weeks later. “That’s been quite a burden,” Joan wrote to a friend on November 22, “getting a place for them to live, and getting my brother and his wife jobs.”
Her family could not have arrived at a busier time in her life, as the letter explained: there were “thousands of exhibitors here at the studio having lunch, reporters from the four corners of the earth interviewing me, Mother’s birthday this week, Thanksgiving, starting Christmas shopping, more lawsuits, signing new contracts, still getting my house furnished …” 1
“If you can make it in the movies, with that funny face of yours and allthose freckles,” Hal said to Joan, “then I sure can.” He had not worked more than a day or two in his life, and now he was twenty-five. But he thought his good looks augured a surefire career as a movie star.
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” according to Shakespeare. So it was for Joan, beginning that season. Hal drank, he often stayed out all night with Joan’s car, which he scratched, dented and finally wrecked—and more than once, Joan awoke in the morning to find Jessie absent and some stranger sipping coffee at the kitchen table, after spending the night with Hal in his room.
She introduced her brother to the head of casting at Metro, but there was nothing for him until 1935, when he landed a job as an uncredited extra. After several months of this unpleasant intrusion, Joan found Hal and Jessie an apartment, paid the rent and hoped for some distance and peace. The following year, Hal began to complain that Jessie wanted an independent life; Jessie countered that Hal didn’t like being a husband, which suggested all sorts of unspoken problems. They were divorced in August 1929, after less than a year of marriage.
“Hal was a parasite and a drunk, and he made my life miserable,” Joan said many years after her brother’s death. “For over thirty years, I supported those two free-loaders [Anna and Hal], and I can count on one hand the number of times they said ‘Thank you.’ Hal was chronically mean, and nothing lasted long—not his jobs, not the men and women in his life. Liquor, then drugs, and always his distorted ego, took over. I supported that son of a bitch until he died.” Joan’s daughter Christina saw Hal’s decline for herself years later: “Mostly he seemed to be in constant trouble with women, with drugs and drinking, and finally with ill health. My mother bailed him out.”
Joan’s mother remained at North Bristol longer than Hal—until claims were made by several Los Angeles department stores where Anna (Joan recalled) “was spending money as if it were going out of style—hats, shoes, bags, clothes—she never showed me the bills, she just charged everything to my name and address—five hundred dollars at one place, four hundred at another …” Joan paid the stores, and then she found her mother a comfortable apartment; she also continued to provide support throughout her mother’s long life.
“She was old and tired,” Joan recalled years later, “but she was a good woman—even though she ignored me when I was a kid. She found life a lot easier during her last years. She was, you might say, intimidated by my friends, by anyone who was famous, and she preferred to stay out of the way. I let her live her own lifestyle, and that style included Hal. But I simply wouldn’t have him around—so her loyalties had to have been divided.”
Not long after Joan helped her mother move into an apartment, Anna legally changed her surname to Crawford.
1 The exact meaning of “more lawsuits” is impossible to determine. Some have claimed that Joan was cited as the corespondent in several divorce cases, but there is no documentary evidence to support these assertions. The phrase probably refers to the protracted legal tangle over the auto accident described above.
CHAPTER FOUR
Enter the King
| 1929–1930 |
M ISS CRAWFORD IS as
Her family could not have arrived at a busier time in her life, as the letter explained: there were “thousands of exhibitors here at the studio having lunch, reporters from the four corners of the earth interviewing me, Mother’s birthday this week, Thanksgiving, starting Christmas shopping, more lawsuits, signing new contracts, still getting my house furnished …” 1
“If you can make it in the movies, with that funny face of yours and allthose freckles,” Hal said to Joan, “then I sure can.” He had not worked more than a day or two in his life, and now he was twenty-five. But he thought his good looks augured a surefire career as a movie star.
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,” according to Shakespeare. So it was for Joan, beginning that season. Hal drank, he often stayed out all night with Joan’s car, which he scratched, dented and finally wrecked—and more than once, Joan awoke in the morning to find Jessie absent and some stranger sipping coffee at the kitchen table, after spending the night with Hal in his room.
She introduced her brother to the head of casting at Metro, but there was nothing for him until 1935, when he landed a job as an uncredited extra. After several months of this unpleasant intrusion, Joan found Hal and Jessie an apartment, paid the rent and hoped for some distance and peace. The following year, Hal began to complain that Jessie wanted an independent life; Jessie countered that Hal didn’t like being a husband, which suggested all sorts of unspoken problems. They were divorced in August 1929, after less than a year of marriage.
“Hal was a parasite and a drunk, and he made my life miserable,” Joan said many years after her brother’s death. “For over thirty years, I supported those two free-loaders [Anna and Hal], and I can count on one hand the number of times they said ‘Thank you.’ Hal was chronically mean, and nothing lasted long—not his jobs, not the men and women in his life. Liquor, then drugs, and always his distorted ego, took over. I supported that son of a bitch until he died.” Joan’s daughter Christina saw Hal’s decline for herself years later: “Mostly he seemed to be in constant trouble with women, with drugs and drinking, and finally with ill health. My mother bailed him out.”
Joan’s mother remained at North Bristol longer than Hal—until claims were made by several Los Angeles department stores where Anna (Joan recalled) “was spending money as if it were going out of style—hats, shoes, bags, clothes—she never showed me the bills, she just charged everything to my name and address—five hundred dollars at one place, four hundred at another …” Joan paid the stores, and then she found her mother a comfortable apartment; she also continued to provide support throughout her mother’s long life.
“She was old and tired,” Joan recalled years later, “but she was a good woman—even though she ignored me when I was a kid. She found life a lot easier during her last years. She was, you might say, intimidated by my friends, by anyone who was famous, and she preferred to stay out of the way. I let her live her own lifestyle, and that style included Hal. But I simply wouldn’t have him around—so her loyalties had to have been divided.”
Not long after Joan helped her mother move into an apartment, Anna legally changed her surname to Crawford.
1 The exact meaning of “more lawsuits” is impossible to determine. Some have claimed that Joan was cited as the corespondent in several divorce cases, but there is no documentary evidence to support these assertions. The phrase probably refers to the protracted legal tangle over the auto accident described above.
CHAPTER FOUR
Enter the King
| 1929–1930 |
M ISS CRAWFORD IS as
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