Joan Crawford: A Woman's Face by Scott Eyman
Lucille LeSeueur couldn’t cut it as a nom de cinema. The PR department at MGM thought LeSeueur was too hard to say—or might easily devolve into “The Sewer.” They held a name-the-new-actress contest in a fan magazine, and the unknown Lucille LeSeueur became the famous Joan Crawford.
Crawford had been the subject of previous biographies, including the notorious hack job by her embittered daughter called Mommie Dearest. The new one by Scott Eyman stands a good chance of remaining definitive for its deft writing, archival research, critical thinking and cineaste’s eye for telling details. While admiring his subject, Eyman doesn’t gloss the spotty years of a career that included high peaks, dark valleys and long plateaus of mediocrity. But even in the worst movies she was handed (1970’s Trog?). Crawford strove to perform credibly.
She was one of the bright young things recruited by MGM in the mid-1920s, exemplary flappers of the Jazz Age, and is the only member of that crew remembered today. Her face with its big deep eyes was an immediate asset and served her from youth through old age. Eyman doesn’t quite say this, but she is remembered more for one movie than for any of the 80 other entries in her filmography, Mildred Pierce (1945).
Crawford hadn’t worked for nearly two years before she turned up on the Warner Bros. lot for the production. “That has-been?” Jack Warner sniped. “We’re only using her because Barbara Stanwyck’s too busy!” And while Stanwyck would have been a good choice as Mildred, Crawford endowed the character with a certain middle-class work ethic, the aura of being worn down while remaining determined. She was magnetic but not glamorous, embodying the cares of working women balancing jobs and children while navigating the choppy waters of treacherous men.
Along with Mildred Pierece, classic film buffs will also cite Crawford for her roles in a pair of star-laden pictures, Grand Hotel (1932) and The Women (1939). However, as Eyman chronicles her career, he concedes that much of her time was spent on “stock screen merchandise.” She resisted the onset of television but sought work in the new medium as her post-Mildred career faded. She was dead-on as ever, including an episode of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery” directed by an unknown young hopeful named Steven Spielberg.
In Eyman’s telling Crawford comes across as resolved to make it in a difficult industry without succumbing to the hubris of stardom. On her last day at MGM, she cleared out her dressing room without help, washed the kitchenette and vacuumed the carpet. Like Mildred Pierce,” nobody was going to be able to say she left any mess behind.”
Scott Eyman’s Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face is published by Simon & Schuster.
