Authors: Donald Spoto
In March, the
Saturday Evening Post
had published William Faulkner’s story “Turn About,” and director Howard Hawks snapped up the movie rights. It was just his kind of material—a story of military men in war-torn London, saving the world mostly through their skills with fighter pilots. After Faulkner and Hawks came up with a screenplay, Thalberg was interested—but only if a love story could be mixed in, specifically for Joan Crawford inthe role of an Englishwoman who has promised to marry one man but falls in love with another.
When Joan was told the studio’s plans for her, she demurred. This was going to be a buddy picture, all the characters but one were English, and the story was set in Europe. Foreign accents were not among Joan’s gifts, as she reminded her bosses. Other writers composed subsequent drafts of the screenplay, and by the end of November the project—renamed
Today We Live
—was ready to go. Joan reluctantly received her work schedule.
She may have felt more optimistic when she learned that Gary Cooper was among her leading men: at that time, he was a major star at Paramount who had already worked with Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Helen Hayes and Tallulah Bankhead. The other actors included Robert Young, who had appeared in a dozen movies, and Franchot Tone, thus far seen in only one.
Today We Live
must be ranked not only as the low point in the career of Joan Crawford but also as one of the most dreadful movies ever made. Cooper was the only player to be cast as an American, so he did not have the burden of affecting a British accent. But Young, Tone and Crawford were not so fortunate, and the result is beyond ludicrous. Not for one moment is Joan credible as an English country gentlewoman named Diana Boyce-Smith (for some unknown reason, everyone calls her “Ann”), and the script was almost comically bad. It told of Diana’s engagement to a childhood friend (Young) who is replaced in her affections by a tall American stranger (Cooper); woven in and out of the action is Diana’s brother (Tone). Joan’s accent comes and goes—and when it comes, she stumbles and hesitates before saying almost anything.
In this rancid soup, audiences knew that the story was set in England because everyone said things like “How veddy, veddy good of you” and “Stout fellow now, girl!” and “That’s a good job, what?” and “I say …” But they did not, for the most part, understand what they were hearing, for the dialogue consisted of a crazy kind of elliptical speech that made the characters sound like Indians in a Hollywood Western. At one point, a man introduces himself and his sister by saying, “Brother. Sister. Mine.” The movie’s language has all the charm of a first-year foreign language class, for characters do not speakin complete sentences: instead, they say things like “Gone yesterday. Forgot. Or didn’t say. Can’t tell where … Thought so. Your letters.” Subjects and pronouns vanished, and present-tense verbs were rarely employed. This was not lifelike adult speech, nor was it poetic diction—it was simply arty, self-conscious baby talk that had no effect but to confuse audiences. Because of this nonsense (and a twenty-five-minute sequence of aerial fighting), moviegoers stayed away in droves, as Samuel Goldwyn said in another context. How could they do otherwise, when word got around that the movie featured sentimental episodes starring a fighting cockroach?
The two-hour-long picture has all sorts of unexpected oddities. When Robert Young’s character loses his eyesight, he and Franchot Tone (as his best buddy) stand at the open door to Joan’s bedroom while she sleeps. “Now look at her while I’m touching you,” Young says to Tone. Just what was going on here?
Perhaps because Joan was smitten with Franchot Tone, who played the role of her brother, she never recalled just how bad the picture was. That discovery was left to the audience, but neither they nor the critics were fooled, much less impressed; the film was a failure in every regard.
TODAY WE LIVE
WAS
completed in early 1933 and released on March 3, the eve of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, which injected a dose of optimism into the American psyche. At the end of April, while the new administration was activating bold economic measures, Joan shared the front pages of newspapers with her announcement that she and Doug had submitted papers for a legal separation. “There will be no divorce,” she said, but two months after that, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. filed for divorce; the final decree became effective on May 13, 1934. “Doug had married Joan Crawford the chorus girl,” she said years later, “and maybe that’s the woman he really wanted—not the pretender to the throne. I was recreating the sort of life he’d had with his parents, and he didn’t like either one of them very much. In any case, I am convinced that an actress should not marry.”
It was particularly poignant that husband and wife had by this timebecome good friends if not compatible marriage partners—and they would remain good friends for the rest of their lives. Joan had seen something of a more refined life with Doug, and he was grateful that she had removed him from parental pressure and urged him on to a more mature independence. But for the present, they had to put some distance between them: Doug left Bristol Avenue and continued to pursue other ladies and other interests, while Joan was almost immediately seen around town in the company of this or that eligible man.
But life was always earnest for her, and she knew what she had to do—return to work, and in something that would be a surefire success after the failures of
Rain
and
Today We Live.
Always on good terms with Mayer, she went to him (not to Thalberg) and begged for a good role in a good picture. Mayer was sympathetic—not only because Joan was an expensive investment and he much needed a successful project for her, but also because he liked her common sense and dedication to hard work.
As it happened, Metro owned the movie rights to a novel by James Warner Bellah that had been serialized in the
Saturday Evening Post
earlier that year—the episodic and sentimental story of a burlesque dancer who rises to respectability, wealth and fame, with predictable romantic complications before the happy ending. This seemed the perfect vehicle for Joan, but at first she was hesitant. She finally accepted after Mayer invited her to participate in the story’s development from page to screen. The production retained Bellah’s title—
Dancing Lady.
At the same time, Mayer’s son-in-law, producer David O. Selznick, had just arrived at Metro from a tenure at RKO, and he was assigned to handle the production of
Dancing Lady.
Selznick had no great fondness for musicals, but he saw at once that the script lacked precisely what would make it a success for MGM and Crawford—sequences of dancing and singing stirred generously into the story. Warner Bros. had just released the musical extravaganza
42nd Street,
which was so lucrative that it very quickly saved that studio from bankruptcy. The moral of the story was clear: Metro would have to prepare
Dancing Lady
very carefully indeed if it was to be successful.
The screenplay went through several drafts, but Joan was still dissatisfied and on the verge of telling Mayer that she would prefer not to do the picture—until Selznick invited her to a script session and cannily told her, “Joan, I think you’re right. I don’t think this is really the right picture for you—it’s such a tarty role. I think it’s more Jean Harlow’s style.” His remark had the desired effect: “Look, Mr. Selznick,” Joan replied with a touch of acidity, “I was playing hookers before Harlow knew what they were. And let’s not hear any talk about style, because I know more about that than she ever will.” Selznick then clinched the deal with Joan by telling her that Clark Gable was available to be her leading man, and by agreeing to her request that the important supporting role be given to Franchot Tone, who was then being photographed as Joan’s escort around town.
But these actors were not dancers, and the picture needed a good dancing partner for Joan. Selznick quickly solved that problem, too. One of his last deals at RKO had been to sign the stage star Fred Astaire to a movie contract, beginning August 1. Telephone calls were made, telegrams were sent, Selznick’s legendary elaborate memoranda were dictated—and on July 15, three days after he was married in New York, Fred Astaire arrived in Culver City for two weeks of work on
Dancing Lady.
Fred had briefly appeared in an on-set cameo in a 1915 silent picture, when he was sixteen, but
Dancing Lady
would be his real movie debut.
Joan knew that the scenario was very like her own life story—the tale of a poor but determined hoofer who, like cream, rises to the top—and she had decided to celebrate the connection between the movie and her life before the press did so in uncomplimentary terms. On the first day of production in late June, Joan expeditiously completed the opening scene of the movie, which she had developed with the writers and with director Robert Z. Leonard—and had based on her time as a Broadway chorus girl for J. J. Shubert. As dancer Janie Barlow, she and a group of burlesque showgirls are hauled before a judge after performing a remarkably inoffensive striptease number. With tough humor, she explains that this was the only work she could find that allowed her to dance. Joan’s performance was managed wittily—it was grit with asmooth velvet surface—and no one could find fault with either the girl in the story or the one on the screen.
The picture was planned to take only four weeks, but more than four months were needed to complete it.
First, Clark Gable fell ill with a strange infection that defied certain diagnosis. A few days after he returned to work, he collapsed and had to be hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy. There were complications, and his recovery kept him away from the studio until the end of August. This, of course, necessitated rearranging the shooting schedule and recasting several roles played by actors who now had other commitments. Fred Astaire’s participation was a stroke of good fortune, as his scenes were conveniently moved forward in the production schedule.
Misadventures accumulated. Dancing with Astaire (who was playing himself) as the camera rolled, Joan overdid a scene in which she was supposed to interrupt the action of the story because of a leg cramp. But in fact she fell awkwardly and badly sprained her ankle. The production schedule was so tight, however, that this incident was left in the finished film, and a line of dialogue was added to explain it. Game girl that she was, Joan returned to the studio that same day—cooperative as always, despite the discomfort of her taped and painful foot. She worked for seven hours, doing close-ups for a major dance number that now had to focus on her face instead of on her usually agile feet. But a week later, she had to withdraw for several days—and again shooting was interrupted—when she learned that she had sustained a hairline fracture. “I am holding up production with a sprained ankle,” she wrote to a friend in New York on September 9, minimizing the diagnosis. “It is the same one I’ve broken three times and it’s painful as the very devil.”
Despite all the production setbacks,
Dancing Lady
shines with good humor, engaging songs, lively dancing and an astonishing polish, justifying Selznick’s belief that Metro could out-Warner Warner when it came to musicals. The picture provided a major boost to the careers of Crawford and Selznick; it introduced Fred Astaire to the moviegoing public; for the first time, people saw a trio of boorish louts who became wildly successful as The
Three Stooges; and, in a small scene, Eve Arden appeared with Joan (as she later would, in more important roles in
Mildred Pierce
and
Goodbye, My Fancy).
The picture opens in a burlesque house and concludes on a legitimate theater stage, bookending ninety minutes that fly like a greased eagle, mostly because of the appealing performances and the witty dialogue. Joan was perhaps never before more lovingly photographed; her hair was lightened, softened and parted; her makeup was more natural, emphasizing her eyes; and Adrian’s wardrobe for her was not as outrageous as in
Today We Live.
Her tap dancing was spirited—at least in what remained of the footage taken before the accident—and her acting was alive with nuance and the kind of unexpected humor that made the romantic triangle of Crawford-Gable-Tone less sticky.
Gable, thin after his illnesses and sometimes all but unable to stand up straight, wears his pencil-thin mustache for the first time in a Crawford picture, and audiences loved them in their fourth collaboration together. As for Tone, he had little to do but feign adoration of Joan and appear both sophisticated and drunk most of the time—characteristics too often replicated in his offscreen life. Another of Joan’s contributions to the screenplay was the development of Franchot’s character, a snob forever tutoring Janie Barlow on proper grammar and the best way to dress. Those moments of corrective etiquette were lifted right out of the Crawford-Tone relationship.
Dancing Lady
took far longer to complete than Metro had planned, and the four months of production were unusual in those more disciplined and economical years of meticulous movie preparation and six twelve-hour days each week. But the healthy box-office returns in December immediately wiped out its $780,000 cost and brought in nearly twice that much in profits. However riddled with problems during filming, this surprisingly entertaining picture justified Mayer’s faith in his son-in-law as a Metro producer, and Joan was blissfully restored to the critical and popular favor she coveted. Unlike
Rain,
this was a movie the public took to its heart.
THE YEAR ENDED WITH
an announcement from the family. On December 2, Kasha Le Sueur bore a baby girl, soon christened Joan Crawford Le Sueur. “I admire my sister-in-law more than any woman I know,” Joan disingenuously remarked to a reporter. “But if they let me have that baby, I’ll adopt it right away.” This seemed like a shocking thing to say, but Joan knew, as the newspaper-reading public did not, that Hal and Kasha were soon to separate and, as she told friends, she was deeply worried about the fate of the child.