Joan Crawford's Oscar for Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford’s Oscar award was the measure of her success. Arguably the pinnacle of her career, but in a career of so many makeovers and incarnations, so much achieved for the struggling young chorine with the Dickensian childhood and the lifelong need for recognition, with the strong on-screen personality and even stronger off screen, we may wonder not so much what an Oscar is worth, but what it was worth to her. It’s easy to assume she wanted it bad, but what was it worthto her?

This is our entry in the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon hosted by Aurora of Once Upon a Screen, Kellee from Outspoken & Freckled, and Paula from Paula’s Cinema Club.   

Joan Crawford won Best Actress for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), a movie which represented, yet again, another phase in her career as she had left, by mutual agreement, her over two-decade association with M-G-M, and attempted to rise from the ashes at Warner Bros. We covered Mildred Pierce here in our series on Ann Blyth, who, along with fellow castmate Eve Arden, were nominated in the Best Supporting category.  Both lost to Anne Revere.

Joan Crawford was up against a tough field of other nominees herself: Ingrid Berman for The Bells of St. Mary’s, Greer Garson for The Valley of Decision, Jennifer Jones for Love Letters, and Gene Tierney for Leave Her to Heaven.

Reportedly, Joan feared that Ingrid Bergman was the shoe-in to win.  I would have thought Gene Tierney was the more likely close contender with her powerful performance as the glamorous sociopath.  Ingrid had won the statue only the year before, and Greer Garson and Jennifer Jones were former winners as well.

The 18th annual Academy Awards was presented on March 7, 1946. It was the first post-war awards, and the austerity that marked the ceremony during World War II was gone in a stream of klieg lights and the flash of camera bulbs popping.  Plaster statues had been given out during the war—every metal except the fillings in your teeth was promised to The War Effort—and the post-war Oscars were bronze with gold plating.

Director Michael Curtiz had not wanted her for the role.  Bette Davis had first dibs, and she turned it down.  Curtiz preferred Barbara Stanwyck, who was interested, but he agreed to let Joan Crawford test for the role—as if she were an up and coming newbie—but was bowled over not only by her performance, but her willingness to work hard and humble herself to play a non-glamorous role, and worse still, the mother of a much more glamorous nearly grown daughter, played by Ann Blyth, who nearly stole the movie. Joan was generous to the newcomer and they became lifelong friends.

Bob Hope and James Stewart were co-hosts for the event, which was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.  Radio station KECA broadcast the awards ceremony, with a nationwide hookup on the ABC radio network.  ABC was only three years old, having been established in 1943 and formerly known as the NBC Blue Network.  (The NBC Red Network became at that time simply NBC.) The radio program began at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

Joan Crawford came to Hollywood with the name of Lucille LeSueur, and Pete Smith, head of publicity at M-G-M, saw great promise in the young actress, but not in her name, which he felt had to go.  He set up a “Name the Star” contest in Movie Weekly magazine, and fans voted on the name.  Joan reportedly was less than enthused about the final selection, but seemed to immediately grasp that she owed her career even more to the fans than to the moguls, and she courted them for the rest of her life.  Her career, and her ultimate success, came through artifice, and she embraced it.

But she did not go to the ceremony.  She listened to the Academy Awards on the radio that night on station KECA.  So sure she would not win, and fearing losing in so public a setting, she spent the evening at home in her Brentwood mansion, in bed.  She reported that she had a fever and pneumonia. She was 41 years old and undoubtedly wondered where her career was going next after this evening.

Joan Crawford's Oscar ceremony program

Charles Boyer presented the award for Best Actress.  Joan Crawford sipped a few cocktails for courage. 

He read Joan Crawford’s name.

We can only imagine her reaction. 

Michael Curtiz accepted the award on her behalf.

Cue hairdresser and makeup artist, and off to Joan’s bedroom.

After the ceremony ended, Michael Curtiz went to her bedside to present the award, in the company of the press.  Several other well-wishers, including young Ann Blyth, arrived at Joan’s house to congratulate her. It was considered to be an enormous comeback for a woman who had been regarded as a has-been only the year before.  Her bed jacket and nightgown acceptance of the gold-plated prize was plastered all over newspapers, outshining any other victory of the evening.

In a woman notorious for hungering for legitimacy, did it give her the measure of self-worth she craved?

Years later, in a series of conversations in the 1960s and early ‘70s with interviewer Roy Newquist and published in his book Conversations with Joan Crawford, published in 1980, she presents a more complex, even sadder perspective on the event:

I remember how I felt the night the Awards were presented. Hopeful, scared, apprehensive, so afraid I wouldn't remember what I wanted to say, terrified at the thought of looking at those people, almost hoping I wouldn't get it, but wanting it so badly—no wonder I didn't go. I stayed home and fortified myself, probably a little too much, because when the announcement came, and then the press, and sort of a party, I didn't make much sense at all, even though I wanted to spill over...

I think the Academy voters honored me as much that night for A Woman's Face and Strange Cargo and maybe Grand Hotel as they did for Mildred. Or maybe it was for just staying around that long. Hollywood is like that; they compensate for their sins of omission later on, like the special awards they had to vote to Chaplin and Garbo in order not to seem completely ridiculous...

Winning the Oscar did revive her career, splendidly.  She received two more Academy Award nominations, for Possessed (1947) and for Sudden Fear (1952).  I assume she attended those awards, but I don’t know and I hope someone will fill us in.

Again, on her Mildred Pierce win:

And funny, the morning after, when I realized the award wasn't a dream after all, I realized that Mildred Pierce really rang down the curtain on "my" Hollywood. The character I played in that film was a composite of the roles I'd always played—and a few elements from my own personality and character. (Not the long-suffering bit; I'm too much of a Christian Scientist to suffer very long at a stretch.) My professional and personal worlds had changed so much—good friends were dying or moving away—the public was restless about making up its mind what it wanted to see—the studios were in bigger and bigger trouble. No, my day, my long and golden and often glorious day, had ended, and Mildred Pierce was sort of the bittersweet celebration of the end...

...In some respects everything that happened afterward—except  Alfred [husband Alfred Steele]—was anti-climactic...It's like being a mountain climber: After you've done Everest, what's next? And, why?

She was not one to rest on her laurels, and even apparently did not mind lending her laurels to a friend.  Have a look here at my Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.  blog for the tale of how Ann borrowed Joan’s Oscar for a scavenger hunt.

The Oscar win joined pop culture with an episode of the TV show Saints and Sinners called "The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar" in 1963, which we discussed in this previous post. This may have been less a nod to her 1945 win than the buildup to the Oscar nominations in 1963 for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, discussed in this post on the TV miniseries Feud.

Joan Crawford’s film career ended with Trog(1970) and she rang the curtain down herself, taking no further work, disillusioned with the film industry, with her own aging, and as the next few years passed, with ill health.  She did not appear in public after 1974, and suffering from cancer, died in her New York apartment of a heart attack in May 1977.

Her friend, director George Cukor held a memorial service at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.  He said of her in his eulogy:

 “She was the perfect image of the movie star, and, as such, largely the creation of her own indomitable will. She had, of course, very remarkable material to work with: a quick native intelligence, tremendous animal vitality, a lovely figure and, above all, her face, that extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes, finely chiseled like the mask of some classical divinity from fifth-century Greece. It caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle, and the face moved beautifully....The nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became—her eyes glistening, her lips avid in ecstatic acceptance. The camera saw, I suspect, a side of her that no flesh-and-blood lover ever saw....I thought Joan Crawford would never die. Come to think of it, as long as celluloid holds together and the word Hollywood means anything to anyone, she never will.”

The Oscar she won was left to her daughter, Cathy Lalonde, along with all of her mother’s property, and shared an inheritance with her sister Cindy. She sold the Oscar at auction in 1993.  It was only the third time an Oscar was offered at public auction, and it was the first major award to be sold in this manner.  Expected to fetch between $8,000 and $12,000, the winning bid to a private collector was $68,000.

What is an Oscar worth?  It depends on who you talk to.

Almost twenty years later, Joan’s Oscar was sold again at auction, in 2012. For $426,732.  Does a gold-plated bronze statue appreciate in value?  Or is it the reputation of the actress that has cachet?

That Oscar is 13.25 inches tall and weighs 6 pounds, 2 ounces.  The plaque on the base is engraved:

“Academy First Award

To

Joan Crawford

For Her Performance In

'Mildred Pierce'”

It was described by Christie’s auction house to have, “Light speckling and rubbing to finish and scattered chips to base, else near fine.”  In other words, it had flaws.  But was still, like Crawford's body of work, “near fine.”

The souvenir program from that March 1946 ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theater was also auctioned off, and expected to fetch between $80 and $120.  It sold for $875.

In 1970, right around Trog and before her self-imposed exile from the public view to the confines of her New York apartment, she participated in an interview with David Frost on his television show.  With an expression that seemed to indicate she had re-lived that bedside Oscar win many times in her memory, she remarked as if still enthralled:

“I don’t think the public knows what the Oscar means to us.  It is one of the most emotional things that can ever happen to a human being.” 

Watch the David Frost interview below.

Please take a look at the other blogs in this terrific 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon hosted by Aurora of Once Upon a Screen, Kellee from Outspoken & Freckled, and Paula from Paula’s Cinema Club. 

Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929)

In Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929),  Joan Crawford epitomizes the daring flapper, living only for the moment, the eternal symbol (one of many glitzy symbols) of the 1920s. We continue today with part 3 of our series on the 1920s – Then and Now.

Novelist-turned-Hollywood-writer F. Scott Fitzgerald saw in Joan Crawford the essence of the flapper, as he is noted to have remarked:

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

He might have been describing her in these two movies.  Our Dancing Daughters stars Joan as a high-octane flapper or “modern,” her name for the first time above the title.  This movie and Our Modern Maidens are "modern" morality plays of sorts – Joan Crawford is not so much a scandalous woman but a survivor on her own terms in a fast-paced world. There is something brave and admirable about her, despite the implied warning about a life of burning the candle at both ends.

We open on Joan Crawford during a frenetic shimmy as she changes into a party frock for an evening out. Her well-to-do parents, played by Dorothy Cumming and Huntley Gordon, give her free reign, and she adores them. They have a great relationship.

This is immediately contrasted with the less well-off family of a conniving mother and daughter played by Kathlyn Williams and Anita Page. Her mother wants Anita to marry rich and passes on the age-old advice that men want wives who are virtuous – but to get them one must be only virtuous-appearing and yet not so virtuous that one fails to entrap a male and drag him to the altar. This will happen to our hero Johnny Mack Brown, the millionaire’s son.

Life is a whirlwind of parties for Joan and her “crowd.” Dorothy Sebastian plays Beatrice, a friend with a “past” which she loathes to confess to her intended, played by Nils Asther. She eventually does confess, he forgives her, they are happily married, but reminders of her past are thrown in her path every moment, straining her marriage. It is not smooth sailing for those who are not virtuous to begin with, even if their friends and their families give them pass.

I’d have to say my favorite character is played by Edward J. Nugent, who also appears in Our Modern Maidens as a slick-haired callow youth with a smart line, a boyish worthlessness, and a tennis sweater.  He has enormous personality and plays to the camera very well.  I get a kick out of him.

When we first meet Joan getting dressed to go to her party, she goes downstairs – every private home and every public ballroom is dripping with Art Deco ornamentation – she has a companionable drink with her father, and is toasted by three young men all standing at attention in their tuxedos. Each offers her a sip from his glass, and she obliges because she is Diana the famed huntress – not of men, but of life and good times.

When she meets Johnny Mack Brown, she does not immediately throw herself at him but she flirts with him and they develop feelings for each other. Anita Page, however, openly throws herself at him in pseudo-virtuous manner – always insinuating herself in between Joan and Johnny.

Johnny is clearly smitten with Joan, but he is wary about her goodtime girl reputation, and he feels he must uphold the family honor by considering the matter very carefully. In the meantime, on an outing with the fake good girl Anita Page, she traps him, with the help of her conniving mother, into not so much proposing to her as refusing to embarrass her in public by saying, “Hold the phone, I never asked you to marry me.”  He is too much of a gentleman for that.

Joan, of course, is crushed. And she is angry, because she feels that even though she has led life in the fast lane, she has never lied about herself or attempted to trick anybody into marrying her.

She lashes out at Anita Page and her "nasty little mind.” She is disappointed in Johnny Mack Brown but she doesn’t blame him. She understands that one must play by the rules or at least accept the consequences for not doing so. Anita marries Johnny, but they are miserable. She never loved him, she just loves his money and she has grown bored stiff being the wife of the millionaire’s son. She runs around on him.

In a climactic scene at a party, she catches Johnny Mack Brown and Joan having a quiet conversation and accuses them of infidelity.  She has had a little too much to drink. 

At the bottom of a very long staircase are three scrubwomen, and she mocks them in a way that will engender our pity for her. She asks them why they are working, and thinking of her own self-interested mother, “Don’t you have pretty daughters?” She knows she has been prostituted by her mother for a cushy life. Here we see what will be a theme in later decades for movies: The younger generation blaming the elder.

While quite drunk, Anita will fall down the very long set of stairs, landing at the feet of three scrub women in a terribly sad end to her life.

We cut to two years later when Joan returns from Europe and she will marry Johnny Mack Brown. Moral of the story? To thine own self be true. And suffer the consequences.

Our Modern Maidens is not the sequel we might expect, at least not in terms of having the same characters, but there is the continued theme of what’s a flapper to do to find true love?

Here, Joan Crawford is called Billie, and an interesting point of trivia is that she went by the nickname of Billie as a kid, and this is what her first husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., called her. This movie capitalizes on their real-life romance by putting young Doug in the role of her boyfriend.

The movie starts on the night of the prom where Joan is a senior at an exclusive girls' school – again she is the rich, spoiled flapper with the zest for living. Two jalopies careen down the road at night nearly causing a traffic accident, and they pull up and have an impromptu prom on the side of the road, dancing to the music on the car radio. This is a generation besotted with technology, radio and cars in a way that baffled their elders. Our friend Edward J. Nugent is along for the ride in this movie as well, only here he plays Reg. Playing fellows named Freddie or Reg pretty much indicates this is going to be a guy with a hip flask in the pocket of his white flannel tennis pants.

Anita Page is back along for the ride, only this time she’s not the rival nasty girl, she’s Joan’s good friend named Kentucky. She is sweet, innocent, naïve, and as loyal as a hound dog. She also has an unspoken crush on Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and her infatuation with him is rather heartbreaking.

Just as the title suggests, these young women are “modern." These are modern maidens who crash life like they are crashing a party. On the train, Joan meets Rod La Rocque, who is a wealthy man well connected in government. It seems that upon graduation from college Douglas Fairbanks Jr. wants to pursue a career in the diplomatic corps. They believe that Rod La Rocque can open doors for them and get him a post in Paris – Paris in the 1920s—this is about the only flirtation we get with the famed expatriates of the decade.

Joan Crawford flirts shamelessly with Rod La Rocque in order to wheedle a position out of him for Doug, and Doug, though he has misgivings, goes along with it.

Anita Page is also seen in many scenes strumming a ukulele. So far we are meeting our quota of 1920s images.

At a party, again in the giant Art Deco ballroom, Joan is the center of attention, dancing herself silly, playing drums, in a whirlwind of jazz. Douglas get the spotlight, too, doing impressions—silent impressions – of John Barrymore and Jack Gilbert and Robin Hood, perhaps a take on his father? Joan disappears for a moment and then returns in a scanty outfit with a wild pattern and performs not just for the crowd but specifically for Rod La Rocque in a dramatic scene.

Douglas knows she’s going over the top for his sake and he feels uncomfortable with it, but assuages his discomfort by having a brief fling with Kentucky, who has such a crush on him. He feels like a cad. “I was cad!” The title card tells us.

Meanwhile, Joan gets herself invited to Rod’s hunting lodge, a rustic venue with knives, guns and whips on the walls, guy stuff. Whips? He is in love with her and he agrees to help Doug get a position in Paris because she affirms that Doug is only a friend of hers. However, after the appointment to Paris, Rod La Rocque reads in the newspaper that Doug and Joan are going to be married. Well now, isn’t this awkward.

She tries to apologize for shamelessly using him and leading him on, but he, hurt and angry, sets her up at his hunting lodge for a fate worse than death, and when she shrinks from him, he goads her, “What’s the matter? I thought you were a 'modern'!” Wearing nothing but his bathrobe (clothes got all wet in the rain), she submits to him because she feels she owes him, but he pulls back and she admiringly says, “I knew you were too decent.”

He throws it back in her face. “It’s not decency. I just don’t want you.” It is a great line and she is as shattered as she is relieved, because she is ashamed.

Doug and Joan have an opulent wedding but Kentucky is clearly upset and not just because she is losing Doug. Finally, Joan gets the truth out of her when Joan discovers a doctor’s appointment card for “Mrs.” Kentucky. This is movie code for Kentucky has gone to a GYN and she is pregnant.

“I didn’t want you to know, Billie!” Kentucky apparently wants to spare both her friends and when Doug enters to collect his bride and go on the honeymoon, he is flummoxed because he didn’t know Kentucky was pregnant after their one fling either. “You poor, brave little kid!” Doug says.  Nobody seems to realize how humiliating this sounds, even in a silent movie. 

Unlike Our Dancing Daughters, where Joan paid the price of losing a lover but then eventually gets him back through the convenient death of the third person in the triangle, this movie takes an interesting turn. Joan simply gives Doug to Kentucky. We’re never told if Doug, who is truly fond of Kentucky, really wants to spend the rest of his life married to her.  Nevertheless, this is what Joan does because she loves both of them, and she skips out and pretends to be a true modern, an uncaring, selfish woman with loose morals and no feelings, parading this persona for the sake of the reporters, of her friends, and her father, who washes his hands of her.

“What you think of a girl going on a honeymoon alone. Modern, isn’t it?” For a moment, our Edward J. Nugent steps out of his callow youth role and attempts to stand up to the crowd with her to give her support, but she kindly and sweetly says she is going alone. She will take no one along the path to perdition with her.

She goes off to Paris, but she is eventually joined by Rod, still reading about her in newspapers.  He still loves her, and she will go back with him to his cottage in the Argentine. 

It doesn’t seem like the “modern” thing to do, but perhaps the 1920s flappers were having second thoughts about the whole flapper thing.  Society might have gotten a little tired of the wild party, too.  A huge hangover was coming at the end of 1929.

The decade was notable for being perhaps the first wave of a future norm where the youth of the country seemed to run the show. Their tastes and their interests were catered to, and created, American pop culture.

Both Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. are quite good in this movie, both attractive and able to woo the camera with a glance or a clinch, or, as in Joan’s case, a spirited Charleston, and we can see why Joan Crawford became a star in this role of the flapper. She gets to show a lot of different emotions like selfishness, regret, loyalty, love, shame. She laughs, she cries, she dances.

It’s a silent movie but there are sounds added to the track in which we hear the buzz of a crowd, a radio announcement. There is no dialogue except for what we see on the title cards, but there is incidental background noise, a way to ease us into sound pictures. Our Dancing Daughters made her a star. It has been reported that she climbed out of the lesser roles in Hollywood by making the producers notice her when she moonlighted in dance contests.  She “rocked” the Charleston, and the Black Bottom.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan were married just before the movie was released and they were married for four years. But unlike the characters of the “moderns” she played, she was not welcome by Doug’s father, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and stepmother, Mary Pickford, and she felt out of place in their world. Her background was really more like the shop girls that she would portray in the 1930s, beginning with her next film released in 1930, which was considered the third in the trilogy of films, called Our Blushing Brides. That one is a sound film and we see that Joan makes the transition to sound recording very well. She does not play the same character, of course; she plays a department store clerk and her love interest is Robert Montgomery.  When glancing at this trilogy of films, we can see where Joan’s career and film persona was headed, and where the country was going, too.  The flashy “moderns” she played in Our Dancing Daughters and in Our Modern Maidens were left behind in the 1920s.  When the party ended, the flapper had either left the room, or was passed out on the floor.  

In Our Blushing Brides she’s the working girl, who might be Cinderella, or maybe just another dame down on her luck.

Women revolutionized the decade as much as they scandalized it.  Fashions, mores, work force, and the economy rode the waves of women's empowerment.  This was gently satirized in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), as we mentioned in the intro, but our now somewhat condescending view of that era and its women belies the fact that they set the stage for much of the twentieth century.

Come back next Thursday the 22^nd when we discuss the last film in our 1920s series, a Marx Brothers romp, The Cocoanutsfrom 1929.  It reflects not only the zaniness of the 1920s, and of the Marx Brothers brand in particular, but also hints at our near future as it makes fun of the Florida land boom that went bust in the middle 1920s, a forerunner to the terrific stock market crash just a few months after the movie was released.

The first two posts in this series are the intro here, and The Racket (1928).

The 1920s - Then and Now - Intro

The 1920s were silent – but only as far as the movies. It was actually a loud and raucous decade, but one that, despite our image of quaint innocence, was actually strangely close to our own era socially, politically, and as regards the economy. The movies captured some of that, either intentionally or incidentally. But not all of it.

Over the next three posts were going to discuss a few films from the 1920s, including The Racket (1928), The Cocoanuts (1929), Our Dancing Daughters(1928), and Our Modern Maidens(1929). The latter two movies, both starring Joan Crawford, leave us with the impression of the decade being dominated by flappers. Perhaps the most well-known chronicler of that era, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Joan:

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

The hedonistic young woman of the 1920s with the rouged knees may have shocked her parents, but she has come down to us as a more or less comic cliché. She was called a “modern.” She has been interpreted, and innocuously, many decades later, in the film Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), and The Boy Friend (1971).

Both movies are musicals, and interestingly, while The Boy Friend had its origins as a Broadway hit starring Julie Andrews in 1954, Thoroughly Modern Millie, which starred Julie Andrews, ended up being a Broadway hit in 2002, taking the opposite direction. The movie The Boy Friend starred Twiggy, whose pencil-thin figure and wide eyes epitomized the flapper. Glenda Jackson plays an uncredited role as the stage star who breaks her foot, for whom Twiggy must go on as an understudy. That movie is a rather heavy-handed spoof of early Hollywood films, overladen with Busby Berkeley fantasy sequences.  Some dialogue, such as when Twiggy is admonished that she must go out a youngster and come back a star, are taken pretty much verbatim from 42^nd Street(1933).

The movie lacks the subtler, silly charm that Thoroughly Modern Millie had which, along with Miss Andrews starred James Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Channing, and John Gavin – who I really think was the funniest of the bunch just by being straight-faced through it all. The wonderful Beatrice Lillie appeared here in her last film. Being spoofs, they are more interested in exaggeration, as is the nature of parody, and though they are fun to watch, they are about is genuine a view of the 1920s as mock apple pie is to real apple pie. Perhaps, though, they were the vanguard of the 1970s nostalgia craze.

The 1920s is remembered for being The Era of Wonderful Nonsense, The Jazz Age.  Often films made much later that are set in that decade, such as The Helen Morgan Story (1957), which we discussed here, are jammed with slangy dialogue and visual triggers like hip flasks as a shortcut to jog something in our collective memory about the decade.

One of the few movies made after the dust of that decade had settled that actually remembered the era not with nostalgia but with chagrin and something like regret was The Roaring Twenties (1939), which we discussed here.  The movies actually made in the 1920s, however, especially the freewheeling chaos of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton films, seem to celebrate the technology that shaped the era – the phones, the cars, the flickers. The antics may be as remote to our present day as a black-and-white silent Felix the Cat cartoon to a modern-day CGI animated feature, but this fascination with technology and consumer products should key us into a mindset that was closer to our own than we realize.  It wasn't the only similarity to our era.

Though we recall 1920 as the year women won the right to vote – and all the bold flappers were called “moderns,” the decade was not really as progressive as it may seem. A generation of expatriates, writers, artists, musicians, composers, were living out their dreams overseas because of what they regarded as stifling and overbearing conservatism at home, including its most virulent and perhaps, to them, objectionable edict: Prohibition.

It was the era of the Palmer raids, the red scare and the wholesale roundup and deportation of immigrant aliens.  The National Origins Act restricted immigration. Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death in the electric chair after a trial that left much room for doubt about their actual guilt, but the climate of the red scare and sudden animosity toward the foreign-born usurped any interest in finding out the truth.  As poet Edna St. Vincent Millay noted:

[The] men were castaways upon our shore, and we, an ignorant savage tribe, have put them to death because their speech and their manners were different from our own, and because to the untutored mind that which is strange is in its infancy ludicrous, but in its prime evil, dangerous, and to be done away with.

It was the era of the Scopes trial when a high school biology teacher was tried in court for teaching anything but creationism.

It saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to its most powerful point, most especially in Indiana, with resultant beatings, lynchings, and shootings. Benito Mussolini founded a fascist regime in Italy, and Hitler began his fascist crusade, but we flirted with it, too, long before we met up with those devils in another generation.

The 1920s saw the rise of religious fundamentalism joined with materialism.  President Harding spoke of returning to “normalcy” after World War I and yearned for an orderly, Calvinistic world that never existed. The word “normalcy” never existed before that, either; it was made up for the occasion.

Under a trio of Republican presidents there were restrictive tariffs, scandal most notably in the Harding administration, and a stock market run ruthlessly like a Ponzi scheme. The shareholders’ titanic profits took precedence over the workers’ meager share (though wages did increase during the 1920s, unlike our own era), and an expansion of credit and few restrictions led to a booming economy and a dizzying stock market bubble in the year 1928.  Republicans controlled the Congress and the presidency through the decade that began with a depression and ended with one. 

It was an era of pop heroes, perhaps the most famous of which was Charles A. Lindbergh, who flew the first solo trans-Atlantic flight.  In another decade, he became involved in the America First committee and was a Nazi sympathizer.  If we think of the 1920s only in terms of “Oh, you kid,” and “23-skidoo,” it may be that the silent movies, though only a fraction of which that were made have survived, have bequeathed to us the image of an “Era of Wonderful Nonsense.”  There was a lot more going on off the set, and some of it quite serious.  Movies had been around since the turn of the twentieth century, but the 1920s was the turning point that made film a huge part of our national psyche, yet the flickers didn’t catch everything that was going on.

One could say that our era is more like the 1920s than it is of any other decade in the past century.  One film that resonates this is The Crowd (1928), which we discussed here in this previous post. This unflinching examination of a fellow whose failure to cope is summed up in one of its title cards, “We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is…until we get out of step with it.”

The excellent narrative history The Perils of Prosperity by historian William E. Leuchtenburg gives us many points on which to make the comparisons between that world and ours.  Perhaps another reason why we are left mainly with lightweight images of flappers, speakeasies, and bathtub gin is that the door slammed shut very quickly on the Jazz Age in October 1929 when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.  As Mr. Leuchtenburg remarks in a sympathetic if ominous epilogue: “Never was a decade snuffed out so quickly as the 1920s.”

Come back next Thursday, February 8th, when we’ll discuss The Racket (1928) about mobsters and political corruption—the first film to be produced by a young Howard Hughes.

Extras - A Life in the Background

Extras line up for a job in Meet John Doe (1941)

Spotting familiar “extras” is fascinating to classic film buffs, and is something we can’t help doing even while enjoying the screen time of our favorite stars.  They may have a minute or two on camera, a single line or none at all, but they contribute immeasurably to the look and tone of a movie.

Last week we discussed Beverly Washburn’s accepting work as a television extra as an older adult despite her early career of starring and supporting roles on film and TV in the 1950s.  Once in a great while, an unknown extra became a star—John Wayne was perhaps the most famous former-extra.  Sometimes they became stand-ins and then graduated to starring roles:  Joel McCrea was a stand-in for Valentino and for Wallace Reid in the 1920s.  Gilbert Roland once served as a stand-in for Ramon Novarro, and Ann Dvorak for Joan Crawford.

The plight of most extras, though, was far from hopeful and could be heartbreaking.  Gone Hollywood, an interesting book of classic film trivia by Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz notes that Central Casting, an employment registry for studio extras, came about in the 1920s as a response to the hordes of young people heading for Hollywood in search of fame and fortune.  There were more hopefuls than there were jobs, and the lucky ones sometimes snagged a role through nefarious means, including bribes and sexual favors.  Will Hayes, of Production Code fame, set up Central Casting to circumvent feared scandal when it appeared that a fair number of prospective starlets were actually prostituting themselves for work.

Central Casting established a pool of extras and a more appropriate and professional way for them to acquire work from the studios.  Hundreds were assigned jobs on films every day, but with as many as 15,000 on the rolls, there still weren’t enough roles.  It was also a factor of their employment that they supply their own costumes—street clothes, sport clothes or evening dress for scenes that required them.  The authors of Gone Hollywood reference a 1934 Photoplay magazine article about extras pooling their meager resources and living five and six to a room to share costumes and expenses, and that others were living in Hoovervilles around Los Angeles

They would usually earn an average of $5 per day and overtime, if called for.  The authors report that in 1936, only 58 out of 5,500 men and only 20 out of 6,500 women averaged three or more days of work per week.  One could earn a little more if they were willing to take roles which required them to get wet or fall off a horse.  Certain physical impairments might also be on demand for a particular film, and often there was a demand for extras based on ethnicity or race. 

It is harrowing to recall that, according to the authors, the average yearly income for an extra in the mid 1930s was only $131.36.  Think of this the next crowd scene you see.  Their plight, especially for older extras, was sometimes met with sympathy by some directors and producers, who would throw work their way whenever possible.  MGM casting director Billy Grady organized the Casting Directors Ball to raise money for extras who were ill or in need.

Perhaps the most famous of these not famous actors was Bess Flowers, who we’ve mentioned on this blog from time to time, known as The Queen of the Hollywood Extras. She worked in the background from the early 1920s through the early 1960s, in more than 350 films, as well as television.  She was one of the founders of the Screen Extras Guild.

 Gone Hollywood.  Finch, Christopher and Linda Rosenkrantz (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.) 1979.

Feud - Bette and Joan

“This is where television actually helps us.  Kids today, they grew up watching Crawford and Davis on Saturday afternoons.  They know who they are.” Pauline to Bob Aldrich, Feud.

Today I’d like to discuss the miniseries Feud,which has just concluded its eight-episode run on cable channel FX.  It is uncommon these days for the world of classic films to have such a well-publicized “center stage” moment in modern pop culture.  For that reason alone, Feud is worth examining.

Long post.  Go get a drink.

I enjoyed the series.  It was not without flaw, but the overall production I think was a success for many reasons, and some of those reasons are not technical at all, but rather for the themes and messages presented in such a thoughtful and creative manner.  One accomplishment is that the series manages to be more than about Bette and Joan; it's about Bette and Joan in the scheme of things.  To take a narrow focus and from it draw a large and sweeping view of our society is the mark of a production that wants to do more than just dish the dirt for ratings.

The series has made classic films relevant, and that is an achievement, however temporary, over which classic film fans must marvel.  As for the technical merits:

I thought the acting was superb, and I like the various Zeitgeist touches of musical score, sets, and all the ephemera that is plunked down and inserts us neatly into the early 1960s.  I noticed, as many of you probably have, a few anachronisms, but nothing that really mattered to render the production illegitimate or phony.  (But that did not look anything like the Martin Beck Theater, now, did it?)

My biggest joy was that Jessica Lange’s portrayal of Joan Crawford did not stray into the asinine realm of Faye Dunaway’s cartoonish Mommie Dearest persona.  I suppose once I saw that in the first episode, the rest of the series was, at the very least, a relief.

Executive Producer Ryan Murphy and his band of collaborators have done an admirable job.  I liked Judy Davis, striking, prickly, and funny as Hedda Hopper.  She is allowed to pull out all stops as befits this ridiculous, venomous gossip columnist.  It must have been a blast to play.  I think probably my favorite line from the series or at least the one that made me laugh the most was Hedda Hopper’s disdain that Bette Davis appeared to show no respect for the two Oscars she had won in past years, fuming that Davis had put one Oscar on display in her bathroom.  “That poor Oscar has to watch that woman go to the toilet.”

Alfred Molina as director Robert Aldrich was splendid.  His anger of a schmuck caught between the spokes of a controlling hierarchy in his industry and two controlling women, his gloomy resentment, and his guilt at various turns for his sins was masterfully eloquent, and the humanity of a kind of everyman, yet morally complicated in his dual function as both manipulator and victim.  I think of all the characters, we come to know him best because of his profoundly transparent performance.

I believe that Catherine Zeta-Jones did a credible Olivia de Havilland, although I’m aware others have a different opinion about her effectiveness in the role.  She did not mimic her, but there were instead deft traces of de Havilland’s demure, ladylike but steely reserve, breathy, elegant, and knowing. Kathy Bates was a funny Joan Blondell, actually an easier role to interpret than De Havilland.

I have to say my favorite character was Mamacita, Joan Crawford’s maid, played with an almost vaudevillian deadpan by Jackie Hoffman.  Mamacita had only to enter a room to crack me up and make me wonder what she was going to do or say next.  I’ve never seen such an adept scene stealer.  I think Jackie Hoffman as Mamacita should have her own TV show.  Her own weekly show, The Mamacita Show.  The Mamacita Variety Hour.  Featuring the Mamacita Dancers.

The production values including minute detail of the sets were terrific and if not always spot-on, certainly evocative of the era, of both the glamour and the artifice.  The opening credits are inspired, a mimicry of the work of Saul Bass, with a nightmarish cartoon synopsis of the Davis and Crawford relationship as their characters in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.  This sequence is on YouTube here.  The cartoon characters in silhouette run an obstacle course of events from the film but always are seen as marionettes under the power of the executives.  This particular theme I think we can accept perhaps only to varying degrees, but we’ll get to that later.

I was particularly struck by the first moments of this cartoon sequence when the two figures are standing on top of the Hollywood sign, which though unintended I’m sure, reminded me instantly of the tragic Peg Entwistle and the comment that Bette Davis made in an interview that Entwistle was her inspiration to become an actress.  She saw Peg Entwistle in the Ibsen play, The Wild Duck, and was captivated.

What I most enjoy about the series is what I most love about classic films – close-ups and slow scenes, beautiful lighting, camera work that allows us to soak up the background, and the clever, intelligent dialogue spoken in clear, crisp enunciation.  (“They had faces then.”)  The murky “realistic” (yeah, right) filming, the shaky camera, the irritating untrained voices of the grunting low-talkers of today’s films is nowhere to be found.  Hallelujah.

I love the many scenes where Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon as Joan and Bette re-create moments from Baby Jane, and also from other Crawford and Davis films (Catch the back of “Ann Blyth” in the Mildred Pierce scene on the receiving end of the famous slap).  What a surprise to see Sarandon do the Davis singing of the pop version of the Baby Jane song parody on The Andy Williams Show.  I was familiar with that clip and so to see her re-create the performance in such spectacular detail was a marvel.  Have a look at this “mash up” on YouTube, and another here.

It is in these scenes where Sarandon does most of her close mimicry of Davis and her clipped speech.  I think it was wise to save it for these “replica” scenes because we are familiar with these jocular moments on television talk show interviews and in clips from her movies.  It was prudent to reserve most of Bette Davis’ vocal and physical traits to these moments.

The many repeated mirror shots are captivating – especially those in hand mirrors, which are more intimate.  We are dealing here with a lifetime of reflected images.

There is still some campiness in these episodes, as we might expect, but not as much as there could be and I do think the directors and producers showed restraint, considering the gossipy subject matter.  

On the use of background music of popular tunes for moving the tale along, this was done in a delightfully skillful manner.  Unlike the heavy-handedness of a Max Steiner score, rather they cause us to smile at their slyness.  Peggy Lee’s chipper rendition of “Somebody Else is Taking My Place,” in “The Other Woman” episode, and in a montage of the Baby Jane scenes, “Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This,” and the moody strains of “Charade” (anachronism alert) when Joan and Bette go out for drinks to dish the dirt and talk about their childhoods.  In the “Abandoned” episode Bob comes to Joan’s hospital room to face off with her over her stalling the picture, and we hear from the portable radio Leslie Gore singing “You Don’t Own Me.”

The music swells at the end of the “Abandoned” episode and we hear Miss Patti Page (“The Singing Rage”) sing the theme song to Hush,Hush, Sweet Charlotte as Bob, Bette and Olivia pose for a photo in front of the Coke cooler with Cokes in hand (a dig at Joan Crawford’s connection to Pepsi).  This was a re-creation of an actual photo except that Joseph Cotten was also in the original picture, but it’s a cute touch.

I'd love to know if sales of Pepsi were increased lately, as well as of Aqua Net hairspray.

Another aspect to Feud that I thought was great fun was seeing the “familiar” faces of lesser characters in the story, like George Cukor, Patty Duke, Anne Bancroft, Joseph Cotten and others.  Also the scene with Wendell Corey who was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time.  His secretary gets a great line when Joan Crawford stomps towards his office.  The secretary looks up in horror, “Mr. Corey, Joan Crawford’s heading this way and she’s not slowing down!”

We could mention, of course, that the scene where Joan and Bette go out for drinks and discuss their childhoods is helpful for us to understand their motivations, particularly for Joan whose reputation has been pretty nearly destroyed by her daughter’s book, Mommie Dearest, but in real life they never would have sat down and had this heart-to-heart talk.  However, this not a documentary but a dramatization, and this and similar scenes are used not to stretch the truth, but to illuminate it.

Other scenes also do not necessarily ring true, but they do convey the spirit of the themes beautifully and draw our emotional response.  In the “More or Less” episode there’s a scene where Joan and director Bob Aldrich attend the sneak preview of Baby Jane and, because they all feared that it would be a flop, they are astounded and filled with surprised rapture when the theater audience is receptive to the movie.  Joan stands in the lobby and young people crowd around her asking for her autograph, and she lifts her eyes in an eloquent mixture of gratitude and resplendent triumph towards Bob.  (Lange’s work is consistently remarkable in this series, and she does most of the heavy lifting.)  We could cheer for her.  It is a skillful film indeed that draws such an emotional response from us, especially over a character who is not even likable most of the time—because we are growing to understand her.

Other scenes, however striking and well used dramatically, are, at best, manipulations of the truth, such as Jack Warner’s rant (played wonderfully by Stanley Tucci) where Bob first brings the Baby Jane project to him.  Warner throws a temper tantrum about the idea of using Bette Davis, because of his resentment for her taking Warner Bros. to court in the 1930s.  His tantrum and explosive spewing of vulgarity directed more towards appealing to a modern audience and less with an idea of documentary realism, however real it might have been, is another case where the truth is stretched just a bit for entertainment value.  It’s true he probably felt that strongly twenty or so years earlier, but in the meantime he and Davis had long since patched things up, and Davis often complimented Warner on his taste in women’s pictures.  She was, after all, often jokingly called The Fifth Warner.  Neither woman, back in her day, was anybody's marionette.

Most devastating is not Warner’s meanness towards Davis or Crawford, but to Bob, whom he repeatedly humiliates simply because he can.

Another invented aspect to the show is the possibility of Joan’s having performed in a stag film in her past and then later trying to cover it up: she may or may not have appeared in stag film and may or may not have tried to cover up, but this series boldly pronounces it as fact, and boldly pronounces her brother as being a blackmailer over the issue.  That I feel is going too far.  This is too serious an issue to play creative pretend games.  Speculation must always be used wisely because it is a most powerful weapon.  We live in an era where practically nobody believes anything about politicians anymore, but many people read any sort of tabloid supermarket trash about a Hollywood star and instantly believe everything they read.  Why the stars, once idols of glamour, became our punching bags, is perhaps a topic for another time, but Feud certainly outlines this strange change in our treatment of celebrities.  Jack Warner as played by Tucci is tickled over the success of Baby Jane, calling it, “Degradation, that’s what sells.  Tearing down your idols.  It’s very satisfying.”

Those of us from the world of classic film fandom can sort these things out with equanimity (I hope):  the careers of Davis and Crawford and the tales about them, but such freewheeling with the facts may not benefit the newcomer to classic films, or those with only a casual interest.  It is perhaps good to remember that for a writer, stories are not really about characters so much as they are about themes.  The characters are just tools, mouthpieces through which the themes are woven (or unravel).

Sexism and ageism, the two main themes of the series – and if sometimes expressed a little too heavy-handed and even trite—reiterate that these are important problems to handle for our own time.  What the series seems to fail to capture is that, despite sexism rampant everywhere and in every industry in the twentieth century, the Golden age of Hollywood was something of an oasis of great women’s roles and marvelous actresses, and more opportunity for women than in other careers.  Conversely, the 1960s through the rest of the twentieth century saw far fewer roles for women – great roles or otherwise, no matter their age.  Most stories featured women as victims.  They were merely the props around which the male characters conducted their adventures.  They were mostly disposable on TV and in the movies.  Women in later eras saw it become normal for an actress to be prepared, if not required, to take off her clothes for a part.  We need not feel so superior over the days of the studio system, when actresses often had it better.

The character of Pauline, director Bob Aldrich’s assistant, played by Alison Wright, is fictional.  That she has such an important role as a spokesperson and sounding board and yet she is fictional, is quite telling in and of itself.  There was no real person in the early 1960s connected to this story to whom the writers could assign this function.

Her character is used to express this theme of sexism.  When she dreams of directing the script she has written, and her hopes are dashed—even by other professional women such as Joan Crawford, Mamacita encourages her with statistics about the ratio of men to women, and how more women in the future will be the audience and therefore more roles about women and by women will be created. Mamacita tells her “your time is coming.”  She also adds in her amusing Mamacita philosophy, “Men have shorter lives because they are less strong.”

We are left to feel the bitter irony, knowing what Pauline does not yet know – that it never happened.  It is 2017 and superheroes and such movies made for teens and young males are the norm.

There is yet the promise fulfilled, however, because Lange and Sarandon are both in their late sixties early seventies, and still working in prominent roles and positions of power in the film industry.  They are producers of the series as well as its stars.  Ryan Murphy, the originator of this series has taken some heat for his long, slow education on using women writers, directors, but he has learned marvelously, and except for the remaining bits of campiness and the childish titillation over two women having a cat fight, I’d say he deserves encouragement and congratulations.

“And the Winner Is” episode brings us to the 1962 Oscars, a glittering festival of rivalry, revenge, and shameful opportunism.  I particularly liked the tracking shot following Joan offstage after presenting Best Director to David Lean when he is confused about where to go next.  She briskly tells him to follow her and she proceeds to march through a series of hallways with David Lean and us following her through twists and turns, seeing bystanders and loiterers, a brief handoff from Mamacita like a train snagging a mail pouch, and through a men’s room where she pats a man on the shoulder who is standing at a urinal, and then she emerges on the other side of the stage preparing for the announcement of the winner of Best Actress.  She has agreed to accept for Anne Bancroft if Bancroft is the winner.  And, of course, she is, and therefore Joan is also the winner.  It’s funny, but that trip as we follow her through a backstage maze is like a metaphor for her career trajectory, full of twists and turns, light and shadows, moments of attention and adulation, and quiet moments of anxiety.  She lights another cigarette.

By the way, when I was blogging on my Year of Ann Blyth series, I had completely missed the significance of the television episode Ann Blyth appeared in called “The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar,” discussed here, which was broadcast in January 1963.  I had suspected that this title, which really had no significance to the plot of the story on the short-lived series Saints and Sinners (it refers to a trivia question), was only a cute nod to the fact that its star, Ann Blyth, was also in Mildred Pierce, for which Joan won her Oscar (and Blyth was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.)  I see now that naming this episode as such was probably part of the publicity campaign for Baby Jane’s upcoming Oscar season.  The nominations for the Oscars were announced in late February, a month after this TV show had aired, so at the time the episode was broadcast Joan was still very much a contender in people’s expectations.  The ceremony was broadcast in April.

Speaking of smoking; it's funny that the constant smoking and drinking may be the most shocking aspect that catches our attention in this series.  I doubt seeing events of the famous feud being played out is more shocking than this, because we are familiar with the stories.  The series also presents us with the era’s glamorized self-destruction of these women. 

The ageism theme I think is as valid but strangely less political than the sexism, and I don’t know why because we all age and we have all experienced or will experience prejudice because of it.  We can even feel sorry for the nasty Jack Warner when he says, “I used to make the culture.  Today I’m lost in it.”

The final episode of the series, “You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends” addresses the final years of the feud and Joan’s last days.  We are in the 1970s, and another in a repeated series of scenes set in 1978 shows a documentary director interviewing another player in the story about the feud (it is only in this last episode that we learn the interviews are being held on the occasion of the Oscar ceremony -- nice touch).  This time, Pauline is back, and she tells us what she’s been up to: finding job satisfaction in producing documentaries, which affords more opportunities to women than does trying to work in feature films.  Is she involved with this one?

True to her purpose of being the linchpin for the writers, directors, and producers of this series and the audience they are trying to reach, Pauline recounts meeting a frail, elderly, and lonely Joan in an airport.  She tells the documentary director to call his grandmother.  To some this will sound like Hallmark card mawkishness, but I liked it because it was a dash of sentiment in which there is also truth.  Joan was still a scrappy person at the end of her life, but she was also alone and overwhelmed.

And stop being so prickly over films with messages in them.  You need to hear this.  Go call your grandmother, dammit.

We have a montage of scenes of Joan now living a Spartan existence in her New York apartment, cleaning, learning to use the new microwave oven, and doing without a maid or the lavishness of her former lifestyle.  She watches TV while eating her meals on a tray, and switches the channel from the news of the Vietnam War, and finds an old movie of hers.  She is pleased and watches it with interest.

I don't find this glimpse into Joan's vulnerability exploitive, not the way it's handled.  This episode is loving, in the way that caretakers of the elderly protect and comfort their charges but are forced by circumstances to involve themselves frankly and intimately with the slow demise of a human being—which is physically messy and emotionally painful.  A lot of people don't have the stomach for it, or the heart.  The best caretakers are also mindful of, and ready to preserve, the elderly person’s dignity.  I believe this episode does that.  It does what so many of Joan's closest friends, family, fans, and colleagues did not do: it accompanies her as she does not go gentle into that good night.

Some fans might feel any depiction of the frailty of their heroes as demeaning, especially for someone like Joan Crawford who took herself out of the public eye in her final years with the intent of keeping her dignity and her pride.  Bette Davis would later put it succinctly: “Old age is no place for sissies.”

In this self-imposed seclusion, I would contend we see not the degradation of a star, but the true measure of her feistiness.  Battling severe periodontal disease, Joan relates the career move of having several molars extracted in her twenties at the advice of an agent to attain the sunken-cheek look.  She refuses dentures, but tells her dentist, “I’d rather spit blood into a sink than look like Martha Raye.”

We see, before this period, her stoic professionalism on the set of Trog (1970), an awful experience that was in its way far more degrading than being old and ill and alone.  

Finally, back in her apartment, she tells her agent over the phone to not submit her name for any more work, she’s quitting.  It’s another mirror shot, but her reflection is through a window this time, on which a brick wall is reflected in a pattern against her face.

Bette is having trouble securing work also, filming a succession of TV pilots that were never broadcast. Dominic Burgess as Victor Buono has a great line here: “It was like Miles Davis performing jingles for lunch meat commercials.”

Davis’ biggest challenge of the era was working on the TV movie The Disappearance of Aimee (1976), and an unhappy collaboration with Faye Dunaway.  It is remarked, “For all her complaints about Joan, she didn’t know true hatred until she met Faye.”  It also gives Bette an opportunity to defend Joan, noting that she was a professional, who unlike Faye Dunaway, did not keep the cast waiting.

Before we dwell too much on the thought that Dunaway will figure prominently in Joan’s future reputation, we have a poignant scene where her daughter Cathy visits with her children.  Joan is ill with cancer, serving her guests microwaved food on paper plates and Styrofoam cups.  A far cry from her glamorous days in her Hollywood mansion, but here is the picture of a woman courageous and ingenious enough to adapt to the realities of her situation.

She watches the children playing in the living room and whispers to her daughter, “Do they think of me as their real grandmother?”  It’s a heartbreaking moment, an image meant to remind us that all her life, Joan fought to remove the stain of illegitimacy—in her childhood of poverty and abuse; in her career; in her first marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. where she was unwelcomed by his family, including the queen of Hollywood, Mary Pickford; even in being unable to enjoy winning the Oscar without the nagging doubt that she would never compete with the likes of a “serious” actress like Bette Davis.  Here she wonders if she is accepted as a real grandmother by the children of her adopted daughter.  Her daughter’s response is affectionate and comforting and brings Joan to tears.

Bette has an adopted daughter with special needs whom she visits and plays with, but whom she cannot reach emotionally to give her the satisfaction of reciprocal love.  Her biological daughter, B.D., hates her.  We don’t really see the motivations for B.D.’s virulent hatred of her mother, and B.D. comes off just as a nasty person (some people just are).  Not delving into her motivations, and not including the adopted sons of both actresses in the narrative is probably a concession to expedience, more than anything.  There are just so many plot threads you can follow.  I was surprised, though, that the series did not cover Joan's filling in for her daughter Christina on the soap opera The Secret Storm in 1968.

Another nice use of imagery is the dream/hallucination Joan experiences in her last days, when in the middle of the night, she wanders into her darkened living room and finds Hedda Hopper and Jack Warner playing at a card table, in evening dress, laughing over party conversation.  Joan joins them, and we see her as she appeared in earlier days, dark hair coiffed, white opera gloves.  Bette Davis then joins them, both women in red.  Joan, still psychologically her frail, elderly self, muses, as though watching herself in a dream, “Why am I so happy to see you?”  They confess they wish they had been friends.  Faithful Mamacita arrives in her bathrobe to escort the confused Joan back to bed.  She dies a week later.

At the Oscars, Bette and Olivia de Havilland, Victor Buono, Joan Blondell, and Pauline gather in the green room and watch the In Memoriam reel.  For a brief instant, Joan Crawford’s face appears on the TV monitor.

Olivia remarks, “Fifty years in show business and all they gave her was two seconds.”

Bette grimly replies, “That’s all any of us will get.”  They raise their glasses and toast Joan.  The documentary director approaches Davis, but she will not be interviewed.  “You’ll want funny, bitchy lines about Joan Crawford.  I won’t do it.  She was a professional.  We did one picture together.  Our lives intersected.  That’s it.”

The documentary crew muse to themselves afterward that nobody will ever know the truth about the Davis-Crawford feud, and a young woman on the crew (perhaps their modern era “Pauline”) wonders what they said to each other on their first meeting on the Baby Jane set.  Instantly, we melt back to the past, to the first day of shooting on Baby Jane, and that iconic photo of Joan and Bette in their chairs, laughing. 

I like the final roll call of “whatever happened to…” the cast of the main characters, with their real photos alongside the actors playing them, from Bob Aldrich to Hedda Hopper.  Joan is lauded in these end credits as “a good and sometimes great actress.”  It is a good tribute.  That more people are starting to say it would gratify her.

Interestingly, Joan Crawford’s grandson, Casey LaLonde likes the series because his grandmother is treated with fairness even if in sometimes ugly frankness, and presented at times sympathetically and with dignity.  He hopes to encourage his mother, who was deeply hurt by the Mommie Dearest book and film, to watch it.  Last weekend Olivia de Havilland announced her typically classy and distant response.

What would Joan and Bette have thought of the show?  I really don’t know.  More to the point, what would they have thought of each other’s characterizations, the revealing of each other’s motivations?  

I believe both Joan and Bette would have gotten greater satisfaction by their work being shown on Turner Classic Movies, which has done more to rehabilitate Joan Crawford’s reputation than anything else could.

I am pleased that the Hollywood greats are back in the focus of pop culture for this series – not just their peccadilloes, but because of their important place in Hollywood history.  I don’t suppose, however, this series will create any new classic film fans.  The only thing that can create more old movie buffs is to show more classic films on more channels.  Although many classic films are available on DVD, most newcomers will be easier introduced to them if they are given an ample selection for free.  Like that person standing in the grocery store with the tray of crackers—you try it, you like it, then you go buy a box.  New fans have to be exposed to classic film before we ever expect them to spend their money and their time on it. 

This past Easter we again had a prime time major network broadcast of The Ten Commandments (1956). There are seldom other opportunities that major networks take to promote classic films. They do it with this movie because it fits the Passover/Easter season and is so-called family fare.  In a weekend of expected low ratings, it has the feeling of a throwaway, a pro bono broadcast.

With the notice Feud has received, the major networks could ride the tail with showings of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, to start.  There’s a whole world waiting to explore for all those who don’t have TCM or would normally venture to find it on cable company with hundreds of channels. We discussed some of this last year in our year-long series about the state of the classic film fans.

“This is where television actually helps us.  Kids today, they grew up watching Crawford and Davis on Saturday afternoons.  They know who they are.” – Pauline to Bob Aldrich, Feud.

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