Crawford and Spoto
I’ll always admire Donald Spoto, particularly because of “The Dark Side of Genius,” his 1983 Alfred Hitchcock biography. But I resolved to stop buying after reading “High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly,” which told me that Spoto had become an ally and protector of his subjects’ reputations. Now it’s being claimed that his Joan Crawford biography, called “Possessed,” continues in this vein.
As an Amazon.com reviewer puts it, “Joan Crawford biographies seem to fall roughly into three categories: (1) Utterly Junky; (2) Interesting Curios with Revealing New Biographical and Career Information; and (3) Respectable Tomes that Defend Joan and Primarily Gather Info from Already-Published Sources. Donald Spoto’s ‘Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford‘ falls into the latter category.”
“Spoto, who did good work on Hitchcock decades ago and has since become a rolling mill of star bios, tries to cleanse [Crawford's] portrait,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby, “separating rumor from fact, alleged hysteria from garden-variety unhappiness.
“Must we hate Crawford? Must we think about Crawford at all? Few men go weak in the knees dreaming about her, as they might with Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth; nor is she the kind of woman men could imagine bantering with blissfully as a lover, as they might with Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck. She’s the date who raises your blood pressure, not your libido.
“Yet if Joan Crawford is not very likable she would, in a just world, be widely honored for a series of fiercely effective performances and for her emblematic quality as a twentieth-century woman. She was no feminist, but, willy-nilly, she got caught up in the dilemmas of strong women who are also the kind of highly sexual women who need men.
“In her more than eighty movies, she played flappers, working girls, adulteresses, matrons, and, most notably, the anguished heroines of melodrama. Any call for justice to Joan Crawford, however, runs into a dead end: the image of her as a madwoman is too juicily entertaining to give up.
“In 1978, the year after Crawford died, her estranged and disinherited adopted daughter Christina, a failed actress, produced a venomous portrait, “Mommie Dearest,” which alleged both physical abuse and a series of bizarre tests and punishments. In 1981 the director Frank Perry made the sensationally vindictive movie of the same title in which Faye Dunaway, her career as a star fading, grabbed at a chance for glory, or at least notoriety, by launching herself into a spangled caricature of Crawford.
“The collective memory of Crawford quickly hardened into the remorselessness of camp.”
Postscript: I had heard stories all my life about Grace Kelly, the hottest blonde in Hollywood history, having had affairs with almost all of her leading men, and then along came party-pooper Spoto, plausibly debunking most of them. But I don’t want truth and realism — I want magic! I want to hear stories about Gary Cooper‘s portable dressing room rocking with passion during the shooting of High Noon. I know now that the tireless and scrupulous Spoto is averse to this sort of thing, and that’s fine, but that’s also why I’m off the boat.
Mommie Dearest is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. It’s absolutely batshit crazy and deliriously fun. Faye Dunaway deserved better for her unhinged performance. Love it!!
Spoto doesn’t try to be protective of Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn in his bios, so they’re more interesting than the Kelly but not as good as the Hitchcock.
It’s amazing someone so lacking in sexuality and charm as Crawford could have been a star, though she is good in Mildred Pierce.
She is really freaky in JOHNNY GUITAR.
I guess you just can’t keep Donald Spoto down. I see by clicking the link that he has published 26 books and the Crawford one is his 2010 offering. Like Jeff I have turned away from his most recent work though I had to read David Denby’s New Yorker comments. It all prompted me to grab my paperback copy of Spoto’s masterpiece:,”The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.” Somehow Spoto managed to find a staggering number of people who knew or had worked with Hitchcock. One result was what the New York Times called “the picture of a severely repressed, even twisted ,Victorian gentleman.” The NYT in a back cover blurb excerpt also called it “absolutely compulsory reading.”
I ran into Spoto at the Academy of Motion Picture library a few months ago, and he said that his next book will be a generational biography of the Redgrave family, which I believe will start with Roy Redgrave and continue on through the lives of Michael and Vanessa, etc. I believe this has the potential of being one of Spoto’s better books.
Joan Crawford started out being quite the fox before evolving into the gay icon matron. In the 30s, she looked like a saucy Gillian Anderson.
I could never get over Grace Kelly sleeping with Bing Crosby. That man makes my skin crawl. Ray Milland, William Holden? Sure. The older and greyer incarnations of Gable, Grant and Cooper? Fine. But Bing?! EW!
Joan Crawford really was quite fetching in the 30′s. She’s pretty stunning in Dancing Lady, The Woman, etc.
But by the time Johnny Guitar and Straight-Jacket came out, she was horrifying, almost like the career path of Bette Davis, who is strangely alluring in stuff like Jezebel before turning into the Grandma From Hell.
The Art of Alfred Hitchcock granted him cachet to many within the Hitchcock circle all by itself, and I think of it and the Dark Side of Genius as almost being a single work. Let’s not forget that Spoto is a seriously pious and religious fellow who isn’t keen on dishing to be dishing; he gives his subjects the benefit of the doubt where someone more salacious would run with the unsupported rumors. I haven’t liked all his biographies either, and I think he fell down particularly on Olivier, but it must have been hard writing about a man with so little personality off the stage.
Regardless, he remains one of the best biographical writers around and I will choose his failures gladly over most of the promising illiterates (like Kitty Kelly) who are his competition.
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I read Spotto’s biography of St. Francis of Assisi, and he was totally in the bag for the guy.