Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (22 page)

Mildred Pierce

In the fall of 1945 Crawford would embark on a film project that would establish her acting credentials and restore her star status in Hollywood. It would also force Bette Davis to acknowledge Crawford's presence at Warner's, and look to her own position as queen of the lot. The name of the property was
Mildred Pierce.
"It would not only save her, but set her off on a new series of conquests," said the New York
Times.

"Kinda hard ... kinda soft ...
Mildred Pierce. The kind of a
woman most men want but
shouldn't have."

—AD LOGO FOR THE FILM

Confessions of a gay cab driver:
" 'What Joan Crawford—and
most of all Bette Davis—is to
me is
relief,
a way to relax. I
can get out the video, put on a
good dress, and watch
Mildred
Pierce.
I don't need anything
more. That's my food, my sleep,
my shoulder to cry on.' "

—FROM JULIE BURCHILL'S
GIRLS
ON FILM

It could have been the story of Joan's life, critics commented later. Mildred Pierce was an ambitious lower-class woman, with a vain, evil, selfish daughter who competed with her mother for the same man.

The book, by James M. Cain, first appeared in 1941. It was not a best-seller, but it did attract the attention of one Jerry Wald, who was to be Crawford's producer and savior for many years.

Wald, a journalist and scriptwriter, was described as "the fastest and smoothest talker ever born in Brooklyn." His abundant credits at Warner's included two recent successful war films,
Destination Tokyo
and
Objective Burma,
and he was anxious to expand his reputation by breaking into women's pictures.

It was Wald who first suggested to Jack Warner that they buy the rights to
Mildred Pierce.
The story of the "immoral Mildred," who uses men to provide the luxuries for her pampered, spoiled daughter, Veda, was considered too racy at the time. Wald was told that if he could revise the story so it "played on a higher level" the studio would have a good chance of getting it past the censors. The producer had the story sanitized, making Mildred more noble, and in February 1944 Warner's bought the film rights for fifteen thousand dollars.

From February to October of that year, seven different treatments and scripts were worked on by six different writers. Screenwriter Catharine Turney worked on two drafts and had been asked to do a third when she was delegated to work on a picture for Bette Davis. "Wald tried but failed to have me reassigned, because Bette was adamant in refusing to release her writer," said Turney.

Retitled
Courage
(analogous to
Mother Courage),
subsequent drafts were worked on by Albert Maltz and Ranald MacDougall. On the morning of September 17, 1944, the final script was handed to Jack Warner. His enthusiastic response came that afternoon. He was approving a budget of $1.34 million, with production to start on November 6. The haste of his decision was stimulated by two positive factors, said Jerry Waldo The script, credited to Ranald MacDougall, was first class. And, by a fortuitous coincidence, two weeks before, Paramount Pictures had released a hit movie based on another James M. Cain story.
Double Indemnity,
the story of a trollop wife (Barbara Stanwyck) who murders her husband with the help of his insurance agent (Fred MacMurray), was drawing thunderous praise from the critics and public, not to mention wrath and denunciation from hundreds of church groups around the country.

The timing of the
Mildred Pierce
filming with the release of
Double Indemnity
was perfect, and just a tad derivative, some film historians and Paramount executives would later claim. There was no murder in the original book of
Mildred Pierce,
and the incorporation of flashbacks suggested that Wald had altered the plot and inserted those techniques after viewing a sneak screening of
Double Indemnity.
Not true, said Warner's legal department, claiming the ideas had been in Wald's treatment two years earlier.

The Casting of the Film

By late September, with the green light from Jack Warner, and a director, Michael Curtiz
(The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex),
assigned to the picture, Jerry Wald was still without an actress to play the lead role of Mildred. "No actress wanted to play the mother of a sixteen-year-old," said Catharine Turney. Bette Davis would state repeatedly in subsequent years that she never saw a script, although her contract with the studio said she had first refusal on all Class-A scripts at the studio. Other actresses who passed on the role were Rosalind Russell (signed to an independent deal at the studio the year before), and Ann Sheridan. "I was offered one of the early scripts," said Sheridan. "I didn't like the story. Mildred was too tough, and the kid was an absolute horror."

It was Jerry Wald who thought of Crawford. He had met her on her first day at the studio, when her agent, Lew Wasserman, brought her around to meet the staff producers. Having done her homework, Joan already knew Wald's credits and greeted him as an old friend. "I was very impressed with her," he said. "I said to myself, 'Now,
that's
a star.' And I made a note to myself to work with her someday."

With Warner's approval, he sent her the script. "She called me that night," said Wald, "whooping with joy. I didn't know about Joan and the telephone then. She considers an hour on the phone par."

Mildred Pierce
would be her comeback role, Crawford decided. "I was eager to accept this chance to portray a mother who has to fight against the temptation to spoil her child. As I have two adopted children, I feel I could understand Mildred and do the role justice."

But she had some competition to face. Another actress with an independent contract at the studio was now in the running for Mildred Pierce. Barbara Stanwyck, who had played the steamy blond killer in
Double Indemnity
and was eager to play another Cain character, read the script and asked for the role. "I desperately wanted the part," said Stanwyck. "I went after it. I knew what a role for a woman it was, and I knew I could handle every facet of Mildred. I laid my cards on the table with Jerry Waldo After all, I'd done a dozen pictures at Warner's by then, including
So Big
and
Meet John Doe.
I'd paid my dues, and I felt Mildred was
me."

Stanwyck also had the support of Michael Curtiz, whose creative influence on the project was considerable. Curtiz, to put it mildly, was opposed to Joan Crawford as Mildred. When Jerry Wald suggested her, the director fumed, "With her high-hat airs and her goddamn shoulder pads, she's a has-been. I won't work with her." His choice was Barbara Stanwyck.

Crawford, when told of Curtiz's reaction, decided her only recourse was to humble herself before the great director. After fifty-six pictures and nineteen years as a star, she told Wald she was willing to test for the part. Early in October 1944, with a modicum of makeup and her pep personality restrained, Crawford auditioned on camera for Curtiz. "After the test, which so engrossed him he forgot to yell 'Cut!'" said Joan, "he forgot all about Stanwyck."

"You think now you've made a
little money you can get a new
hairdo and some expensive
clothes and turn yourself into a
lady. But you can't. Because
you'll never be anything but a
common frump, whose father
lived over a grocery store and
whose mother took in washing.
It makes me shrivel up to think
you ever conceived me."

—VEDA PIERCE TO HER
MOTHER, MILDRED

Having secured the main role, Crawford volunteered to test with the young actresses who were trying out for the second lead, that of her nasty, conniving daughter, Veda. "They auditioned close to twenty girls," said Crawford, "but none of them seemed right. It was a difficult role to cast. The part called for a young girl who could act and sing. She had to age from fourteen to nineteen, to be credible as a child
and
as an adult. There was also that combination of sweetness and evil that Veda possessed. I recall one girl who came to see us from Twentieth-Century Fox, where she later starred in several of their movies. She was quite good as the younger Veda, but in a later scene, where she was supposed to be a singer in a cheap nightclub, she was hopelessly inadequate."

A serious candidate for the part of the vile Veda was Shirley Temple. "Shirley was Jerry Wald's idea," said Crawford. "The idea caused some laughter at first; but not from me. Shirley was fifteen or sixteen at the time, the right age. She had musical talent, and she certainly could act. No one stays on board the Good Ship Lollipop all those years without talent. She had left Fox and was with David Selznick. I believe she had already made
Since You Went Away,
playing Claudette Colbert's bratty daughter, and David was eager to have her do more adult roles."
^*1

Reportedly it was Michael Curtiz who said no to Shirley. "Vonderful!" he cried. 'And who do ve get to play Mildred's lover? Mickey Rooney?"

"Curtiz didn't want me either," said Crawford. 'And it could have worked with Shirley. She never got to test, because at the same time Universal sent over Ann Blyth. I was there when Ann came in. She was so lovely that my first reaction was, She's too sweet; she'll never be able to play the bitchy scenes. But we read together and she was wonderful. Then we tested together. Ann was perfect. She was the right age, the right type, and a superb actress and singer. The test was shown to Jack Warner. He agreed, and we were in production within two weeks."

"Don't do it the way I showed
you, do it the way I mean."

—DIRECTOR CURTIZ TO
JOAN CRAWFORD

On December 7, 1944, shooting commenced on
Mildred Pierce.
Within the week Michael Curtiz asked that Crawford be fired. The problem had to do with Joan's revised interpretation of her role. In her winning test for Curtiz, her usual look of high gloss had been supplanted by one of low-keyed starkness. For the actual filming, Joan had no intention of appearing dull or dowdy. "Mike and I wanted to deglamorize Joan," said producer Jerry Waldo "We wanted to make her look like she lived in a suburb and bought the cheapest dresses."

"I went to Sears and bought my dresses off the rack," Joan later told this writer, failing to add that her dresses were subsequently custom-tucked at the waist with slight padding added to create the famous Crawford shoulders.

On the first day of shooting she wore one of these dresses for a kitchen scene. Curtiz politely asked her to dispose of the shoulder pads. "Those are
my
shoulders," Joan cried in half-truth. On the second day, for a scene where she was waiting on tables in a restaurant, Joan wore a regulation (but custom-fitted) uniform and plain Red Cross shoes, with full cocktails-at-five makeup and hairdo. This time Curtiz screamed and attempted to wipe the lipstick from her mouth with his fist. Joan, "gulping down loud dry sobs, fled to her dressing room."

Producer Jerry Wald was called to the set. Curtiz told him to payoff Crawford and replace her with Barbara Stanwyck. Crawford asked that the director be fired and "replaced with a human being."

Born in Budapest, director Curtiz was well known for his malapropisms. 'Anybody who has any talking to do, shut up," was one; and on sports: "You can keep your tennis, golf, and swimming. I'll tell you in two words what I like, polo!" He was also recognized for his lack of finesse when dealing with stars. After he won the Oscar the previous year as Best Director for
Casablanca,
he gave his formula for good pictures: "Story first, director second, actors last." "A no-good sexless son of a bitch," was how he greeted Bette Davis when they first met on the set of
Cabin in the Cotton
in 1934. By 1939, when he directed her in
Elizabeth and Essex,
she had graduated to "a stinking no-good bum." During the first week of
Mildred Pierce
he referred to Crawford as "Phony Joanie" to her face; and "the rotten bitch" when her back was turned.

"I had to be the referee," said Jerry Waldo "We had several lengthy meetings, filled with blood, sweat and tears. Then everything started to settle down. Mike restricted himself to swearing only in Hungarian and Joan stopped streamlining the apron strings around her figure and let them hang."

"He put me through a postgraduate course in humiliation," Crawford said of Curtiz. "Then, when he found out I could take it, he started training me."

During the first four weeks in December, the script of
Mildred Pierce
continued to undergo alterations. Writer Louise Randall Piersall, an early women's liberationist, added a feminist polish; while another studio staff writer, William Faulkner, gave his Southern male perspective. Faulkner suggested they change the title to
House on the Sand
(inspired by the sinking foundation of the Malibu house where fornication and murder occur); and he added a scene in which the black maid, Lottie (Butterfly McQueen), holds Mildred in her arms during her time of stress and sings the spiritual "Steal Away." ("God damn! How's that for a scene?" the Nobel Prize winner wrote in the margin of his script.)

Minus the Faulkner touches, the script was frozen on December 29, 1944, when Jack Warner threatened to shut down production. Joan Crawford, however, still managed to add a few character embellishments. "There were far more close-ups [for Crawford] than the original script called for," said cinematographer Ernest Haller. Joan also requested that the age of her character be changed. "I married Bert at seventeen," said Mildred, making her thirty-two at the start of the film (the star was close to forty). Mildred was also made "less conniving ... less carpy ... with her lower-class origins underplayed," and her boozing and teary scenes were kept to a minimum.

Mildred and daughter Veda

Happy Mother's Day!

A segment that caused considerable anguish to the actress was the fight scene between her and Ann Blyth. In the original script, when Veda tries to blackmail her boyfriend and is stopped by Mildred she turns on her mother and calls her a waitress and a common frump. Joan in retaliation was supposed to turn on her daughter and beat her savagely, then throw her clothes out of an upstairs window. "I just couldn't hit her," said Joan. "I kept looking at Ann's sweet face and I couldn't bring myself to strike her, let alone give her a beating." The scene was revised, reduced to a mean tussle between the two, and three slaps—one administered by Blyth, followed by a double swack from Crawford, who snarls at her daughter, "Get out of here, Veda, before I kill you." The confrontation, though softened, traumatized Joan. "I was terrified of hurting her. I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of the day. Perhaps I was reminded of the physical abuse I suffered as a child."

Ann Blyth, who would receive an Oscar nomination for her role as Veda Pierce, remembered Crawford as "the kindest, most helpful human being I've ever worked with. We remained friends for many years after the film. I never knew that other Joan Crawford that people wrote about."

To the cast and crew Joan was equally good natured. She not only memorized the names of the fifty-six people working on the film, she had her secretary get a list of their birthdays and when possible arranged for a cake and a small gift to be delivered to the set. "She has a genuine interest in making people happy," said
Silver Screen,
"an interest, by the way, which reflects how she has matured."