Joan Crawford

Haunted Hollywood

June 26, 2011 by Robert J. Avrech 21 Comments

Joan Crawford 1959#2 — Joan Crawford, 1959

In Seraphic Secret’s move to WordPress last week, this post was, for a while, lost in cyberspace. Due to the kindness and tech know-how of our faithful reader Alter Ben-Zion, we have been able to snatch this blog out of its spectral prison. Alter also sent all the comments and they are included.

In 1925, on Stage 6 of the MGM lot, electrician Carl Barlow was working on a lighting platform when one of the supports fractured. The entire platform collapsed in a heap and Barlow plunged to his death.

Stories of a ghost in white overalls haunting the catwalks of various MGM stages were widespread in Hollywood for many years.

As told by Esther Williams in her memoir “Million Dollar Mermaid,” in 1953 the swimming star heard spectral noises from Stage 5.

Williams entered the empty stage. She heard a voice tragically wailing. Tentatively, Williams moved towards the tortured echo.

And then she saw it.

But Williams did not see a ghost.

She saw the legendary star Joan Crawford, after a twelve-year absence at MGM, standing on the dark sound stage pleading to an audience that no longer existed:

“Why have you left me? Why don’t you come to my movies? What did I do to you? What did I say? Don’t turn your back on me!”

It’s no wonder that when Williams saw her movie career heading into its inevitable decline she got out of Hollywood and became a highly successful businesswoman.

Joan Crawford: An Obvious Strumpet

January 14, 2010 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

Joan Crawford, an obvious strumpet, plays Sadie Thompson, another obvious strumpet, in Rain, 1932.

In her fascinating but frequently scathing Hollywood memoir, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas recalls a young starlet’s arrival in Hollywood in 1925.

Eddie Goulding [prominent director] called me one morning and asked if I would like to join a welcome party going downtown to meet the Santa Fe train, which was bringing yet another young hopeful to the MGM roster of starlets. This one had been discovered and signed by [producer] Harry Rapf, who had picked her out of the chorus line at the Winter Garden in New York. Not having anything better to do, I went along. The name of the starlet was Lucille LeSueur.

When the train pulled in, I couldn’t believe what I saw. My first thought was that the name “LeSeuer” (pronounced sewer) was certainly applicable. She was a gum-chewing dame, heavily made-up, skirts up to her belly button, wildly frizzed hair. An obvious strumpet, I was introduced.

“You a writer, huh?” She looked me over, her gray eyes cold and calculating. Restless ambition was written all over her. Crude as she was, everything about her seemed to say, “Look out. I’m in a hurry. Make room!” We kidded among ourselves about Harry Rapf’s choice and forgot about it.

A week later, she looked me up. She had remembered my name from among the others she had met that first day. “They’ve given me a new name,” she told me. “From now on, I’m gonna be Joan Crawford, see? Lucille LeSeuer, I’m burying her. For good. I was thinkin’ I oughta change-like and kinda live up to being Joan Crawford. Because Joan Crawford is gonna be a Hollywood star—that’s why she came out here.” Her determination was fierce.

I wondered where I entered the picture, since she had sought me out. “How can I help you… Joan?” I asked.

“You’re a writer, right?”

I nodded.

“I like the way you dress. You dress like a lady. I need that. I want to be dressed right. Smart. I figured you could help.”

How could anyone turn down an ambitious young person like that? I took her on. Next day, Saturday, my Moon [a car] and I picked her up at a nondescript hotel where she was staying in Hollywood, and we went shopping.

You have to admire young Lucille’s pluck. She transformed herself into a lady—of sorts—and went on to become one of Hollywood’s greatest stars with a career that stretched from 1925 to 1972. In contrast, Frederica Sagor Maas became another show biz casualty, fleeing Hollywood in the 1950’s. Ms. Maas is now 109 years old. One of the few Hollywood pioneers still with us.

Lost Joan Crawford Not So Lost

November 12, 2009 by Robert J. Avrech 10 Comments

Robert Montgomery and Joan Crawford in the long unseen MGM film “Letty Lynton,” 1932. The white cotton organdy gown with deliriously ruffled shoulders by Adrian, real name Adrian Adolph Greenberg, is one of his most famous and influential designs. A copy of the dress was mass produced to help promote the film and over half-a-million were sold at Macy’s. I can just imagine a depression era housewife assuring her husband that the dress is an investment, or just perfect for a quick run to the grocery store. Photos via: The Best of Everything: The Joan Crawford Encyclopedia.

Quick, while it’s still up, you can screen the famously unavailable 1932, Pre-Code Joan Crawford vehicle Letty Lynton, directed by the great Clarence Brown.

The entire film is posted in nine segments, but because of a tangled legal history I’m not embedding the video.

It’s easy to find on You Tube.

But move fast before it’s removed.

Letty Lynton allows us to view Joan Crawford in all her glory. Never has she looked more beautiful or elegant. Her character suffers, oh how she suffers: desire, guilt, betrayal, fear, passion, hatred, and oh yes, did I mention desire.

Built around an unusual narrative structure Lette Lynton pounds away at a single story line with unblinking focus. Most movies juggle three narratives, the A story, from which the central plot emerges, and then two more narratives that branch out from the A story. All are resolved, ideally in an organic manner, in the third and final act.

But Letty Lynton hangs its sole narrative line on a packet of love letters—intimate, racy—that threaten Letty’s love for Boston blue blood Robert Montgomery, letters so scandalous that, if made public, will forever mark her as a fallen woman.

It’s hard for post-modern audiences to relate to such a high moral tone. We live in an age where raw sex tapes catapult people—and I’m using that term loosely—to instant celebrity, frequently rewarded with their own reality shows.

Nevertheless, Letty Lynton possesses a singular power that hypnotized this viewer, yes, even as a nine-part You Tube experience.

Screenwriters John Meehan and Wanda Tuchock’s dialogue is spare and powerful. Joan spits her lines, poisoned darts designed to wound, yet words that reek with subtext and feel more like self-inflicted blows. It’s a fine script aided by director Clarence Brown’s signature precision camera placement—the murder scene is a nail biter, I’ll bet anything Hitchcock studied it carefully. And Brown’s ability to step back for the extended medium shot is a model of a master director allowing his stars the space in which to work their magic.

Crawford’s wardrobe—she plays one of Hollywood’s beloved and ubiquitous “socialites”—is jaw dropping. There’s the white organza gown, and a fur coat with a massive collar that winds around Joan’s body like a cuddly python—it will cause PETA’S collective heads to explode. There’s also a silver lame gown that makes Joan look like a silver bullet.

This is classic Hollywood, the Golden Age that can never be replicated.

Via: Self Styled Siren, via Lou Lumenick.

Nils Asther, Joan Crawford, and the Adrian designed fur coat in Letty Lynton, 1932.

Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and spiritually meaningful Shabbat.

Not to be missed, Charles Krauthammer explains Explaining Away Mass Murder.

And my good friend Shrink Wrapped, a practicing psychiatrist, demolishes the argument that Hasan is psychotic.

Joan Crawford: Untouched/Retouched

July 24, 2008 by Robert J. Avrech 19 Comments

Here’s what happens: I snap a picture and she—every she I’ve ever photographed—takes a look at the raw digital image and recoils in horror.

No matter how beautiful the woman or girl she always says:

“Is that what I really look like?”

“I look so old.”

“Delete it.”

On location, I’ve taken photographs of gorgeous and glamorous movie stars and even they claim to be, yup, ugly.

The greatest Hollywood still photographer ever was George Hurrell. During Hollywood’s golden age, in the 1930’s and 40’s, his studio portraits became the desired image of Hollywood beauty and glamor. For a handful of stars Hurrell portraits defined their G-d like images. For years the biggest stars in Hollywood clamored to sit for Hurrell.

What was Hurrell’s secret?

He hated studio make-up.

Normally, Hollywood stars—male and female—slapped on the same heavy make-up that was used in motion pictures, and then posed for the various studio photographers.

The studios valued the stills for publicity purposes. Photos were submitted to the numerous movie magazines. Influential columnists—often accepting pay-offs from studio PR people—published photos that helped stoke public interest in the latest starlet. Before she made a single movie, MGM flooded newspapers and magazines with Ava Gardner’s stunning image.

Hurrell was unhappy with the thick, painted-on look. He felt that what worked in movies did not cross-over into still photographs—at least his vision of what a Hollywood portrait should be. And so Hurrell insisted that the stars scrub their faces clean, and then he lit and shot them with his large format camera.

Hurrell and his staff then spent hours in the dark room retouching the photographs.

He made blemished and freckled skin glow with an inner luminescence, eyes were turned into deep clouds, lips were made sensually moist, and hair shined like a planet.

Here’s a rare Hurrell portrait of Joan Crawford—unretouched.

Crawford Unretouched.jpg