Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

HOW TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOUR "W/iy, / ask the world, is it more correct to hate than to keep on liking a man you have once loved?" "Why can't we be friends?" asks Joan, pictured with her first husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. BY JOAN CRAWFORD as told to RUTH WATERBURY WHEN this last April I sought my divorce from Franchot Tone, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles court, Judge Ben Scheinman, expressed a very adverse opinion on my attitude toward the man from whom I was seeking my freedom. When I said to His Honor, "I hope that I am intelligent enough to be friendly with my husband," I meant it in all sincerity. What I didn't say is what I want to add here, thanks to Photoplay's having given me the opportunity to express myself more fully. It is this: I think it is not only intelligent to be friends with your exhusbands, but I cannot imagine being anything else. Why, I ask the world, should it be consid, ered more correct to hate, rather than to keep on liking, a man whom you have once loved? Every divorce is a tragedy. Every legal separation represents somebody's heartbreak. We all know that. There is no possible way of arguing any differently. Nevertheless, divorce is no longer an exceptional proceeding. Speaking for America alone, one out of every six of our marriages ends in divorce. Those figures are hideous. They are appalling. In an ideal society, they wouldn't exist. But we are all human beings and those are the facts about our marital situation. There are in this country, according to the 1930 census, 905,697 divorced people. Think of it, 905,697 men and women who once adored each other, now separated. Nearly a million men and women, who once shared love and marriage, now trying to go on alone or to make a go of a new union! The attitude of Judge Scheinman, and many sincere people like him, seems to be that these million people should forget all the delights and tendernesses, all the dreams they once inspired in one another; that they should, in effect, become enemies. But why? Hate is the most destructive force in the world. Hate has never done one single good thing, either for an individual or for a nation. Why then replace the song of love with the hymn of hate? Why can't we be friends? Edouard Bourdet in one of his plays wrote, "There's only one way to love and one way to suffer. It's the same formula for everyone." I believe that is true, but the way we use our love and our suffering to make ourselves greater people, or the world a better place, is, I believe, an individual thing. MY love for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. had all the magic, all the ecstasy, all the exquisiteness that comes with the glory of first love. My love for Franchot was more mature, no less intense, but more intellectual. Yet, the same thing broke up both my marriages. Neither Douglas and I, nor Franchot and I ever had time for our love. Our separate careers, with their toll of hours, energies and jangled nerves, were the forces that destroyed the delicate relationship between us. But not the friendship. I insist upon that. It did not destroy the friendship I am determined to have always with each of them. I say "I am determined" because I believe it my job, the woman's job, to turn her ex-husband not into an enemy but into a friend. I do not believe any ex-husband is capable of taking the first step in that direction. Men are too proud. Their emotions are too severe to let them be the one who initially asks the other partner to let bygones be bygones. So what I am saying here, whatever little advice I can give, I'm really giving to women. If some women, whose hearts are heavy with loneliness and disillusion, can profit by it, I shall be very glad. Every divorced woman, I'm sure, goes through a stage of self-pity. I know I did. It would be much easier for you to hate. You feel betrayed and hurt. You think everyone is pointing you out and calling you a failure at love. Next, you are so bitterly lonely. Those rooms you once shared with your beloved, that chair for which you two went shopping, those curtains you both decided upon, all seem to be crying out to you. You have a habit of another person in your life, a person of whom you think even before you think of yourself, and now you must break the habit. He is no longer about and you do not know what to do with the time that hangs heavy on your hands. You feel incomplete— a half woman — and you cry and cry and cry. After you begin to emerge from that mood, you go into the next and more dangerous one. That's the "I'll show him" stuff. That's the spirit in which you decide you are going to let him see that you are attractive to other men, even if he hasn't sense enough to appreciate you. Beware! If you let either of these moods master you, you will get yourself into fearsome trouble. You may actually become just as dreary as you imagine yourself to be or you may, on the rebound, wake up some morning married to a new, wrong person. The antidotes for these are humor, memories 12