Chapter Eight

  JUNGLE RED

  

  

  Considering the hit-or-miss quality of the films that came before, it is perhaps not surprising that Joan wound up in Ice Follies of 1939 with Jimmy Stewart, who'd had a bit part in The Gorgeous Hussy, instead of Gone With the Wind. ("Talk about going from the sublime to the ridicuѓlous!" commented Joan.) The two leads had very different styles, but they played well together as Mary McKay and Larry Hall, an ice-skating duo who break up when Mary becomes a movie star. By now, Stewart was a major player in his own right. The two are at their best in a seѓquence in which Mary comes home late from a premiere drunk and tells Larry how rich and successful she's going to become: "I'm gonna be a star, a star, darling; they lent me that [dress] for the preview, but after this I'm gonna own all my nice clothes." As Joan does a splendid drunk routine, Stewart skillfully expresses jealousy and resentment underneath his affection. Larry tries to continue the act with a male partner, Eddie Burgess (Lew Ayres) - naturally this doesn't work out as well. Although many have commented that Joan and Stewart used doubles for long shots in the skating sequences, such doubles were hardly needed because the two only appear on skates once, coming off the ice at the end of a show. We never do see their characters do any fancy footwork on the ice.

  Ice Follies is fun and the performances perfectly charming, but it's not the uninteresting details of the plot that stand out in the memory, but rather the movie's raison d'être, the terrific ice acts performed by the International Ice Follies (including a drag queen on skates!), the pleasant musical sequences, and a striking shot of a boat on the Hudson River sailing past the Statue of Liberty as a plane passes overhead. Ice Follies ends with a film within a film, the latest picture starring "Sandra Lee" (Mary's new name), which turns out to be a campy Cinderella, only with ice-skating acts. The Cinderella sequences were in Technicolor - Joan's first appearance in a color movie. Joan manages to get out a few bars of "It's All So New to Me" as well, first in the aforementioned drunk scene and then in the Cinderella sequence. Joan also made a recording of the song, which was released commercially. An interesting feature of Ice Follies is how Mary McKay is turned into "Sandra Lee," much the same way that Harry Rapf turned Lucille LeSueur into Joan Crawford.

  "This represents the nadir of the bad assignments Miss Crawford has gotten from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and if she stages a cataclysmic rebellion after this, no one can blame her," wrote one reviewer, who was certainly telling it like it was. "Everyone was out of their collective minds," Joan said years later. Joan was out of her mind with anger. She despised the assignment, but she figured that it wouldn't hurt to do a light, breezy comedy after the heavy emoting in The Shining Hour. What she couldn't know was how bad The Shining Hour would turn out, and how little it would do for her career. She also did Ice Follies as a favor for Rapf. Joan was also told that she would sing several numbers in the picture; as she still fancied herself a real singer, this helped her approach Ice Follies with a degree of optimism. Of course, Joan had been working with Romano Romani, but his emphasis on operatic material meant that Joan's voice in Ice Follies didn't sound any different than it did in Possessed.

  When the studio publicity department learned of Joan's training with Romani, and discovered that Joan had even recorded operatic duets with actor-baritone Douglas McPhail as well, the bullshit factor roared into high gear. Joan wasn't just studying opera, the flacks reported to the papers, she was going to make her debut at the Met in the fall! Even Joan must have had a good laugh over that one. After all, celebrities did not impress the powers that be at New York's famous Metropolitan Opera; even Grace Moore had a hell of a time getting onto the stage at the Met. Joan would never have had a chance. Perhaps figuring that if she no longer had Tone she at least still had her singing voice, Joan whined when most of her numbers were dropped from Ice Follies due to overlength and even put forth the ludicrous suggestion that MGM singѓing star Jeanette MacDonald feared that a singing Joan would be too much competition. (For the record, the Met never invited the talented but rather shrill MacDonald to sing, either.) Joan was always able to delude herself when she needed to, and she deluded herself a great deal about her singing voice in these early years. A line she spoke as Sadie Thompson in Rain best describes her singing voice: "My voice ain't so bad if you don't listen too hard."

  Joan needed something else to occupy her attentions when she wasn't in front of the camera, and she noticed that Jimmy Stewart had gotten a bit cuter since his appearance in The Gorgeous Hussy. Or perhaps it was just that his new star status filled him with a confidence that made him sexier. Stewart wasn't really the type that normally got Joan's juices flowing (neither was her other Ice Follies costar, gentlemanly Lew Ayres), but she had neither husband nor boyfriend at the time, and Joan was always on the prowl for an intriguing encounter in the sack. Jerry Asher and Billy Grady were certain that Joan managed to snare Stewart at some point during filming, although probably not in her dressing room but at her home. Neither Asher nor Grady was surprised when the affair ended even before shooting did. For his part, old-fashioned Jimmy liked to be predator more than prey, and Joan simply made him nervous. Neither Joan nor Stewart ever went on record about their affair, but in later years whenever Stewart's name came up, Joan would speak of him fondly. Apparently he came along just when she needed him and disappeared when she was through with him, without any tiresome melodrama. In other words, he was just what the doctor ordered, and Joan was grateful for that.

  Her feelings toward MGM and Mayer were another matter. She told Mayer in no uncertain terms that he had better find her a picture that would showcase her talents better. "I deserve better than this and so do my fans," she told him. "You've got a valuable commodity in me - why throw it away on crap like Ice Follies?" She demanded a choice role in The Women.

  And she got it.

  Although her screen time in the film was comparatively brief, Joan had one of her snappiest roles in The Women (1939), and she ran with it. She is absolutely superb as the tramp Crystal Allen. What made the movie unique was the gimmick that, as the title suggests, no man is ever seen on-screen. Accordingly, most of The Women takes place at a dude ranch in Nevada where women can establish residency in the state in order to get their divorces. The movie starts with housewife Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) reluctantly deciding to divorce her (of course, unseen) husband when she finds out that he's been carrying on with Crystal. Mary winds up at the ranch in Nevada, where she encounters new friends Peggy Day (Joan Fontaine) and Miriam Aarons (Paulette Goddard) among others, as well as old friend Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell), who is divorcing her husband because of his affair with Miriam. Naturally, the entangleѓments inevitably lead to some good catfights. Afterward, the marriage between Mary's ex-husband Stephen and Crystal doesn't proceed very happily, and Mary wins him back. In the final scene, Mary rushes out of a restaurant ladies' room into his arms. When someone asks her whether she still has any pride, she replies "pride is a luxury that a woman in love can't afford."

  Nowadays, The Women certainly has its dated aspects - all the catty, bitchy, conniving obsession with menfolk seems a bit stereotypical after women's liberation - but the picture is still grand entertainment, beautiѓfully acted and amusingly written by Anita Loos (from the play by Clare Boothe Luce; F. Scott Fitzgerald also worked on the script). And even today there are women who worry endlessly about men and compete with other women for the ones they want. Affairs are commonplace, and two-faced friends still easy to find. One can enjoy the picture as if it were an ancient time capsule that still contains a few truths for the contempoѓrary viewer.

  The Women was essentially Norma Shearer's picture. Never a great comedienne, Shearer's usual conviction works superbly in the straight central role. But Joan knew that she had a chance to make a splash in her flashy supporting part, which sets the interlocking plot strands in moѓtion. Highlights of the film include the bitchy interchange between Joan and Russell at the perfume counter where Crystal works, as Sylvia teases Crystal about her relationship with Stephen. Even better is the confrontation between Joan and Shearer in the former's dressing room, tiny Mary standing up to homewrecker Crystal, who sneers down at her and reѓfuses to apologize or show any compassion. According to Anita Loos, it was Norma Shearer's idea to have Joan play Crystal Allen. "Norma knew that she and Joan," Loos recalled, "highlighted as love rivals, complete with the juicy, catty scenes I wrote for them, would bring them into theaters. I think it helped things along a great deal." Originally only Shearer and Joan were supposed to be above the title, but Rosalind Russell caused such a fuss - and called in "sick" so often - that her name was added to the credit card, albeit in smaller type.

  George Cukor, who directed the all-female cast, years later had resѓervations about the picture. "At the time it probably wasn't as silly as it seems now, because it came from a different world. 'Kept women' and marital break ups were big moral questions then. Now, of course, everyѓbody would be screwing everybody, and everybody would know about it. Crystal wouldn't be a kept woman, she'd be carrying on with another girl." Cukor inexplicably thought that the "central story . . . didn't fit with the rest," an odd comment as everything else revolves around this central story, Mary and Crystal fighting for Stephen. Cukor also hated the studio's insistence that a long color fashion show sequence be inѓserted into the middle of the black-and-white film, about which he was certainly right. The fashion show seems to go on forever and stops the movie dead in its tracks. Actually, Cukor had not been first choice to direct The Women. Ernst Lubitsch originally got the assignment, but when Cukor was replaced on Gone with the Wind by Victor Fleming, Cukor was in on The Women and Lubitsch was out. Cukor was seen as one of the few directors who could handle, as Hedda Hopper put it, "that feminine kennel" of MGM egos.

  Considering the negative reaction to her portrayal of Sadie Thompѓson in Rain seven years earlier, it was risky for Joan to take on the role of hard-as-nails Crystal Allen, who is scarcely better than a prostitute. Louis B. Mayer told her he thought of her like a daughter and that he was afraid it might not be good for her to play a bad gal. Cukor also needed convincing. As Joan told Mayer, "If I can't have a good picture of my own, let me sneak into someone else's." Privately she kind of liked the idea of taking attention away from Shearer with the less sympathetic - but showier - role.

  Joan got away with it. She didn't steal the picture from Shearer, but she did get a lot of attention, and she didn't alienate any of her fans or the critics. Why the difference? For one thing, The Women wasn't really a "Joan Crawford movie," it was an all-star extravaganza. Second, Crystal was far removed from the essentially kindly shopgirls she had played in the past. Joan got higher marks from some of the critics than Shearer did, because she was trying something different, unlike Norma, who was perceived as playing it safe. The irony is that the public accepted Joan as Crystal but not as Sadie, when of the two, Sadie was the much nicer character, despite her occupation.

  Joan always loved the film and had an honest admiration for her own work in it. She thought that Rosalind Russell stole the picture (she never had terribly kind things to say about Shearer), and she recalled how much fun it was to work with Russell, Mary Boland (as an older woman perpetually - and foolishly - in love), Butterfly McQueen (she played her maid in this, as she would in Mildred Pierce), and Paulette Goddard, who was much more Joan's speed than the somewhat pretenѓtious Joan Fontaine. "Cukor did a great job, I did a great job, Roz was sensational," she remembered. "I think the only one I could have done without was Joan Fontaine. She wasn't a bitch, she wasn't nasty - there was just something about her. She had the smallest part of all of us and maybe she was just a little jealous."

  

  Joan had always been a little jealous herself - of Norma Shearer. Her oft-quoted comment about Shearer went, "How can I compete with Norma when she's sleeping with the boss," meaning, of course, Irving Thalberg. Joan felt that Shearer was given the choicest assignments out of nepotism. She didn't deny Shearer's talent - after all, Thalberg couldn't get up there on the screen and act for Shearer - but she fumed at the way she was considered, and seemed to consider herself, queen of the lot. By the time of The Women, Thalberg had passed away, but Norma still had a lot of clout at MGM.

  The studio publicity department wanted The Women to be known as "the catfight of the century," and they did their best to drum up stoѓries about the alleged feuding and fussing on the set, in particular about how much Joan and Shearer hated one another. Howard Strickling, head of MGM publicity, engineered and was overjoyed by a Look magazine cover featuring Joan and Shearer glaring at each other in mock hatred. The caption, which read "They don't like each other," referred to the characters the two women played, but Strickling didn't mind if the pubѓlic believed it was more personal. After all, insiders knew that it was.

  Nevertheless, Joan and Shearer got along for most of the filming. They pretended to be feuding for the columnists, but underneath the pretense there was genuine dislike. "Norma and Joan could never have been personal friends," remembered Anita Loos. "They came from difѓferent worlds - Norma thought Joan crude and pushy and Joan considѓered Norma overbearing and uppity - but they both knew the 'feud' was good copy, and so they helped it along. And why not?"

  Hedda Hopper passed along the true story of the famous on-set incident between Joan and Shearer. Joan was off camera feeding lines to Shearer for close-ups. Joan always considered it the mark of professionѓalism to feed lines to a costar, and was annoyed if a costar didn't return the compliment. To indicate the antipathy she felt for Shearer, Joan fed her the lines, but sat in a chair doing her knitting, needles clicking all the while. She would momentarily stop knitting so that Shearer's lines could be recorded, but the minute it was her turn to talk the needles would begin clicking again. Finally Shearer lost her patience and shouted at Joan to go back to her dressing room if she couldn't be professional. Joan got up, savagely stuck her knitting back into a bag, and stormed off the set, calling Shearer a bitch. Outwardly incensed by (but secretly relishing) Joan's behavior, Cukor ran after her to reprimand her, but Shearer ordered him back to her side "that instant." Back in her dressing room, Joan fumed and, according to Loos, drafted a nasty telegram to Shearer at the urging of Howard Strickling "just to keep things percolating for publicity purposes." "So many people say Norma and I dislike each other," Joan told Hedda Hopper, "who are we to disagree with the majority opinion?" Many years later, when Lawrence Quirk was interviewing Joan about The Women, he made the mistake of mentioning that he hoped one day to do a book on Norma Shearer. "Someone should!" Joan snapped gleefully. "She's all but forgotten!"

  Joan was back with producer Joseph Mankiewicz for Strange Cargo (1940), Joan's eighth and final pairing with Clark Gable.

  The two of them were teamed for sizzling results in the picture, which unfortunately didn't make the most of their sexy pyrotechnics, focusing instead on suspect religious symbolism. Strange Cargo deals with an escape by several prisoners from Devil's Island. The escapees include tough guy Moll (Albert Dekker), wife-killer Hessler (Paul Lukas), pious Cambreau (Ian Hunter), and Verne (Gable), incarcerated for un-stated reasons. Joan played Julie, the bar entertainer Verne meets up with; having had an abortive dalliance with her earlier in the film, he takes her along for the ride. Their adversarial, purely sexual relationship gradually softens into warm affection as they struggle to stay alive on a boat without fresh water. Cambreau's compassionate, often sanctimoѓnious musings eventually stir up kindly feelings of self-sacrifice in the escapees. Verne eventually realizes that Cambreau is actually God - that's right, God - in human form. After everything he goes through to escape the hellish prison, Verne winds up turning himself in; he will serve out his sentence until, presumably, he begins a new life with Julie.

  Joan offers a vivid and convincingly "hard-boiled" portrayal as Julie. At times she even seems a bit psychotic, such as when she knocks down and nearly stabs a man who is making demands of her. Sometimes regarded as a superficial glamourpuss, Joan proved in Strange Cargo that she could deglamorize herself as much as Bette Davis or any other actress when she allowed herself to be photographed without elaborate makeup, as in the jungle sequences. When she remarks to Cambreau on his religiosity, "I know that routine; it starts with a prayer and winds up with a bible in one hand and me in the other," she could be a sadder-but-wiser Sadie Thompson sizing up her latest pious hypocrite. Gable finѓishes a distant second to Joan in the acting department. Although he had played plenty of tough guys in his career, Gable's portrayal of Verne never delves below the surface or seems especially convincing.

  Strange Cargo is the kind of dopey hybrid that results when the popular motion picture industry finds religion and decides to offer a message to the "Great Unwashed." What could have been a perfectly good adventure story and romance is turned into a dubious vehicle for alleged enlightenment. It is the kind of film that seems devout and proѓfound only to Hollywood illiterates. It is a shame that Strange Cargo couldn't have jettisoned the Cambreau character or at least made the religious overtones less heavy-handed, for the picture has a good deal of tension and suspense and there are many arresting sequences. Never conѓfident in the audience's intelligence, Mankiewicz was probably the one who decided to have Cambreau spread out his arms, Christlike, onto a floating piece of wood behind him so that he could appear to be mock-crucified after Verne throws him off the boat - just in case the audience didn't get it. The picture momentarily becomes clever when Verne shouts at Cambreau that since his life is in his hands, he, Verne, is God, but then it blows it when Verne has a sudden epiphany: "I'm God, he's God, you're." It is amusing that throughout the film nobody ever bothers to ask Cambreau, if you're so great, what were you doing locked up in prison with the rest of us? Of course, as Cambreau is not a real person but God on a mission, he simply fades into the shadows at the end of the movie.

  "It was almost a good film," Mankiewicz remembered. Referring to the censorship problems the film encountered, he said, "I wish it could have been made later." Any and all intimations of sexual intimacy beѓtween the characters played by Joan and Gable had to be scrupulously avoided. Incredibly, the character of Cambreau was considered blaspheѓmous by the Catholic Legion of Decency, who condemned the picture, which severely affected its performance at the box office. It was banned outright in Boston, and other cities demanded cuts before allowing it to be screened. This was all ludicrous, especially when one considers that the film is about how bad people can change, if they take the influence and spirit of God into their hearts. But Joan and Gable were simply too sexy in their playful banter to appease the prudes, who cared more about their hypocritical version of morality than about any so-called "decency."

  While Joan and Gable were no longer hot and heavy offscreen - Gable was enjoying a happy marriage to Carole Lombard at the time, for one thing - their relationship was still friendly and comfortable. There was a slight behind-the-scenes contretemps when several people twitted Joan about Gable's name being above hers in the promotional materials. Joan knew that Gable was now as big a name at the box office as she was - perhaps bigger, thanks to Gone with the Wind. But her competiѓtive nature was challenged when someone unwisely reminded her that only rival Norma Shearer had gotten top billing over Gable for Idiot's Delight, made the previous year. What was good enough for Norma was good enough for Joan, who lobbied for - and got - top billing in Strange Cargo. Gable only shrugged and went about his business. Both of their names were above the title, what difference did it make? It made a lot of difference to Joan, not so much due to pettiness or megalomania, but rather because she saw any sign of diminishment as a sign that she was slipping, letting somebody else (not Gable, of course, but the higher-ups) chip away at what she had worked so hard for. She also did not see why the male star, even someone on Gable's level, always had to have top billing. So it was not just a cosmetic victory, as far as she was concerned. Although Gable may have been her nominal leading man in so many of her early movies, everyone knew that he had been supporting her, in what the public perceived as "Joan Crawford movies." His status in Hollywood may have changed, but hers had not. She would not be "sup-porting" him in Strange Cargo - or any other movie. His name could go above the title, but it could not go above hers.

  Joan liked Strange Cargo well enough, and enjoyed working with Gable. "That certain chemistry was still there between us," she rememѓbered. "Making a picture with Clark was always so energizing in one sense, and relaxing in another. He was effortless at what he did, with wonderful results." She told one interviewer that Gable came up to her one afternoon and told her that they'd play each scene exactly the way she wanted it. "You've become an actress and I'm still Clark Gable," he told her. There was talk that Gable was a more "natural" actor than Crawford and should not be teamed with her any longer, but Joan was arguably the more talented of the two.

  Joan got a kick out of working with Peter Lorre, who played her nemesis, Monsieur Pig, who promises nor to turn Verne in, as long as she agrees to go off with him - and everything that that implies. "Peter had a tremendous sense of humor," she remembered. "A really wicked, impish wit, and he always had Clark and me in stitches. I had to say the most terrible, degrading things to him when he was playing Mr. Pig, of all things, and he always had an even nastier comeback, which of course had to be cut because it wasn't in the script." When asked if Moll and the younger man he befriends were intended to be homosexual characѓters - Moll cries and commits suicide after the younger man dies - Joan replied, "We had enough trouble with a Christ figure, for Pete's sake, let alone homosexuals. Frank [Borzage] didn't say anything about it, but it really wasn't played that way. I think the Albert Dekker character just thought of the kid as the son he never had, someone he wanted to save from the kind of life he had had. But who knows?"

  Strange Cargo was partially filmed at Pismo Beach, where Joan wore the same dress constantly until it was in realistic tatters. Her career, on the other hand, was in pretty good shape.

  Susan and God (1940) was based on a Broadway show by Rachel Crothers that had starred Gertrude Lawrence, and Joan picked up some pointers on how to play the title character (Susan, not God) by watching Lawrence play the role on Broadway. Director George Cukor also helped her with the role. Joan plays Susan Trexel, a frivolous woman who has allegedly "found God" and wants everyone to follow in her righteous path. She neglects her husband Barry (Fredric March) and her daughter Blossom (Rita Quigley), and spends most of her time espousing a new brand of religion she picked up in Europe. Ruth Hussey plays Charlotte, a woman who has always secretly loved Barry, who drinks too much. While Susan and God is often hilarious and certainly lands some (relaѓtively safe) points about religious hypocrisy ("Your own life is a mess," one character tells Susan), it veers back and forth between drama and comedy, never settling comfortably into either. The sentimental ending, wherein Susan realizes the error of her ways, is also not believable.

  On one hand, Joan is sensational in Susan and God, really domiѓnating the screen. On the other hand, despite some of the self-delusionary pretensions of her own life, she was simply too down-to-earth an actress (think of all those shopgirls she portrayed) to fare entirely well as such a flighty bird as Susan. But Anita Loos's often witty screenplay does little to make Susan much more than a caricature. Some find the picture very funny and entertaining; others, talky and long. It's both.

  The rights to the play were originally bought for Norma Shearer, who passed on it, possibly because she wanted time off to spend with her family, or maybe it just wasn't what she was looking for. It is amusing that Joan wrote in her memoirs that "Norma didn't want to play a mother," when Norma had done just that in The Women. (Of course, it's possible that Norma just didn't want to play a mother twice in a row.) Then Greer Garson was the front-runner for the role, until Cukor sugѓgested Joan, who jumped at the chance to work with him again, in what she hoped would be an "important" picture. However, as the first day of shooting approached, Joan began to get a bit panicky - she didn't have a clue to Susan's character, didn't understand what made this odd woman tick, and the screenplay wasn't giving her any help. On the first day of shooting, she went to Cukor, nearly hysterical. Cukor sat her down and spent half an hour or so discussing the part with her. When they were through, she knew just how to approach the role. Joan always gave credit to costar Fredric March for helping her give a good performance. March understood that she had the showier part and wisely underplayed in counterpoint. To some viewers, this makes him seem a bit bland as Susan`s husband.

  Although the movie was successful at the box office (both play and movie are largely forgotten today), the real payoff was that the studio and its directors began to take Joan more seriously again. There were those who thought she was more interesting in the first half of the film, but found the later scenes too much in the traditional "Joan Crawford" mold. Cukor took the blame for that, remarking to interviewer Gavin Lambert that Susan "should have remained a foolish woman all the way through, even when she was coming to her senses. I should have talked to (Joan), we should have understood together. . . . Put a black mark against me." As always for Joan, it was three steps forward, two steps back. The role of Susan was different from what she had played before, and as most critics felt she was quite good in the movie, even the public began to see her as more versatile and gifted than they had previously imagined. This led to her next picture.

  After which many people would never see Joan Crawford in quite the same way again.

  

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