Once Crawford mastered her style, she never abandoned it—at least not publicly. “Never in the thousands of times in our company was she less than perfectly dressed, in full makeup,” recalled an MGM publicist. “She never acted casually, even if it was only an audience of 20 fans. She had her own image and she lived up to it.” (Moreover, Eyman notes that studio head Louis B. Mayer “allowed Crawford to keep clothes from her films so that she could always look like a star, and at the studio's expense.”) Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (whom she married in 1929 and divorced in 1933) said, “She was the hardest worker I ever saw. Her only excess that I can remember was an excess of ambition. She was completely absorbed in her career and work.”
Eyman's thesis is that Crawford's desire for fame “was about seeking and receiving the attention and love that she always craved and never had.” It reads like an MGM logline. For Crawford, the business of fame, the art of performance and the desire for self-transformation were inseparable. This art did not arise spontaneously; it took years of on-the-job self-improvement and is inseparable from the story of the formation and development of the real-life fiction that is Crawford. Thus she became the most deeply created film actress of all film stars. For example, her efforts extended to advertising photography; she would often spend an entire day changing costumes, hair and makeup for photographer George Hurrell, who said that “she used the opportunity to try to present a new look that would perhaps suit her entire on-screen persona.”
Through her relentless pursuit of visual self-awareness, Crawford has become an expert in the field of cinematography. Actor Raymond Massey, one of her co-stars in Possessed (1947), said: “She was the best technician I ever met. She could combine close-ups and long shots flawlessly. She knew everything about lighting, camera lenses and dressed for the camera, not the other actors.” Director Vincent Sherman, who made three films with her in the fifties, agreed. “She was involved in achieving the full effect. She was the person you could talk to about how you wanted to shoot the thing, the background, the editing. She was aware of everything that was happening on set,” he said. Crawford was obsessed with controlling her appearance in films, recalling: “Every night I religiously looked through my daily diaries. And I taught myself.”
Crawford also worked hard on her acting – on conveying emotions, which she did in a completely modern way, truly feeling them. Having never done anything on stage other than dance, she did not understand the art of pretense. Again, Fairbanks: “She could not believe that Lynn Fontanne could feel physically terrible and yet be able to perform high comedy with the highest and subtlest wit. She also could not believe that such a great actress as Helen Hayes could deliberately reduce an audience to uncontrollable tears while she was thinking about a juicy steak sandwich after a performance.” The result was both simple and complex. Her speech, devoid of theatrics, is direct, harsh and ill-mannered, and the polished artificiality of her physical behavior is the basis of the immediacy and spontaneity of the emotions she releases. Essentially, Crawford had stumbled upon her own method, later explaining: “I remember each of my important roles the way I remember parts of my life, because at the time I played them, I was role and she was my life is 14 hours a day.”
Eyman emphasizes that MGM was the most star-driven of all the studios, as well as the most top-down and top-down. The directors there were tightly controlled, and Crawford had little respect for most of them, although she did respect one in particular: George Sugarwith whom she co-starred in three films, most notably The Women (1939), in which she played an indelibly vicious supporting role as a department store clerk seducing a wealthy married man. In this era of top studios, actors, directors, screenwriters, and even composers had long-term contracts (usually seven years), and technicians (such as cinematographers, set designers, and hairdressers) were permanent staff members; As a result, each studio's style, set from above, was embedded in its films. Crawford's first leading roles were aimed at tough women, be they laborers, dancers or playgirls, whose sex appeal was a source of power. However, MG-M's idea of colorism was more subdued than at other studios, and once the Hays Code came into full effect in the mid-thirties, the studio moved toward what Eyman calls “domestic middle-grade fantasy” that didn't fit well with Crawford's image and personality. Even her best films at the studio (such as Dorothy Arzner's The Bride Wore Red, a trio of films directed by Frank Borzage, including Mannequin, and her last film with Cukor, A Woman's Face, from which Eyman's book takes its title) were imbued with sentimentality. Her popularity declined; many in the business thought her career was over.
In 1943, Crawford asked to be released from her contract and quickly signed with Warner Bros., a cooler organization whose slate of films emphasized hard-boiled, populist dramas. The first film in which she played there, Mildred Pierce, filmed in 1944 and released in 1945, brought her an Oscar for Best Actress. When Crawford turned forty, she came back and was bigger than ever. Moreover, she had found her creative voice, but, unfortunately, she didn’t quite know it and wasn’t particularly happy about it. When she went to Warner Bros., her style changed, hardened, and not just because of the studio: by the time she got there, she had recently gone through a breakup with the man she loved, newspaper publisher Charles McCabe, because he was married and had no intention of divorcing his wife. She was in her third marriage, and it was also unsuccessful; she had stepchildren (Christina, born 1939, and Christopher, born 1942; later twins Katie and Cindy, born 1947), which added additional pressure. World War II created an atmosphere of tension; her career change was stressful. She liked the corporate protection that MGM offered: her responsibility was to show up on time and do her job, and it did take up almost all of her time.
