Faye Dunaway is famously unwilling to talk about playing Joan Crawford in the notorious 1981 biopic Mommie Dearest, a film that she claims damaged her reputation by grafting her portrayal of Crawford to her own cinematic persona and professional reputation. Which is shame since it is possibly her greatest performance – it's definitely her most audacious – and dominates clip reels of her career whenever she's in the news. Whatever Dunaway thinks about it, her Joan Crawford will take top billing in any video career summary in some future obituary.
Defenders of Joan Crawford insist that Dunaway's indelible performance – as much if not more than the tell-all memoir written by her daughter, on which the film is based – damaged Crawford's reputation for posterity. Which is a backhanded compliment to Dunaway; a complaint that she did her job too well and ensured that a film that was critically savaged upon release would endure for decades, collecting an audience along the way that has no living memory of Crawford the movie star.
Mommie Dearest is nearly 45 years old, as far back in the past as the peak of Crawford's career was when the movie was released. It's hard to say with certainty that Crawford's star would have abided as long as it has without Mommie Dearest. It was dismissed as unintentional camp when it was released, re-marketed as camp comedy by Paramount when reviews were harsher than audience reactions, and embraced as a camp classic by its fans in subsequent decades, who lived for its frequent TV screenings before it was reissued on disc in increasingly deluxe editions.
Samuel Garza Bernstein, author of the recent book Starring Joan Crawford: The Films, the Fantasy and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon, explained why he wanted to write about a movie star who died when he was just seven years old. "I wanted to explore what did she meant to us and what does she mean to us now," Bernstein said in an interview with Provincetown Magazine.
"Why do we still know who she is now? There are so many actresses that have gone completely forgotten. Why do we still know her name? Young people use her image to create memes on social media. Why? Why is she still so relevant?"
Joan Crawford was a creation; her name was chosen by an MGM fan contest and bestowed upon Lucille LeSueur upon her arrival in Hollywood in 1925. In the first scenes of Mommie Dearest we see just how much effort she put into the upkeep of this creation: waking before dawn wearing white gloves and a collection of bands around her head, face and neck, painfully scrubbing her hands and arms as if her huge bed and its silver satin sheets had coated her in a layer of filth, then plunging her face into a huge bowl of ice.
We see her shower and dress, then ride in the back of a limo through darkened streets to the studio, studying a script – Ice Follies of 1939, a musical bomb made during her "box office poison" period – and signing autographs. She arrives at MGM and walks through a dim soundstage to a makeup trailer where she undergoes a transformation that ends when the camera finally gives us our first glamourous closeup of Dunaway as Crawford.
Crawford's "box office poison" period is a bit oversold in the movie and in general. The next film she made after Ice Follies of 1939 was George Cukor's The Women, a critical hit that only lost money for MGM due to its high production costs and now considered one of the many highlights of 1939 – Hollywood's "miracle year". Crawford's films after that were hardly a string of flops – the studio turned a profit on Strange Cargo, A Woman's Face, When Ladies Meet and Reunion in France.
But she had been listed (alongside Garbo, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Kay Francis) in an infamous 1938 Hollywood Reporter ad by the Independent Theater Owners Association of America as stars whose box office performance didn't justify their high salaries, and everyone on the list (expanded to include Norma Shearer, Dolores del Rio, Fred Astaire, John Barrymore and Luise Rainer in an article in the Independent Film Journal) suffered for their inclusion.
It's an anxious time in Crawford's career, and the film shows her trying to cope by supervising her secretary Carol Ann (Rutanya Alda) and housekeeper as they clean her pristine art deco Brentwood mansion, down on her knees polishing the marble foyer. She upbraids her housekeeper for being sloppy when they move a huge potted tree and find a ring on the marble floor.
"I'm not mad at you," Joan tells the woman. "I'm mad at the dirt!"
Crawford was obsessed with cleaning, covering her furniture in plastic, waxing not just floors but walls, banishing rugs and showering several times a day. In a blog post about Crawford's cleaning compulsion, Tyler Hughes writes that "cleaning created a sense of order. Not only did she find it a cathartic experience scrubbing floors on her knees with her hands, but it also provided her the chance to have the control over her space that she'd never had had during her incredibly unstable childhood."
In the film, Joan is in a relationship with Greg Savitt (Steve Forrest), a lawyer with close ties to her boss, Louis B. Mayer, and during a walk on the beach (Dunaway kicks at the sand complaining about how dirty it is) tells him that the only thing that will make her life perfect is a baby. She's rejected by the state adoption agency but Savitt expensively procures a lovely blonde baby for her from less official channels. (Her daughter Christina said that gangster Meyer Lansky had a hand in her adoption and echoed rumours that Joan relied on the services of the infamous "baby snatcher" Georgia Tann but there's little evidence that either story was true.)
Crawford is transcendent with joy when the baby is delivered, carrying it slowly up the grand staircase of her home till she's framed on the landing like a Madonna, complete with halo. She names her Christina and promises that she'll never want for anything, and when we see her next it would seem that Joan has kept her promise, throwing a lavish birthday party for her daughter, documented by cameramen and photographers from the studio. In the meantime she has adopted a baby boy named Christopher. (Crawford would later adopt "twins" named Catherine and Cynthia; it's probably unfair but I have always thought naming children to a system involving letters or rhymes is a red flag.)
There are already a few elisions and omissions in the picture: Crawford was married to actor Phillip Terry when Christopher was adopted, and while she was notorious for her affairs on-set and off, Terry is wholly omitted from the story in favour of Forrest's Savitt, who facilitates scenes showing how the couple are in thrall to the power of Louis B. Mayer. This ends up being the cause of a break-up that turns on how hard it is to tell if Joan is acting or expressing real emotion. It's an old stereotype applied to star actresses and movie divas: Sandra Dee levels the same complaint against her mother, Lana Turner, in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life.
Producer Frank Yablans turned his genius marketing of Love Story as head of sales for Paramount into a promotion to studio president, where he oversaw the studio's winning streak with the Godfather films and Chinatown. But he had apparently run a crooked ship and was replaced as studio head by Barry Diller, going on to work as an independent producer with a special deal with Paramount.
Diller brought Christina Crawford's bestselling memoir of her mother to him; Yablans had met Crawford briefly when he was a young man and never forgot the encounter. The first major complication was the script, with Crawford producing a draft before it was given to actress and writer Tracy Hotchner, James Kirkwood Jr. (A Chorus Line) and even an uncredited William Goldman until Yablans and director Frank Perry worked on the final drafts. Perry had not been Yablans' first choice, however, and Franco Zeffirelli had originally been signed to direct, around the time Anne Bancroft was set to play Crawford. (Imagine how different that picture would have been.)
Dunaway campaigned to get the role by showing up for dinner at Yablans' house fully made up and costumed as Crawford. Christina Crawford was worried that the scripts she was seeing were making her mother too sympathetic, and Yablans told Dunaway that he wanted her to create a less extreme version of Joan than the one in her daughter's book. In any case the deals made with Christina and Dunaway meant that Yablans was sidled with Christina's husband, David Koontz, and Dunaway's future husband, photographer Terry O'Neill, as executive producers.
As Christina gets older, Joan develops an unhealthy jealousy of her daughter, competing with her to swim across their pool and crowing with triumph when the little girl loses to the grown woman: "Nobody said life was fair, Tina." Despite their privilege, Christina and her brother are given servants' tasks and live in fear of their mother's rages.
When Joan discovers Christina sitting at her vanity table imitating her mother, she accuses the little girl of being vain and self-obsessed ("Why are you always looking in the mirror?") and hacks off her blonde curls with scissors. Joan later comes across the girl giving her favorite dolls a stern lecture on their ingratitude, after she has yelled at her children for waking her up by playing under her window.
Christina discovers that the dolls have been taken from her room, she confronts her mother who is reclining in her dressing room, immaculately made up, in a glowing white turban and dressing gown. She coolly tells the child that she should be grateful, that they were "thoughtless, selfish, spoiled children. Now they won't wake you up when you need to rest."
Joan needed her rest to prepare for a meeting with Louis B. Mayer, with whom she had been battling for better roles. In spite of what we're seeing at Crawford's home, for a moment the film imagines that Mayer is the real villain of the story – a trigger for the anxiety that is making Joan such a bad mother. The demands of his studio's publicity department for idealized images of their stars and their families feed Joan's painful striving for a flawless façade to sell to her fans, smothering fleeting instincts to be kind and forgiving.
Mayer was not the only studio mogul with a reputation for cruelty and lecherousness – Daryl F. Zanuck, Harry Cohn and Jack Warner helped create the abiding cliché. But Mayer was the most powerful of them all, and all the stories of his infernal treatment of actors under contract to MGM, starting with children like Judy Garland, makes you wonder how he made time in his busy schedule to abuse so many girls and women.
Joan's meeting with Mayer (Howard da Silva) begins with the mogul flattering her as his greatest star, the idol of every young actor signed to an MGM contract – true "Hollywood royalty". But he quickly changes his tone, asking if he's ever given her bad advice, then telling her that she will leave the studio that made her a star, that he can no longer protect her from her reputation as "box office poison."
She's apparently the last to know; the contents of her bungalow are being packed and put in her car as they speak. Joan asks him to at least walk her out, a final show of gratitude to "Hollywood royalty" and the money she'd made him, but he gazes back at her sternly and silently, a father figure rejecting the child that he has violated in secret.
What follows is one of the film's four or five most iconic scenes, and the source of its abiding infamy. Joan, in full evening couture, is in her garden that night with a pair of shears, attacking the rose bushes while howling about "Hollywood royalty" and "box office poison". Carol Ann wakes the children so they can go downstairs and clean up the carnage their mother is creating, and Dunaway delivers the first of Joan's signature lines:
"Tina-ah – bring me the axe."
Dunaway has blamed Perry for allowing her to take her performance further out than she wanted, saying that he lacked experience. But Perry, who began his movie career with the psychological drama David and Lisa (1962), had made nearly a dozen films by then – a fascinating list that includes The Swimmer, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Doc (with Dunaway and Stacy Keach as Doc Holliday) and the western comedy Rancho Relaxo. They were all, to be sure, very much of their time, but Perry was no journeyman, content with keeping his producers happy and his audiences unchallenged.
Yablans and Perry chose to make Mommie Dearest look as much like a product of Crawford's movie heyday as it was possible at the turn of the '80s. Irene Sharaff, whose career went back to the '40s (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bishop's Wife) was hired to design the costumes, and after attempting to shoot in Crawford's home, they decided to film everything on soundstage sets, with cinematographer Paul Lohmann (Nashville, Silent Movie) ramping up the stylized lighting on scenes like the rose garden massacre.
Joan signs to Warner Bros. and achieves revenge on Mayer when she's cast in the role of her career – the heroine of Michael Curtiz' Mildred Pierce – and wins her only Oscar for best actress. It's a triumph and for a moment it seems like Crawford might finally be satisfied with both her work and her life; peering out from the front door of their mansion after her mother's victory speech to the press and fans outside, little Christina is allowed an unforced smile.
Alas, the camera immediately cuts to the notorious "No Wire Hangers" scene, and another one of Joan's nighttime terrors. Director John Waters, an outspoken fan of the picture, says on a commentary track for one reissue of the film as the scene begins that the picture is as much a horror or monster movie as it is a biography of a movie star, and the tone of this scene embodies his statement perfectly.
Joan is in the children's walk-in closet in her floor length dressing gown, her hair pulled back with a hairband and face covered in cold cream. She smiling as she goes through the racks of clothing until she comes across a wire hanger. There are theories that Crawford's aversion to wire hangers goes back to one particular low point in her childhood when her mother was working as a laundress after her father had left, leaving them penniless, but Joan might not have needed any particular reason to be set off.
She flies into a rage, screaming about how the presence of a wire hanger proves how little gratitude Christina has for all the money Joan has spent on her huge wardrobe (itself only a fraction of her mother's, which takes up several rooms). She starts tearing clothes off the racks, throwing them to the floor while the child cowers in her bed, then lunges for the little girl, beating Christina with one of the hangars while she wails pitifully.
Dunaway put everything into the scene, screaming herself so hoarse that she had to ask her friend Frank Sinatra how to restore her ravaged vocal chords. The white hairband she's wearing on top of the cold cream and bright red lipstick makes her face a mask with a high forehead; several critics have compared it to Japanese noh theatre and Dunaway's Joan, rallying her energies in the middle of her rampage, retreats to the children's bathroom at the far end of the set where she actually squats down like a sumo wrestler at the beginning of a bout. I was astonished the first time I saw it and I still marvel at her audacity today.
Joan drags the little girl into the bathroom and accuses her of doing a sloppy job during that morning's (apparently daily) cleaning. On their knees they begin scrubbing the deep blue tiles until Joan's hysteria crescendos again, beating the little girl with cans of Old Dutch cleanser, the white powder flying everywhere. She tells Christina to clean it up but the little girl croaks "How?"
"You figure it out," Joan replies and Dunaway, pushing the scene as far as she can, twists her mouth into a grimacing smile/frown, crosses her eyes and gazes offscreen, her face transformed into a kabuki mask as she glides back into the darkness. Mara Hobel's performance as the young Christina is too often overshadowed by Diana Scarwid's older version, but little Mara pulls off something amazing with the final words of this legendary scene, surveying the wreckage and, in a voice less like a child than a woman who has lived too much, gasping "Jeezus Christ."
In that moment she speaks for all of us. My colleague Ken Anderson, writing about Mommie Dearest in his blog, praises Dunaway for being "incredibly brave and frighteningly committed", and compares her Joan to Al Pacino in Scarface or Jack Nicholson in The Shining – two wildly overacted (and roughly contemporary) roles that are considered, if not the best, then the most archetypical performances of those actors' careers.
By this point the film is still only half over. Little Christina has been through a lot so it's no surprise that she becomes a bit too blasé about the world her mother inhabits. She acts as greeter for her mother's gentlemen guests, even mixing them a drink while her mother prepares herself upstairs. One day she brings her mother a customary tall glass of vodka and interrupts her while she's entwined with Ted (Michael Edwards), the latest of Christina's "uncles".
This earns Christina a banishment to Miss Chadwick's, a boarding school, and initiates a flash forward several years, to Scarwid's teenage Christina and Dunaway's Joan visibly aging as her career begins its long, slow decline. Pleading poverty, she has Christina put to work to earn her tuition at the school, just as Crawford did during her own miserable childhood. Discovered necking with a boy in the stables, Crawford pulls her out of the school where, despite the hardships, Christina has started to flourish.
Back home for the weekend, Joan admonishes her daughter to behave herself while Barbara Bennett (Jocelyn Brando, Marlon's sister), a writer from a women's magazine, stays there as a guest while writing a puff piece on the actress. But Joan is unable to resist disparaging her daughter and when Christina defies her they end up in a brawl with Joan on top of her daughter, trying to choke her out while her secretary and the writer struggle to pull Joan off.
It's yet another one of the film's eruptions, with another jaw-dropping turn by Dunaway, who only stops throttling Scarwid to rear back in a howl, throwing off Alda and Brando before springing off her gasping daughter like a cat, landing on her knees.
In 1956, writer Helen Lawrenson was assigned by Esquire magazine to write a piece about Hollywood and ended up being hijacked by Crawford to stay with her in Los Angeles. Lawrenson wrote about that week just before Mommie Dearest was published, for Viva, Bob Guccione Sr.'s high class ladies' soft porn magazine, recalling that Crawford "spent hours showing me her clothes, including the nightgowns she had had made, chiffon shorties in different pastel colors, one for every night of the week."
Lawrenson noted that, on the day she arrived, Christina had graduated from her school, winning a prize, but that Joan hadn't attended, sending her secretary instead. Crawford talked incessantly about her children and the joys of motherhood while all her children were living elsewhere. At lunch with Judy Garland at the Brown Derby or at Jane Greer's dinner party she would rhapsodize about motherhood but Lawrenson never saw the children.
"Anyone who didn't know how Joan treated them would have said that they were four lucky kids," she wrote. "In reality, their childhood and adolescence were wretchedly unhappy."
When Lawrenson visited Crawford she had just married Alfred Steele, the chairman of the board at Pepsi Cola, played by Harry Goz in Mommie Dearest as a kind older man, shocked both by finding himself married to a movie star and by her callous treatment of Christina. We see Joan spend his money lavishly renovating their New York apartment before he dies offscreen of a heart attack.
In the picture's final showpiece scene, Joan presides over one end of the boardroom table after Steele's death, impeccably turned out as peak Crawford, facing down a room full of Pepsi executives intent on easing her out of the role Steele had given her while forcing her to assume the debts he had run up during their marriage. Joan rounds on them ("Don't f**k with me, fellas!"), telling them that she's faced bigger monsters in Hollywood and that she'll ruin the company with bad publicity – a heroic moment from the film's villain.
The film winds down after that, with Joan and Christina both living in New York, actresses struggling to get roles at the beginning and ends of their careers. When Christina is forced to take time off from her role on a daytime soap opera, Joan takes over while she recovers from surgery in the hospital, playing a woman half her age. (This really happened.) When Joan finally dies, Christina and her brother discover that they've been disinherited, Christopher marvelling how Joan managed to get the last word while his sister wonders aloud: "Does she?"
When the bad reviews for Mommie Dearest started rolling in (only Pauline Kael at the New Yorker seemed to like Dunaway's performance) Paramount pivoted their ad campaign, with posters featuring wire hangers. John Waters claims that they actually hired drag queens to hand out coat hangers at screenings in an attempt to astroturf a Rocky Horror phenomenon but says that it never worked and that the drag queens felt manipulated.
But Crawford was already a gay icon alongside Bette Davis, her rival at Warner Bros, and Waters describes Dunaway's performance as the actress doing Joan as "a female female impersonator." If there's anything wrong with Mommie Dearest it isn't Dunaway but the script, which can't decide who the film is about and lurches forward through Joan's life. But there are still Crawford fans who blame Dunaway, Yablans and Perry.
"There weren't enough gay people working on that movie," said Starring Joan Crawford author Samuel Garza Bernstein. "They didn't realize what they were making was high camp. They thought they were making this serious drama and everyone was going to win Oscars. And there's Faye Dunaway looking like a drag queen instead of how glamorous Joan actually was. Instead of a serious examination of her life it was this kabuki like performance."
Ken Anderson thinks that the film is "too flawed a film for even nostalgic revisionism to one day convert into a misunderstood classic; but I think there stands a good chance that time will be kinder to Faye Dunaway's performance . . . Dunaway's Joan Crawford may be a bit 'out there' at times, but it is a fascinating, almost athletic performance. Perhaps far more layered and intelligent than the film deserves."
Club members can let Rick know what they think by logging in and sharing in the comments below, as access to the comments section is one of many benefits that comes along with membership in the Mark Steyn Club.