Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford (William Morrow, 2010).

 

Donald Spoto doesn’t dish. He researches and he analyzes and he sympathizes and he places in context. This is good for other scholars. But for my own purposes, as someone who’s never been a Joan Crawford fan and always wondered what others saw in her, this book is no help whatsoever. It takes her talent superstardom as givens.

 

On the personal side, Possessed downplays the infamous Mommie Dearest accusations of Joan’s daughter Christina and even puts the lightest possible spin on her fraught role as Pepsi-Cola executive. Spoto’s  hagiographic attitude is evident from the first page of the book, where he reprints the text of a letter he received from the star when he was 11 years old in 1952. A couple of pages into the same introductory chapter, Spoto’s making such pronouncements as “Crawford spanned generations, movie styles—in fact, history itself.”

 

As a casual reader in search of thrills, you know I immediately dug into the index to see if Crawford’s legendary early-career forays into pornography (vaunted in the admittedly mistake-laden Hollywood Babylon) was mentioned. There it is, a helpful entry for “pornographic film, Crawford’s, 26-27.” Yet the section is dismissive. It notes one attempt to blackmail Crawford’s MGM Studios with a purported porno reel featuring Lucille LeSueur (the actress’ real name) roundly discounted as nonsense: “A minatory letter was hurried off to the blackmailer, whose house mysteriouslyu burned to the ground the following month.” Otherwise, it simply says of Crawford that “the assertions of wild promiscuity that accumulated after her death are impossible to corroborate.”

This taste made the rest of the book a laborious slog, not unlike (for me) watching a Joan Crawford performance—everything telegraphed way in advance, no surprises, just overconfident bluster.