Big Blend Radio

Samuel Garza Bernstein - Starring Joan Crawford

This episode of Big Blend Radio's "Toast to The Arts" Show features Stonewall Book Award-winning author, screenwriter, and playwright Samuel Garza Bernstein who discusses his new biography, "Starring Joan Crawford: The Films, the Fantasy, and the Modern Relevance of a Silver Screen Icon.”

In "Starrring Joan Crawford," Bernstein examines what makes this star from Hollywood’s Golden Age a powerful cultural force and model of feminist self-determination for women today. Covering her five-decade career, Garza Bernstein reveals how Miss Crawford continually molded and remolded her image, trying on and discarding various personas and fads, while staying true to herself. Embracing her conflicts and contradictions, he describes Joan Crawford as “an essential American archetype.”

Keep up with Samuel at https://samuelgarzabernstein.com/

This episode is also featured on Big Blend Radio's "Women Making History" Podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duration:: 26m
Broadcast on:: 08 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to Big Blend Radio's Toast to the Art Show where we celebrate books, music, visual, and the performing arts. Everybody's so excited on our Toast to the Art Show today to chat with Stonewall Book awarding author, screenwriter, and playwright Samuel Garza Bernstein. His biography is out now. It is called starring Joan Crawford, the films, the fantasy, and the modern relevance of a silver screen icon. I encourage you to go to his website, Samuel Garza Bernstein.com. And of course, get the book wherever you can get books online or even a bookshop. How about that? Go to an independent bookstore. But welcome, Samuel. How are you? I'm well. Thank you. A little bit of horse. I've been doing a lot of book events and just talking, talking, talking. So I found today, I'm a little like, well, yeah, well, maybe Joan Crawford has some insight for you on that. I don't know. But she seems like, so, I mean, I think the first thing, as soon as we hear about Joan Crawford, we think of all the classic movies, but mommy dearest comes to mind, right? I remember reading the book when I was a teenager and watching the film. And so I don't, do you think today that's a lot of people go to that first, depending on their age or what they want? I mean, you know, there's a lot of, there is a lot of meme activity with Joan's image all over the still. And I think a lot of teenagers use those memes without even knowing kind of who she is. And I think a lot of that stems from the notoriety of mommy dearest. But part of the reason why I wrote this book is to kind of get beyond. The mommy dearest stereotype. And remember that this was a woman who in many ways invented modern celebrity and believe me, if she were, if she were young now, she would be all over tick tock with a line of wellness products and, you know, she would be on it. It's in the motto steward of movies, you know, she'd be hanging out with Snoop Dogg. But, but actually, you know, her face is iconic. And I think there's something. So she really kind of had a branding power, don't you think? Absolutely. And especially, you know, people forget that her career started in the twenties. And she was like the original jazz baby and women copied her hairstyles. They copied her clothes. She wore a dress in a movie in 1932. And the next year, a million women worldwide were wearing that dress. Wow. And she was industrious. I think very entrepreneurial, very, like she couldn't sit still. I know you divided the book up in these different parts and, you know, you know, survivors like the closing. So it kind of, I think once you have that drive, when we go into like the mommy dearest and everything, it's really hard, even though she adopted the children, right? You're still battling your own demons yourself, right? You know, two of the children struggled with their relationship with her. Two of them, till they're dying day, both said that she was a wonderful mother. And so I personally think that both things are possible. Yeah, I agree. People grow and change over their lifetime. And I think a lot of us with siblings have this experience where we have different parents, you know, the oldest has parents that are one way and the youngest has completely different. Yeah, people grow. Yeah. And, you know, so I think that she very much wanted to have children. That became a very important part of her life. And, you know, the five kind of eras that I sort of divide her to roughly correspond to the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. So in the 20s, she was kind of an influencer and it girl. And in the 30s, she was a queen of the movies. She was a romcom queen. She was MGM's biggest money maker. Oh, yeah. By the 40s, when she reinvented herself and became sort of a mother and martyr figure, especially in a movie called Mildred Pierce, where she won the Oscar. And then in the 50s, she kind of graduated into this dragon lady phase, where she was doing all these things in movies where she was like nobody's more than she is, you know, she's a kind of a badass. And then the 60s became this sort of survivor mode where with whatever happened to baby Jane, she did a series of movies where she was, you know, imperiled and she had to like struggle to be on top. And the, the, the, shall we say impolite term after whatever happened to baby Jane was called HAG exploitation. And so they would use all of these older actresses like her and Betty Davis and Olivia de Havilland and Geraldine Page and Shelly Winters, and they would put them in peril. And they'd called it HAG exploitation. Wow. Wow. I, you know, she was really iconic and she was able to change in her career. That's the other part of it. She shows you don't have to be typecast. And I think that's something that actors struggle with today is being typecast into one kind of role. So she's proving that she's, you know, she does one style really, really strongly but then goes okay screw that I'm over with it I'm moving on. So we all grow and change, you know, it's not, I think people have this idea. And I mean, a modern corollary is Madonna, like people have this idea that she takes around and plans her next incarnation like whoa this will make me popular. And I don't think that's the case I think she grows and changes and becomes interested in something else. And you know, the public follows or sometimes the public doesn't follow. And with Joan. Look, she loved being beautiful she loved being a leading lady wasn't stupid. She knew that she was aging. And she knew that she couldn't play the same characters at 40 that she was playing at 20. And you didn't fight that you know she really went with it and found roles that fit who she was at any given time. What could she was born in San Antonio right what was it that led her to go into the acting too because it was really kind of at the beginning of the screen right because even didn't she start even before there was actual vocals on movies. Yeah, she started in silent movie she started in 1925 so next year is the 100 year anniversary of her timing. Yeah. She started in 1925 she was a worldwide star. In 1928. And first big hit was our dancing daughters, which was sort of the Barbie of its moment it ran in theaters forever for years afterwards teenage girls were still saying that's who they want to grow up to be. It was just this monster hit. And she started out though she had a very, very difficult childhood. A lot of physical emotional and likely even sexual abuse as a very young. And she always wanted something more she always wanted to get away. And she joined a chorus line eventually in Chicago that got her to New York. And you know in her mind, this all took forever. But in, in real time she was sort of 18 and working in a department store, and she was 19 and in the chorus on Broadway. And she had a spark, somebody put her on a screen test and MGM hiker. Wow. And she stayed there for 18 years. Wow. 18 years as a long contract man. But you think about like how fast you know how fast you moved in within three years how fame how famous she became. It's got to think to now I mean, with social media online, you know TV, you know, all of that was different back then for her to make to become such an icon so fast. Well, she did utilize what was available at that time. And she wanted to, you know, she she started her first couple of years in movies. She played a lot of girlfriend roles, you know, like the star of the movie would be a guy. And her job would be to say, you know, be careful. Or, you know, like, you know, come back with those big eyes, you know, yeah, but she wanted more. And the character that she played in our dancing daughter. It's like she created that character. And she went out in the Hollywood scene and showed everybody how vibrant and joyful she could be while she was dancing. And she, you know, she made friends with the columnists. She made friends with the photographers of fan magazines. She did all the things that a young starlet would do now that were available then. And that's why I say she would have been all over tick tock. I mean, because she did everything by herself. And she showed them, hey, look, I can do this. And when they were playing this movie, they said, yes, you can. And they hired her and she never, she was above the title for the rest of her career. Wow. Going through her history must have been fascinating. Did you sit and like, do like, you know, Joan Crawford binge sessions of movies because I think the last one I saw of her was Johnny guitar. That movie is demented. It is because I think I've watched it. One time I think I was a little impaired. I'm just watching. If you watch it. If you were a little impaired. That's a little I should say. Yeah, the two stars. Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge. They were a little bit, you know, they were also a little bit drunk when they were making. You know, I did. I watched everything that's available. Some of the early silence are lost. But almost everything is available somewhere. And, yeah, I mean, and including television, I watched, I watched her in about 120 performances. That's amazing. And then all the artwork you have, not only the writing that you have in there, which is awesome. The artwork, you've got posters. And then seeing her, what I really enjoyed in the visual aspect is seeing her face change through times. But her eyes, her eyes, like her eyes are everything. Her eyes are like this. I'm either going to kill you or come see me, you know, it's like, you know, I mean, some of the people that were closest to her. They said that they don't think that anyone in real life got that intensity that she could do in a close up, where like those eyes, just like, you know, were like, they were amazing. They're magnetic and also killers. Yeah. And well, I really wanted to, I wanted the reader to experience her the way that audiences would in order, you know, where you're seeing her change. And I wanted to show images, you know, I pulled most of the images, the black and white images directly from digital prints of the films. So they're not images that we've seen a hundred times before. Okay. And I wanted, you know, this is what it was like to experience this woman in real time. Wow. And then, you know, putting her together and then looking at her change in fame or growing and then what, and then four husbands. Does it four, right? First, yeah. Yeah, four. Because she had a quickie in there, I think, like a, you know, the Philip Terry. I knew her first husband. Oh wow. Fairbanks, Jr. Oh wow. I knew her in New York when I was very young. And he was working on his memoir. And I was able to talk to him about Joan, and his memories of her, and they stayed friends. Their whole lives. And she also stayed friends with her second husband, which I think really contradicts her as some kind of ball buster, you know, yeah, yeah. But really, she had good relationships with her, with her husband's even after they divorced. Wow. But with going through all of these changes of her life. I mean, you start to see how a woman grows like you were saying the very beginning, how they grow, and how they can change and morph. And thinking about her like that hundred year mark coming up next year you've kind of have to have a soft spot for a woman growing through an age yet at the same time I wanted to ask about her relationships, not just with her husband's or kids. But what about the women because, you know, we asked women can be vindictive, or we can be, you know, loyal supporters. So what was that like, and for women in that era, did you get any, you know, inside as to what they were going through? Because it's always kind of been a man's world and a lot of different things, but in a lot of ways, although, you know, she had above the title, billing in her contract and even when she made a movie called Strange Cargo in 1940, and Clark Gable was the lead. And, you know, they were like, is it okay if you're second to Clark Gable and she's like, no. And, but he also had first billing. So they compromised and on the prints of the film, one of them got first billing and on the posters, the other one got first billing. And her relationships with women, though. You know, it's very funny. There are women that she worked with, like, you know, there was Anne Blythe in Mildred Pierce, who said that she was the most generous, a friend until the end of her life. Diane Baker, who did two movies with her said the same thing. Now, I don't know if her rival at MGM, Norma Shearer, would ever have said anything like that. They did not get along. And, as Ryan Murphy made clear in his series in 2017 feud. You know, she and Betty Davis did not get along. I think when Joan felt disrespected. I think something in her just like, that was it. Like it's tapped. And there was no coming back from it. Wow. She felt like you respected her. Then I think she was incredibly generous to other actors. Ah, that's interesting. So maybe that's even clues into, you know, the way her husband's the relationships with their husbands. It's like, okay, we're just not getting along. And also you got to think at that time, a woman in in a stronghold of power in her career. But that was intimidating to husbands. Absolutely. She was a bigger star. Her first three husbands were actors. And she was, I mean, she wasn't just like more successful. She was a giant, giant star. And, you know, I think it can still be hard for men if their wives are more successful than they are, but go back a hundred years. We were in a different era. I mean, the world of what's going on for women. I mean, it's changing backwards again. So, I mean, I think these are, that's a whole other show. But when you look at, you know, someone like Joan, I think there is an inspiration to also understand what it's like to climb the ropes, right? And so have some respect for that. And to also not forget her, you know, like you're saying that there's memes going around, but do we know who Joan is? Do we remember her other than her eyes and eyebrows? Well, and that's why I chose this image. Oh, I love that. She's cute. She's fun. She's like she's sexy and fun and flurry. She could be selling food, like a picnic basket on the beach kind of thing with that. She could be selling anything and you'd buy it. You'd buy it for her. And, you know, I wanted, I wanted potential readers to see her in this different life because she could be very joyful. She could be full of life and full of energy and full of optimism. And I think that was what carried her through. You know, she made movies for 50 years. Wow. That's a long time. And she did it by staying optimistic, by looking forward, by looking at what she could achieve tomorrow, what she could become next week, not just what did I do last year that was so great. She wanted, she was very forward thinking forward looking. And then she had to be right in the moment to be able to act. Well, as a, as a screenwriter and filmmaker. So do you understand her, her work as well from that perspective? I think so. You know, and I can, I can see. Like in some of the performances. Look, she always gives her all. But you can see when the material isn't really there. Or when a director doesn't really, you know, get it right for her. You know, you can see her maneuvering to try to find, well, how can I get there? How can I get there? Even if the other actor isn't great or even if the script isn't great. How can I get there? I've got to get there. I've got to push through and communicate something to my audience. Yeah, commit to it, even if you're not a happy with it. That's right. Oh, that's hard. And that is hard about actors. That's something that I understand in my life. You know, I've worked in television and film and theater and books. And, you know, some things don't work out. And, you know, sometimes I, I can probably quote word for word from a people magazine review of a movie I did that they hated. And, you know, like you just, that's part of the thing. Suck it up. Yeah. Move on. And you do the next thing. And the next thing. And you do the next right thing. Well, that's a really good point too, you know, for Joan Crawford, you know, if something didn't like it in here, you know, this is when you get really big fast. You're on this pedestal. And I think if you had a slower amount of time going up, it wouldn't be as hard. But when you're in a pedestal up here, the intense pressure of that, and then society now getting into the stardom, right? That was a new thing. I mean, the stardom before used to be presidents. Well, now it's changed. When she was 24 years old, she was the number one box office attraction in the world. That's insane. Number one. And she's 24 years old. And, you know, she's doing the best she can to make sure that she's doing a good job, that she's present, and that she really, she was somebody who really appreciated the crews that she worked with. And she, like she would give them gifts at the start of shooting and at the end of shooting, she remembered people's name. She remembered when they were having a child and would give them, you know, christening presents. And, you know, she just she was very mindful that a movie comes together because of a whole bunch of people. And all of those people want to be seen, you know, they want to feel like they're being seen and appreciated and respected. And that really mattered to her. When she wasn't working, she went a little crazy, you know, because I understand that because I do not know under. I can't. I mean, I can't really. I don't sleep very well because I can't. My brain, you know what I mean? So I understand that. I think, you know, I'd start getting into more mimosas if I was like just sitting around. And I could understand, you know, the kids becoming more of a project. You know what I mean, and it's kind of like a tough love if she came from that background. So some of those negative qualities we all have. We're human. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to excuse child abuse, you know, and I certainly think that some of her relationship with Christina was child abuse. Yeah. I don't want to soft self or soft pedal that rather. But that's not the sum total of who she was as a creative artist or as a person. It was a terrible failing. And it was certainly tragic for Christina and for a brother Christopher. And you know, that's part of the story. It's not the whole story. Yeah, then that's why you wrote a book. Now, do you think you'll make it into like a film, like a biography film. It's kind of cool if you could get some of the old footage and put it together and I don't know, like a documentary. There has been some talk in that there's been some talk about that or doing it as a limited series, scripted. You know, for her story. And, you know, we'll have to see if anything develops. You never know. Yeah, you never know. I think it would be cool. You know. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much. This is such it's like a joy. This is like a little treasure of a book for folks to have and do. I think just revisit and I think also, you know, there's the general public who loves pop culture and wants to learn, but I also think maybe for those in the movie career TV career. I mean, could you imagine she probably have her own Netflix specials in some some way she'd have her own channel. You know, I imagine what she would be doing at the various ages of her of her career. And, you know, I think she would be working just as much today as she. Look at her almost 90 and she's still going. You know, you've got to think Jane Fonda is still going. You know, all this is awesome. But, but if she, you know, for for students, do you think that would help for students in the movie in the film industry to read this. Absolutely. It's always a good idea to understand the progression of your art form. And, you know, the movies that she made in the 1940s are not the same as the movies we make now in on any level, but there's still a lot to learn about performance about about lighting certainly. And, and that's interesting. Character development. Yeah. Yeah. Now, what was it? What was that spark that said, Oh, I'm going to write a biography on her. What was that one moment and you're like, Okay, I'm going to do it. Is it just been festering, or did someone thing just go, that's it. And to be honest, my agent had the idea. And we made a deal with the publisher. So that was how it started. But the minute my agent mentioned it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I would love to write about her. You know, there's so much that so much bigger than, you know, these, these mommy dearest means or whatever. Yeah. And, you know, so I was really, really happy to take that dive into her career and into her life. And I think that's great because, you know, people get pegged as just one thing a lot of times and that's, it's insane for anybody. I don't care who it is. You know, you're not all one thing. You know, but one thing she definitely was was driven. And I think that is a story of success. So I think it's an entrepreneurial success too. You know, absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much everyone again. Go get it. Go get your from your independent bookstore. My lot of promote them. I have to go again. It is Samuel Garza Bernstein and the biography is called starring Joan Crawford, the films, the fantasy and the modern relevance of a silver screen icon. And you can also go to Samuel Garza Bernstein dot com. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Big Blend Radio's Toast to the art show. Please keep up with us at bigblendradio.com and keep up with Big Blend magazines at blendradio and tv.com.