't Cry is never far from the world of schlock. The death of Ethel's little boy on his bicycle is a heartbreaking scene, but it's simply the impetus that starts his mother on her heady road to ultimate damnation. Ethel should be completely numb on the day of her son's funeral, incapable of thinking or planning, let alone ready to take off on a new adventure, but that's what happens. Is the picture commenting on Ethel's cold nature? Is Ethel deliberately trying to commit slow suicide by taking up with dangerous people? You won't find out by watching The Damned Don't Cry, because it has little to say on the subject. Warner executives were pleased with The Damned Don't Cry, and Columbia wanted Joan and Sherman to team up, on loan out, for a subsequent feature. Based on a Pulitzer-Prize winning play by George Kelly entitled Craig's Wife, it had already been filmed twice, once by Cecil B. DeMille's brother William in 1926, and once by Dorothy Arzner in 1936, starring Rosalind Russell and John Boles. A misunderstanding developed between director and star when Sherman told Joan he thought the script was badly dated and that neither of them should do it. Joan bowed out, and the assignment was handed to Margaret Sullavan, with Sherman attached as director. But Sherman had agreed to work with Sullavan without realizing that the project they would be working together on was Lady of the House. Joan contacted the film's producer, William Dozier, and got herself cast in it after all. In truth, Joan and Sherman were probably manipulated into doing the picture. It was highly unlikely that Sullavan would ever have accepted a part that was so patently wrong for her. Instead she made a film that was completely right for her, No Sad Songs for Me(1950), rejected all other offers, and retired from the screen for good until her death ten years later. In this new version of an old play, now retitled Harriet Craig (1950), Joan played the title role, teamed with Wendell Corey, who played Harriet's husband Walter. The basic premise remained - a woman seems to love her home, furnishings, and gracious manner of living more than anything - but there were some minor changes to the supporting characters and to the storyline, including the elimination of a murder/suicide subplot involving friends of the Craigs. Harriet was now also much more multi-dimensional than she was in the earlier versions. In all three versions, the heroine suffers terrible early privations in life because of her father's abandonment of the family for another woman; this accounts for Harriet's preference for possessions over men. In the 1936 version, Rosalind Russell played Harriet in a very icy, relatively unemotional fashion that left no room for sympathy, whereas Joan's Harriet is much more loving and affectionate to her husband, and a more well-rounded person. Perhaps because of Joan's more apparent sensuality and femininity, one can imagine her Harriet making love to her husband, whereas in the earlier film one supposes that the married couple have stopped having sex a long time ago. At the same time, Joan's Harriet is more monstrous than Russell's in her behavior. She destroys her cousin's relationship with her boyfriend by lying to her, and even goes to Walter's boss behind his back to intimate that he can't be relied upon, just to keep the boss from sending him to Japan for three months on business. Chic and handsome, Joan exhibits her wonderfully disciplined technique in every scene, although there are times when she could perhaps have exuded more vulnerability without betraying the veracity of the character. Vincent Sherman recalled that the shoot went smoothly, and that Joan was the consummate professional. In her dressing room, the two had dinner and, presumably, occasional sexual encounters. Sherman was not alone in noting that Harriet and Joan shared certain characteristics: abandonment by their fathers (Joan's best scene is when Harriet recalls this) and a reverence for possessions and cleanliness. In truth, Harriet Craig was very close to some aspects of the real Joan, but the two women were more different than alike. For instance, Joan never had to rely upon any man to get her the good things in life. Also, Harriet is right about some things, such as the rose-carrying next-door neighbor who rather intrusively comes over all the time. After the picture wrapped, Sherman took a vacation with Joan - with his wife's permission. According to Sherman, the two drove to Canada, stopping in motels along the way where they registered under assumed names. Sherman's wife was not overjoyed when a columnist got wind of the escapade. The trip was also cut short because, according to Sherman, Joan kept nagging him to divorce his wife and marry her. Sherman and Joan continued their professional (and physical) association with their next picture, Goodbye, My Fancy (1951), which had originally been a Broadway play with Madeleine Carroll. In the film Joan played Agatha Reed, a congresswoman who goes back to the college that had expelled her when they offer her an honorary degree. There's a problem, however, when the administration is afraid to show Agatha's anticommunist film. The initially clever storyline eventually turns into a plea for freedom of speech that manages the remarkable feat of seeming both left- and right-wing at the same time. Joan is at her best in the second half of the film, when the script provides her with some righteous zingers. Goodbye, My Fancy may have seemed daring in its day (or, given the political climate, cravenly safe). Aside from Joan, a very young Janice Rule stood out, and Eve Arden was reliably good as a snappy colleague of Joan's. ("It was miscasting for Joan as an intellectual," Arden wrote in her memoirs.) The picture did not do well at the box office. "They watered it down so much," Joan said later, "that there was hardly any point in making it. A complete waste of time for everyone!" Joan and Rule did not get along. Depending on whom you listen to, either Joan picked on Rule because she was jealous of her youth and the attention both the press and Sherman lavished on her in her film debut, or Rule provoked Joan with her total lack of professionalism. Both accounts may have had some truth to them. One afternoon, Joan snapped at Rule, "Youcertainly won't be in this business very long!" There's no doubt that Joan became jealous of younger costars on occasion - she was human, after all - but she was still The Star of the picture. Rule's lack of experience and "theater world" arrogance made Joan impatient, but Rule's persistent refusal to listen to and absorb advice from the director and others made Joan outright angry. As Joan often said in one form or another over the years, "You can have all the talent in the world, but it won't do you a bit of good if you're an idiot." Joan never suffered fools gladly. At the same time, she was an honest admirer of talent. In her autobiography, Joan actually apologized to Rule because she found her performance in The Subterraneans(1960) so superb. When Joan accepted the part in Goodbye, My Fancy, she assumed that it was only offered to her because the studio couldn't get their first choices, Katherine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell, both of whom Joan thought would have been better in the film. She gave credit for the relative success of the film and her capable performance to her director, who continued to accompany her to the bedroom frequently. Considering that her male costars in Goodbye, My Fancy were Robert Young and Frank Lovejoy - neither of whom sparked any romantic stirrings in Joan - it's no wonder that she continued to focus on the director. Neither the gentlemanly, placid Young - whom Joan only liked in a platonic sense - nor the rather crude Lovejoy was the type to get her motor racing. Sherman tried to get Lovejoy fired because he felt he wouldn't have any on-screen chemistry with Joan, although there are those who felt that Sherman and Lovejoy were similar "types" and that Sherman just felt threatened. Joan's relationship with Sherman did not last long after Goodbye, My Fancy wrapped. In his memoirs, Sherman wrote that there was a melodramatic conclusion, with Joan alternately throwing him out, phoning his wife that she could "have him back," and then attempting suicide (or pretending to) so that he would come running back to her. Years later, Joan would not openly admit to an affair with Sherman, although she hinted at it. On one occasion, Joan seemed a little bitter about Sherman: Sherman was a user. I knew it. He knew it. We used each other. His wife was a masochist and I lost respect for her - I would never have let a man get away with the things he did. He wanted very much to be up in the big leagues and he figured I was his ticket. It didn't matter what his wife wanted. He would holler at me that he didn't like the way I tried to control him, but he never gave me back any of my gifts, did he? He made it clear that I was only a diversion, but he didn't understand that that was all he was to me. At times he could really be a prick. However, she said more than once that she felt he was a good, sympathetic director and that she admired the independent stance he took with the studios. As usual, Bosley Crowther had it in for Joan, although he did concede that she succeeded in making "the atmosphere... electrically charged." But, he added, "The lady is famously given to striking aggressive attitudes and to carrying herself in a manner that is formidable and cold. That is the principal misfortune of Goodbye, My Fancy. Miss Crawford's errant congresswoman is as aloof and imposing as the capital dome." This Woman Is Dangerous was Joan's last Warner Brothers film until Trog, nearly twenty years later. (Ten years, if one counts What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962, distributed but not produced by Warner Brothers.) Joan wanted to end her association with Warner Brothers so that she could get the lead in Sudden Fear. Jack Warner thought Joan's days as a star were coming to an end, and he wanted to end her contract. He offered her the script for This Woman Is Dangerous in the hopes that she would realize how third-rate it was, and turn it down. Joan surprised him by taking on the assignment. Her price? To be let out of her contract. Joan was happy about that, at least. Unfortunately, the film still had to be made. This Woman Is Dangerous turned out to be a tired and inferior retread of A Woman's Face. In it, Joan plays Beth Austin, another tough gal with a soft heart who's fallen in with thieves after a brief stay in prison. Now she is the girlfriend of gangster Matt Jackson (David Brian), her former cellmate's brother-in-law. When she finds out that she will lose her sight unless she gets an operation, she goes to a clinic run by Dr. Ben Halleck (Dennis Morgan), who not only restores her vision but also falls in love with her. Beth is torn between the two men - the one rough and exciting, the other decent and romantic - but fate intervenes when Jackson is killed by the police during an attempt to murder his rival in the operating theater. Done properly, This Woman Is Dangerous might have amounted to an intriguing piece of film noir, but instead it was turned into little more than a Joan Crawford formula film. Joan may seem excessively calm when she first learns that she may go blind in only a few days, but she's playing a very tough cookie who is all too accustomed to hiding her emotions. Some critics harped on this scene as evidence of her limited acting skills, even though her reaction is clearly explained in the dialogue: "I find it difficult to get emotional when there are other people around," says Beth. Joan was back with David Brian of Flamingo Road and The Damned Don't Cry. By this time, Brian seemed to be cast in every Warner Brothers movie featuring a fading movie queen, as with Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest. Brian is effective in the same maniacal mode as in The Damned Don't Cry. Dennis Morgan is as pleasant and as superficial as ever as the surgeon; It's a Great Feelingwas more his speed. It was the only time she ever worked with director Felix Feist, who did inject a few arresting moments into the film. In one, Beth sits in the good doctor's automobile in the prison yard as he (improbably) attends to a dying woman in the prison infirmary. As she watches, several female prisoners are unloaded from a prison van. The matron realizes that one of them has been smoking against the rules and has them stand in a row while she looks at their hands. The offending party painfully crushes the lit end of her cigarette in her fingers, as Joan does the same in empathy. In this scene and others, Joan makes good use of her wonderfully expressive face. The climax in the operating theater is also quite tense. The Joan Crawford of movies like This Woman Is Dangerous was an easy target for any critic who had it in for her. Later, Joan would remember that she just didn't have the energy or internal resources at the time to try to make it a better picture. She was defeated by the script, by Jack Warner's attitude, by the unfamiliar director. What was the point of knocking herself out when nothing could save the movie from being formula schlock? Sure enough, Bosley Crowther offered his most vicious sally in his review of This Woman Is Dangerous. He wrote that Joan's persona "has now reached the ossified stage" and theorized that the only possible reason for a movie like This Woman Is Dangerous was "for the display of Miss Crawford's stony charm. [To her fans] the arrant posturing of Miss Crawford may seem the quintessence of acting art. But for people of mild discrimination and even moderate reasonableness, the suffering of Miss Crawford will be generously matched by their own..." Crowther had never been too keen on Joan, and his contempt for drivel like This Woman Is Dangerous was understandable. But no one, least of all Joan herself, exactly expected her to get an Oscar nod for this film. In his contempt for Joan, Crowther willfully overlooked the good points in her performance. Joan was intelligent enough to realize that the script for This Woman Is Dangerous was so theatrical and artificial that the only thing that might salvage it was a colorful, theatrical performance by The Star. To play the role of Beth Austin as if she were a Eugene O'Neill character would have been ludicrous. Joan played the lightweight material the only way it could have been played - anything more "serious" would have come off like overacting. Crowther's reviews bothered Joan, primarily because she felt he never gave her enough credit for all the hard work she put into her portrayals. She would write him plaintive notes on her "baby blues" imploring him to tell her why he didn't like her. Bosley knew that Lawrence Quirk was friendly with Joan and told him that he never deigned to answer what he styled her "whining notes." Crowther felt that "stars should ignore criticism in print. When she whines she shows she has no class. Let her fans gush and rhapsodize. I am not a fan - I am an objective journalist." Joan also knew that Crowther had been an early mentor to Quirk, so she asked him why Crowther was always so "mean" to her. Quirk, who knew that Crowther objected to Joan's "movie-star ways" and acting style - he simply was not a fan of hers - tactfully told Joan that Crowther was "a man of rather rigid tastes." Joan had one of her best roles in the highly popular suspense thriller Sudden Fear (1952), for which she received an Oscar nomination. In it she played playwright-heiress Myra Hudson, who objects to the casting of the talented leading man, Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) in her latest play, Halfway to Heaven, because he lacks conventional romantic good looks. Lester angrily tells her that she should study a painting of the famed lover, Casanova, who was not exactly a beauty either. Lester goes off in a huff, only to run into Myra again on a cross-country train trip. Myra finds herself responding to Lester's charms, and as they spend time together in San Francisco, she falls in love with him. The two marry and seem to enjoy an idyllic existence, but Lester has no love for Myra and is simply after her considerable fortune. Myra learns of his plot to kill her, and conspires to murder him instead and pin the blame on his lady friend, Irene (Gloria Graham), but the best laid plans of mice and men.... Clark Gable was offered the male lead in Sudden Fear but turned it down. He and Joan had remained good friends over the years, but Gable didn't think the part was right for him. For one thing, at fifty-one he was too old for it. The man was supposed to be a young actor on the way up. Director David Miller knew he needed a very strong, indeed menacing, leading man or else Joan's powerful presence would overwhelm her counterpart and throw the movie off balance. When he went to dinner at Joan's, he brought along the picture Panic in the Streets so they could watch it in her private screening room. At first Joan thought he had the movie's star, Richard Widmark, in mind for her male lead, but he told her that wasn't the case. For the next two weeks Miller brought the same movie and insisted they "study" it; she didn't protest too vigorously the first week, but by the second week she had had enough of Panic in the Streets and demanded that Miller tell her what was going on. When Miller told her that he wanted supporting actor Jack Palance to star with her, she became livid and threw him out of the house. She was used to handsome, sexy leading men, and in a real-life turn that mirrored the plot of Sudden Fear, she thought Palance was simply too ugly. In actuality, Palance was not a bad-looking man; he just wasn't a pretty-boy. Miller convinced Joan that Palance would be perfect because he had the raw masculinity and dangerous quality that would make the audience believe he really was a threat to the sturdy, self-reliant heroine. Joan reluctantly agreed and Palance was hired. It has been said that special wigs, make up appliances, and lighting were used to make Palance seem less Hun-like than usual in his early scenes, and that he reverted to his regular appearance as filming proceeded and his character became more menacing, but this does not ring entirely true: there are "unattractive" shots in the early sections and "attractive" shots of Palance late in the film. In another case of life imitating art, Joan fell for Palance the way her character fell for his in the movie. Palance's machismo and confidence intrigued her, and she was anxious to find out what he was like in bed. Unfortunately, Palance had already zeroed in on supporting player Gloria Grahame, who played Irene, his character's lover. When Joan found out, she was even angrier than when Miller had suggested Palance be her leading man. Here she was stuck with him and he was "otherwise engaged." As for Grahame, didn't she know that The Star always had dibs on the leading man? It didn't help that Grahame was frequently late for work, infuriating Joan and violating her sense of professionalism. The main problem between Joan and Palance wasn't the sex angle (or, rather, the lack thereof), but the fact that Palance, like other male leads before and after him, hated the way Joan showed up with an entourage each morning and even took the trouble to greet each crew member personally. Palance thought Joan was insincere about these greetings, but when Joan protested in her memoirs that she "meantthose good mornings," she wasn't kidding. Joan has been accused of catering to the grips and cameramen and so on just so they would like her and make her look good, but she did truly respect her fellow professionals in the industry. Palance`s main problem toward Joan was that she was a much bigger name than he was and he thought he was much more talented. A lot of Joan's male costars and supporting players simply didn't like strong women. "She's a woman and has to have her way in everything," Palance ranted to one reporter. He may have picked up one acting tip from Joan, however. A few years later it was reported that he was listening to music by Richard Strauss in his dressing room to psych himself up for a scene. As previously noted, Joan had on occasion also used music to put her in the mood for certain sequences. Sudden Fear did not have a very large budget and there was money for Joan's wardrobe, but not for Grahame's, which were bought off the rack, much to Grahame's dismay. When she protested, the costume lady - Joan's personal dress designer - angrily reminded Grahame that she wasn't the star. Some Grahame defenders insisted that Joan ordered Gloria's outfits to be altered so they would be less flattering on her, but there's no evidence of this. So Joan was mad at Grahame and Palance and vice versa, which generated a great deal of tension on the set. Joan wasn't too thrilled with director Miller, either. She told him that Grahame was not to be allowed on the set unless she was in the scene that was being filmed. Grahame would mischievously sneak onto the set even when she wasn't needed and hide behind a wall or just outside a doorway, hoping Joan would spot her and become hysterical. When she did, shooting would stop until the offending party was removed. Joan and Palance didn't exchange words except when they were speaking dialogue to one another. Joan didn't allow her negative attitude toward her costars to affect her performance, however, although her dislike of Palance undoubtedly helped her in the second half of the film when Myra learns of her husband's perfidy. Mike Connors, also in the supporting cast, remembered that at times it was like a war zone. "There were days Joan looked so angry that I was afraid she was going to chuck something at Jack. She put all this intensity into her performance instead, thank goodness. She pretended Gloria didn't exist, and I just tried to stay out of her way. I think David Miller found it all a trial, but he stayed on keel in spite of it. Not the easiest way to make movies, but exhilarating, I guess. " Joan is excellent in Sudden Fear, which gives her ample opportunities to display the superb, expressive pantomiming that had been her trademark since the silent days. The best example of this is when Myra hears her husband and his lover plotting together (their voices recorded by her Dictaphone) and realizes that everything about her idyllic life with Lester is a complete fabrication. She is also splendid when Myra waits in a closet in Irene's apartment for Lester to arrive so she can shoot him, her face registering her confusion, determination, and disbelief over what she's prepared to do. Later on, when she spots herself in the living room mirror holding the gun, and is appalled by what she's planning, she seems to age twenty years in a few seconds. Joan also has a fine moment waking up in bed after her wedding night, looking at her new husband as if she were a young girl and he her prince. In real life, although she was quite capable of having torrid just-for-pleasure quickies, Joan always approached each romantic affair as if she were a young schoolgirl in love for the first time. Despite their mutual enmity, Joan and Jack played very well together. This is especially true in a scene when Myra demonstrates her Dictaphone to Lester, and has him recite some lines from his play (the play Myra has fired him from), and then plays them back. There's a strange tension to the scene as Myra and Lester listen to the playback of Lester's voice, which is the only dialogue at that moment. In this and other scenes David Miller makes good use of the pause, such as when Joan accidentally smashes the record that has Lester and Irene plotting her demise on it and the camera stays fixed on her stricken face for several seconds as she stares down on the broken pieces, allowing the audience to absorb what has happened. Without the record, Joan has no proof for the police, so she must come up with the plan to stop the conspirators herself; the audience might not swallow this if she had the option of going to the authorities and be taken as something other than a hysterical, jealous female. (This is not to say, of course, that Sudden Fear is without its share of contrived and illogical moments.) Joan had specifically requested Miller for the picture, as she had known him since his days as a film cutter at MGM. She may not have liked working with him all that much, but she was very pleased with his work. "Mentally he cuts as he shoots, and wasted angles and film are at a minimum," she wrote in her memoirs. Although making the picture had its pressures, sexual and otherwise, Joan never regretted it, not just for the obvious reason but because she genuinely believed it to be a good film and that she was very good in it. "One of my better efforts," she said. "Not humble, maybe, but it's the truth." Miller contributed some fine touches to Sudden Fear, such as when Myra imagines how her plan will go forward as the shadow of a clock pendulum swings back and forth across her face; we see images of the assorted characters acting out what she's thinking superimposed over her features. There's a wonderful bit of business when Myra hides in the closet after losing the gun, and Lester plays with a wind-up dog which makes its way across the carpet to the edge of the closet door as Myra, fearing discovery when Lester picks up the toy, squirms inside. The last twenty minutes of the film, with Lester pursuing his terrified wife through the city streets, is so briskly directed and edited that it merits comparison with vintage Hitchcock. On the other hand, if Hitchcock had directed the film, we probably would have learned more about Lester's life and background (he's an interesting villain but not exactly three-dimensional), and Lester would have been played by a handsomer actor (Hitchcock always saw good-looking men as being a bit evil, and vice versa). The film also seems to miss the point that Myra, a woman with inherited wealth who embarks on a successful career to boot (an embarrassment of riches), is not exactly the most sympathetic of victims - not only as far as Lester is concerned, but for most of the audience as well. Shortly after filming wrapped, a scandal-sheet columnist tried to get "dirt" on Joan from Grahame, who merely said Joan was "a true professional" and nothing more. According to Grahame, Joan sent her a note thanking her for her silence. But what exactly was she supposed to say: "Joan got mad at me because I was sleeping with Jack Palance"? Grahame kept silent more to protect herself than Joan. A couple of years later, Joan would have an affair with Gloria's ex-husband, Nicholas Ray, when he directed her in Johnny Guitar. Joan lost the Oscar to Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba. Joan was terrific in Sudden Fear, but everyone, including Joan, agreed that Booth's was a once-in-a-lifetime performance deserving of recognition. Another actress who lost to Booth was Bette Davis, who had been nominated for her performance in The Star, which had an interesting genesis. The screenplay for The Star was written by Joan's old friend, writer Katherine Albert, and her husband Dale Eunson, whom Joan had known since the early days at MGM. Katherine ended her friendship with Joan when the latter encouraged Katherine's daughter Joan (named after Crawford) to marry her beloved, Kirby Weatherly, over her mother's disapproval. Joan even held the reception at her home. In revenge, Albert wrote a script about a Hollywood has-been, apparently inspired by Joan's life. The character of Margaret Elliott, the eponymous "star, " is somewhat self-delusional, has to deal with parasitic relatives when she herself has money problems (a reference to Joan's financial situation after divorcing and paying off Phillip Terry, and to her relationship with Hal and Anna), and tries desperately to act younger than she actually is. Elliott goes about acting as if she still thinks she's in her prime, a top-drawer star with major box-office clout. Margaret Elliott was less the Joan Crawford of the early '50s as it was what Albert hoped Crawford would become. The part was never offered to Joan, but Bette Davis thought it had marvelous possibilities - she also thought it would be amusing to play a role that made fun of Joan. But Joan had the last laugh, as virtually everything in the script - right down to the greedy, no-account relatives - could be applied just as much to Davis as to Joan. The ending of The Star has Elliott turning down a chance to star in a film about a has-been actress much like herself for a new chance at love and marriage and a "normal" life with Sterling Hayden. Joan, of course, would never have turned down a good part, or even an indifferent one - she loved to work, loved every aspect of being a movie star, faded or otherwise. Davis wouldn't have turned it down either. Which is probably why they both made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? instead of sitting home knitting or watching television like honest-to-goodness has-beens. It was at the Photoplay awards dinner in 1953 at the Beverly Hills Hotel that Joan first saw Marilyn Monroe in the flesh. The giggling, silly, but supersexy Monroe was wearing a skintight gold lame dress that exposed most of her ample bosom. Joan went on the attack, and her comments were quoted in the newspapers. "She should be told that the public likes provocative feminine personalities," Joan told columnist Bob Thomas, "but it also likes to know that underneath it all the actresses are ladies...." It may seem hypocritical for Joan to have attacked Monroe for flaunting her sensuality, but Joan rightly saw herself - even when she was starting out - as being quite different from Monroe. Joan was sexy on the screen when it was appropriate for the part; she was sexy in private rooms with men who held out tempting offers in exchange for her body - indeed, she played that game as well as anyone. But Joan had never deliberately acted in publicin a cheap or vulgar manner. The dances she did in clubs with Michael Cudahy bordered on virginal innocence compared with the common and pervasive antics of Marilyn Monroe. Joan was also shrewd in attacking Monroe, as she knew - given the public's intense new interest in her - that it would guarantee her plenty of press. Many years after Monroe's death, Joan said, "The girl had talent, and her death at such an early age was a tragedy, but my God she was just so totally common. I certainly come from humble beginnings, but I think it's everyone's duty to try to rise above those beginnings. With her cheap behavior, it was like Marilyn was trying to bring everyone down to her own level instead of rising up to everyone else's." When asked her opinion of Marilyn clones like Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, Joan cursed, adding, "Those aren't even actresses. Those are boobs with mouths trying to get publicity. I got where I did through hard work. It isn't hard work to stick your chest out and make everybody stare at your tits. Please!" Seeing herself as a Grand Lady (but certainly not a grand oldlady) of Hollywood, Joan liked to play the voice of reason commenting on the younger generation and their foibles. Thus her famous comment when Joanne Woodward won an Academy Award in a homemade dress: "Joanne Woodward is setting the cause of Hollywood glamour back twenty years by making her own clothes," she stated with her trademark bluntness. This and other opinions helped give Joan a bitchy reputation, but she took being a star very seriously, regarded it as a great honor and a privilege, and honestly thought she had a right to point it out when she felt less grateful actresses had gone shamefully awry. At other times, her cutting remarks, picked up by eavesdropping columnists, were off-the-cuff comments made at parties where she'd been drinking. But Joan was rarely embarrassed when these appeared in the paper: she felt she was only speaking the truth. Joan was the Queen Bee of Hollywood, and she wanted everyone to know it. Though she had lost her second chance for an Oscar, there was an unexpected bonus to all the attention that came with her nomination for Sudden Fear. She suddenly found herself on her way back to MGM.
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