Chapter Four

  LIFE AT EL JODO

  

  

  

  

  

  

  Just before starting work on Rose-Marie, Joan went with Paul Bern to see Young Woodley at the Vine Street Playhouse. The star of the play was Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the son of the macho silent action star, Douglas Fairbanks by his first wife, Beth Sully. Young Doug was trying to carve out a career of his own without slavishly imitating his father, with whom he had an essentially sterile relationship. Joan had met Doug Jr. briefly at the studio, and found him stuffy, but she so admired his sensitive performance in Young Woodley that she sent him a congratulatory telegram. That was the beginning of their relationship. "I thought his performance was wonderful," Joan remembered years later, "but I also had set my cap for him. Not so much marriage, at first. I just thought he was delectable and wanted to get to know him better, if you know what I mean. At the studio he was cool and distant, and that made me angry. I wanted him to notice me. What better way to an actor's heart than through a telegram telling him he's wonderful? It did the trick."

  While generally well-liked in youth (as he would be later in life), Doug Fairbanks Jr. was also considered a bit of a snob and a pantywaist, a pretty boy trading on his father's name. He wore an air of entitlement, and acted decidedly "superior" - at least until he got to know someone. He was a product of impeccable breeding, however, and usually was well-mannered enough nor to make his contempt obvious. But Joan, sensitive to slights and condescension, had noticed his somewhat haughty demeanor at the studio and was determined to thaw the iceberg. No one could stick up his nose at her and get away with it.

  Doug was "thawed" by Joan's telegram, and by her obvious sex appeal. Joan was also shrewd enough to play up to the actor's vanity. Doug may have been more cultured and better-educated than she was, but Joan was no dummy. She let him patronize her - up to a point - letting him feel that he was the big, strong man giving the little girl the advantage of his masculine counsel and advice. But at all times it was the more sophisticated Joan who was really pulling the strings.

  After a while, Doug Jr. became more than just a catch, but someone Joan liked, was attracted to - and then fell in love with. Underneath his snobbery, he was boyishly sincere and unsure of himself sexually. "For all his good looks," Joan recalled, "Doug was not that sexually experienced. I think I taught him plenty of new tricks and from then on he was putty in my hands." Joan didn't need Doug's money - she had plenty of her own - but it was part of her upwardly mobile nature to seek a mate with an impressive pedigree, and in that regard he was the right stuff. Both Doug's father and his stepmother, Mary Pickford, were Hollywood royalty. Invitations to their estate, Pickfair, were highly coveted. Joan would definitely be marrying up, if she could just keep him as starry-eyed as he had been since their first encounter involving the big telegram.

  But Joan had two obstacles to contend with: Doug's mother Beth did not want her little boy to get married, especially not to a "fast" girl like Joan; his father thought that Joan was just a fling, certainly not the kind of woman who should marry the "Scion of Pickfair." Not as influential as far as Doug Jr. was concerned, but definitely part of the equation, was Mary Pickford herself, who looked down on Joan as just another sluttish chorus girl. There would be no invitations to Pickfair for Joan from that quarter. As Doug and Joan continued to see each other and fall deeper in love, they both continued making movies, first at separate studios, and then both at MGM. Joan continued to be sexually active with other men (and sometimes women) during the period that her friendship with Doug Jr. blossomed into a full-fledged love affair. Rumors of her activities undoubtedly got back to his parents - and Pickford - which made them doubt Joan's suitability as a bride all the more.

  Illogical as it may seem to us today, it was common during the silent era to make straight dramatic film adaptations of famous operas and operettas; the pianist or orchestra might play some themes from the score but there were no individual arias or song numbers. (Actually, it was not so strange to adapt musical works, as many silent films had already borrowed their basic plots from them, without credit.) Even stranger, Joan found herself in two of these productions, Rose-Marie and Dream of Love, both released in 1928. The former was based on the famous operetta by Rudolf Friml, Otto A. Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II; the latter was not so much based on Francesco Cilea's Italian opera Adriana Lecouvreur as it was on the French play Adrienne Lecouvreur by Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve that Cilea had used as his source material, although for the most part the story stayed the same.

  In Rose-Marie, Joan received fine reviews in the title role of a French-Canadian mountain gal who bewitches men at a trading post. A soldier of fortune named Jim Kenyon (James Murray, who also starred in King Vidor's masterpiece The Crowd that same year) comes along and the two fall in love, but Kenyon is falsely accused of murder and has to flee. Rose-Marie goes so far as to promise her hand to another man in the hopes that he will use his influence to save Kenyon from a posse. The real murderer is revealed, the lovers are reunited, and all is well in the French-Canadian Rockies once again. Joan thought the picture worked better than it had any right to. She recalled that the highlight of making the picture was when Doug Fairbanks Jr. came to Yosemite to visit her during filming.

  In Dream of Love, Joan played Adrienne Lecouvreur, a gypsy girl who dallies with a handsome prince (Nils Asther) and doesn't meet up with him again until she has become a famous actress. By this time, the prince has earned the enmity of the duke he's cuckolded as well as of the duchess, who learns of his affair with Adrienne and is hell-bent on revenge. The prince finds himself in front of a firing squad, but he is saved by a revolution at the last second. According to most contemporary reviewers, the melodramatic goings-on were poorly served by James McKay's editing and Fred Niblo's direction, not to mention by "ludicrous" title cards. Joan was generally found to be "charming," although she came to see the picture as "a load of romantic slush." Joan said of Asther, who later appeared with Joan in Letty Lynton, that he was a "sensitive, self-destructive type. Considering his accent, I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did in talkies." As with Haines, she knew that Asther was gay. She also recalled that while director Fred Niblo redid scenes as often as he felt necessary (unlike "One-Take" Woody Van Dyke), the results were less felicitous.

  Between Rose-Marie and Dream of Love, Joan appeared in the aforementioned Law of the Range and Four Walls, and also did a third film for director William Nigh, Across to Singapore (1928). It was the only film that she did with the great silent star Ramon Novarro, who like Haines and Asther was also gay. While perhaps not as upfront as Haines, Novarro was more accepting of his orientation than his friend, the conflicted Rudolph Valentino. Like most people, Joan liked the charming and attractive Novarro, and was horrified in 1968 when she heard of his death at the hands of two sadistic male hustlers. "He was much too nice a man to deserve to die like that," she said. She was also reunited with her friend from Twelve Miles Out, Ernest Torrence. "He was nothing like his bad-tempered, horrible screen image," she recalled. "He was a very sweet, good-natured man, generous, loving, and helpful. He helped me make it through the three or so pictures I did with him." In her autobiography, she referred to Torrence as "the lamb of the world."

  The convoluted plot of Across to Singapore involved two seafaring brothers, Joel and Mark Shore (Novarro and Torrence) who are both in love with Priscilla Crowninshield (Joan). Mark has the gall to announce his engagement to Priscilla without bothering to ask her to marry him. The two brothers set sail for Singapore, where too much drink and the machinations of an evil shipmate lead to Mark being deserted on shore and Joel winding up in irons. After several trips back and forth across the Pacific Ocean, some fistfights, a mutiny, and an encounter in a dope den, Joel and Priscilla are finally reunited, after Mark is killed coming to the aid of his brother. Most critics found the film outlandish and the two stars grossly miscast; Joan herself thought little of the picture and of her own work in it. Several years later, when Joan met the great theatrical husband-and-wife team Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the latter told her how much she admired her work in films. When Joan asked her which of her pictures she might have seen - Possessed, perhaps, or Grand Hotel? - she would always remember her mortification upon hearing "Across to Singapore" instead. A far happier memory of filming Across to Singapore was the day that Douglas Fairbanks Jr. proposed marriage, in Long Beach on New Year's Eve. Joan agreed without hesitation.

  Our Dancing Daughters (1928) has always been considered the film that made Joan Crawford a superstar of the silent era and beyond. In it, she plays Diana Medford, a jazz-era flapper who puts up a wild front but underneath has her head on straight. Her friend Anne (Anita Page), conversely, seems childlike and innocent on the surface but is actually immoral and irresponsible. Both women pursue a handsome rich man, Ben Blaine (Johnny Mack Brown). Turned off by Diana's outward manner, Blaine marries the seemingly demure Anne instead - but deep down he still pines for Diana. Unfaithful Anne unfairly accuses Diana and Ben of carrying on behind her back; a drunken tumble down a flight of stairs eliminates her for good, and Ben and Diana end up together.

  As soon as she read the script, Joan fought hard for the part. On the set, she loved working on the film. She liked the way the director, Harry Beaumont, allowed the cast the free range of expressions and emotions.

  "I think it helped that Harry Beaumont let us be uninhibited because deep down he wanted to be uninhibited like us, too, but couldn't," she recalled. "Another director might have held us back, constricted us, and compromised the picture. I remember at the time thinking that I had never been in anything like it. The characters may seem like stereotypes now but back then they were fresher and more novel than they would be seen as today."

  Many critics compared Joan in Our Dancing Daughters to Clara Bow, predicting that her career would overtake and outlast Bow's, which it eventually did. The movie caused a sensation, especially with the Jazz-Age youth, who ate up its apparent message of free love and fun but also understood that Joan was playing a woman who was essentially kind and decent. Suddenly, thousands of female fans wanted to dress, dance, and in all ways be like Joan, who received more fan mail for this film than for any other before it. Although Joan was not the star of the film on the title cards - no one was - the reaction to her was so positive that theater owners began highlighting her name on their marquees. Joan had really arrived: she bought a big Hollywood home with ten rooms.

  Around the time of the shooting of Our Dancing Daughters, rumors of Joan's bisexuality began to surface, in spite of (or perhaps because of) her highly publicized relationship with pretty-boy Fairbanks. Part of it was her intense desire to become friends with costar Anita Page, which some thought indicated that she had a crush on Page. For her part, Page later told writer William Mann that "it may have been true in the beginning, that she wanted to know me for that reason." Her friend and confidant Jerry Asher was certain that Joan had lusted for Page, revealing that she had more than once admitted as much. Asher also related that Joan got farther with Dorothy Sebastian, cast as Beatrice in Our Dancing Daughters, and with Gwen Lee, who would appear with Joan in Untamed and Paid. He felt certain that Joan and early roommate Mae Clarke had been on and off lovers for a time. In later years, Joan would become very close to her Hollywood neighbor Barbara Stanwyck. Asher confirmed that Joan had admitted to him that the two had had a sexual relationship. "Missy [Stanwyck] and Joan were very alike, interested in men and women alike," said Asher. "They had adjoining properties in Brentwood. When Barbara was mistreated, beaten, by her first husband, Frank Fay, Barbara would escape from his drunken rantings by fleeing to Joan's house, where Joan would console her. Eventually one thing led to another." Helen Ferguson, a bisexual former actress who was Stanwyck's press agent for many years, confirmed this.

  "There is no doubt in my mind," said Ferguson, "that Joan and Barbara were intimate on more than one occasion."

  Joan also was sexually curious about Bette Davis, but, according to Asher, more than anything else it had to do with Joan's amusement over Davis's crush on her then-husband Franchot Tone:

  

  Joan would laugh about it. "Franchot isn't interested in Bette, but I wouldn't mind giving her a poke if I was in the right mood. Wouldn't that be funny?" I was never certain if she was serious or not - Bette wasn't the kind of beauty these other women were - but I do think Joan was attracted to Bette's vitality and energy. Mostly she wanted to be Bette's friend because she admired her ability and sensed some similarities between them. Bette was always convinced, due to her ego, that Joan had the hots for her and that's one reason why she was always so antagonistic and called her a phony.

  

  Asher added that by the time of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Joan had no sexual interest whatsoever in the overweight, slatternly Davis, "but I'm sure when Joan sent her gifts Bette was convinced she was still trying to get into her pants."

  Late in life, Martha Raye claimed that she had had an affair with Joan when both were working for the USO during World War II. Most of the women Joan was attracted to were highly pulchritudinous or at least very sensual (for example, Davis in her youth), neither of which Raye was, at least on-screen. But not all of the men Joan had affairs with were so handsome. In some cases, it was the masculine aura that attracted her; in other cases, Joan was using her body to garner favors. But what favor could she have wanted from Raye? Was Joan responsive to Raye's lust due to her own narcissism? As intriguing as it is, it's more likely that this story was an example of a former star thinking they could get away with saying nearly anything about Joan's behavior.

  Joan met Jerry Asher at MGM, where he was a gofer and office boy. He was obviously gay, and he brought out Joan's maternal instincts. She was instrumental in getting Howard Strickling, head of MGM's publicity department, to hire Asher as a press agent. Joan frequently invited Asher to her home, and the two became extremely close. Joan was perhaps more indiscreet with him than with any other person in those days. When Asher, who died in 1967, told these stories about Joan, he wasn't trying to be nasty, he simply saw nothing wrong in Joan's involvements, homosexual or otherwise. Rather, he found her various sexual entanglements too fascinating to withhold from people he knew were sophisticated enough to deal with them. Also, this was during the '20s and '30s, before the production code inflicted a more conservative morality on Hollywood. Knowing of Asher's own orientation, Joan introduced him to William Haines, and she felt safe in talking about her occasional indiscretions with her own sex, which she never took very seriously. "Joan's main interest was men," Jerry often remarked. If one were to try to place Joan on Kinsey's Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale (where 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 6 is exclusively homosexual), she would probably rate about a 2 ("predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual"). At this time, lesbian experimentation was sometimes seen as just a way of expressing freedom and lack of inhibition. "At least you can't get pregnant," Joan joked many years later, when the subject of lesbianism somehow came up at a luncheon.

  Joan's primary sexual interest was in the male of the species. She may have thought Anita Page of Our Dancing Daughters was luscious, but her heart really pounded for the male lead, Johnny Mack Brown, who was a former football hero. "He was as handsome as all get-out," she remembered, "but much too reserved and a little too gentlemanly for my taste." He did not light Joan's fire as much as Clark Gable would; apparently Joan did not interest Brown either. "I think he liked Anita," Joan remembered.

  Asher's opinion was that Joan was a virtual nymphomaniac and gave all of her leading men, and many of the male supporting players, the once-over to assess their potential bedmanship. These hurried encounters were strictly for quick thrills (and, occasionally, control) and had nothing to do with Joan's romantic feelings for, or engagement to, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. during this period. Joan was like a man (at least how we see some men) in that she could be in love with someone and see nothing wrong in having "meaningless sex" with others. "Joan did not like to be rejected, but who does?" Asher said. "She once told me about the guys who rejected her: "If they're gay they're forgiven, but if they're straight - never!" A lot of Joan's forgiveness had to do with the manner in which the rejection came. It did not necessarily impress her if a man was married or engaged, because she knew how many men cheated on their wives and fiancees and basically assumed that everybody cheated at one time or another, as she did. But if she sensed that a man sincerely didn't want to cheat, then she would let it pass, especially if it was someone she wasn't that interested in. "She wouldn't necessarily blackball a guy because he wouldn't sleep with her," Asher said, "it's more that she'd rather make a picture with a compatibly randy fellow - Clark Gable, for instance - than a less pliable Johnny Mack Brown. However, she never objected very strenuously to being cast with a male player when she knew the on-screen chemistry would be good for the picture," for instance her films with Robert Montgomery.

  Our Modern Maidens (1929) was Joan's last silent picture at MGM. There was some concern at the studio that the movie wouldn't seem very contemporary without sound, so it was eventually released with background scoring, some spoken narration, and sound effects, making it a "semi-silent." This fooled no one, as the dialogue was still revealed in title cards, and Joan's voice was never heard. In spite of this, the picture did extremely well at the box office because of the public's fascination with the very public love affair between Joan and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., not to mention the success of Our Dancing Daughters. Although not a sequel to Our Dancing Daughters, Our Modern Maidens also concerns young "jazz babies" - "moderns" who have up-to-date ideas about sex - and their love troubles. Our Modern Maidens is a far superior film to Our Dancing Daughters. (Dream of Love and The Duke Steps Out came between these two "Our" films.)

  Billie (Joan) wants her boyfriend Gil (Fairbanks) to keep their engagement secret until he makes his way in life. To that end, she begins a fake romance with a wealthy older man named Glenn (Rod La Rocque), hoping he can use his connections to get Gil an appointment for diplomatic service, assuring Glenn that Gil is "just a friend." Glenn does as he is told, Gil is sent off to Paris, and news of his engagement to Billie hits the papers. This understandably devastates Glenn, who had thought that Billie was really in love with him. There is another victim to Billie's manipulations as well: "Kentucky" Strafford (Anita Page), a friend of hers who begins a romance with Gil while Billie was spending all of her time with Glenn. Lifelong sweethearts Billie and Gil get married, but after the ceremony Billie discovers that Kentucky is pregnant - of course, by Gil. "Couldn't you have told me an hour ago?" she asks a distraught Kentucky. Billie has the marriage annulled so that Gil can marry the woman he - apparently - truly loves. Recognizing that she was the original architect of this unhappiness, Billie allows her father and her friends to think that Gil is pulling out of the marriage because of her indiscretions. But who should show up in Paris, where Billie has fled, but a forgiving Glenn wanting her back. Realizing that she really loves Glenn, Billie takes him into her arms. Fade to black.

  Some fans were disappointed that Joan didn't walk off into the sunset with her real-life fiance Douglas Fairbanks Jr. However, Rod La Rocque was on the payroll at MGM and Doug was not. In addition, the conclusion of Our Modern Maidens is more dramatic and less predictable the way it is.

  Despite the lack of trenchant dialogue and in-depth characterization, Our Modern Maidens remains an effective movie over seventy years after its initial release. The basic premise of a woman keeping company with one man in order to help another is borrowed from Lillian Gish's silent film version of La Boheme, although the results are quite different. Our Modern Maidens could be dismissed as a hackneyed romance were it not for the suspense it creates as the wedding approaches and the audience wonders what new disaster will ensue. Moreover, the resolution, with Billie and Glenn reunited, is a surprising tearjerker. What also makes it work is the performances.

  Joan is at the top of her form in every scene: alone with La Rocque after he learns of her deception, she registers compassion, anxiety, and then relief (Glenn locks her in a room, ostensibly to have his way with her, but then he can't go through with it). Billie's expression at the end when she sees Glenn at the door in Paris is priceless. So is the look on her face when she discovers that Kentucky is pregnant by her husband. Joan does not play a "bitch" in the movie: her Billie does what she does out of love for Gil, and in some ways she seems more upset by the result of her actions than Glenn or Kentucky is. It's true that at this stage of her life Joan was by no means a raving beauty - short hair was rarely if ever becoming on her, for one thing - but she is still quite attractive. In any case, she arouses interest more because of her personality than her looks - Anita Page was prettier.

  In an early scene, Billie performs a kind of mock ballet at a party for the benefit of Glenn no one would have mistaken Joan for a prima ballerina. Joan was endlessly curious about the effects she was making; she would watch the rushes every day and talk to the editor to see if improvements could be made. "We all bounced, danced, skipped and hippety-hopped . . . but we also exhibited a rather touching sincerity," she remembered about the film - and she was right about the way it plays on-screen. She also thought that Our Modern Maidens was the first time the wardrobe department really had a chance to go all-out on her costumes.

  The other performers match Joan in intensity. None of the players in the movie ever exhibit those dreadful hammy mannerisms that so often plagued silent film actors; on the contrary, for the period they are very natural. Director Jack Conway kept things moving, and the production had all the gloss and extravagance MGM could muster. It did better for the studio than expected. It was the only movie Joan and Doug ever made together.

  After the picture wrapped, the couple then flew to New York to be married. By this time Joan had managed to win Doug's mother Beth over, but his father and stepmother were nowhere in evidence as they tied the knot on June 3,1929, at St. Malachy's Roman Catholic Church. Doug was only twenty-one; Joan took four years off her age, becoming twenty-one again. They spent their honeymoon at the Algonquin Hotel, never venturing from their room. "I saved up some 'tricks' for the wedding night," Joan remembered, "but Doug made up for what he didn't know with plenty of enthusiasm."

  The fans were thrilled (and some a little disappointed), but not everyone in Hollywood was impressed. There were no parties at Pickfair, at least none to celebrate the nuptials. Many thought that Doug Jr. had married beneath himself, and would be cuckolded by Joan before the week was out. Even Joan's supporters figured she had an angle, no matter how much in love she may have been with Doug. Adela Rogers St. Johns, famed chronicler of the stars for Photoplay, summed it up when she observed, "Though it was a love match, Joan was anxious to better herself." Helen Ferguson, Stanwyck's press agent, was later to remember the unkind gossip surrounding the alliance, such as, "She started off tramping for middle-aged big shots - now she's a cradle robber!" On the other hand, while Doug Jr. helped Joan gain polish and social poise, she reaffirmed his belief in his acting abilities - as Fairbanks himself recalled in later years - encouraging him to strike out on his own, and to trust his own judgment. Thanks in part to Joan's efforts, Doug Fairbanks Jr. was no longer Mama's Little Boy, and he was no longer in his Father's Long Shadow either. For this, among other things, Fairbanks Jr. would remain grateful; in later years, he rarely said anything negative about his former wife. It was largely the same for Joan. She was certainly exaggerating when she wrote in her memoirs that Doug taught her how to laugh - she'd had plenty of laughs working, partying, and dancing with William Haines and others - but it was her first warm and sustained relationship with a man who was in love with her and with whom she was in love.

  Not long after they got married, on September 14,1929, Joan and Doug visited Grauman's Chinese Theatre in order to put their footprints in cement in the forecourt outside. As Fairbanks Jr. related it in his autobiography, The Salad Days:

  

  One of the supposed guerdons of film fame was planting one's hands, feet, and signature in wet cement in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.... When it was MGM's turn to plug its newest star, Joan Crawford, she and I were both sent downtown to a big ... event in front of the theater. The report that we both left our marks for posterity was only half true. The film and the star were MGM properties and I was a corporate foreigner from First National. Hence, no provision was made for my recorded hands and feet at all.

  

  Joan and Doug moved into Joan's large house after they were married. Playfully mimicking the name of "Pickfair," they combined their names and christened their love nest "El Jodo." Since they weren't invited to Pickfair's soirees for quite some time, they held their own parties instead. Joan remembers this period as a rather blissful one, and no doubt it was. They were young and in love; they were good-looking; they had successful careers, plenty of money, and fans all over the country. By all rights their existence should have been perfect. Perhaps it was a little too perfect, a little too calculated, a model home with marching Ken and Barbie dolls merely playing at being a normal wife and husband when that was hardly what they were. When not spending quiet hours together, enjoying sex, or carousing with assorted guests, they reported to the studio. Married life was not about to deter Joan Crawford from her career.

  A plotless revue staged for the cameras, Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) was Joan's first sound film, featuring Hollywood stars undertaking activities, both appropriate and otherwise, in front of an unseen audience. Jack Benny (appropriate) and Conrad Nagel (inappropriate) were the masters of ceremonies. Norma Shearer and John Gilbert performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Laurel and Hardy did a comedy spot. Marie Dressier and Polly Moran clowned around. Joan sang "I've Got a Feeling for You" (she puts the number over but proves herself no great song stylist) and danced - none too impressively. It seems more like faux dancing than anything else, but she did kick up her legs with great vigor. Not well-served by the makeup department, Joan looks rather plain - too scrubbed, virtually lacking in sex appeal. Her pal William Haines also got to do a bit.

  

  Her next film, Untamed (1929) was Joan's first real talkie. This was the first time she worked with Broadway star Robert Montgomery (with whom she would costar several more times), and the third time with her chum and admirer Ernest Torrence; Jack Conway was back as director. In the movie, Joan plays "Bingo," who inherits millions of dollars after her oilman father is killed. Transplanted from South America to New York, she finds that she lacks the polish and social graces that people expect of a woman of means. (Perhaps Joan's exclusion from Pickfair made her relate to the script.) Bingo falls for Andy (Montgomery), a man she has met on the boat ride to New York, but he is intimidated by her wealth and goes off with Marjory (Gwen Lee). Having already scandalized most of Manhattan, Bingo shoots Andy in the arm, which somehow makes him see the error of his ways and agree to marry her.

  Reviewers found Joan's speaking voice "alluring," and her career in sound films was therefore assured. The reviews of her performance were mixed: some critics thought she was convincing in both the South America and Manhattan scenes, while others found her completely "ill-at-ease" throughout. All in all, the material took the brunt of the negative criticism. For the most part, Joan made a good impression and great things continued to be predicted for her. Joan had two song numbers in Untamed. On "Chant of the Jungle," her voice is simply too deep and bassoony to be sexy. Montgomery joins her for "That Wonderful Something is Love," in the process proving that he wasn't much of a singer, either.

  Joan and Montgomery worked well together over the years, but in terms of temperament, they were oil and water. There were no major blow-ups, and certainly no romance, but after a while Montgomery got tired of what he perceived as Joan's grand manner and her single-mindedness about her career, a quality that many male actors found unattractive in women. It didn't help that Montgomery played mostly supporting roles under Joan until he became a star in his own right. Even then, he never quite came up to the level of - or had the staying power of - a superstar like Joan, even though, with his theater background, he was convinced that he had more talent than Joan. (A lot of Joan's male costars felt that way.) They often had fun working together, depending on how they felt about the rest of the cast, but they would never have a warm relationship. Jerome Cowan, who worked with Montgomery in the Bette Davis vehicle June Bride many years later, said, "Bob had a kind of feline, feminine talent for getting under a lady costar's skin. I heard that Joan Crawford had cordially hated him during their films together at MGM and I could see why." Later on, Joan was more blunt: "He was a big bitch!" (Note: such references to "bitch" or being "feminine" in no way reflect any opinion about his sexuality - they were both merely saying that Montgomery was displaying characteristics perceived as feminine.)

   By her next film, Montana Moon (1930), Joan had managed to raise her singing voice an octave or so, but she still doesn't sound that great warbling the interesting number "Montana Call." Joan dismissed the picture as an attempt to do something for the career of Johnny Mack Brown, although it ended up doing little for anybody's career. In this bit of froufrou, Joan plays "Montana" Prescott, daughter of a wealthy rancher who meets a cowpoke named Larry Kerrigan (Brown) and decides to marry him. At the wedding reception, Montana outrages Larry by doing a torrid number with a sexy fellow named Jeff Pelham (Ricardo Cortez), which ends in a steamy kiss. Infuriated by what she feels is her husband's overreaction, Montana takes the train to New York, but "bandits" - Larry and his pals in disguise - pretend to hold up the train and Montana is carried off by Larry to hearth and happiness. Technical problems of the new sound process did not distract reviewers from noticing that Montana Moon was a pretty silly, flimsy concoction. About all Joan got out of it were pleasant memories of several "dates" (and then some) with the handsome Cortez, who would have a respectable Hollywood career as a character actor.

  It seems Joan was already finding life with Doug at "El Jodo" rather boring. And Joan Crawford could not tolerate boredom.

  She would have to take steps to find outside stimulation.

  

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