Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1932)

W; The Unknown Hollywood IK HEN Joan Crawford first came to M-G-M she was more unhappy than Garbo. Joan's unhappiness was within herself and had no external cause. Garbo had a reason for misery. Joan's vague, intangible emotions were later to grow into thoughts. There is no pain so great as that which comes when one first begins to feel an idea wandering about in a hitherto unused brain. I flatter myself that I saw what was going on in Joan. Although I did not like her at first and disapproved of her in many ways, I knew that within her was a deep well of intelligence and logic waiting to be used. In the years that followed I saw Joan Crawford become a personality. She was a strange girl — wanting more than life had to offer, but unable to open the door and take it. She thought it lay in the realm of gayety. She found it did not. When she was winning all those dancing cups, she was unhappier than she has ever been (and she has, during her life, been very unhappy). She went from night club to night club, danced madly for hours and found nothing. It was worse for Joan than most people, since she did not drink. I believe that cabaret habitues are able to keep going because of the false stimulus of liquor. JOAN never drank. She does not to this day. Therefore, she had to bolster herself up on her own emotions. It is a difficult and a wearing task. She got out of one scrape only to find herself in another. Always lavish in her generosity, she remembered all of the workers at the studio with gifts. Among them was a set musician. She gave him, like the rest, a sweater and an autographed photo. His wife sued for divorce and named Joan co-respondent. Of course it was ridiculous, but the papers said it with headlines. It was the second time she had been unjustly named and something had to be done so we, in the publicity department, prepared an answer. The creator of this answer would not want me to tell his name although he should have credit for such a grand retort. Said he — the words were surrounded by Joan's quotes for publication — "I'm tired of being a target for disappointed wives." Joan was a vivid study in contrasts. So many pictures march across my mind. Joan dancing, dancing, dancing at the Mont ho now By Katherine Alber* Don't miss a word of these intimate and never-beforetold stories of famous stars How did Lon Chaney achieve the effect of blindness in one eye for "The Road to Mandalay"? You'll find the secret in this story martre, the Ambassador, Cocoanut Grove, the beach places . . . Joan sitting in the middle of the floor of her room at a smart seaside hotel making an entire dress for herself without a sewing machine . . . Joan, going into raptures over a flamboyant, beaded velvet hanging (now she prefers the beauty of an old English print) . . . Joan, reading aloud the notes from her boy friends . . . Joan, living on coffee and cigarettes . . . Strange, unhappy, ever-changing Joan. You see these girls change before your eyes. They come to the screen so young and so unformed that they must crystallize as they work, whereas women and men in other professions and arts do most of their internal growing before giving themselves to the public. The picture public is a witness to all the stark nakedness of mental growth. I should prefer to have my divorces or my affairs of the heart flaunted to the world rather than my thoughts, wouldn't you? Joan's change from an eager, tragic girl into a lovely woman was everybody's show. Yet it was a lovely thing. Four years ago when I was visiting in New York a nice voiced young actor called me and explained that he was a friend of Joan Crawford. He suggested that we have tea together. We had it together — with an olive, while he told me of meeting Joan when she was on location at West Point. He adored her but he told me then that she had been perfectly honest with him and had never said she loved him. It was Joan's honesty (sometimes, in those early days, amounting to rudeness) that saw her through the first part of her troublous THE lad I've just mentioned came to Hollywood and made good in pictures. His name is Monroe Owsley and he may now say he and Joan were sweethearts, but she never held out false hopes to him and she wrote him immediately when she fell in love with Doug. Joan's life, at its beginning a muddled mass of emotions, is now beautiful, but she is not yet through growing. Every time I see her I say to myself, "She has come to the last of her capabilities. She is as good, as a person, as it is possible to be." And then I see her again and some new facet has turned in the light of her personality. [ PLEASE TURN TO PAGE 92 ]