Hollywood's Once and Only Star

The customs of stardom clung to her even after death. In the obituaries of Joan Crawford, who died of a heart attack last week, some newspapers felt compelled to note a certain confusion about her age. Officially it was listed as 69, but she may have been several years older. It was characteristic of her that at a time of life when two or three years no longer make any difference to most people, Joan Crawford insisted on the smallest believable number.

Small, image-enhancing fibs like that are a habit of the profession whose code she helped to shape, and let there be no doubt about what that profession was. It was stardom. This is not to say that she was not, on occasion, an effective actress. It is to suggest that acting -- like shading her age or flattering her fan clubs with personal attention or fighting the studio bosses for strong roles or making sure her eyebrows were properly plucked -- was part of the larger job of being a star.

In Passage. She loved that work, loved having "a hundred people clutching at my coat, clamoring for autographs." And loving it, she stretched her stay at the top far longer than most women ever do. She made her first powerful impression as the good-hearted flapper in the 1928 silent Our Dancing Daughters. She did musicals (she was Fred Astaire's first movie dancing partner) and a string of pictures opposite Clark Gable.

In the '30s she began her fight for meaty roles that would lift her out of the overcrowded pretty-face category. She nabbed a few -- notably in Rain and Grand Hotel -- but those parts at MGM, which held her contract, usually went to the likes of Norma Shearer. After 17 years, Crawford moved on to Warner Bros., where she held out for two pictureless years until she got Mildred Pierce, which won her an Oscar in 1945. That film launched her on her middle passage, during which she played women who suffered much for love or ambition but won out in the end.

Aging out of those menopausal dramas, she made yet another transition, this time into horror films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) that kept her before the public at a time when most of her contemporaries were pretending to be happily retired. After three unsuccessful marriages to actors, she achieved happiness as the wife of Pepsi-Cola Chairman Alfred Steele and yet another career as good-will ambassador and board member of the company. Steele died in 1959, but she continued on the Pepsi board until her death.

What propelled her? As much as anything, she thought, a tough childhood. Like so many female movie stars, she was the product of a broken home. She made it through high school by serving as a slavey in a private school, enduring broom-handle beatings from the headmaster's wife. Dancing was her escape -- first emotionally, then literally, when she became a Shubert chorus girl.

Joan Crawford was never a widely beloved star, but like many of the women she played, she survived in a tough, male-dominated world. Over the years people came to respect her tenacity. Meeting her, they were always surprised to discover that she was smaller (5 ft. 3 in.) than she seemed onscreen. But the fire and discipline were always there, the source of her singularity.

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