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

Conversations with Crawford.  Oh my, what a delightful foray into high camp, which I now understood, at the age of my Saturn Return, full of education and experience, at my first professional job. Joan, interviewed late in life, answering questions with gusto, swearing, grinding out her cigarettes in an ashtray like the pugnacious broad that she was. Drunk and sentimental, she reminisced about the one that got away, Clark Gable. So sad! So sad that she could never keep a man! 

So delicious was this silly, freaky book; better yet were the dead-serious marginalia written by some earnest follower of Joan’s life and career. Mommie Dearest, the movie version starring Faye Dunaway, had been released: “No wire hangers!” we shouted at each other. The people I worked with understood the camp value of Joan: we loved Conversations with Crawford; we took turns describing the awful late-career movies we rented: Torch Song, Queen Bee, Johnny Guitar, Female on the Beach. There were other stars we pondered and talked about: Susan Hayward and Barbara Stanwyck, for instance, but nothing at all could ever match Conversations with Crawford, or those bizarre films. What an odd coincidence it was to find out that our head librarian was the daughter of Jean Rouverol, who had written the script for Autumn Leaves, where the very masculine late Joan has an affair with a boyish and dangerous Cliff Robertson.  

At my Saturn Return, I went to an astrologer. It was accurate, all of it, including how I would have trouble finding love, that the placement of Venus meant that I would have trouble with my femininity. I would have to learn to be more feminine, as in receptive and yielding and related. What sounded like horrible language to the equality-minded part of me (and probably to you, reading it) sounded true to the side of me that shared a birthday with Joan Crawford: it’s a lonely future you face when you find out that you can be castrating and critical, when you can clearly envision  living life as a lonely drunk, or in some version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, or when your perfectionism starts to drive you crazy, and when I looked into the abyss, this was the person who stared back at me.  

Over forty it’s a blur; I forget how old I am. I’m in a Laundromat. I haven’t been in one since my Saturn Return days. While I wait for my loads to finish, I watch Larry King Live on the TV above the dryers. His guest is Christina Crawford, and this is the 25th anniversary or some year anniversary of the publication of Mommie Dearest. Christina Crawford discusses the book’s impact, how people didn’t talk about child abuse back then. It’s a very different world now. Is anyone fooled by the star-making machinery nowadays?

I could define who I am in a completely different way, using other famous figures whose lives influenced mine, along with a better list of books and films that shaped my life. That list would flatter me, of course.  It’s suspect and embarrassing, yet also true, that I did make life decisions based on Joan’s cautionary tale, and this happened because I discovered that I shared a birthday with her.  I contemplated Joan Crawford’s example up to the time of my first Saturn Return, ages 28-30. At a Saturn Return we have to face ourselves and change what needs to be changed, or we risk staying in stasis, or moving backwards and making things worse. When I reached that age I felt compelled to change because I didn’t want to end up, like Joan, with the cleanest kitchen but the loneliest heart. 

-- Stephanie Brown

Comments

[Eric Bourland]

This is really well done. I'm a big fan of Joan ever since I saw her in Mildred Pierce.

Saturn comes back for us all I reckon, once, twice, maybe thrice.

[Daria Farrell]

Fascinating analysis and self-awareness. Thank you.