Reviewing Charlotte Chandler's new biography of Joan Crawford, Thomas Mallon writes that "It’s a truism that every film star knows how to make love to the camera; in Crawford’s case, it was more like an insistence on penetration... Some of Crawford’s most intense love scenes feel like libidinal nightmares. It’s difficult to think of a more sexually repellent star, of any other actress creating such feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the male viewer" and adds that "Crawford’s overstated performances, often intelligent but almost never instinctive, remain garishly earthbound." He describes her face as "an Art Deco masterpiece — jutting chromium cheekbones, gargoyle eyebrows — as fabulous as the Chrysler Building and scarcely more human. It was a construction designed for the lens, not life." He compares her to Nancy Reagan! ("Like that later Hollywood striver, Nancy Davis Reagan, her head was too large for her body — except for the shoulders, which Gilbert Adrian had the wit to pad instead of disguise when he dressed her for Letty Lynton (1932).") Is there another enduring movie star who most people feel so comfortable slagging like this? I'm not even saying that I disagree. (Well, I do think that he might be giving himself undue credit for psychic powers when he speculates that "If she were arriving in Hollywood today, she’d probably be checking out Scientology’s Celebrity Centre as soon as she got off the plane.") I can't help but wonder if Crawford might get a little more of a show of respect if her adopted daughter Christine's memoir Mommie Dearest hadn't revealed her as a child abuser. Crawford was always a limited actress with a slightly creepy screen image, and that image has only gotten creepier over the years, for reasons that have more to do with changing times than what we know about her off-screen life. Still, that book may have gone a long way in letting people feel free about letting their distaste for her, as both a movie star and a human being, just hang the fuck out.
Charlotte Chandler actually met Crawford — the new book opens with an account of interviewing Crawford at her home in New York — and is, Mallon writes, "firmly in the pro-Joan, anti-Christina camp." She attacks both Christina and her brother, to the point of seeming to suggest that anybody would have whaled on the little shits and that they ought to be grateful that Joan let them live, while pasting together "a fanzine Saint Joan" that goes out of its way "to overaccentuate anything positive about her subject." It seems unlikely that her efforts will results in a major re-evaluation of Crawford the woman. For one thing, no matter how many sugary anecdotes are served up about the "real" Joan, she still has to compete with the movie images that she left behind, and there's no contest: she remains magnetic in a way that makes you wish you could look away. The fact that you may not be able to might not be such a great thing for her.
