Jeanine Basinger got to know Joan Crawford the old-fashioned way, by defending her in print. The film historian wrote to The New York Times to answer a piece she felt had treated the actress unfairly, and Crawford picked up the phone to thank her. Basinger tells what she learned from their talks in her introduction to Illeana Douglas’s new book, Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women, and People shared it on November 4.
Most of us filed Crawford’s enemies under one name the year What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? opened in 1962. Basinger says the woman Crawford truly could not stand was Norma Shearer, the MGM queen she once doubled for on camera.
How Did a Body Double Become Norma Shearer’s Rival?
The story starts in 1925, when Crawford was a young dancer newly signed by MGM and stood in for the studio’s rising star on Lady of the Night. Turner Classic Movies notes that she “often doubled Norma Shearer, who ten years later would be her chief rival at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”
The balance of power tipped for good on September 29, 1927, when Shearer married Irving Thalberg, MGM’s head of production, and from then on she had first choice of the studio’s scripts. Crawford’s frustration produced a wisecrack that has been passed along secondhand for decades, usually quoted as “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss!”
Douglas came away from her research feeling for Crawford. “I was surprised and gained sympathy for Crawford when I learned that Thalberg actively thwarted her career, punishing her with bad material when she asked for better parts,” she told the Seattle Gay News in July.
Thalberg died on September 14, 1936, but the pecking order outlived him. In 1938 Crawford wanted the showgirl role opposite Clark Gable in Idiot’s Delight, and according to Douglas’s book, producer Hunt Stromberg told her Shearer wanted it too. Louis B. Mayer sided with Shearer. “I cried buckets over Idiot’s Delight,” Crawford said, and within months the two women were cast in the same picture.
What Really Happened on the Set of The Women?
George Cukor’s The Women (1939) had an all-female cast led by Shearer as Mary Haines, the wronged wife. Crawford wanted the smaller, nastier part of Crystal Allen, the perfume counter girl who steals Mary’s husband. Mayer, Basinger writes, “felt the part was too small for her and too unsympathetic for her fans to accept.” In Douglas’s telling, Crawford made her case in one sentence: “The woman who steals Norma Shearer’s husband can’t be a nobody.” She tested for it like a newcomer and won.
Off camera, the fight moved to contracts and trailers. Shearer’s deal put her name above the title, but Turner Classic Movies reports that “Crawford fought for, and won, equal billing.” When Shearer noticed that Crawford’s dressing-room trailer jutted out one foot farther than the others, Douglas writes, she demanded it be moved back in line.
The clash everyone remembers came during Shearer’s close-ups. Crawford sat off camera feeding Shearer her lines, and by TCM’s account she was “knitting furiously and noisily” and never looked her co-star in the eye. When Shearer asked Cukor to send Crawford home, he did, and TCM says he then made Crawford apologize, which “she did, grudgingly.” Retellings credited to Gavin Lambert’s 1990 Shearer biography tell it differently, with Shearer asking Cukor to dismiss “Miss Crawford” and Crawford walking off, then sending a telegram later.
Crawford got the last word on screen anyway. Crystal’s parting shot, “There’s a name for you ladies, but it isn’t used in high society, outside of a kennel,” is still the line people quote from the film.
So Why Do We Remember Bette Davis Instead?
Once the picture opened, Shearer wrote to the trade press to play down her power at MGM, insisting, “I don’t think anyone acted more like an employee than myself.” Crawford answered that “Norma Shearer, as usual, played the perpetual virgin, the wronged wife.” Screenwriter Anita Loos said the two came from different worlds, but “they both knew the ‘feud’ was good copy, and so they helped it along.”
Neither stayed at MGM much longer. Shearer made her last film, Her Cardboard Lover, in 1942 and retired after marrying Martin Arrougé. Crawford asked out of her contract after 18 years, and MGM released her on June 29, 1943. At Warner Bros. she won the Best Actress Oscar for Mildred Pierce (1945).
That cleared the way for the feud our readers remember. Crawford and Bette Davis finally shared the screen in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and Davis earned a Best Actress nomination while Crawford did not. At the Academy Awards in April 1963, Anne Bancroft won for The Miracle Worker but was on Broadway, so Crawford swept onstage to accept for her, a moment that turns up in nearly every retelling of the Hollywood feuds that turned ugly.
What Did Crawford Tell Her Friend About Norma Shearer?
Basinger heard Crawford’s side firsthand. “I knew from our conversations that the only Hollywood rival she really, really disliked was Norma Shearer,” she writes. As for Davis, “Bette Davis was never on her hit list.” The two actresses worked at different studios through the 1930s, a point Douglas made too when she said they “never interacted.”
Basinger also dismisses the old theory that Crawford feared Davis would steal her husband Franchot Tone. That idea, she writes, “can exist only in the minds of people who did not know Joan Crawford.” Shearer was another matter, because “Shearer got first pick of the best roles because her husband looked out for her interests,” while “Crawford had to fight for anything good, and ‘Crystal’ was no exception.” In Basinger’s view that is exactly why the role fit her. “Crawford didn’t feel the need to be loved on-screen, only off,” she writes.
When Crawford called to thank her for that letter to the Times, she told Basinger, “You, my dear, are a very great lady.” “We became good friends, talked on the phone a lot,” Basinger recalls, and she visited Crawford in New York, where the actress died on May 10, 1977. Basinger, now 90, has kept one souvenir of those visits. “I still have the recipe she gave me for Jerusalem artichokes,” she writes. “Not that I ever cook.”
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