David Sutton, Part 2
On Joan Crawford
TW discussion of child abuse
The other day, a friend and I were DMing about growing up as trans Millennials. My friend, who’s a few years younger than I am, described young people who have an awareness of and affinity for exploring and refining their own gender identity within a greater context that includes actual trans people as “gender teens.” As people who came of age after the “trans tipping point,” my friend and I are too old to have ever been gender teens, too old to have been obsessed with RPDR as queer youths. Instead, we had America’s Next Top Model and, I don’t know, Degrassi: The Next Generation.
When you’re trans but don’t know you’re trans, or don’t know that you can be trans, cultural artefacts meant for binarist understandings of your “true” gender that have been co-opted by the “opposite” gender will resonate with you for reasons you don’t understand (if you’re too old to have been a gender teen, that is). This applies to cis queers, too. For example, when I was in elementary school, I was relentlessly bullied by this rancid little flamer named Kirk, for likely the same reasons that femme boys and butch girls tended to hate me in school. When he wasn’t being a relentless bully, Kirk claimed, loudly and often, that his celebrity crush was Tyra Banks.
Even though it was technically correct for a boy to have a crush on a beautiful swimsuit model, especially during the 90s, Tyra was obviously the gayest woman a boy could have had a crush on. Kirk was following the letter of the law, but not the spirit. Even as a child mostly unaware of my own gender nonconformity, I didn’t see how Kirk’s lie wasn’t obvious to everyone who heard it. To be honest, I was scornful of him for it—me, a kid who was secretly cross-dressing and knocking on doors in my neighborhood to introduce myself as a boy!—which is as sad as it is embarrassing.
Perhaps Kirk was like me in that he was so estranged from himself that his claim to heterosexuality wasn’t a lie; it’s not a falsehood if you believe it. For me, elementary school was the era in which my mom would regularly rent Gypsy! from Blockbuster for me and my sisters to watch. I enjoyed musicals and fabulous women and camp, but I often had the sense that I was not supposed to like them the way I did, although no one would have said it was inappropriate, or strange, or . . . you know . . . for a little girl to get excited about Oklahoma!. Despite the guilty confusion they caused, the syrupy, slightly hysterical feelings that I had about Rosalind Russell as Rose Hovick, which were later evoked by her roles in Auntie Mame (1958) and His Girl Friday (1940), eventually brought me to The Women (1939) when I was in my twenties. That was how I discovered Joan Crawford.
As I said in the first installation of this DAVID entry, we understand ourselves by what we are and also what we aren’t, by where we end and what we brush up against when we get there. Our self-identity—these days constituted by, among other things, a menagerie of hotly contested microidentities—is shaped by desire and whether and how it is acted upon within the restraints of our official or assigned categories, a framing that Kay Gabriel, Andrea Long-Chu, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and even that dingo at n+1 have recently written about. And as I’m wont, broken-record-like, to say, in the absence of representation, of cultural narratives to inform the inchoate selves inside us, we will inevitably identify with people and sensibilities that aren’t really for us. We will mold ourselves to them, in the process molding their reverberations to what we know of ourselves. If Russell is the cinema fag’s hag, Crawford is the cinema fag’s femme fatale. It was love at first sight.
To hear it from the internet’s legion of creepy Crawford apologists, her legacy as one of Classic Hollywood’s most accomplished actresses was unfairly and irreparably tarnished by allegations of abuse from her daughter Christina shortly after her death in 1977. It’s still common, decades later, to find defenses of Crawford that don’t dispute, much less address, her daughter’s quite credible allegations. Snide references to decontextualized examples of the reported abuses are stacked up next to unequivocally disturbing descriptions of Crawford’s treatment of her children, as if one delegitimized the other: Christina’s “vengeful, tell-all memoir,” writes one fan site, “. . . excoriated Mommie Joan for wrongs ranging from late-night drunken rampages to forcing daughter dearest to--gasp!--write thank-you notes for gifts!”
But generally speaking, and in keeping with the abuse apologist MO we know and love to this day with Hollywood predators like Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Mel Gibson, as far as these fans are concerned, whether or not Crawford beat her children with wire hangers, tied them to their beds, starved them, or attempted to choke them to death is besides the point. The point is that her legacy was worth more than a human who dared to assert her humanity, and yet was ruined by this assertion all the same.
But “ruined,” of course, is debatable. Film-lovers less invested in the Crawford cult have long noted the disparity between her career highs and lows, the way she went from Oscar-winning MGM heavy-hitter to widely panned low-budget flicks like Trog (1970), but no one can deny that she was one of the last century’s greats—though her acting abilities aren’t universally agreed upon, her legendary enmity with the better-regarded (but inferior, IMO) Bette Davis proves that. Evidence of that ruination seems to always go back to Crawford’s evolution into gay/camp icon, whose popularity among drag queens and fags is seen by some as more demoralizing than the (again, quite credible) allegations of grievous harm to children. Now well into the 21st century, any roses still to be spared for Crawford are delivered in the arms of the gay boys who love her, though if Ryan Murphy’s Feud was a rose, it was the stinkiest in the bouquet. I don’t even like Bette Davis and I was offended by Sarandon’s portrayal of her; Lange wasn’t much better as Crawford herself. Both icons were done dirty by actors incapable of a half-decent caricature. Murphy should have cast drag queens instead.
Unlike her contemporary Bette Davis, or some of our today’s great actresses, like Meryl Streep or Viola Davis, Joan Crawford’s legacy is uncertain, up for debate. That there’s more than one narrative about her almost-fifty-year career might be the best reflection of the complexity of that legacy: There is more than one Crawford.
There’s the sassy flapper ingenue of the Silent Era and early thirties, the feminine and long-suffering matron, the crazy old crone. There’s also the feral, hypersexual bitch with no sense of loyalty to other women, the possible epitome of which Crawford plays as Crystal Allen in The Women. The film’s antagonist, Crystal is a sharp-tongued perfume counter salesgirl who swoops in on the hapless husband of the unshakably angelic Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) and homewrecks his tony manhattan manse. Crystal is a miserable moneygrubber who, despite her perfect dresses, perfect sneers, perfect barbs, eventually gets her comeuppance. She may lose her man in the end, but she puts up a fight the whole way down, scratching and biting her way through Mary’s cadre of rich bitch friends, all of whom take their inherited spoils for granted.
Though The Women is divinely cast—it’s also where I discovered the lusciously motherly Shearer—with her canny, comedic, chirruping genius, Russell would have stolen the show if not for Crawford. While Russell is always a delight onscreen, Crawford is always a threat: It’s unwise to take your eyes off her. In one humble stan’s opinion, she is at her best when she isn’t being good.
Of course, goodness is relative. A calculating gold-digger, Crystal Allen is just getting hers, which she at least has the integrity to admit—“I've worked too hard to land this meal ticket to make any false moves now,” she tells a friend of Mary Haines’ husband. It’s not my fault your man is worthless is her basic position, and like, where is the lie? What is framed as déclassé meangirl cuntiness is actually a ruthless realism about a world where the Mary Haineses get what they want as a matter of course. In her disdain for Mary’s romantic notions of married monogamy, I see the frustration of bygone working girls, a term to be interpreted as broadly as possible here, just trying to get paid.
I don’t mean to position Crawford and Shearer, or Crystal and Mary, as two ends of a privilege spectrum. Butterfly McQueen, best-known for her role as Prissy in Gone with the Wind, plays Crystal’s foolish, browbeaten maid in The Women, her first movie role, which was also uncredited. In a 2004 essay, super-TERF Jeanette Winterson (???) says the sexual politics of The Women is why “feminism had to happen.” But this discussion can never happen without including its racial politics, too.
The working girl vs rich bitch dynamic of The Women was reflected in the real-life relationship between its stars. Crawford accounted for Shearer’s popularity with the clarity of a woman who clawed her way from nameless poverty and abuse to become one of the biggest stars in the world. “What do you expect?” she said of Shearer, who came from an affluent Canadian family and went on to marry Irving Thalberg, VP of MGM. “She sleeps with the boss.”
Crawford was no stranger to sleeping with who she had to to get where she needed to be. She was merely pointing out that the difference between her and Shearer was that the latter’s relationship had the benefit of state recognition, and therefore respectability, something she had to work very hard to cultivate from scratch and was not able to maintain after her death. “I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star,” Crawford famously said. “If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”
Crawford is often written off as “naive camp,” which I don’t think is true, not entirely. I see her as a realist, a practical person willing to do what it took to get what she wanted, but then again, marginal women who somehow manage to acquire the trappings of wealth and status will always be seen as artificial, no matter how good at it they get. Without going so far as to describe this straight woman as a femme (and as a true gay icon, the homophobic Joan would have been insulted by the insinuation), Crawford embodied the same beauty, toughness, and resilience that I admire in queer working-class femmes. Even now, Crawford’s cunty, quotable, steel-willed flappers, prostitutes, dancers, and social climbers are the among the closest approximations of that sensibility you’ll find in straight cinema.
By most accounts, Crawford was an intelligent, driven, strange, brutal woman, obsessed with self-control and controlling those around her. It’s how she managed in the world, and you can’t say it didn’t get results. This is not me joining the ranks of her apologists, by the way. Crawford was a child abuser and likely harmed other people as well; I believe that this is true. And I believe that I can believe this while also acknowledging where she came from, and how little Lucille Fay LeSueur from San Antonio, Texas, was created by her circumstances as much as she went on to pull Joan Crawford from thin air. Especially since she is long dead, I can, I suppose, separate the artist from the art. She will not make any money nor see any benefit from my repeated viewings of Dancing Lady (1933) (the chemistry with Clark Gable is butter knifable, baby).
In many ways, Crawford reminds me of my mother, and my mother’s mother, too: dogged, proud, conniving, masochistic women who torture themselves for the family life they want because they have learned that aligning themselves with men against other women is the surest route to what seems like safety. It is pitiable and it is true, and it is, I think a quality of white womanhood we could stand to examine more scrupulously, which I will attempt to do next week with Possessed (1947)—yes, yes, finally!—perhaps my least-favorite Crawford film.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.