Joan Crawford and I Share the Same Aries Birthday: A Bio-Bibliography (Part One) [by Stephanie Brown]

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

Comments

[Laura Orem]

JR in "Grand Hotel" is young and tragic and beautiful, so unlike what she became in later life.

[Laura Orem]

That should be "JC" - which looks like someone else, so I probably should avoid initials altogether.

[Stacey]

Laura, I didn't know Jim Cummins was in "Grand Hotel."
Stacey

[Laura Orem]

He was either the impoverished baron or the aging ballerina - I can't remember which.

[Elle]

People forget how beautiful she was once.