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Chapter Seven LOVE ON THE RUN The Crawford-Tone combination still had a couple of years to self-destruct, but Joan did her best to concentrate on her work and avoid the sullen Tone when he was drinking. Things seemed to be looking up a bit when both were cast in another film together, with the added attraction of Clark Gable. Tempting as it might have been for Joan to seek shelter in the arms of Gable, she was wise enough to know that doing so would only make a bad situation worse. She still hoped her marriage to Tone would magically improve; his becoming as big a movie star as she was would certainly not do their union any harm. Although Joan always liked Love On the Run (1936), the second of her MGM films produced by Joseph Mankiewicz (perhaps because Gable was again her costar, with the added bonus of having her husband around), it was a major disappointment after some of her successes. Love on the Run is a distinctly poor imitation of It Happened One Night, which Gable had made with Claudette Colbert two years before. It Happened One Night had ushered in a sub-genre of "reporter romances runaway heiress" movies - and Love on the Run was one of the worst. Although Joan established herself as a skilled comedienne in many other pictures, Love on the Run didn't showcase this side of her as well as it might have. The talents of Jean Harlow would have been more appropriate, but the script might have done even Harlow in. Love on the Run opens with a long shot of a couple in bed. The covers flip up and we see that it isn't Joan with either of her male leads, but rather Gable and Tone, platonically sharing the mattress. It turns out that they are Mike Anthony and Barnabus "Barney" Pells, reporters and friends who are always trying to one-up one another. Barney lords it over his rival when Mike is bound and gagged - a viewer who knows the background can take it as Tone chortling over having snatched Joan away from Gable. Joan stars as Sally Barker, who runs out on her wedding to the Prince of an impoverished nation when she realizes that the groom values her money more than he does Sally. Trailing her from the church, Mike befriends Sally, concealing his profession from her. The twosome impersonate a baron and baroness who are famous aviators, and take flight in their plane, after a nearly catastrophic take-off. Unbeknownst to Sally and Mike, the real aviators are spies who want at all costs to get their hands on an important map on the plane. Meanwhile, rival reporter Barney follows Mike and Sally all over the globe trying to undermine Mike's deceptions. While the story is efficiently told by director "One-Take" Woody Van Dyke, it simply never catches fire, and the movie eventually becomes quite tedious. The performances are all very professional and adept - just not very amusing. Tone especially lacks the light touch his part requires, and, surprisingly, Joan isn't much better. When Sally finally learns that Mike, with whom she's falling in love, is just another reporter after a story, Joan's reaction isn't strong or funny enough. While no one could accuse Joan of being a brilliant comedienne along the lines of Lucille Ball, she was certainly capable of better than this. Donald Meek temporarily enlivens the picture as the batty caretaker of a palace in which Joan and Gable briefly take refuge; first he dances a minuet with Joan (he thinks she is a ghost haunting the palace), and then he does a snappy jazz number. Aside from this, Love on the Run is a comedy virtually devoid of laughs. Joan liked her performance in the film, however, and had a great time making it. In fact, Joan, Gable, and Tone had a ball together. Love on the Run may not have been stellar, but it made a lot of money. During filming, a crew from Motion Picture magazine came to do a photo spread on Joan and Tone on the movie set. Life magazine had christened her "Queen of the Movies," and the film journals were not about to be outdone in covering "the queen." Joan had been named the top box-office star for the third year in a row. Joan gave the reporters and photographers from Motion Picture the full-glamour treatment. Joan was used to such treatment and could take it in stride, but her husband, less used to being in the limelight and blatantly jealous of the attention paid to his wife, came off a little full of himself. At one point, when he was tired of the flashbulbs directed at his wife (and not himself), he curtly ended the interview and ordered a rug to be unrolled from where Joan was holding court over to her dressing room. Taking her hand, Tone escorted the queen of the movies to her dressing room and closed the door in everyone's faces. They did not emerge for quite some time. But then, dressing room trysts were nothing new to the Tones. Making The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) was not an especially happy experience for Joan. First, in this adaptation of a Frederick Lonsdale play, Joan was again teamed with Robert Montgomery, neither of whom particularly cared for the other. Both Joan and the studio had hoped that teaming Joan with one of their top male leads, William Powell, would generate sparks, but the chemistry just wasn't right. In this tale, Fay Cheyney (Joan) poses as a society gal so that she can rob wealthy socialites. Joan was arguably better in the part than Norma Shearer in the 1929 adaptation of the material, but then Shearer never had a particular flair for comedy. But not even Joan was a match for Powell, who was entirely in his element. As usual, Joan and Montgomery played well together despite their mutual dislike, which may have helped imbue their interchanges with a peppery acidity. Most critics agreed that this was a story that may have been told once too often, and it does not loom large in the Crawford canon. Crawford herself was always critical of her performance in the film, blaming personal problems. "My mind wasn't on it, not one hundred percent. I wasn't embarrassed by my performance, but it's not one I want to be remembered for, either." When asked about the picture many years later, Montgomery snapped, "I barely remember the thing. Joan was fluttering all over the place, as usual. I just came in and did my work and went home at night until it was over. I liked working with Bob [sic] Powell, though." Many viewers wondered why Powell had not been teamed with his usual leading lady Myrna Loy, and, in fact, Loy was originally assigned to do The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. The trouble was that Joan did not want to do another costume drama - Parnell, with Clark Gable - after The Gorgeous Hussy, so she and Loy switched parts, with the studio's blessing. Parnell turned out to be a bigger bomb than The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. The director, Richard Boleslawski, was terminally ill while making the film, and couldn't muster the needed energy to remedy the problems; sadly, he died before filming was completed. "We knew he was ill," Joan remembered, "but had no idea how really serious it was. I came into the studio one morning and was told he had died during the night. What a shock. Most of the picture had been shot. I think an A.D. (assistant director) finished what was left [it was actually completed by Dorothy Arzner and George Fitzmaurice]. It was not a happy experience for anyone. I think it showed on screen." Joseph Mankiewicz was not involved in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney in any capacity, but he did produce Joan's next feature. In The Bride Wore Red (1937), Joan plays Anna Pavlovitch, a broke gal who goes on vacation at a ritzy resort in Turano (financed by an admirer who gives her two weeks to change her life) and finds love and confusion when she falls for two suitors: wealthy Rudi Pal (Robert Young), and Giulio, a poor postman wonderfully played by Tone. Anna knows that Rudi could change her life for the better (and gives little thought to the other woman who's in love with him), but she's more simpatico with Giulio than with rich Rudi. When Anna meets up with an acquaintance, a former B-girl, who (improbably) seems perfectly happy as a hotel maid, she wonders if chasing rainbows is the answer. Still, she continues to resist her attraction to Giulio . . . until she finally gives in. Anna scandalizes everyone late in the picture with the titular red dress, a year before Bette Davis would do the same early in the superior Jezebel. With fine supporting performances from George Zucco (as the patron who sends Joan off on her excursion) and others, excellent direction from Dorothy Arzner, and a good Franz Waxman score, The Bride Wore Red is certainly not one of Joan's misfires - except for her performance, which is one of her worst. Joan remains on the surface throughout the picture, self-conscious, overrehearsed, and perfunctory, rushing through her lines as if she'd forgotten everything she'd ever learned about acting. She and Tone were not having the easiest time of it during shooting, and then there was the presence of the director, Dorothy Arzner, who had finished the few remaining scenes of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney after Boleslawski died. Joan had thought it would be interesting to have a woman direct one of her films, but with Arzner she got more than she bargained for. Despite her relationships with women and her bisexual nature, Joan never thought of herself as a lesbian, certainly not the stereotypical "dyke" so disdained by homophobes of every generation. Arzner fit that stereotype, unfortunately, which made Joan quite uncomfortable. Joan was also made uneasy by the fact that Arzner was obviously very attracted to her. "I knew she found me sexually desirable, and in a way I felt bad for her," Joan said years later, "but I swear she just made my flesh crawl." A bigger problem was that despite Arzner's obvious talent, she was simply overawed by Joan, and didn't tell her when she was overdoing things or not doing enough. Despite her talent, there were times, especially when she was preoccupied, that she needed a guiding hand, someone like George Cukor, for instance. Arzner was not in the same league when it came to helping shape a star performance. It didn't help that she didn't want Joan in The Bride Wore Red to begin with. The film was originally to star Luise Rainer. According to Arzner, Mayer himself got down on his knees to beg her to use Joan when Rainer was put on suspension "for marrying a communist." It is unlikely that Mayer would have to beg Arzner to use Joan; he simply would have told Arzner that Joan was in and that was that. It was less that Arzner objected to using Joan, whose participation she feared would make the movie "synthetic," than that the switch in female leads would necessitate major script changes, which is what ended up happening. It is ironic that her attraction to Joan, combined with her resentment that she was in the movie at all, helped bring about precisely the synthetic quality that she was so worried about; in a sense, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things got so bad that by the time the filming was nearing completion, Joan and Arzner refused to talk to each other. Studio publicist Maxine Thomas would carry a written note from Arzner to Joan, wait for Joan's reply, then take the reply to Arzner - and so on. Joan told one writer that The Bride Wore Red was "a waste of time for everyone; what a botch!" On another occasion she denounced it as "just a fashion show; a lot of those early things were fashion shows. The plots didn't matter. After a while, they all seemed alike." One admirer of Joan's, writer Fred Lawrence Guiles, credited Arzner with doing "what no male director could have done as well: she fashioned its thin plot around costumes, or the way Joan dressed - a tactic perhaps appropriate to a film career as dependent upon what the star wore as upon the story or her performance." Evaluated on its own terms, The Bride Wore Red was actually a good movie; it just didn't showcase Joan at her best. It attracted her fans, but not much of a crossover audience. Moviegoers who thought that a little of Joan Crawford went a long way voiced their opinion - by staying away from the theater. When the picture failed to make much money, it helped Joan qualify for inclusion on a prestigious list of fellow professionals labeled "Box-Office Poison." Louis B. Mayer's faith in Joan's durability was unshaken, however, and she was signed to a new five-year contract. Mannequin (1938) is a slightly above-average movie in which she costars with Spencer Tracy. Joseph Mankiewicz was good friends with both Tracy and Joan (somewhat more than just good friends, in the latter case), and he thought the two would make a good team. In Mannequin, Joan played Jessie Cassidy, a factory girl living with her sweet, bedraggled mother and ne'er-do-well father and brother in a tenement on Hester Street in New York. She marries handsome but unworthy Eddie Miller (Alan Curtis), who then notices that a wealthy shipping man named John Hennessey (Tracy) has his eye on Jessie. Eddie suggests that they get divorced so that Jessie can land Hennessey, divorce him after six months, and then return to Eddie with a large settlement. Repulsed by this plan of her husband's, Jessie walks out on him and the two soon divorce. As fate would have it, Jessie eventually does wind up marrying Hennessey, but when Eddie reappears and tries to cause trouble to raise cash, she decides to walk out on her second husband with just the clothes on her back. When Hennessey's business goes belly-up, however, Jessie decides to prove her love by staying with him and helping him rebuild their lives. In Mannequin we again see the Joan Crawford who won legions of fans, as she plays with simple sincerity, rather than artificiality. Under the sympathetic direction of Frank Borzage, Joan gives one of her finest early performances. Affecting, touching and completely convincing as Jessie, Joan manages to outact the legendary thespian Tracy, who overall gives a good performance but is also at times rather perfunctory. For the most part, Joan and Tracy play very well together, although of course they lack that Gable-Crawford chemistry. Joan is wonderful as she pours out her hopes and fears to her first husband on the subway: "Sometimes I feel kind of old, responsible for everything." Surely the actress was thinking back to the vicissitudes of her own early life. "I took one look at those poor Delancey Street sets and knew I was back home; I was Jessie," she wrote in her autobiography. Once again, some critics insisted that Joan was too polished and spoke too well to be a truly convincing tenement-dweller; however, it was precisely this quality that always made her inevitable conversion to wealthy woman more believable. An interesting aspect of Mannequin is that the script by Lawrence Hazard (based on a story by Katherine Brush) is often especially sympathetic to women, at times almost feminist and definitely ahead of its time. Jessie's friend Beryl (played by Mary Phillips, the second Mrs. Humphrey Bogart) tells Tracy, "I'd say you deserve Jessie but I don't believe any man deserves any woman." When Jessie tells Beryl that at least "Eddie Miller took me away from Hester Street," Beryl snaps, "A streetcar coulda done that and cost you less!" Jessie's mother has a sad speech about her past, and the need for Jessie to strike on her own and to get what she wants out of the world, rather than live "a man's life" with her husband, like most women do. Large sections of Mannequin are intelligent and literate, but the picture becomes too pat and contrived by the time the movie wraps up. In her autobiography and early interviews, Joan focused on the positive side of Spencer Tracy. She said that acting opposite Tracy taught her how to underplay (which she did very well in Mannequin), but this may have had as much to do with director Borzage as it did Tracy. Tracy was not yet a big star, and perhaps for that reason he was supposedly unimpressed by big stars. He was amused and a little irritated with the way that Joan played the "star game" so obsessively. But Joan also had a steeliness about her that he admired. At first, Joan found Tracy's practical jokes during filming to be relatively harmless and even somewhat amusing, but things changed once the two began an affair. They were both still married and had many clandestine encounters during the shooting of Mannequin. Now that Tracy had slept with Joan more than once, he saw her not so much as a strong personality as simply a woman who could be "had," like any other. For her part, Joan found herself turned off by the very things she had first found attractive: his macho appeal and his charming boyishness. Joan was as susceptible to such things as any other woman. Tracy's jokes became more and more obnoxious, as did his behavior when he was drinking, which was often. "He would show up for romantic scenes with beer and onion breath," Joan complained. "I was supposed to act all lovey-dovey with him when I wanted to gag. He was like a big child who needed to be spanked." In later years, Joan rarely spoke well of Tracy in private, although she always felt he had a lot of talent. "His drinking really was the problem," she'd say. "It put an end to any relationship we might have had." Mankiewicz did not seem to mind that Joan and Tracy had become intimate while making Mannequin; in fact, the two men exchanged observations about Joan during more than one drinking session. Joan was set to do two new projects for Mankiewicz after Mannequin wrapped, but she changed her mind about both of them. Three Comrades was an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling novel, and The Shopworn Angel was a remake of a 1929 semi-silent movie. The official story was that Joan was afraid that the three male costars of Three Comrades would dominate the picture (she was to play the woman that all three love). While this was true, she also did not relish working yet again with Tone, cast as one of the three comrades. The role of the kept woman and actress in The Shopworn Angel smacked to Joan of something she had done too many times before; reluctantly, she bowed out. Margaret Sullavan played both parts, and was more appropriate for them. Joan worked with Sullavan in her next project. She was excited when she learned she had been cast in the film version of Keith Winter's successful Broadway play The Shining Hour (1938); it was she who urged the studio to acquire the rights to the play. She always enjoyed working with Robert Young, with whom she had acted twice before, and was happy to be working with Melvyn Douglas and Sullavan, both of whom she admired. Mankiewicz again produced, and Borzage of Mannequin directed. With all of that talent both in front of and behind the camera, Joan was sure that The Shining Hour couldn't miss. This turned our not to be true: The Shining Hour didn't work at all. Years later, Joan would blame this picture for starting her on her downward spiral, observing that the audience could only sit through so many bad movies before they stopped wanting to see her. In The Shining Hour, Joan again played the rags-to-riches type who gets involved with a rich, proper guy from a ritzy background. The difference is that Olivia Riley doesn't need anybody's money, as she has become successful as a dancer in Manhattan. However, she grows tired of her frivolous life and agrees to marry Henry Linden (Douglas). This does not sit well with Henry's stern sister and brother, Hannah (Fay Bainter) and David (Young), both of whom are not only snobs but are convinced that Olivia will inevitably cheat on Henry, marriage or no marriage. Instead, David falls for Olivia himself; afraid she'll come to return his feelings, Olivia convinces Henry to depart for a belated honeymoon for six months. Olivia has become close to David's wife, Judy (Sullavan) and has no desire to hurt her or Henry. For her part, Judy realizes that her love for David is less than fully requited. Up until this point, The Shining Hour is a literate, polished, well-acted romantic drama whose snappy, intelligent dialogue and intriguing situations lift it above mere soap opera. After that, unfortunately, it becomes more and more ludicrous. Hannah inexplicably burns down the home that Henry is building. (For Hannah, the home represents Olivia, whom she despises, but since Olivia and Henry were going away for months, there seems little point to the destructive act.) Judy runs into the fiery conflagration - not to commit suicide because her husband loves another woman (which would at least have made sense), but to sacrifice herself so that David and Olivia can be together. ("I wouldn't have believed it if I read it in a book," Olivia says of this development.) If that weren't enough, we are then asked to believe not only that Henry would still be on speaking terms with his sister, but also that Hannah would suddenly accept Olivia into the family, rather than blame her for Judy's near-death experience. Judy does survive, however, and David's love for her is finally awakened. Olivia realizes that Henry is the only one she truly loves. Meanwhile, in the bedroom upstairs, Judy's head is completely covered in bandages like a mummy, even though it is clearly seen in the preceding sequence that the fire never actually touched her and all she could possibly be suffering from is smoke inhalation. Such slipshod attention to detail ultimately undoes The Shining Hour. The shame of it is that Joan is very good in the picture, in every way a match for Margaret Sullavan, considered by many the superior actress. Whether Sullavan could out-act Joan or not is beside the point. Sullavan made only a handful of movies, and obviously didn't appear in as many bad ones as Joan. When the two are on the screen together in The Shining Hour, they come off as equals. Joan is especially effervescent and delightful as Olivia, as believable in the emotional scenes as in the comic ones (such as when she socks Frank Albertson on the jaw when he makes a drunken pass at her). In her dance number early in the picture, Joan does more of her faux dancing, but she is fairly graceful. It is very clear, however, that while her male dance partner's movements are effortless, Joan is concentrating on every step. As for her costars, Sullavan and Bainter are superb, Douglas is adequately smooth (and sometimes better than that), Hattie McDaniel is delightful as always, and Robert Young, in hot young pursuit of Joan, is simply miscast. The Shining Hour is handsomely produced, and the proceedings, believable or not, are bolstered by a lovely Chopinesque score by Franz Waxman. There are so many good things about The Shining Hour that it is too bad that it fails as a whole. The picture did not do very well at the box office, either. "It should have worked but it didn't," Joan remarked ruefully years later. "When it finally sank into me that we'd put so much into a movie that offered the public so little in terms of story value, I was ill. We should have thrown the script into the fire instead of Maggie Sullavan!" At 76 minutes, the movie is so short, much like a silent movie, that one senses that a lot of footage must have ended up on the cutting-room floor. Joan remembered that certain sequences were never filmed, but after so long she couldn't recall precisely what had been excised. "Another half an hour may not have done it any good in any case," she said. It also didn't help that the action was shifted from England, with its strongly held traditions and class-consciousness, to Wisconsin. On the set, relations between Joan and Margaret Sullavan were cordial but not warm. Apparently each was a bit envious of the other. Joan knew that Sullavan was considered the better actress of the two, and she was anxious to prove that she was Sullavan's equal. Meanwhile, Sullavan was envious of Joan's stardom. As Sullavan once described her status at MGM, "There were too damned many bitches in that kennel for my taste. In the middle of all that noise, I had to yap the loudest to even get myself heard!" Sullavan later said she found Joan "affected" and "pretentious" and "caught up in a Hollywood dream world." Sullavan was not as driven as Joan, and she didn't understand how important the success of The Shining Hour was to a woman who'd been labeled "box-office poison." Ever the perfectionist, Joan didn't just want the picture to succeed - for her, it had to be quality. When Joan tried to explain this, Sullavan's dismissive response annoyed her. Far more laid-back than Joan, Sullavan felt that it was pointless to lose sleep over such matters. Joan felt Sullavan was "cold . . . not a sympathetic person." According to Fay Bainter, everyone on the set was concerned that one of the women might eventually blow up at the other. Joan's knitting between takes nearly drove Sullavan crazy. But the two were very professional, and when all was said and done they even managed to become friendly in a casual way. There was another reason for Joan to envy Margaret. Sullavan was happily pregnant, and Joan was constantly reminded of her various miscarriages and two bad marriages. "She's such a tiny, small-boned thing," Joan complained to Jerry Asher. "How come she can have a child and I can't?" It wasn't long after finishing The Shining Hour that Joan began mulling over the possibility of adoption. Her assorted miscarriages (and abortion or two) had made it impossible for her to have any children of her own. Or so Joan always claimed. Margaret was not above playing jokes on Joan. She felt that Joan's occasional nervous tension ought to be playfully punctured now and then. When Joan has to carry Sullavan out of the burning house at the end, she was concerned because of Sullavan's pregnancy. At one point Joan stumbled, and did her best to break the fall by dropping to her elbows and knees. Sullavan kept her eyes shut and waited until Joan endured a few frantic moments wondering whether Sullavan was injured; she then opened her eyes and shouted "Boo!" Relations between Joan and Melvyn Douglas had not warmed up much since The Gorgeous Hussy. "I didn't think Joan really appeared to advantage in it," he recalled. "She was challenged by the superior acting skills of Maggie and Fay, and to her credit she did try to rise to the challenge. But Borzage, fine director that he was ... was not the director to bring out the best in her." Douglas accused Joan of "attitudinizing all over the place," adding that "she had to watch the happily married and happily pregnant Sullavan achieve maximum effects with relatively little effort and it put her off no end." Joan was still determined to stick it out with Franchot Tone, even though the situation at home was as bad as it had ever been, despite some loving moments and happy times. Tone's drinking was sometimes out of control, making him late for work and depriving his performances of spontaneity. Joan decided to surprise him at the studio one afternoon when she was in between film commitments. She opened his dressing room door and discovered him being fellated by one of the bit players in the film. Jerry Asher remembered Joan's account: Joan was livid. I don't know if she'd slept with Joseph Mankiewicz by this point - probably she did, and I know she'd been to bed with Tracy - but what was good for the goose wasn't necessarily good for the gander. She told me she went in and literally pulled him out of the poor girl's mouth. She slapped the girl around until she fled out of the dressing room like a hive of bees was after her. Joan could be funny. I think she was angrier that he was letting a nobody do him than she was that he was cheating on her. When Joan cheated on her husbands, she cheated with the best. Gable. Mankiewicz, and so on. The costars, the director, the producer, maybe a supporting player or two, but a bit player - never! Joan may have forgiven this and other of Tone's indiscretions - she was well aware that she would have been a hypocrite not to, under most circumstances - had it not been for Tone's attitude afterward, and even right then in the dressing room. "He was so contemptuous," Joan said many years later, still trembling a bit at the memory of her fury at Tone and her hurt feelings over his words in the dressing room. "I'd really tried my damndest to make that marriage work, to build up his career, to get him good parts, to do everything for him because I loved him. And the way he spoke to me. I don't remember the exact things he said to me; I just remember they were vile and hateful and unforgivable." Driving home from the studio after the fateful encounter, Joan decided then and there to divorce Tone. There was a trial separation at first, and according to the columnists there had been some chance of a reconciliation, but that marriage was over on that very day - and Joan knew it. Tone did his best to smooth things over, he said it was only hurt male pride that made him lash out at her and have affairs, but Joan wasn't having any of it. The physical blows, the tongue-lashings, the drunken beratings, and the infidelities had finally combined to make Joan fall completely and irrevocably out of love with Tone. It wasn't long before Tone was out of her home in Brentwood, then out of her life for good. For their next project, Mankiewicz wanted to team Joan and Gable in the film version of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. It wasn't that the studio had a problem with Joan as Scarlett O'Hara - although in retrospect she would have been an odd choice for the part - but that, according to Mankiewicz, Irving Thalberg assured Louis B. Mayer that Civil War pictures never made any money. Gone with the Wind would not be made at MGM. Gone With the Wind, of course, was produced by David O. Selznick and went on to make motion-picture history, with Vivien Leigh unforgettable in the role of Scarlett. While she probably suited the part better than Joan would have, Joan would hardly have been terrible as Scarlett. Joan could have done the character's determination and anger full justice, and she had already shown how well she worked with Gable. Would Joan have been too strong as a Southern belle? That we will never know. Hollywood - and life - had other things in mind for Joan Crawford. _
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