Joan Crawford strikes a pose in this 1930s MGM publicity photo. Crawford’s appeal has transcended that of many of her contemporaries, like Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert and Irene Dunne. (Photo courtesy of Neil Maciejewski, www.legendaryjoancrawford.com)
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JOEY DiGUGLIELMO
Friday, March 28, 2008
Joan Crawford would have been 100 this week.
Or at least that’s what she’d have wanted us to think. Her birthday was March 23 but the year is up for debate. She claimed she was born in 1908. There’s no birth certificate to authoritatively say but most biographers and historians claim 1906 is the likeliest year of her birth.
But whether a centennial celebration is in order or a couple years too late, Crawford is one of those old Hollywood stars who’s maintained a prominent post-death place in pop culture. She died at age 73 in 1977 most likely of undiagnosed cancer.
And unlike James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or Lucille Ball, there aren’t a million Franklin Mint dolls, clocks, shot glasses, figurines or similar tchotchkes bearing Crawford’s likeness to keep her image alive.
She manages to be the subject of ongoing fascination in other ways and gay men have played a pivotal role in perpetuating the Crawford flame.
The big pink elephant in any room in which Crawford’s name is discussed these days is, of course, “Mommie Dearest,” the notorious 1978 memoir by Joan’s daughter, Christina Crawford, which, depending on your opinion, was either a cowardly way for Christina to get back at her mother for being left out of Joan’s will (the book’s Joan Crawford is a physically abusive madwoman and drunk who adopted children only for publicity) or a harrowing true story that shed light on child abuse and cracked the façade of old school Hollywood glamour.
A 1981 film adaptation starring Faye Dunaway as Crawford is one of the campiest movies ever made with a straight face (Some of Joan’s own films, like 1953’s “Torch Song” or 1955’s “Queen Bee,” could run close seconds). It’s also the vehicle by which most gay men — at least those born in the last 35 years or so — discover Joan.
Acknowledging the damage “Mommie” caused to Joan’s reputation, gay author Lawrence Quirk, in a 1988 reissue of his 1968 book “The Films of Joan Crawford,” predicted that, in time, a Crawford renaissance would occur. That was a dubious proposition in 1988, just a decade after the book came out, but there are signs now that he was right:
- Last month Warner Home Video released a second DVD box set of Crawford’s films. She’s one of only a handful of “Golden Age” Hollywood actresses to merit the box set treatment.
- Crawford movies continue to be released in home video formats. Twenty-six of her 80-odd theatrical features are available on DVD with another 22 having been released on VHS. While actresses like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe have a much greater percentage of their films on DVD, they also made far fewer movies than Crawford.
- In 1999, the list-making fanatics at American Film Institute ranked Crawford the 10th greatest female film legend behind Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Garland and Marlene Dietrich. Crawford ranked higher than contemporaries such as Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Vivien Leigh and Rita Hayworth.
- Crawford films remain staples of Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel dedicated to classic cinema. Since TCM doesn’t show commercials, Nielsen ratings don’t apply but Crawford’s pictures are popular enough to justify continued programming. Seventeen are on this month’s schedule.
- Books about Crawford continue to proliferate. The latest is Charlotte Chandler’s “Not the Girl Next Door,” which Vanity Fair excerpted at length in its March issue. Released in February, it’s already sold 3,000 copies. David Bret’s “Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr,” released in 2006, sold 5,000 copies. Another Quirk-penned book, “Joan Crawford: the Essential Biography,” released in 2002, sold 4,000 copies. These are considered decent sales for the genre.
- Drag queen performer John Epperson toured with a 2007 show that found him lip synching to an aural montage of Crawford clips comprised mostly of a 1973 career-retrospective interview Crawford granted. “The Passion of the Crawford” did well in Washington and New York but was “a smash,” according to Epperson, in ¨über-gay San Francisco with every performance sold out.
- Crawford maintains a strong Internet presence. Fan sites like “Legendary Joan Crawford” and “The Best of Everything: a Joan Crawford Encyclopedia” contain original reporting and are far more expansive than fan sites devoted to (Katharine) Hepburn, Davis or Bergman.
- Crawford-themed YouTube clips are also legion. Some, such as those by gay montage wizard Dan Rucks, have become gay club staples.
So to what degree are gays responsible for this ongoing Crawford mania? Nobody can provide exact numbers, of course, but some clues indicate the gay angle is significant.
“I would say a great deal,” Epperson says, citing his and gay actor Charles Busch’s commentary on a deluxe DVD edition of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” the 1962 thriller/black comedy that’s been transmogrified into a gay cult flick. Epperson also commented on the “Mommie Dearest” DVD deluxe reissue.
“These companies obviously realize the gay community buys these things,” Epperson says. “So a lot of it is gay, gay, gay.”
Neil Maciejewski, a gay San Francisco resident, Crawford collector/historian and web master of legendaryjoancrawford.com, says about 70 percent of the feedback he gets for his site is from gay men.
“She came from nothing, she wasn’t educated, wasn’t that pretty at the beginning, but she fought her way and made herself,” Maciejewski says. “She had to fight for everything she had and I think many gay men can relate.”
Gay San Francisco resident Neil Maciejewski, a Joan Crawford historian and webmaster of legendaryjoancrawford.com, poses with the hand- and footprints a young Crawford made for Sid Grauman in Hollywood in 1929. (Photo courtesy of Neil Maciejewski) |
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Maciejewski’s site, which just passed 80,000 hits since its 2004 launch, admits part of the draw is Crawford’s camp appeal. Though it’s impossible for younger gays to fathom how over-the-top Crawford pictures like “Torch Song,” “Queen Bee” and “Strait-Jacket” played in the ’50s and ’60s when they were released, Maciejewski says to think of Crawford as only that kind of performer would be a mistake.
“That’s certainly part of it, but there are many different sides to Joan, the working girl, the flapper, the glamour queen, the camp — that mostly came later and was one more way she kind of reinvented herself like a chameleon,” Maciejewski says.
And what would Joan have thought of this?
Gay men were among some of her closest friends. Fellow actors Cesar Romero (the Joker on TV’s “Batman”) and Billy Haines were life-long pals and gay director George Cukor was one of her favorite directors. But it wasn’t until William Friedkin’s “The Boys in the Band” came out in 1970 that Crawford realized she was becoming a gay saint a la Garland.
In one scene in the movie (just out on DVD, incidentally), Leonard Frey’s character holds up a copy of “The Films of Joan Crawford.” Joan was baffled.
Gay Crawford pal Quirk tried to explain, telling her gay men identified with her on- and off-screen struggles for career success, love and happiness and with her romantic and sexual encounters with a variety of men.
“Joan didn’t mind having gay fans and was perfectly friendly to gays, but she didn’t like the idea that some of her movies might now be considered camp,” Quirk writes in “Joan Crawford: the Essential Biography.”
Her disparaging reference to “fag designers” in Roy Newquist’s “Conversations with Joan Crawford” is probably more an anachronism than an intentional insult, considering Crawford’s other gay-friendly views. She often said Haines and long-time partner, Jimmy Shields, had “the best marriage in Hollywood.”
Maciejewski says Crawford, in time, wouldn’t have minded the camp factor.
“She’d just be glad people were still remembering her,” he says.
Rucks says that although gay fans may appreciate the young Crawford, it’s the older, exaggerated, campy Crawford that resonates most.
“As she matured, she became a caricature of herself,” Rucks says. “That entices the gay, camp appeal — the enormous shoulder pads, eyebrows and lips. When you combine these attributes with Faye Dunaway’s over-the-top performance in ‘Mommie Dearest,’ which is the way most gay men learn about Joan Crawford, it’s absolutely absorbing.”
Questions about Crawford’s gay appeal inevitably lead to larger questions, such as why gay men are drawn to larger-than-life female stars in general.
In a 2000 Salon article, author Damien Cave argues these women provide gay men with vicarious opportunities. He also suggests it’s a thing of the past — women like Judy Garland, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, all straight (though Crawford dabbled in bisexuality) — provided coded gay role models before there were openly gay public figures.
“In Judy Garland’s drugs and multiple comebacks, [gay men] saw their own closeted battle between loneliness and survival,” Cave writes. “In the lines of Bette Davis’ characters … they recognized the ability to overcome, even cackle at life’s villains. And Joan Crawford, with her broad shoulders and masculine air, embodied the in-your-face assertiveness that gay men longed to express.”
His theory lends credence to the drag queen phenomenon, so integral to the gay community and yet so misunderstood, even in queer circles. Since drag queens just as often ape Hollywood stars as create their own characters, the vicarious experience theory seems valid.
While Joan Crawford could convey ethereal glamour, she was a more accessible, projectible screen persona than her MGM contemporary Greta Garbo. (Photo courtesy of Neil Maciejewski) |
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Perhaps this phenomenon also exists in lesser extremes, Cave suggests. Not all gay men dress as their screen idols but many drop their favorite film quotes, often bitchy, into conversation. Perhaps that’s channeling a Crawford or a Davis in a subtler way.
Others point to big stars of the studio era who aren’t being emulated or quoted. Nobody goes around quoting Irene Dunne or Loretta Young and yet, at times, their stardom was on par with Crawford’s.
The gay fascination with old Hollywood could be equal parts diva worship and the general gay interest in all things historical, a topic explored by author Will Fellows in his 2004 book “A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture.”
But vicarious experience is something Crawford was providing long before she entered the camp arena. In the ’30s and ’40s, Crawford provided a world-weary onscreen empathy to millions of American women, a phenomenon Jack Nicholson acknowledged, referencing his sister’s infatuation with the actress, in a 1999 Golden Globe acceptance speech.
Maciejewski says another 15 percent of the feedback he gets from his web site is from female gay Crawford fans, perhaps suggesting the Oscar winner’s dabbling in butch/femme personae has lesbian appeal (witness the same-sex subtext of 1954’s “Johnny Guitar” or the cropped haircuts Joan sported in 1950’s “Harriet Craig” or 1956’s “Autumn Leaves”).
Like many of the old-time stars, Crawford’s ability to make her persona the attraction, as opposed to disappearing in a part, may have worked to her advantage in terms of posterity.
“With Joan, you kind of knew what you were going to get,” Rucks says. “Ultimately she was playing Joan Crawford in each role. That was more important to her and her fans and that’s why her appeal remains.”
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