Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1948)

Mademoiselle La Chandelier ( Continued, from page 57) nickname apt enough to stick. And even those stars who might have felt competitive laughed in agreement. She both looks and acts like a great glamour queen. When I met her, a big black hat with plumes was chosen as a dramatic frame for her intense face and great eyes. On the shoulder of her black Adrian gown, so simple that it wasn’t simple at all, she wore her famous clip of star sapphires and diamonds. She moved with gracious authority. She spoke in the same throaty tones and with the same fine diction that mark her on the screen. Even her least gesture, the way she pulled off her gloves, revealing a companion star sapphire ring of great size, had import and finesse. “Bless her for being a real movie queen,” 1 thought; “for daring to be colorful.” Frankly, I am a little weary of the current vogue for stars to essay all the conservatism of successful business executives or elegant young matrons. Women like Joan Crawford, who see to it that they move in an aura of beauty, who are theatrical, if you will, give life a fillip. IN BEING the woman she is, Joan is true to the same deep instincts which, when she was a little girl, sent her running off into a dream world as escape from the mediocre existence she knew as the daughter of a poor family in Kansas City, Missouri. She’s never been willing to accept a life that was less than her vision of what life could and should be. Not only does Joan look and act glamorous. She lives glamorously. I’ll long remember the day she showed me around her white house in Brentwood, the pride with which she flung open the double doors to her white drawing room. Over the exquisite marble fireplace hung her portrait. Wall sconces held white candles. On the floor was a deep white rug. The high-backed chairs flanking the fireplace were of the palest lavender. A Chinese red backgammon table stood at right angles to a window hung with white damask. Old tables held rare cigarette boxes and silver ashtrays. Her dining room is white too. Eighteenth Century mahogany, so old and beautiful it would grace a museum, furnishes this long room with its floor of polished parquetry and its doors and fluted columns and pediments. Joan’s house turns a closed and impersonal face to the road. At the front is a courtyard where cars enter, to the rear lie her gardens and her blue tiled pool. The pool is flanked by walks bordered with yellow roses and the dark green columns of cypress trees. Facing the pool is her white playhouse, done in pickled pine. A stage big enough to permit serious theatricals lets down a full size movie screen. There are deep sofas and chairs of flowered chintz. At the piano Joan’s adopted daughter, Christina, was taking her music lesson. Delightful bowls of garden flowers were everywhere. “Joan,” I said, “when you were poor and unknown you must have dreamed of beautiful houses!” “All my life,” she answered, “I have dreamed of everything beautiful. Hungered for it, Elsa! And, needless to say, worked that I might have it!” Most women would have been selfconscious to answer in any such manner. Not Joan She was speaking the truth. That was enough. She has, through the years, known more hurt and criticism than most. Because she is so definite and determined and intense. And because, from the time she was very young, she insisted upon a luxury too few men or women ever know — the luxury of allowing her heart to guide her speech, without fear of being ridiculed and misunderstood. She’s been both, of course. When she first bought this Brentwood house, at the time she was married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., it wasn’t as it is now. I remember it, a Spanish-Moorish affair covered with mustard colored stucco. She began doing the house over at just about the same time she began her personal transformation from a naive, unlettered hey-hey girl into a well informed and gracious lady. At this time, reporters, more concerned in getting a provocative story than in understanding Joan’s metamorphosis, taxed her with saying one thing one time and another thing another time. A lesser person than Joan would have been chagrined at this charge, fear they had been found vulnerable. But Joan, with only her vehemence bespeaking her young insecurity, answered, “I hope I change! Who wants to stand still? You can’t stand still and grow!” At the time I was sure this incident reflected the very essence of the Crawford personality. Now I know it did. Speaking of Douglas Fairbanks', I showed him and his wife, Mary Lee, a print of “Humoresque” the other evening. Both of them shared my enthusiasm. “She’s terrific,” they said. And Douglas added, “She’s a great girl, a wonderful person!” “You ought to know,” 1 told him. “You were with her when she began.” Ij'RANCHOT TONE was Joan’s second husband. Then came Philip Terry. The rumors that she next will marry Greg Bautzer have for some time now been on again, off again. Whether or not they will marry is anyone’s guess. Bautzer, who is handsome, who dances divinely and has all the social graces, is a perfect complement to one side of Joan’s nature. Because both are tempestuous, quarrels flame high and reconciliations flame high, too. This, Joan and Bautzer, romantic, excitementeating people, thoroughly enjoy. There is, however, another side to Joan. She is domestic.. Her love for her home and her children is great. And she has a great urge towards beauty and self-improvement. Should this side of her prevail she might not become Mrs. Bautzer. She hasn’t been too happy in her marriages because they have not — and probably will not — sustained the ideal she set for them in the glamorous beginning. It would not, in all honesty, be easy to love Joan or to live with her — unless you had the same dreams and the same drive. And men with such dreams and drive usually are great tycoons who want for their wives women whose individual performances are confined solely to creating a home and family and social life that will merge into a proper background. Joan hasn’’t been too happy in her marriages, I said. I might go further. I doubt that she has been too happy in life. Happiness usually isn't given to great artists, men or women. Always they search for something they never find. But if their search doesn’t yield day-by-day happi ness it brings them the joy of accomplishment, the fruits of success and to the world it gives their song. At J oan’s house that day, after our sight-seeing tour, we visited for a little while with Christina, who had finished her music lesson, and Joan’s second adopted child, Christopher. Christina is seven and Christopher is four. They are delightful children who reflect the environment and training Joan has given them. In spite of the fact that she is a disciplinarian, they adore her as they would adore a beautiful fairy princess come to life. Christina and Joan must try on their mother-and-daughter hats for me, gay bonnets with pink plumes which the famous Walter Florell whipped up for them as an Easter surprise. And after Joan and I had settled ourselves in her chartreuse and gray and brown bar for tea and talk, Christopher must come to the stair landing, grin, and call “Hi!” and then scamper back to his room. “It’s always a joy when children misbehave a little,” Joan said. “It lets you know they’re healthy!” We talked of “Possessed,” her next picture. In it she plays a girl suffering from psycho-amnesia. For days she had been sitting in the observation room of a Los Angeles hospital observing patients suffering this mental illness. She had, I know — although she did not say so — arranged for one girl, badly off, to be removed to a private hospital where she could know the greatest physical comfort. She began to tell me how those who suffer from a psycho-amnesia behave. “They are so unhappy, so wary . . And then before she knew it or I knew it she was impersonating one of these patients for me. She was that patient. “If you play your girl like that,” I told Joan, “you’ll win another Oscar to stand guard on the other side of that bar.” “I wonder. I’ve thought and thought about it,” she said, her eyes dark with her uncertainty. “But I’m afraid if I did it like that — as nearly the way those people act as possible — it would be too much, seem theatrical and overdone, and perhaps spoil the picture’s illusion.” Constant telephone calls, from producers and agents in California, from business associates in New York, interrupted us that day. Joan took all of them. When you’re as busy as she is you have no time to put things off. And always she was gracious. She is not given to prima donna airs. She lacks the inclination as well as the time for them. When she comes on the set her attitude towards the grips and electricians is identical with her attitude towards her cameraman or director. “Well, boys — what do you want me to do?” she asks. She has great simplicity. But she can kick up plenty if anybody tries to high hat her. Her frankness, incidentally, doesn’t even except Louis B. Mayer, head of M-G-M. At a recent Sonja Henie party at Giro’s Louis B., bored, waiting for dinner to be announced, sat down and ordered his own dinner. Joan, coming upon him eating a big steak, challenged, “L.B., how do you get that way?” So I give you Joan Crawford, my Mademoiselle La Chandelier, who looks like a great glamour queen and lives and works and acts like one, except in her human relationships. There she’s as friendly and honest as an open hand. The End The Stars Model Photoplay Fashions to Make You Lovelier — on Page 99