MyDancingLady

"The film is 16MM Kodachrome, so it has those “nice, bright colors” Paul Simon sang about. The cans were stacked in the back of Joan Crawford’s closet when she moved back to New York in 1955. After she died in 1977 they sat in the closets of her daughter Cathy, and of Casey LaLonde, her grandson.

The expectations were that they would be the usual movie star home movies—birthday parties with the kids in Brentwood, some behind-the-scenes shots from the studio, etc. There was some of that, but there were also several cans sealed with masking tape on which was written “Charles and Me.”

They were Joan Crawford home movies all right, but they weren’t what anybody had expected. From her look, and from the cars on view, the bulk of them were made in 1939 or 1940 outside New York City. There are shots of the Dakota apartment building, of Central Park in the winter as well as the spring, but mostly the atmosphere is country—a glamorous movie star on strangely unglamorous vacations: trudging through the woods, lugging a rifle on a hunt for pheasant, having a cigarette by a dying campfire.

The Kodachrome reveals Crawford’s russet hair, her freckles, even her impromptu dance moves, as she does an enchanting little sideways shuffle while playing with her dachshund. She’s relaxed, coquettish, glowing, completely unguarded. In one shot, she’s sunbathing nude.

There are two startling factors revealed by the footage. Most obviously, there is the way Crawford pops through the screen without the intervention of a script, editing, or even rudimentary lighting. She loves the camera and the favor is returned—she was born to be captured on film, any film, under any conditions. And the rifle, the earnest trooping through the woods, means she’s obviously shaping herself to fit in with her man’s predispositions.

Despite her reputation as an imperious diva, this was always Crawford’s pattern. When she was married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., she immersed herself in fiction and philosophers, albeit with a singular lack of enjoyment, while her marriage to Franchot Tone meant a conversion to the gospel of Stanislavsky.

The man behind the camera some of the time, in front of the camera most of the time, is pushing middle age, has a widow’s peak, and sports a Bertie Wooster-ish set of hunting togs indicating a charge account with Hammacher Schlemmer. From Crawford’s body language and the intimacy of the footage it was obvious they were a couple.

Casey LaLonde asked me if I had any idea about the man’s identity, but I was stumped. He wasn’t a director, although he could have been a producer. But why meet up outside New York City when Palm Springs was only a few hours away from Crawford’s home in Brentwood?

I turned to A Portrait of Joan, Crawford’s autobiography, published in 1962. I didn’t expect much, but I found something dating to shortly after her divorce from Franchot Tone in April 1939: “In New York, I had met a marvelously mature man, one of the best people I’ve ever known. This man must be nameless because he was never able to get a divorce. He is a business executive, and I respect him thoroughly. Again I had to settle for a long and lovely friendship. He taught me to hunt and fish, we used to go on these expeditions with a whole group of men. The first time, I’m sure, their reaction was, Oh No, not a dame tagging along! Carried my own gun and my own camera, waded through streams in the vanguard, and at noon when we’d camp, I’d help fix lunch and surprise them with all sorts of snacks packed away in my knapsack just in case they didn’t catch any fish. This friend introduced me to politics, to banking, big business and public affairs.

“He says I taught him to be brave, to stand up for what he thought was right, to be considerate of other human beings, especially those with whom he was working, and to be generous in giving of himself. I didn’t teach him. Those were his instincts. He merely needed someone gently to remind him.”

That told us some of what the film had already told us, but it didn’t offer any hints about Charles’s last name. That came through the back door—an item in a Hedda Hopper column from 1940 that carried a whiff of sulfur, as many Hopper columns did. Hopper included the name of Charles McCabe in the cast list of an upcoming Crawford movie. Charles McCabe? Who the hell was Charles McCabe?

There were no actors in Hollywood with that name. Perhaps a New York actor? Nope. A quick glance at Wikipedia, and there he was—the same man with Crawford in the footage. Charles McCabe was the publisher of the New York Daily Mirror, a Hearst paper that Woody Allen called “a sparse rag that would have gone out of business were it not for the fact it housed Walter Winchell’s column.” Unfortunately, irrelevance can only be withstood for so long—the Daily Mirror died in October 1963.

Hedda Hopper had found out about the affair and wanted Crawford to know she knew.

Casey LaLonde called one of McCabe’s surviving sons, who told him that after their father’s death in 1970, his sons had gone through his papers and found letters from Crawford that made the relationship obvious. McCabe’s wife hadn’t known about the affair, or about any of McCabe’s numerous extramarital entanglements. In any case, McCabe had never asked his wife for a divorce. McCabe’s sons didn’t want their mother to find out about the affair, so they burned Crawford’s letters.

Joan Crawford died seven years after Charles McCabe; there were no letters from him in her papers.

A relationship with a public figure such as Crawford must have been risky for McCabe, but the footage clearly indicates neither of them cared, while the fact that Crawford kept the movies for the rest of her life indicates the affair was far more than a passing fling.

The home movies are a glimpse into the unexpected emotional accessibility of a woman often regarded as ferocious even by other ferocious movie stars. How did Crawford and McCabe meet? How long did the affair last? We can’t be sure, because Joan Crawford could keep a secret.

But not all of them."

"Bette and I haven't feuded at all. [...] We're getting acquainted as our time permits. She's actually been charming to me".