Joan Crawford, whom I’d seen in films like Strange Cargo with Clark Gable, sleek,
slender, slinky young Joan: How
beautiful she was! I knew that Garbo and Dietrich were considered superior
movie star beauties (and they were in the book too), but Joan captivated me. I
especially loved a close up of her face, its lashes heavy enough to create
shadows, her eyebrows plucked and arched above her heavy lids (her Aries
eyebrow glyph, but I didn’t know that then) and her round cheekbones. I loved
the way she wore a gown and held herself like a statue: proud, hard, clean.
At my job at the public library I noticed that lots of
people checked out My Way of Life by
Joan Crawford; I shelved it often. Its photos, with back-lighting and cheesecloth
over the lens, show Joan as an older woman, with huge lips and eyebrows, a
severe upswept hairdo and a dead look in her eyes. This was not the Joan of my
star photography book; this was the Joan of Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane and Trog. Sneaking a peek before I put it back on the shelf, I read bits and
pieces of her life philosophy which discussed moisturized hands and a clean
house. A photo had her mopping her dark spotless kitchen floor.Mommie Dearest was
a shocking story of a drunk, a harridan who punished others for her personal dissatisfactions. As I recall there were debates about its
veracity; Joan had her defenders and loyalists and her detractors. It seemed
true and believable to me. In my late teens and early twenties my friends and I
started to read about astrology in things like Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. We would read those canned descriptions
of the sun sign and its attributes and of the famous people who shared one’s
sign — my friends shared theirs with, say, Grace Kelly or Gloria Steinem, while
I was left with Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Doris Day: Aries women,
described as childish, masculine, and bossy. Even worse, I found out that I shared
my exact birthday, March 23, with the now infamous Mommie Dearest.
Our shared birthday became a joke and a
ribbing and a dig among my friends. We took up an interest in Joan and her
weirdness. Over time we read Joan
Crawford: A Biography; we read Joan
Crawford: The Ultimate Star; we perused Joan
Crawford: Jazz Baby, The Films of Joan Crawford, Crawford’s Men. I discovered
that she had camp value, as did Bette Davis (and Doris Day, for that matter). I
didn’t quite understand how to define camp, but wanted to know. I read Bette
Davis’ This ‘n’ That, I read Doris Day: Her
Own Story.
Bette Davis met her match with Gary Merrill in real life and
in All About Eve, but the marriage, I
read, did not last, nor did Joan’s love affair with Clark Gable. I found both
of these men really appealing, so these facts made me sad. I saw that they had
ended their lives alone. This was the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and I was
taking in feminist thought from the world around me, mostly by osmosis, and
making up the rest. Like most Aries women, I was a strong, fearless, and
directed person. I didn’t particularly need feminism, if you will. I also fit
the worst descriptions of an Aries woman. I was oblivious, brash, and selfish.
I was a drinker and a carouser—I had my own campy qualities, but did not
realize it yet. I was able to dominate men in a way that made me hate them for
it and made me miserable. It seemed to me that this was Joan’s problem, too,
along with her anger and her perfectionism.
-- Stephanie Brown
