Hollywood producers first noticed Joan Crawford in the silent era for her unique face, those wide eyes and strong features. And when given a meaningful role, her bewildered expression gave way to the determination displayed in her most enduring film, Mildred Pierce (1945). Her vulnerability was steeled with an inner strength. She was also a Hollywood party girl and according to the sympathetic account given in Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography, the actress was more than willing to use sex to gain favor from important men and women. After all, she liked having sex.
In the 2002 biography, out now in a paperback edition, Hollywood veteran Lawrence J. Quirk collaborated with his younger colleague William Schoell. Quirk met Crawford as a young reporter for the Hearst publications and friendship developed as he covered her over the years. Quirk introduced the actress to Schoell, who came up in the ‘70s just as Hollywood history was being written. Lacking home video, film buffs and historians had to work hard in those days and look sharp for old movies on the late show or at the nearest revival house. They enjoyed one advantage: many of the actors and directors were still alive.
One impetus behind writing The Essential Biography was to counter the dubious bestselling book by Crawford’s daughter, Mommie Dearest (1978). Adapted as a TV movie, it blackened her mother’s reputation for a generation. Quirk and Schoell describe the daughter as a whiny loafer, angered (among other things) that mommy cut her allowance. Although conceding that Crawford was less than perfect, they write, “she deserved a lot better than what she has gotten since the publication of Mommie Dearest.”
Quirk seems to have handed most of the writing to Schoell, who briskly summarizes Crawford’s extensive filmography while drawing from the older man’s insights into her character. Her career dwindled sadly into a few cheap pictures and her last years suggest an emotionally balanced Norma Desmond, humored by old friends at the studio but doomed by her age and the idea that she had become irrelevant despite a career playing strong women confronted by duplicitous, maybe even murderous men.
Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography is published by University Press of Kentucky.
