This essay originally appeared during the 2008 Democratic primary race. I am encoring it in honor of Todd Haynes remake of "Mildred Pierce" on HBO and thought you might enjoy some insights on the original Mildred Pierce: Joan Crawford reentered our cultural national collective with two recent events: The rehabilitation of her motherly instincts by her other adopted daughter Cathy Crawford in a new biography (in which she claims a lot of sister Christina's "Mommy Dearest" was invented fiction for monetary gain); and the release on DVD for the first time of one of Crawford's greatest and rarely seen performance in "The Damned Don't Cry" (1950). But tonight it was Hillary Rodham Clinton who made me think about Joan.
I purused some of the democratic blogs this evening to sample the flavor of celebrating going on over there after finally arriving at a nominee. Instead of joy and exhultation I was stunned by the vitrol and just plain meanness directed at the first credible woman candidate for President by her own supposedly enlightened and more liberal contemporaries.
Many of them could not understand why Hillary was still in the race; Others couldn't understand why she didn't get out earlier when pressured by the party elders to exit stage left so to speak. But to everyone's amazement and shock she just keeps coming back, winning I'm told important and very big states. But her own party didn't get why she was still there. I put on my badly-recorded-off-the-TV-in-the-80s video of "The Damned Don't Cry" (no vhs was ever sold, and the DVD was just released): An epiphany came to me and suddenly it was Joan Crawford who was explaining 2008 politics to me.
Joan Crawford came into my life in junior high school when I watched The Carol Burnett Show do spoofs of her movies such as "Mildred Pierce". Coupled with the TV viewing of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" with Bette Davis, I knew she was some old actress that had won an Oscar. I also knew somehow she had married the owner of Pepsi-Cola and had free Pepsi dispensers at the Oscars backstage throughout the 60s which for an impressionable 9 year old was pretty cool. But I was not interested in her old movies.
Along came her adopted daughter Christina's trashy tome about her crazy actress mother and abuse which I assumed was true. Add Faye Dunaway's cinematic turn as J.C. in "Mommie Dearest" (the role which she claims destroyed her career), J.C. had become a cartoon. By then she was just some old relic with nothing relevant to say.
When I began my ambitious project to watch every Noir film that came out of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, I finally watched "Mildred Pierce"; not because of J.C., but because it was adapted from James M. McCain's book. Her toughness and determination in the face of being abandoned by her husband and starting a successful business from nothing on her terms affected me since my mother had gone through similar experiences.
I then found "The Damned Don't Cry", a rarely seen and arguably her greatest film directed by the vastly underated Vincent Sherman. Trapped in an empty marriage, she escapes the dusty Texas oil fields after her young son is killed in an accident. With nothing but guts in her belly she goes to the big city of Chicago and becomes a model. She meets mobster chief George Castleman (David Brian), who grooms her into a wealthy socialite. She changes her name from the plain Ethel Whitehead to the glamorous Lorna Hansen Forbes. She's sent to Palm Springs to spy on a rival mobster (Steve Cochran), falls in love with him, and then everything unravels when Castleman shows up to do the hit on the one man in this world she loves. This is one of the best Noir films of the 1950s and should not be missed.
I discovered other Joan Crawford gems, and then I realized how much her films had meant to my mother's generation. She was always the woman who started the game in the worst position: Socially and monetarily poor, determined to advance herself through hard work and determination to make it to the top in a world where men made all the rules. She would play by their rules, she would win, become their equal, but she would never gloat about her success. She always understood the tenuousness of her situation. And how it could unravel at any time, sending her spiraling back down to the bottom rung of society she had just escaped from.
I learned that her life mirrored her movies. She was a smalltown girl with big dreams when she became a Broadway dancer in the early 1920s, brought to Hollywood by a producer named Harry Rapf. Rapf's past is fascinating in how it shaped Joan's career. He originally was the third partner and co-owner when Louis B. Mayer formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer but oddly never became an executive. Instead, he was shunted aside by Mayer and was stuck as head of the "B" movie unit at MGM. Joan Crawford was brought into the "B" unit and immediately made an impact as a Roaring Twenties Flapper in a series of films. Her big break came when her film "Our Dancing Daughters" became a runaway bonafide hit.
From there she caught Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg's eye and in the 1930s was given better parts. But she was never the first actress they went to. Those were Great Garbo, Mryna Loy, Greer Garson and her eventual nemesis, Mrs. Irving Thalberg, a.k.a. Norma Shearer. She scored big in a series of eight films with Clark Gable starting with "Possessed". She had an affair with Gable that she was forced to stop under orders from Mayer, and constantly battled the other actresses for their roles. She always had the stigma of being Harry Rapf's girl; the sullen and low brow floozie from the "B" unit that somehow moved up to the "A" unit but didn't deserve to be there and wasn't treated any better.
By the end of the 1930s she was considered box office poison and her contract with MGM was terminated. She heard Michael Curtiz was to direct "Mildred Pierce" at Warner Bros. and sent word that she was interested in the part. She was told to forget it, Bette Davis was the star and besides, Curtiz wanted no part of Joan Crawford and her paded shoulder pads and fancy airs. Suddenly Davis backed out when she discovered she would be a mother to a seventeen year old girl in the film. She was horrified and refused the part. Joan begged Curtiz for a chance and she was forced to audition for him and Jack Warner. She got the part, made it her own, won an Oscar, and was now the top actress over Bette Davis at Warners. But she knew not to gloat. She went back to work for Vincent Sherman on "The Damned Don't Cry" and delivered one of the most astonishing performances of her time by showing women of her generation the price one must pay to step beyond the kitchen and savor the riches of life on her own terms.
She was nominated for Best Actress one more time in 1953, and once again the well dried up until Robert Aldrich suggested she team with Bette Davis in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962) a tragic drama about two elderly actresses who are imprisoned by their own fear of the changing world outside. Box office gold struck one last time, and from there she starred for shockmaster William Castle in "I Saw What You Did And Know Who You Are." (1965, which is where I actually saw her for the first time at the Uptown Movie Theater).
What few people don't know about Joan Crawford is that she was a devout Christian Scientist, and when she was stricken with stomach cancer in the 1970s she never took any pain killers or chemo and died a very painful death in 1977.
Rapf always knew that her appeal was that she was the best at playing the suffering woman. And like the great French director Robert Bresson, who was noted for having his women actresses suffer a lot on screen, her movies showed how pain could be used in a cathartic way to move ahead and achieve your dreams.
I was surprised to learn that most democrats don't even realize that Hillary Rodham Clinton got more votes than her rival for the nomination. And when they do realize it they can't understand her appeal. "It's that time of the month for the witch", "Bitch", "Coniving", "Manipulative", even the perjorative "Mrs." is used as a negative in the blogs and by the pundits on TV when talking about her. The democratic establishment is Louis B. Mayer in this soap opera, viewing with dismissve disdain and contempt the Clintons, who are filling in the roles of Harry Rapf and Joan Crawford. She's Bill's floozie, the sullen "B" movie wimpish wife who did nothing when Bill cheated on her. Like Mildred Pierce and Ethel Whitehead she has the audaciousness to hope big. And like Mildred she's met with vile contempt from the "A" list clique she wants desperately to impress and be accepted. She's undeterred and determinedly fights for her earned place in the ring.
I think her appeal resonates to the same type of women and men who in a previous incarnation would have been admirers of Joan Crawford. They understand she was the victim when her husband admittedly had an affair, and like in a Bresson film, know how deep and painful the suffering must have been. Dogged loyalty has its rewards, and they realize she deserves to be rewarded because she took a bad hand of cards and turned it into a royal flush of a stepping stone to bigger and better things for her in life. She'll fight until the end to succeed in a man's world; She'll play by their rules to achieve success; and even when the chips are down she's knows not to fold her cards because it isn't over until - like Joan - she has the last philosophical word.
I don't know much about politics, but I do know a good story and a star turn when I see one. Hillary Rodham Clinton is Joan Crawford in our haunted world. She has set the stage for other women to follow their own dreams. She knows it's just a matter of time before the men she has fought and their world tries to snuff her candle of haunted dreams out. But like the ending of "The Damned Don't Cry" when Joan Crawford has fled back to her frumpy house in the middle of Texan oil derricks, with her ex-mentor and former lover George Castleman in hot pursuit; He shows up and points at gun at her on the porch. Wearing a stunning full length mink at daybreak, calmly Joan says to him "There was a time when I would have followed you at your beckon call. But that was a long time ago." She knows her world might end right there with a bullet. She knows she has won on her terms. Instead of crying she calmly faces the future with a summation. That is what a classy lady like Lorna Hansen Forbes does. That is what Joan Crawford always did. And Hillary Rodham Clinton now understands that the damned never cry.
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