Joan Crawford

The Name That Came from a Contest

Lucille Fay LeSueur had no backup plan. Her childhood in Texas was marked by her father's absence and a series of stepfathers who did nothing to improve the family's finances. She worked as a waitress and a shop clerk before dancing opened a door for her in the Broadway chorus.

In 1925, she signed a contract with MGM for seventy-five dollars a week.

She didn't like her original name. A contest in a movie magazine decided she would be called Joan Crawford. To her, it sounded like "crawfish," but the studio called the shots, and the publicity machine was already in motion.

During the silent film years, she promoted herself with an energy that unsettled her rivals. She attended every party and won every Charleston contest in town. That's how she got photographers to notice her before the leading actresses.

The arrival of sound sank many stars of her generation. But Crawford had a deep, determined voice that suited the industry's new demands. In 1928, she starred in Our Modern Maidens, and her image as a modern girl became part of the collective imagination of the Depression era.

The Poison That Turned to Gold

In 1938, her name appeared on a blacklist of actors that exhibitors considered **box office poison**. Critics said her style was worn out. MGM stopped betting on her, and Crawford made a decision few dared to make in that Hollywood of ironclad contracts.

She asked to be released from her contract and left for Warner Bros.

There, she had to wait two years sitting in an office until the role of Mildred Pierce (Mildred Pierce) came along in 1945. Director Michael Curtiz didn't want her in the film and called her an "old glory" during the first days of shooting. But she endured the insults and worked every scene with almost surgical precision.

Crawford won the Oscar for Best Actress that year.

She accepted it while lying in bed at home, faking pneumonia to avoid the stress of the gala and make sure photographers would come to her bedroom. It was one of the most brilliant **marketing stunts** of the era. From that moment on, her career specialized in dark melodramas in which she played women who suffered but never gave up.

A Retirement Among Bubbles and Shadows

Her career entered a phase of commercial decline in the mid-fifties. But in 1962, she agreed to work alongside her archrival Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. The budget was ridiculous, and no one believed two women over fifty could carry a psychological horror story.

The film grossed **nine million dollars** in its first few weeks.

The hatred between the two actresses became real. Crawford made sure to sabotage Davis's victory at the 1963 Oscars by accepting the award herself on behalf of Anne Bancroft. It was a chess move that ultimately burned any bridge between the two divas.

After the death of her fourth husband, she took a seat on the **board of directors of Pepsi-Cola**. It was not an honorary position. She traveled around the world promoting the soft drink and insisting that every hotel she stayed in have an ice bucket filled with bottles of the brand.

Her last appearance on the big screen was in 1970 with the film Trog. It was a low-budget British production about a caveman that critics tore apart without mercy. She withdrew from public life in 1974 after seeing an unflattering photo of herself in the press.

Joan Crawford died in her Manhattan apartment on May 10, 1977.

In her will, she disinherited her two eldest children, Christina and Christopher, for reasons they knew all too well. The legal document stated that they would not receive a single dollar of her personal fortune.