Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography
by Charlotte Chandler
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charlotte ChandlerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-12
ISBN: 1416547517
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Book Reviews of Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography
Book Review: Very Weird
Summary: 2 Stars
I like to read biographies. But this one did not give me a picture of what the real Crawford was like. How she wanted to be seen, yes. Crawford's interviews with the author of course put her in the light she wants to be seen in - selfless and generous. For the most part, anyone who spoke about Joan only had good to say, except of course Bette Davis. Crawford would not admit to a "feud" but said she tried numerous times to make friends, but Bette would have none of it. Crawford has nothing but harsh words for her brother, but she criticizes no one in the movie business. She shared that she and Otto Preminger ("nobody liked poor Otto")had the same sense of humor (which must be none). She also said she would not take out the garbage without getting dressed up as "Joan Crawford" first.
Here are the weird parts (to me): Her first three marriages just strangely peter out. The husbands don't know what's wrong (although Fairbanks admits he cheated on her, but said she didn't act like she knew). They would ask her questions, but she would ignore them, and just wouldn't answer, as if that was a normal response between a husband and wife (later her son did the same thing to her, but she didn't see the connection). While married to Fairbanks, she got a cottage by the ocean. When he asked for the phone number, she said she preferred to keep it private. I mean, how do you say that to your own husband? This is a woman who did not discuss problems or feelings. But apparently Fairbanks and Tone stayed on good terms with her, down the road anyway. Terry's after effects aren't mentioned.
Also, how did her looks change so radically? In her childhood photos, she has faint eyebrows and thin lips. The photo taken around the time she arrived in Hollywood (according the the author) shows her with narrow lips and eyebrows which slant downwards (they look real). However, as time goes on, her eyebrows, still thin, have a high arch. These could be completely drawn on, you can't really tell from the pictures in the book, but on the one on the cover, they look genuine. Her lips become fuller, that could always be makeup, but it's strange how they have completely changed shape . Later her eyebrows become even thicker, but still very arched. These look real too. Even later, her eyebrows become black caterpillars, very rounded and super black, not arched up and away. Her lips are even thicker. What's up with all that? I kept looking from picture to picture trying to figure it out. The author makes no note of it. Just that Joan said she wore a size four shoe and everybody said how tiny she was, with a big head and shoulders. At least in her autobiography, Lana Turner tells how she lost her eyebrows (they shaved them off every day for a film, and they never grew back), so they always had to be drawn on. Therefore, they looked different in different pictures. Crawford doesn't even look like the same person as she develops.
With dates, the author is vague and explicit as she pleases. When Joan enters grade school (year not given), she is three years behind the other students because she has never been enrolled in school. When she graduates from the school she's attending, according to the year, she would be fourteen. She then begins high school, graduating a year later (?). So at fifteen she's on her own, and before she's seventeen, she been asked to Hollywood. According to Fairbanks, he's 19 and Joan is a few years older than he, when they begin their romance. A few pages later, Joan tells the author that they were both in their "late teens." The author makes no note of the discrepancy.
In at least one movie synopsis, the author is inaccurate. In "The Best of Everything" Gregg does not end up happy in her personal or professional life. I also don't remember certain things she says Veda said in "Mildred Pierce" but I'll have to watch the video again. Most of the movies, I've never seen, so I don't know if their summaries are correct. I didn't really like them being sandwiched in between the writing either. Some of them I skipped as I wasn't interested - they all seemed to be about a girl having to decide between two men.
The book is pro-Crawford rather than pro-truth. It just isn't realistic that Joan was that wonderful with nary a bad trait. Where's the proof that she paid for this hospital room (for the poor employees)for forty years? Just because somebody said she said she was going to? Her oldest children Christina and Chris were just willful, spiteful and refused to accept her love...or maybe they just didn't want to eat raw meat.
But there are hints. On their honeymoon night she screams at Douglas Fairbanks to pick up his socks. Later he says he never saw her lose her temper so Christina's book could not be true. One of the younger children, talks mainly about all the chores she and her twin had to do, and while she says their life was wonderful, she doesn't really give any examples. Well, Joan did pick her up from school one time when she was injured - but why is that so remarkable? Isn't that what a mother normally does?
Summary of Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography
In this fascinating new biography of screen legend Joan Crawford, Charlotte Chandler draws on exclusive and remarkably candid interviews with Crawford herself and with others who knew her, including first husband Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Crawford's daughter Cathy. As a result, this biography is fresh and revealing, a brand-new look at one of Hollywood's most acclaimed stars.Joan Crawford was born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, in 1908 (as she always insisted, though other sources disagreed). Her father abandoned the family, and her mother soon remarried; Lucille was now known as Billie Cassin. Young Billie loved to dance and achieved her early success in silent films playing a dancer. Her breakthrough role came in Our Dancing Daughters. Soon married to Hollywood royalty, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (who called her "Billie"), she was a star in her own right, playing opposite John Barrymore and a stellar cast in M-G-M's Grand Hotel.
Crawford was cast opposite another young star, Clark Gable, in several films. They would sometimes play lovers on screen -- and off as well. After her marriage to Fairbanks broke up, Crawford married actor Franchot Tone. That marriage soon began to show strains, and Crawford was sometimes seen riding with Spencer Tracy, who gave her a horse she named Secret. Crawford left M-G-M for Warners, and around the time she married her third husband, Phillip Terry, she won her Oscar for best actress (one of three times she was nominated) in Mildred Pierce. But by the 1950s the film roles dried up. Crawford and Terry had divorced, and Crawford married her fourth husband, Pepsi-Cola executive Alfred Steele. In 1962, she and longtime cinematic rival Bette Davis staged a brief comeback in the macabre but commercial What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Following Steele's death, Crawford became a director of Pepsi-Cola while she continued raising her four adopted children. Although her daughter Christina would publish the scathing memoir Mommie Dearest after Crawford's death, Chandler offers a contrasting portrait of Crawford, drawing in part on reminiscences of younger daughter Cathy among others.
Not the Girl Next Door is perhaps Charlotte Chandler's finest Hollywood biography yet, an intimate portrait of a great star who was beautiful, talented, glamorous, and surprisingly vulnerable.
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